Lil’ Jorge, for example, had a table-top. He walked past Mano with his new table-top. “Please don’t eat me,” screamed Lil’ Jorge.
“Why would I eat you?” asked Mano calmly.
Like Mano’s barbershop and butcher shop, every new XO business also had a double door. They became the only other places in Pie Time that Mano, with his enormous body, could still enter. However, all the XO double doors were much more special than Mano’s double doors. They were electric. They were the first electric double doors in Pie Time. Everyone, not just the children, liked to stand in front of the electric eye of the XO double doors and move side to side so that the doors would open automatically for them. To Mano, it felt like being food, and walking into the opening and closing mouth of a giant animal. Mano stood in front of the electric double doors of XO Meats for two minutes while the blurry electric mouth opened and closed. The animal wanted to eat him, he thought. It was bigger than him. And Mano finally let the animal eat him.
XO Meats was cold inside. It had a separate room in the back where they did all the butchering so that none of the customers could see what was really happening to the animals. The meat just came out in different shapes. It was put in the glass display case for all the hungry families to point at. They’d say, “I’ll take that oval shape of meat,” or “I’ll take this oval shape of meat,” or “No, no, I want that tube shape of meat.” They’d say things like that, not even knowing what kind of animal that shape came from. Those shapes came from all different kinds of animals. Sheep, of course, but also wolves, deer, cows, pigs, and horses. Inside XO Meats there was no smell of blood—no smell of death at all. It was clean and bright with white light, like a room built in a time after death was just a problem to be solved, and inside XO Meats it had been solved.
There were also two new places built on Last Street on each side of The Chef’s restaurant. One was called XO Cafe, which served coffee and biscuits all day and all night long. It was always open. The other was called XO Diner, which was also always open. Across from The Innkeeper’s inn was a new inn called XO Inn. In every room was a radio, and a clean bathtub. Across from The Bartender’s bar was a new bar called XO Bar. Like The Bartender’s Bar, XO Bar had just one beer on tap, except it wasn’t Pie Time. It was XO Beer.
The Pie Time Factory was now closed and gutted of many of its machines and vats. In the last three days, construction had already begun on the new XO Factory, which was three times the size of the Pie Time Factory. The wing that was responsible solely for the manufacturing of XO Life Cages was nearly complete, and the concrete foundations for the XO cigarette wing had already been poured. The beer silos were already being built, too. The large billboard on the side of the Pie Time Factory with the words It’s High Time for a Pie Time and a picture of June Good smoking a cigarette in her pearls and fur coat was in its first days of fading in the sun. On the enormous outside walls of the new XO Factory there was just a white sign with big black letters that read: War on Death. XO.
And in smaller letters below the XO, it read: Beers for Life. Smokes for Life. Cages for Life.
Mano looked for his lost black birds in this new world, but there were still no such thing as birds. His eyes hurt from squinting at all the new shapes. Maybe he felt like he had just walked onto the first battlefield of a war, and that his birds had been swallowed up by it.
“Birds!” Mano cupped his hands and called for the black birds as he walked down Last Street. “Birds!” He didn’t know how else to call for them other than to just yell the word for what they were called. He squinted into the trees behind the new shapes, but the shapes looked birdless. So, instead, Mano bent down and put his palm toward the ground, and the black poodle walked underneath it to be petted.
People that Mano didn’t quite recognize were walking past him on the sidewalk. A few were wearing large black cages around their torsos. The people wearing cages looked very large in their cages, though not quite as large as Mano, so he immediately felt comforted simply by their size, as if he was no longer alone. But when he squinted, their size and shape was see-through, whereas his was not. These people looked like lightbulbs, but not like they could light up. Bulbs, for sure, but not light bulbs. Bulbs with a head and legs and arms sticking out of them. And they weren’t made out of glass like a light bulb. Mano wanted to push one of them over to see if they would break, or roll.
“What is it you’re calling for?” asked a tall man with a black cage around his torso.
“Birds.”
“Birds?”
“Have you seen them?”
“What are birds?”
“Nothing,” Mano said, defeated. “Forget it.”
On one of the bars that spanned this tall man’s face was a white rectangle, and in the rectangle were black letters. Mano squinted to read them. War on Death. XO.
The War on Death, Mano thought, was not a war at all, but a milking. It was a way to milk death for what it was worth, instead of loving it for what it had to be. In Mano’s mind, death wasn’t a thing to fight against, but a thing to fight for. And in some small way, if this war on death was a war at all, he thought, it was a war on The Death Lessons.
“Do you think XO makes a cage big enough for that man?” asked a woman wearing a black cage standing behind the tall man in a cage. She pointed at Mano.
Mano overheard her. “I don’t want your stupid fucking cage,” Mano shouted over the tall man’s shoulder.
The tall man turned around and tried to put his arms inside the woman’s cage to protect her from Mano’s surprising vitriol. The tall man used his arms to comfort her, but his arms just kept clunking around on the outside of her cage.
“I’ll take the Reckoner Tree over your fucking cage.”
The tall man tried a little harder to cleanly find the woman’s body inside her cage. “What’s the Reckoner Tree?” he asked Mano.
“Forget about it,” Mano said, resigned.
“He’s a monster!” she yelled. The tall man and the woman turned around and walked in the other direction away from Mano.
Mano felt especially heavy. He spotted a few more blurry people in cages. Everyone in their cages was looking at Mano as if he was a giant monster—as if he was something suddenly uncaged.
It was time for Mano to go butcher some sheep for the children.
27.
Pie Time was swelling with death tourists. XO was spreading the word of God’s Finger to nearby towns, and tourists wanted to take their chances to see a resident of Pie Time show up dead with a large strange hole in the chest. No one who was not a resident of Pie Time had yet died, so the tourists felt safe. With the exception of The Humanitarians, no one from Nun’s Hat had known anything of God’s Finger in Pie Time until very recently.
The Humanitarians walked into Mano’s butcher shop wearing XO Life Cages. The man and woman had the same kind of beauty that June Good had, the kind that belonged in cigarette ads. Their skin was so perfect, and their teeth were so white and straight, it was easy to forget that a skull hid behind them. Their bodies seemed indestructible, impervious to any kind of death. They looked sturdy and giant in their cages. They looked like something a child would want to play on.
“I think you’re looking for XO Meats,” said Mano. “It’s across the street.”
Other than all of the new XO businesses, Mano’s butcher shop and barbershop, with their double doors, were the only other places that people wearing black cages were physically able to enter. These were the only doors wide enough for people with cages to enter. Soon, the people who could afford XO Life Cages for their bodies could also afford to cut larger doors into their own homes.
When The Humanitarians entered Mano’s butcher shop, The Shoveler, Ernesto, and Ernest were already standing just inside the double doors. The Shoveler had been waiting for the cuts of sheep that he had purchased. His sons, Ernesto and Ernest, were behind the counter helping Mano grind the mutton. They had become very familiar with Mano’s butcher shop,
and they were quickly becoming experts with the equipment. Ernesto ran around the counter and jumped up on the lowest bar of the woman’s black cage. He swung his feet around to the second lowest bar on the cage and then he hung upside down from his knees.
“Ernesto! Down!” commanded The Shoveler.
“It’s ok. He’s just having fun,” said the woman. The Humanitarians had been trained well to be calm and polite in any situation.
Ernesto climbed higher until he was inside the black cage with the woman. The woman hugged Ernesto.
“It’s safe in here with me, Ernesto. You see, thanks to XO, in here we’re safe from God’s Finger,” she explained to him, but really she was explaining it to Mano and The Shoveler. Like XO, it was in The Humanitarian’s best business interests that people keep dying. God’s Finger created as much demand as panic, and the XO Life Cages could only be rented by the month, never owned, so that demand would never dwindle, even if God’s Finger appeared cured.
The man reached into his black cage with his arm to tip his cap. “Gentleman, sorry to bother you, but we’re not looking for XO Meats at all. In fact, we’re just here to tell you about how you can rent your own cage.”
“We already know about it, asshole. Thank you,” said Mano dismissively, and with the same angry tone he used with everyone else wearing cages. “Would you like some sheep? I butchered one last night.”
“Hey, I didn’t mean to upset you,” pleaded the man.
“Do you want some sheep? Or not?” Mano asked, holding up a bloody sheep’s leg.
Ernest put down his own cut of sheep to walk over to The Humanitarians. He moved his finger along one of the woman’s iron bars.
“Do you mind?” asked The Shoveler as he shook the man’s cage a little.
“No, of course not. Do you have any questions about it?” asked the man.
“What is it made out of?” Ernesto asked.
“It’s like iron, but lighter,” answered the woman.
“Like iron, you say, but lighter...” said The Shoveler.
“That’s exactly right.”
“So, is it iron?”
“It’s a lot like it,” said the man.
The Humanitarians tried to act natural while their cages were being studied by everyone but Mano, who was making his lack of interest very obvious. The Humanitarians acted as if what they were wearing was as common as a man wearing a cardigan with trousers or a woman wearing a sun dress.
“Look, if you’re going to be in here, you’ll need to buy some meat,” demanded Mano. He chopped off another leg of a sheep so hard that it threw itself onto the floor. “I’m trying to run a fucking business here!” Mano picked up the leg and set it back onto the chopping block.
“We understand,” said the woman. The Humanitarians fought Mano’s shortness with pleasantness, grace, and etiquette, which frustrated Mano even further. “We’ll take two cuts of whatever the special is.”
“I don’t have any specials. You want a leg?”
“Yes, please, a leg. That sounds lovely.”
Mano wrapped the leg that had just fallen onto the floor in brown paper. As he wrapped it, he half-heartedly blew on it to clean it. He set the package on the counter.
“How much do we owe you?” asked the man.
“It’s free,” said Mano.
“Free?” asked the man, surprised. “But you said this is a business. How do you stay open?”
“It’s free for people who participate in The Death Lessons. Now you’re going to need a Death Lesson,” insisted Mano.
“What is a Death Lesson?” asked the woman.
“I’ll show you exactly what it is if you’ll have one.”
The man and the woman looked at each other nervously while Ernest joined his brother climbing on the cages. Ernest had climbed all the way to the top of the woman’s cage, and was preparing to leap from the woman’s cage to the top of the man’s cage where Ernesto was maneuvering. “I don’t see why not,” said the woman, struggling to stay upright so that Ernest wouldn’t fall off the top of her cage.
“Sure, yes, please, give us a Death Lesson!” The man steadied his cage with the shifting weight of Ernesto above him.
“Great news!” exclaimed Mano. “Ok, first you’ll have to take off those unsightly cages.”
Without hesitation, the man explained that taking off the cages was the only thing that they weren’t really willing to do.
“If death can’t get inside your cage, then neither can a death lesson,” explained Mano, suddenly proud of himself. “Now, take them off!”
The man and woman from Nun’s Hat had been in Pie Time for many weeks before investing in XO Life Cages, and they hadn’t yet died. It seemed reasonable to them that removing the cages for a few moments with Mano in the sheep pen would likely be ok. Besides, they knew they would have to remove the cages at various times during their lives for basic maintenance.
“Let’s do it,” said the man.
“If you say so,” said the woman.
They took off their cages like scuba divers taking off scuba equipment. A body that was once in a cage designed to protect it seems awfully small and vulnerable once it is removed from that cage. Like a turtle. The man and the woman, although still very beautiful, looked very small and soft.
In that moment, Mano looked even bigger.
Everyone, including The Shoveler and his two boys, walked through Mano’s butcher shop, past his bloody chopping block, and out of the double doors in the back. Everyone stood in a line on the edge of the pen.
“You can ride them,” said Ernest.
“You ride them?” said the man in disbelief. “Don’t you think I’ll be too big and heavy to ride on the back of a sheep?”
“They’re strong. And they want to carry you.”
“I see.”
Ernesto also added some basic information before Mano had the chance. “They’re all named Curls.”
“You can pick one!” shouted Ernest.
The Shoveler tried to shush Ernest who was getting very excited about his chance to co-teach a Death Lesson. The Shoveler picked his son up and held him. But Ernest squirreled out of the hold.
“Pick one for what?” the woman asked Ernest as he slipped from his father’s grip.
“To die!” answered Ernesto.
Mano filled in some of The Humanitarians’ unanswered questions, and then he tightened the biggest sheep saddle he had on Curls. The man, reluctantly, lowered his weight down onto Curls, who was the biggest of all the sheep in the pen. He was reluctant to let go of all his weight, fearing that he might injure the sheep, but Ernesto encouraged him.
“It’s ok,” he said.” Just lift your feet off the ground now. They’re strong.”
So the man from Nun’s Hat did. And so did the woman. As they rode around in the pen, they laughed harder than they had laughed in a long time. They felt free, and full of joy. They felt lighter and alive. They felt like they were a part of the world.
When the woman fell from Curls, she decided to rest in the mud instead of getting up right away. Curls walked over to her and licked her face. Curls’ cold pointy tongue tried to hollow out her nostrils. It made her laugh so hard that she cried. She rolled around in the mud until her entire body was covered in it, and she kept crying. The man, seeing her roll around in the mud, fell off of Curls and rolled around in the mud with her. Together they laughed and cried while Mano, The Shoveler, Ernesto, and Ernest watched.
“Now I will need your help,” Mano interrupted the rolling. The Humanitarians sat up on their elbows in the mud and listened. “I need you both to pick out a sheep.”
Unlike all the children before them when Mano asked this same question, the man and the woman refused to pick a sheep. They knew Mano’s intentions.
They whispered to each other, then turned to Mano. “We don’t want to pick one.”
“That’s no good. You have to pick one,” Mano insisted. “In order to complete your lesson, you must pick a s
heep.”
They whispered to each other again. The woman was most convincing in her whispering, and the man resigned with a sigh.
“If we must pick a sheep, then we’ll pick the smallest one.” It made some sense to them that if a sheep had to die, that it be the one with the least meat, the one with the least to lose from death, the one that took up the least amount of space inside of their guilt. They picked the one that was, to them, more of an afterthought of a sheep.
They pointed at the black poodle in the far corner of the pen.
“Which one?” Mano was confused as to where The Humanitarians were pointing. He tried to clarify.
“The smallest black one,” said the woman. “That one right there.”
“I’m sorry, that’s not a sheep,” said Mano.
“That’s Mano’s poodle,” said Ernest.
“It looks like a sheep. Look how poofy it is!” said the man.
“It does look poofy like a sheep, you’re right. But it’s not a sheep,” explained Mano.
“But that’s what we picked,” said the woman. “We’ve followed all the rules of your Death Lessons, and you asked us to pick and that’s what we’ve picked.”
And it was. It was what they picked.
The Death Lesson on this particular day had quickly become Mano’s own. He trudged slowly and sloppily through the mud to plop down into it next to the black poodle. He pet it, and he told it he loved it. It was his first real chance to tell something that he loved it before it died. And he did love it. He didn’t love it like he had loved Pepe, and he didn’t love it like he had loved his mother. But it was love. It was the kind of love that he had for himself, a love born from understanding, because they shared a space for so long. They had for so long now walked the same steps. They survived together. “I love you,” he told it. And just like that, the love was true.
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