by Stephen Hand
“Here we go again,” he sighed. Although Kemper appreciated the abrupt positive upswing in mood, he knew she was singing the only real song she knew: When Are We Getting Hitched?
Erin pouted and swung her head to look forward at the road. Kemper stared at her profile and natural beauty. He would have died for her there and then. She was gorgeous.
“One day you’ll get your ring, Erin. I promise.”
No reply.
He tried offering her the roach a second time. “Peace offering?”
She smiled—thank God—and swiveled in her seat to take in Kemper and to accept the joint. His peace offering had worked. They’d reached a truce. Erin took the joint from his fingers . . . then flung it out the window!
“Hey!” shouted Kemper. “Why’d you do that?”
Erin shot him a mischievous look, but it froze on her face when she heard Morgan, still leaning just behind Kemper. “Dude, don’t trip. We got two pounds—”
Oh shit!
Morgan stopped himself too late. He’d tried to stop. He realized what he was saying, but . . . but . . . it was the dope, it made him talk. And now he’d gone and shot his mouth off and Erin had heard everything. She could see the fucked-off expression written all over Kemper’s face. So Morgan had spilled the bag or something? What the hell was going on?
Erin turned the spotlight of her suspicions on Morgan. “What did you say?”
She didn’t see it but Kemper rolled his eyes—good goin’, moron.
Down back, Andy gave Pepper a break and paid attention to what was going on with his friends. He could smell trouble brewing and he wouldn’t miss its sweet, hilarious taste for all the soft lips in the world.
But Morgan tried to make like he didn’t mean anything. “I can’t remember,” he stammered absently.
“Two pounds of pot,” said Erin, recalling his exact words. “Does that refresh your memory?”
Morgan waved a hand as if it was all getting too much. “Sorry,” he mumbled. “Bad brain cells.” He began to stagger back in the direction of his beanbag. “I’ll just be back here if anyone needs me.”
The sheepish voice and bad memory routine only made Erin madder. What the heck was going on here? She turned to confront Kemper and she could see he was nervous. He was hiding something from her.
“Morgan’s baked,” he chuckled unconvincingly. “He doesn’t know what he’s saying.”
But Erin knew better. She folded her arms then got ready to scrutinize every sweaty little unintentional expression on Kemper’s face.
“Please tell me we didn’t go to Mexico to buy pot,” she demanded.
Kemper replied overloud, repeating her words like a boy scout swearing an oath. “We didn’t go to Mexico to buy pot.”
Erin held fast and kept her eyes fixed on him, probing his defenses, looking for weakness, searching for some sign of inadvertent honesty.
Kemper glanced up at the rearview again—what was he looking at? At Morgan? The beanbag? What? What the hell was distracting him?
Kemper knew Erin wouldn’t quit so he fell back on the defensive. He knew she knew he was bullshitting her, so decided to plead for mercy . . . kinda.
“Baby, I’m not a dope smuggler,” he protested, using his sincere voice. “Just an extraordinary guy on an extraordinary trip with the woman I love.” And he gave her his best shot at a charming smile. But he was wasting his time. Funny how he only used the word “love” when he was in deep shit.
“Save it,” she replied flatly.
Then she turned and looked out the passenger window again, angling her body away from him.
Over on the backseat Andy laughed and shook his head.
The cow’s head lay at the top of a mound of mangled carcasses in the dumpster.
Piled high and broken within the rigid metal walls, the corpses bled and decomposed into maggot’s nest soup—concentrated, crushed, reduced to morbid waste, butchered into inarticulate refuse. Food and death.
The head was broiling in the summer heat. It stank. It was crawling with flies. The bovine skull had been blasted and boiled, its fat and scrapes of meat greedily clawed away for the sake of a few cents. Only one eye remained, sitting black as death in a slaughter-stained socket.
And the blood of the cow was red.
TWO
“God, what is that?” Pepper almost retched.
Now they could all smell it. Jesus, it was bad, and it was coming in through the windows. The downside of letting the breeze into the van was that it also paved the way for every shit-kicking, rat-infested stink that just happened to be hanging in the air.
Erin gagged and pulled her head back inside—not that it helped much.
God, that smell—it was awful. Sweet, bad, moldy, like shit, like . . . like . . . hard to explain, just some kind of bad stink that hit you hard in the face. It somehow shocked you . . . the smell physically shocked you. It crawled its way up your nose like a warm vapor trail of suffocating puke-shit, then suddenly kicked you, making your head rock back and your guts turn inside out. Before you knew it, you wanted to throw up.
They were all suffering, but Kemper seemed least affected. Sure, he sniffed a bit and moved uncomfortably in his seat, but he kept his hands on the wheel where they belonged and didn’t make a big fuss. That’s because he’d smelt this shit before.
“A slaughterhouse,” he said.
Immediately, everyone understood.
The van was heavy with the stench of death. Not just one death but a mass production line of deliberate, scheduled, calculated disembowelment and destruction. The reduction of life to death. Of production to consumption. Meat processing. Meat packing. Hygiene. Sanitized. Regulated. Stainless steel scalders, conveyors, spine pickers, cutting boards, shackle line washers, salvage stations, old-fashioned meathooks in state-of-the-art cool rooms. The ultimate symbol of evolution—language, science and technology culminating in mastery of the food chain, forcing birth, creating life solely to die. They don’t understand. They don’t feel a thing. They’re not afraid. Herded in at one end, shrink-wrapped at the other. Pumping the cattle with hormones and antibiotics, then taking a pneumatic stunner to their meat-bastard heads.
Broken bones and bleeding joints. Cows ingesting carcass toxins. Burgers sold with plastic toys and a smile. Human remains the very definition of hell. The killing fields of Cambodia, Ed Gein of Wisconsin. Now here, a reconstruction of Ilse Koch’s Buchenwald played out on four legs, where man has the right to kill because two legs stand closer to God. Where man has the right to kill because he alone has hands capable of holding knives.
Erin looked out and could see the buildings of the meat packing plant just off the side of the road. Before she even saw the slaughterhouse, the stench had reminded her of something. Now that she knew where the smell was coming from her memory came creeping back.
“Smells like a dead cat,” she heaved.
Not just any cat. The cat she had in mind was the one she’d found lying on the sidewalk when she was just a dumb kid. The orange tomcat had been hit by a car. One side of its head was crushed and Erin had cried for days. Her mom had tried to help by telling her all about animal heaven, but if this shit-smelling slaughterhouse was anything to judge, animal heaven must be pretty fucking full-up right now.
“Well, if we’d fire up another joint,” offered Morgan holding his nose, “it wouldn’t smell so bad.”
It wasn’t like Morgan to somehow try to use marijuana to solve each and every little problem in his life. Much!
The van was past the slaughterhouse and Erin was quickly losing sight of the hundreds of cows she saw crushed together under the low roofs of the massive holding pens.
As the van moved on, Andy and Pepper got up and knelt on the back seat to turn and look through the rear window. They couldn’t take their eyes off the place. It was like nothing either of them had ever seen before.
The girl’s jaw dropped; for once she wasn’t smiling.
So that’s what it l
ooked like . . . The slaughterhouse . . . The building where stuff got killed . . .
“How could people work in a place like that?” she wondered aloud. “I mean think of all those poor, sweet cows—”
“To hell with the cows,” Andy cut in, like she hadn’t a clue. “Try breathing those fumes all day for minimum wage.”
“That’s mean,” she scowled, and she made sure that when they sat back down, there was some distance between the two of them—which gave Morgan the opportunity he needed to butt right in. Ducking his head out of the way of the bobbing piñata, he got up off the beanbag and leant forward, pushing squarely in between the hot-and-cold lovers, driving a physical wedge through their personal space. Then he looked back through the rear window at the distant slaughterhouse. It was hard to tell if he was genuine or not when, with a look of total seriousness, he said:
“It takes a special breed to do that kind of work. Cutting cows’ throats and bashing out brains for a living.”
Perhaps he was speaking a little too loudly to be sincere or it could have been the dope. Either way, Pepper was too upset to listen.
“Stop!” she complained. Everything was about death all of a sudden. Dead animals and their sickening, putrefying stench of death. Now Morgan was talking about butchers like they were murderers or something.
But Andy thought his skinny friend had made a reasonable point, even if he was wrong again. “Those dudes get used to it pretty quick,” Andy corrected.
“No, they don’t,” countered Morgan. “Most don’t last a year. The others either stay drunk or go insane.”
Great. First death, now insanity. Pepper looked straight at Morgan through the lenses of his glasses and right into his eyes. A change had come over the van. Some kind of anti-party cloud had descended and she didn’t like it at all. It was a bright sunny day, not a midnight campfire freakathon.
“Morgan’s the expert on the stupidest shit,” said Kemper.
He’d realigned the rearview and could see the confusion on Pepper’s face. He wanted to lighten the mood again. But having said that, as far as Kemper was concerned, Morgan was an expert on the stupidest shit. Erin however, was interested in where all this conviction was suddenly coming from. One minute Morgan’s spaced out on his beanbag, the next he’s some kind of brainiac in the shit-morbid art of meat processing.
“How do you know so much about it?” Erin asked.
“I’m a vegan,” Morgan replied, taking everyone by surprise. “It’s my job to know these things.”
This one sentence worked an incredible magic on Pepper. Her eyes lit up beneath her wavy brown hair and suddenly she was gift-wrapping her smiles for Morgan and Morgan only.
“So cool!” she gasped, beaming. “We have so much in common. I don’t eat anything that can smile either.”
“You did last night,” commented Andy with a wry grin.
“You are crude,” she fired back.
Andy was bragging, showing off that she’d tasted him yesterday, only now he was using their fun to insult her.
Pepper still found Andy’s muscles and his sweaty gray wife-beater a turn-on, and she knew he was only messing with her, but Andy was rapidly becoming Mr. Old News. While his friend, the beanpole from beanbag city, was quickly transforming into Mr. Deep, even though his hair was pretty fucked up. He didn’t eat animals and Pepper liked that. She couldn’t help but look on admiringly as Morgan drunkenly staggered back in the direction of his beanbag. Wow, he’d got totally shit-faced on weed. Maybe she should—
“LOOK OUT!”
The van swerved.
What the—
It was Erin who had cried out, warning Kemper of something in the road and now the van was all over the place.
Andy grabbed hold of the backseat and braced himself. He’d seen it all. A young woman, a teenager, had been walking aimlessly down the side of the road. She looked like she was lost or delirious or something. The moment she’d heard the van approach she’d stepped right out in front of the vehicle. There was no way Kemper could—
Acting solely on instinct, the mechanic cut the steering wheel, darting the van over onto the shoulder of the highway. The moment the A-100 hit the bumpy surface it started skidding and Kemper had to fight for control. Oh shit!
Morgan never reached the beanbag. As the van lurched to the left, he fell forward and accidentally caught the piñata with his hand, knocking it down to the floor where it cracked open.
Meanwhile, Pepper had grabbed hold of Andy and was praying to God that everything would be alright. She looked out the window and watched as the meandering teenage girl rushed by in a blur, the van barely missing her.
Was the stupid fool trying to get herself killed, or what? What was she doing in the middle of the road? And how come Kemper—or Erin for that matter—only saw the blonde girl at the last second? She couldn’t have just come out of nowhere? You can see for miles along these roads. Maybe hitching with these guys wasn’t such a good idea after all.
Kemper grappled with the wheel, trying to set his baby straight and back up on the road. There were times when the van’s awesome power could be a real pain in the ass, and now was one of them. He had to jam both feet on the brakes to get a reaction, and then had to steer into the skid to bring the van safely to a halt.
Silence.
The emergency stop had kicked up a cloud of dust around the vehicle.
“What the hell?” sighed Kemper.
“You almost hit her!” shouted Pepper from the back.
But Andy thought she was beating up on the wrong person. “What the hell is she doin’ walking in the middle of the road?” he rapped. It was a miracle that Kemper hadn’t splattered the dumb bitch’s brains all over the front of the vehicle.
Where was she now?
Still shaken, the whole group climbed back to look out through the rear window. Who was the girl? What was she doing? Kemper didn’t think he’d hit her, he certainly didn’t feel any impact, but maybe the side of the van had clipped her or something.
Erin came up last behind Kemper. As she climbed back, she caught sight of the broken piñata. It was packed solid with marijuana.
Now she got it. Kemper’s eyes had been glued to the rearview ever since their return from Mexico. And all along she thought he’d been taking in Pepper. Erin should have known better. Yeah, she took some comfort from the fact that her guy wasn’t being a pervert, but she was still pretty pissed off that he was always going behind her back like this. And what if they’d been caught at the border?
Seeing her reaction to the dope-filled papier-mâché container, Andy nervously reached out and slid the split piñata under the backseat, but he was wasting his time. Erin was pissed that everyone in the van seemed to be in on the deal except her. Did Pepper, the hitcher, know? She wasn’t even one of the gang.
Erin looked to where Kemper stood by the rear window and could only bring herself to say one terse word: “Asshole.”
Her comment was loud and clear, but the asshole in question didn’t seem to notice. He was too busy staring out back at the girl he’d almost just killed. It was clear now that the girl was a teenager—but it was hard to work out her age. Was she a smooth looking twenty or a rough looking sixteen? At first, when she’d rushed out into the road, she’d looked like a tall kid, maybe because of her knee-high summer dress. But now, her face—
“What the hell does she think she’s doing?” snapped Kemper.
They were going to Dallas. Skynyrd. But now everything was going out of joint, Goddamn it!
“I think she needs help,” said Pepper, which Erin totally bought into. She prodded Kemper and sent him back in the direction of the driving seat, then joined Pepper to peer out through the glass, the two of them having to squint in the bright sunlight.
Kemper got back behind the wheel of the van and turned the ignition.
Everyone else continued to watch the girl as she carried on walking away from the vehicle. She was a mess. Her hair was disheve
led, her pale sundress was dirty and frayed, the skin on her arms and shoulders was bruised and scratched. Her flat shoes were worn and filthy, their soles blistered by the hot skillet surface of the sun-beaten highway.
It occurred to Erin that the girl might have been in an automobile accident, maybe further along the highway towards Dallas. The girl looked terrible. But the strangest thing was the way she just kept on walking—walking away with her back to the van, as if the whole incident of her nearly being run over had never happened.
Slowly, Kemper turned the van around and headed back along the highway.
Morgan sighed. Why the hell hadn’t Kemper stayed on Interstate 35 like everyone said? Scenic route, bullshit! Now they were going back, chasing some fruitcake at less then five miles an hour. At this rate, they’d be back in Laredo within the month.
Soon they’d caught up with her. The van drove slowly alongside her, the chrome rims revolving in time with her dull walking pace. And now that they were close, Erin could see the girl’s eyes: they were dead.
“Hey?” called Erin through her window. “Are you okay?”
No response. The girl’s face was impassive, vacant as she took one step after another, marching painfully along the highway that would lead her to nothing but more and more wasteland.
Immediate panic over and done with, Morgan dropped down onto the backseat. “Boys, that’s a bad acid trip walkin’ right there.”
Andy nodded in agreement, but Erin went right back at them. “Or maybe she was raped, you dip-shits.”
Typical of Morgan to bring everything down to drugs. He could be such a moron some times.
The van continued to roll forward beside the zombie-like girl. She paid no one any attention. The van didn’t exist. Erin and Morgan could have argued for hours, days and still the girl wouldn’t have noticed.
“You gonna get killed doin’ that,” tried Pepper. Anything to break through.
But nothing.
“Hello?” called Erin, louder. “Can you hear us?”