Hog Butcher: 2nd Edition

by Andrew Sutherland

  Lance was making that wide double “L” shape with his hands, meant to represent the bottom two edges of the camera. He walked around to the Asian man. White Shoes looked over the Asian guy’s shoulder. All three were looking through Lance’s makeshift finger-camera. After a moment more, Lance gestured for the Asian man to make his own finger camera. Lance jogged over to the array of Quonset huts, way over to Eric’s right. He nodded to the men, ran two steps forward, yelled at the sky (it was something like “Payback time, you granny humpers!”); then he took his imaginary rocket launcher/ machine gun and lobbed some grenades into the building. He looked around in an exaggerated action-hero sort of way, then he said something non-acty to the others. Eric couldn’t hear what was said; he just knew it was a direction, not a question or another piece of stellar payback dialogue. The impossibly built woman jogged and jiggled over to one of the Quonset huts in front of Eric, between him and Lance.

  As soon as Eric saw him standing there, he knew this was where he would take the shot. Sure enough, White Shoes had come over, and in his head, Eric was writing the little script they were going through right now:

  Lance: OK. Here is where I get shot from behind by one or two bullets.

  White Shoes: Great (in Eric’s imagination he sounded like someone from Downton Abbey). Do you get shot by one or two guys, and where are they?

  Lance: They’re right behind me. Without looking, I fire a grenade into the hut behind me. A bunch of fuckers can jump out before it blows up.

  White Shoes: Beautiful. We’ll rig that to blow as well. We can get a great close up of you with the hut going fucking nuclear behind you…

  This all went on for some time. Eric watched to make sure they were in agreement, and they were. So he would set up his shit up here when morning came, and this is where he would make the kill-shot. It was about 375 yards away. He pulled out his spotting scope to be sure. The scope said it was 361 yards. He’d double-check it in the morning, but this would work. With gun shots, squibs, blood, and confusion, he’d get away clean. Now, he just needed to shoot clean. He was pretty sure he could do it. He headed back to the car.

  When he got there, he opened a can of Dinty Moore beef stew. He liked this stuff. The food in prison had been bad. It wasn’t super bad. In county jail, before he’d been thrown in the big house, he thought he’d die if he had to keep eating the shit. Now, his love for food was wide and as vast as the ocean. He wasn’t picky. He marveled at how many ways there were to be satisfied on the outside. As he finished his stew and set his watch alarm, he thought one simple thought: I may die trying to get all of this done. I think I stopped that Al guy from getting in the way. He wasn’t that tough, after all. But there may be someone or something else that decides to get in the way. If that happens, I play it out to the end. I may die doing it, but I’ll die free. I’m never going back.

  37

  “I honestly didn’t think I needed to be careful…yet. I mean, who’d wanna jump a big guy like me?” He said this lying on the floor of the jet. He was face down and she was straddling his ass, applying ice to his upper back.

  “I’m going to take refuge in the Fifth Amendment on that one.” She got up and offered a hand to help him up. At first he demurred, then he moved, felt a twinge, and begrudgingly offered her his hand. “Come up here, honey. We’ll work on applying some heat now.”

  “I think ice only for the first 24 hours is SOP.”

  “For traumatic injury, yes. But this is strain. I can feel it. You didn’t get thumped. You just lifted without warming up. Body-slamming people should only be done after a good stretch…maybe some yoga.” She was smiling, rubbing his bare skin, and obviously having a good time.

  He’d told her about the morning with the three guys, then the bizarre meeting with Marty and his “organized crime” guy.

  “The more I think about it, the more I agree with Free. This guy sounds like a douche canoe. I’ll call California when we touch down and see if there’s any info floating around out there.”

  “I’m a little hurt, Al. I do pretty good research work, ya know?”

  He kissed her forehead. She was an extremely attractive person. She was a hot woman and all that, but she was an attractive human being. “My associate in California can find out if this guy is a big fish or a minnow with one call. It’s nice to have a ticket into the informational underbelly without risking pissing off some seriously bad individuals. My partner, Scotty Mac, makes one phone call, and we’ll know what to do next. This isn’t on my list of shit to do while I’m here, so I would like to dispense with it as quickly as I can. It is absolutely no reflection on you.”

  “OK. Rehearsal was good?”

  The question caught him by surprise. He realized he hadn’t discussed this project with any non-theatre people. Back when he’d done this for a living, he’d usually be seeing someone who was doing a different show than he was working on but someone who was still in the business. They would talk about their processes. It wasn’t until this very instant that he realized he missed those talks. It hit him like a smell or a painting you’d experienced but hadn’t re-encountered since you were a three-year-old. He was struck by a wave of feeling that was almost nauseating.

  Al was a fairly amazing man in his lack of complexity. He was a straight shooter, but he had a fortress built around a seemingly endless stockpile of emotions that were raw and vulnerable. When he’d run into problems with drinking, it had a ton to do with being hurt by someone he hadn’t guarded himself against. He hadn’t guarded himself because she was his wife and trust was a plant that still grew well in the bramble patches of his heart’s garden. He tried to stay aware of how he felt. He kept an eye on his emotional temperature. He was rarely caught off-guard, but this had hit him out of the blue and right between the eyes.

  “Did I say something wrong?” She was looking warily, even guardedly, at him.

  He softly held her cheeks in his hands and stared into her eyes. “I’m kinda emotionally retarded. I’m not used to ‘kitchen cleaning’ talk. You know, those un-self-conscious conversations you have with your loved ones while doing dishes? I guess normal people call it ‘sharing.’”

  She tightened up. “I didn’t mean to give you the impression I was humoring you with small talk.”

  “No! No, no, no, God, no. Don’t even start going in that direction. I’m not used to someone simply asking me how my day was. Your question was a bit deeper than that, but it amounts to the same thing. You’re asking me how my art work is going for no other reason than to find out. Tenderness in a rough world is just shocking, sometimes.”

  There was a brief silence while they considered each other. “Do you like being asked how your work is going?” she asked.

  “Yes, Edith. Tell you the truth, I miss it so much that when it happens, it hurts my heart. I guess because I find it so foreign.”

  “I haven’t been with anyone since my husband and I split. I didn’t want that kind of…of…”

  “Emotional betrayal?”

  “Yes. No. Yes. Fuck. I didn’t want to put myself in a place where emotional betrayal was a destination where my bus might stop.”

  Al, not knowing what to do and wanting to get rid of the icepack he was holding, went to the small sink, threw the gel pack in the sink, opened the mini-fridge and said, “Leaded or unleaded?”

  She smiled, radiant, innocent, lovely. “Unleaded for now, Al. I might have some wine later.”

  He grabbed two chilled Perrier waters. One was plain, one had lime essence. He couldn’t tell which one he’d ended up with. His focus was shot.

  “I’m going to tell you a brief story. I can expand on it sometime if you like, but that isn’t germane to my point right now. You can have all the details later if you want, but it ties into how I know Ted and about my emotional landscape. When I started being a PI, I used to just help people. Sometimes, I’d follow a cheating spouse, but I’d occasionally get a chance to help someone out. If I could help, I would. Stu
ff like getting an ex-significant other to realize their newly found insignificance. Shit like that.

  “One day, I got a case. A woman who used to be married to my now-business partner, Scotty Mac, contracted me to find her daughter, Scotty Mac’s daughter, who’d come up missing. I took a trip to New Orleans to have a look around. The girl, Lisa, disappeared from the French Quarter and had last been seen keeping company with a guy who didn’t have the reputation of being such a nice fella.”

  “I love how you talk. Sorry. Go on.” She was looking at him with what Al often thought of as “cow eyes.” He suspected he was sporting a pair about as big and open as hers.

  “I met a woman while I was in the Big Easy. The situation went to hell in a hand-basket. There was a ton of very nasty and illegal stuff going on down there. Oh, this conversation never happened, by the way…”

  “Plausible deniability. Go on…”

  “You’re a quick study. It’s sexy. Anyway, I went and introduced myself to the local law enforcement. A lead had gotten me as far as Hattiesburg. I walked into Ted’s Marshal shop.”

  “The Ted we’ve been summoned to see?”

  “Same guy, but I think we were invited with a purpose. You’d know it if Ted summoned you somewhere.”

  “You said he was a no-bullshit guy.”

  “That I did. Ted had one wall of his US Marshal’s office plastered with missing girl posters. It seemed a little coincidental with me down there snooping for a missing gal, so I asked him about them. I said I didn’t think they were strictly on the US Marshal’s normal diet. He said they weren’t, but when you were up to your ass in corn, you tended to scoop a little on your plate. Pretty soon, I started looking into his missing girls as well as my own. I found traces of Lisa, Scotty Mac’s kid, but not the girl herself. Some folks got hurt, and I got a bunch of people reunited with their families. Kinda made me one of Ted’s favorite folks. Most of Ted’s lost girls were safe, but Lisa was still missing.”

  “How many girls did you save?”

  “Initially? Nineteen. Nineteen girls who were destined for a truncated life mired in human filth and degradation. But Lisa was still missing. Meantime, I was falling pretty hard for this woman I’d met.”

  “What was her name?”

  Al sighed, took a pull off of his bubbling water and said, “Anna.” A solitary tear rolled down his face. Edith, with no calculation whatsoever, reached out and wiped the tear away from his cheek with the back of her index finger. Had she cradled his face in her hands or ignored the tear entirely, the spell would have woven itself differently, but the nature of magic is impossible to predict, and the legerdemain of this comforting act turned unforeseen tumblers in the cylinder of their micro-verse. The story continued.

  “Lovely name.”

  “Yes. So I kept pushing. I kept hunting. I didn’t stop, nor could I.”

  “Did you save Lisa?”

  “I think so.” He said this with a degree of introspection that Edith decided to leave alone for now. “She’s living in a little town called Weed in Northern California, running a bar for a friend of mine.”

  “Did you save any more of the girls from Ted’s wall?”

  “Yes. Many, many girls got to go home, or just start over. Ted got to actually get a full night of sleep.”

  She paused. She didn’t want to ask, but it was the only way he’d let her all the way in. She felt she wanted to go all in with Al. It was scary for too many reasons to list. She’d decided earlier today it might not be a good idea. But ideas were thoughts, not feelings. We didn’t think feelings, we felt feelings, and the tenor of her life was going to be dictated by her heart, not by her head. Once death has entered your personal situation and sat in your parlor for a while, many of life’s rules subtly but inexorably change. “Anna?”

  “I’ve made peace with it. She wanted to come with us to get the bad guy. She’d suffered at his hands, too. The whole situation was just one coincidence after another. It didn’t feel that way at the time. It still doesn’t. It changed the trajectory of my life. In the end, she got killed. I didn’t. It was quick, but she’s just as dead. She chose to come, chose to be with me, and chose to walk a path to her own destruction, of her own making. I know now that it was her karma or whatever. It happened. Her death was her own. I live OK with it, but I thought she’d be the person I’d talk to about work, or do dishes with, or paint a fucking accent color on one wall of the living room with. Now you come along and you ask me how work was. And you want to know what the most fucked up part is?”

  “Yes.”

  “I really want to tell you. I really do.”

  “I don’t know what we’re doing, Al, but it isn’t casual and it isn’t a fling. I’m here for you. I want to know how work was.”

  He looked into those uneven pupils sitting in black-flecked fields of green. “And you’re good with knowing how work was just for today? Tomorrow will work itself out? I need to know, because right now, you scare me more than…well, being jumped by three armed men in a violent city.”

  “For now. We take it slow. How was work, honey?”

  The door to the small cockpit was closed. He started to tell her about the rehearsal. By the time he was explaining the significance of the dagger’s path from actor to actor in the scene they’d worked and the beliefs of necromancy among the Elizabethans, they were making slow, soft, rocking love high above the blue and turbulent Earth. They were hurtling through the air, enveloped in the perfect enjoyment of bodies celestial, terrestrial, and corporeal. The artificial horizon remained steady as they rested afterwards, his head on her chest, her hands kneading the muscles in his back. They stayed that way for forty-five minutes until the captain buzzed the intercom on the wall. There was a phone receiver next to the wire mesh speaker.

  “Hey, you two. Don’t know if you’re decent or even awake, but we’ll be touching down in about a half an hour. If you’re presentable, we’d like to come back for some drinks. Pick up the handset to answer.”

  Al picked up the phone earpiece and Edith put on her blouse while wriggling her skirt back down her shapely thighs. “Unless you guys have to pee, let us bring you something. I’ll only deliver one alcoholic beverage up there, someone has to be sober to land, but anything else? I think we have some crackers and cheese as well. What’s you pleasure.”

  “That’s very kind of you, Al. I’d like a diet root beer. Skip, you want anything? He said he wouldn’t narc on you if you had a brew.” There was some mumbling, then, “I guess a real Coke, a diet root beer, and some crunchy Cheetos if you have ‘em.”

  “We’ll do our best.” He hung up and told Edith. She agreed to play steward while he peed. Afterward, he told her what to expect from the meeting, at least what he surmised, and told her to be ready for the best bacon ever.

  “That’s big talk, coming from a carnivore like you. Buckle up, and I’ll tell you about my day. I did some extra thinking and I wanted to run some theories by you about the killings. Something is bugging me, but I can’t put my finger on it.”

  So they talked until they landed. The Cessna Citation landed smoothly. They got ready to deplane. The pilots came out and properly introduced themselves to Al and Edith; they’d only had the briefest interaction in Chicago. They were both members of the US Marshal Service Special Operations Group. They both made a big deal out of meeting Al. One of them even used the phrase “The Al McNair.” They let Al and Edith off the plane; they had packed light enough that they had nothing to get out of stowage. Edith went down the little gantry-like step unit, followed by Al.

  Standing on the tarmac no more than seventy-five yards away was US Marshal’s Office SOG Special Agent-in-Charge Ted McAdams. He was every bit as tall and lean as Al remembered. Without his hat, he was six feet, two inches. With the hat, he was no shorter than six foot, seven inches. His large whisk-broom mustache indicated that there was a mouth residing south of the large and crooked nose, but its present location was on a need-to-know basis.


  Ted walked up to Edith first and said, “Ma’am, you are every bit as beautiful as Al said you were. I’m Ted, and it is a pleasure to make your acquaintance.” He shook her hand, then, almost as an afterthought, gave the back of it a small peck. She giggled as the caterpillar on his lip did the briefest plie before resuming what passed for a thousand-legged first position. Ted turned to Al and regarded him for a moment. He took two easy steps over and wrapped his long, thickly corded arms around Al’s Herculean frame. After a moment, he put his arms on Al’s shoulders and held him at arm’s length.

  “Eighty-six percent,” he said cryptically.

  “Eighty-six percent of what?” Al said back.

  “Your final numbers. That’s your retrieval success rate from the little mission you engineered here. Eighty-six percent of the young ladies you set out to help have their lives back. Just thought I’d let you know.” Edith slipped her arm around Al’s waist. “You’re holding a hell of a man there, Ms. Edith. Now that café on Main?”

  “With the bacon?”

  “That’s the one. They aren’t open for dinner, so I bought ‘em out for the night. Joint’s all ours. We’ll catch up on the way. I’ve got some business, but not before we’ve done some serious damage to the pig population. I’m ready for this. Haven’t eaten anything but salad for the last few days. My colon’s gonna hate me tomorrow, but what a way to go.”

  They piled into a limo that Ted had for them. He’d rented it so that they could talk while they drove. “Friendlier this way and…well, leadership has its perks. This job’s makin’ me an old man, so I take the comfort I can take when I can take it. Now, tell me what you been up to…”