next.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Much diversion indeed!
But listen; you want to know why I kill, I will tell you.
It is the summer between my junior and senior years in college, and I am seeing this great nation of ours firsthand in an old red Ford Falcon with one blue fender from a junkyard in Phoenix, Arizona. I work two weeks at a job, any job I can find wherever I am, then I move on: I wash dishes in Salt Lake City, I unload boxcars in Elton, Illinois, I pack corn in Rochester, Minnesota, where the canning factory has a water tower painted like a huge ear of corn, kernels, husks and all.
The night I leave Rochester I end up in a small, old-fashioned, midwestern bar in Austin, where Hormel has its headquarters. Long and narrow, with dark wood booths along the right wall, the bar along the left, a few tables down the middle, shuffleboard, in the back a golden oldies country-western jukebox-“Good Night Irene,” “Your Cheatin’ Heart.”
But the evening’s real entertainment is two very drunken Great American Working Men with thick arms and beer bellies out over the tops of their Levi’s (Raptor’s rule: Wealthy American males of a like age have pear-shaped guts up over which they wear tailored slacks). These men don’t have tax consultants, but they do have their Detroit tin, their washer-dryer, their outboard motorboat on a trailer in the backyard.
Tonight they are drunk in a bar near Hormel’s, heads to gether to chuckle over one another’s dirty stories. Then the one with hair rears back on his stool, almost falling over.
“You summitch, ya can’t say that to me!”
“Say anything I wanna say, shitferbrains!”
They are off their stools, wild-eyed, lump fists faking jabs. Nobody moves to break them up. The Hairy Man’s roundhouse swing at the Smooth Man’s bald pate misses. The force of his own blow whirls him around so he knocks over two stools and lands on his derriere, startle-eyed.
“Get up’n fight!”
The Smooth Man shuffles like a trained bear. The Hairy Man rises. The Smooth Man swings at him, misses, spins, falls. Twice more each. They assist each other, ascend their stools.
“Onliest frien’ I got inna worl’.”
“Can’t count on nobody but you.”
They embrace, and weep upon one another’s shoulders. Quaff their beer. Heads together, they chuckle once again.
“Rotten bassard, can’t say that ’bout my wife!”
“You summitch, you said it ‘bout my wife firs’!”
In almost an hour, neither lands a solid blow.
Sitting beside me through this floor show is a lanky sandy-haired man with large knuckly hands scrubbed red and raw-looking. He thrums like a high-power line as he sprinkles salt in his beer to raise the head, drinks, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. His change and cigarettes are in the wet puddle left by his glass.
“Every fucking Friday night,” he says. He has a low, hoarse voice that makes me want to clear my throat.
“Better than TV.” I gesture at the bartender for refills of his glass, my own. “Any work at the packing plant?”
“You don’t want to work there. I’m a plugger and…” I do not know what a plugger is. He starts to roll up his left sleeve. I do not know what he is doing. Stitched up his forearm is an orderly row of white dimples. “Gook AR rounds in ’Nam.”
I clear my throat, but there is nothing in my throat except the sound of his voice. I wish I had been old enough to go to Vietnam, see who I was, what I had. He nods as if I have spoken.
“Agent Orange,” he says. I have never heard of Agent Orange. I am nineteen years old. “Why I got me this voice.” He raises the beer I have bought him. “Dead gooks,” he says.
We drink to dead gooks. He puts his glass down.
“We pack hogs. Cut their throats and hang them upside down on a conveyor. The bristles don’t get used for brushes any more, so we take ’em off with acid. Whole hog except the head gets dipped in the vat.”
He waits as the bartender brings us our beers. He is nodding to himself and drumming on the bar with the fingers of both hands the whole while. He drinks beer.
“If the acid gets under the skin, it’ll ruin the meat.”
“But if the head doesn’t go in, how could the acid get-”
“The other end does.”
I sit for a long moment with him, then, as I assimilate what he is telling me, I drain my beer just as he drained his.
“Yeah,” he says. “For eight fucking hours a day I shove corks up the assholes of dead pigs.”
Late as it is and drunk as I get before the 1:00 a.m. bar-close, I drive on out of Austin. I pull off the road somewhere on the way to Albert Lea, throw up the night’s beer into a clump of willows, and sleep in my sleeping bag beside the car.
I do not know if his story is true, but in the casual hour of our acquaintance he does not strike me as a fanciful man. A proud man, with nothing in his life to be proud of-back then, Vietnam vets are denied their public due-but not fanciful.
So you see, I kill for existential reasons-if you can intuit the deductive validity of my argument.
I grow as long-winded as Will. You wish only to know why I kill the Mafia underboss the newspapers call the Spic.
What can I tell you? It is mere butchery, anyone could do it, not really my sort of thing at all. I have had no bad dreams about it, so my nightmare after Lenington was naught but aberration. Perhaps I et a bad oyster- remember that line by a drunken and delicious Kay Kendall in Les Girls?
But I digress. Two days after the Spic’s assassination, I chance to read a one-inch piece about it in the New York Times, one of those much thinner editions distributed outside the five boroughs. Reading of it after the fact makes me feel strange-no, I am not going to tell you in which city or hamlet I read it. I do not wish you to know where these feats might take me; and tonight, after I end Will Dalton’s miserable existence, it will be, as Stepin Fetchit used to say, Feets, Do Yo Stuff.
Since Spic Madrid is Chicano, an Hispanic voice sings my song of death to Stagnaro’s answering machine. I discover the voice at the mission church five miles down the road. He is happy to read my little note into the telephone. He thinks it harmless fun. He thinks payment inappropriate, so I make a donation which I believe makes him happy. But who knows when dealing with a man of God?
Perhaps Will Dalton, still droning on, is also, as the Latin has it, dis manibus sacrum — sacred to the gods of the underworld. I hope so; because soon he will join them.
Do you really believe they will be there to welcome him?
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,’” said Will. Looking around the hall, a fleeting pause at Dante.
“Pretty familiar, isn’t it? Genesis, chapter one, verse one. I want to contrast that story, spanning six days, with the same story told by science, spanning 6 billion years. The Bible representing myth, science representing the
