when you grilled it.”
“I didn’t actually
Mr. Le Renges dropped the bullet into his wastebasket. “Attaboy, John. You’ll be back here bright and early tomorrow morning, then?”
“Early, yes. Bright? Well, maybe.”
All right, you can call me a hairsplitting go-by-the-book bureaucrat, but the way I see it any job has to be done properly or else it’s not worth getting out of bed in the morning to do it, especially if you have to get out of bed at 5:15. I walked back to the Calais Motor Inn looking for a bite of lunch, and I ordered a fried chicken salad with iceberg lettuce, tomato, bacon bits, cheddar and mozzarella and home-made croutons, with onion strings and fried pickles on the side. But as comforting as all of this was, I couldn’t stop thinking about that bullet and wondering where it had come from. I could understand why Mr. Le Renges didn’t want to report it to the health and safety inspectors, but why didn’t he want to have a hard word with his own supplier?
Velma came up with another beer. “You’re looking serious today, John. I thought you had to be happy by law.”
“Got something on my mind, Velma, that’s all.”
She sat down beside me. “How did the job go?”
“It’s an existence. I grill, therefore I am. But something happened today … I don’t know. It’s made me feel kind of uncomfortable.”
“What do you mean, John?”
“It’s like having my shorts twisted only it’s inside my head. I keep trying to tug it this way and that way and it still feels not quite right.”
“Go on.”
I told her about the bullet and the way in which Mr. Le Renges had insisted that he wasn’t going to report it.
“Well, that happens. You do get customers who bring in a dead fly and hide it in their salad so they won’t have to pay.”
“I know. But, I don’t know.”
After a double portion of chocolate ice-cream with vanilla-flavored wafers I walked back to Tony’s where the lunchtime session was just finishing. “Mr. Le Renges still here?” I asked Oona.
“He went over to St. Stephen. He won’t be back until six, thank God.”
“You don’t like him much, do you?”
“He gives me the heeby-jeebies, if you must know.”
I went through to Mr. Le Renges’ office. Fortunately, he had left it unlocked. I looked in the wastebasket and the bullet was still there. I picked it out and dropped it into my pocket.
On my way back to the Calais Motor Inn a big blue pick-up truck tooted at me. It was Nils Guttormsen from Lyle’s Autos, still looking surprised.
“They brought over your transmission parts from Bangor this morning, John. I should have her up and running in a couple of days.”
“That’s great news, Nils. No need to break your ass.” Especially since I don’t have any money to pay you yet.
I showed the bullet to Velma.
“That’s truly weird, isn’t it?” she said.
“You’re right, Velma. It’s weird, but it’s not unusual for hamburger meat to be contaminated. In fact, it’s more usual than unusual, which is why I never eat hamburgers.”
“I don’t know if I want to hear this, John.”
“You should, Velma. See — they used to have federal inspectors in every slaughterhouse, but the Reagan administration wanted to save money, so they allowed the meatpacking industry to take care of its own hygiene procedures. Streamlined Inspection System for Cattle, that’s what they call it — SIS-C.”
“I never heard of that, John.”
“Well, Velma, as an ordinary citizen you probably wouldn’t have. But the upshot was that when they had no USDA inspectors breathing down their necks, most of the slaughterhouses doubled their line speed, and that meant there was much more risk of contamination. I mean if you can imagine a dead cow hanging up by its heels and a guy cutting its stomach open, and then heaving out its intestines by hand, which they still do, that’s a very skilled job, and if a gutter makes one mistake
“Oh, my God.”
“Oh, it’s worse than that, Velma. These days, with SIS-C, meat-packers can get away with processing far more diseased cattle. I’ve seen cows coming into the slaughterhouse with abscesses and tapeworms and measles. The beef scraps they ship out for hamburgers are all mixed up with manure, hair, insects, metal filings, urine and vomit.”
“You’re making me feel nauseous, John. I had a hamburger for supper last night.”
“Make it your last, Velma. It’s not just the contamination, it’s the quality of the beef they use. Most of the cattle they slaughter for hamburgers are old dairy cattle, because they’re cheap and their meat isn’t too fatty. But they’re full of antibiotics and they’re often infected with
“That’s like a horror story, John.”
“You’re too right, Velma.”
“But this bullet, John. Where would this bullet come from?”
“That’s what I want to know, Velma. I can’t take it to the health people because then I’d lose my job and if I lose my job I can’t pay for my automobile to be repaired and Nils Guttormsen is going to impound it and I’ll never get back to Baton Rouge unless I fucking walk and it’s two thousand three hundred and seven miles.”
“That far, hunh?”
“That far.”
“Why don’t you show it to Eddie Bertilson?”
“What?”
“The bullet. Why don’t you show it to Eddie Bertilson. Bertilson’s Sporting Guns and Ammo, over on Orchard Street? He’ll tell you where it came from.”
“You think so?”
“I know so. He knows everything about guns and ammo. He used to be married to my cousin Patricia.”
“You’re a star, Velma. I’ll go do that. When I come back, maybe you and I could have some dinner together and then I’ll make wild energetic love to you.”
“No.”
“No?”
“I like you, John, but no.”
“Oh.”
Eddie Bertilson was one of those extreme pains-in-the-ass-like people who note down the tailfin numbers of military aircraft in Turkey and get themselves arrested for espionage. But I have to admit that he knew everything possible about guns and ammo and when he took a look at that bullet he knew directly what it was.
He was small and bald with dark-tinted glasses and hair growing out of his ears, and a Grateful Dead T-shirt with greasy finger-wipes on it. He screwed this jeweler’s eyeglass into his socket and turned the bullet this way and that.
“Where’d you find this?” he wanted to know.
