SLAUGHTERING FOR ROOPIE

BY THOMAS VAN GEMERT

Roopie jogs the five miles of dusty road to my house. If I had carpeting I know I would keep my door locked at that time and hide in the corner where he couldn’t see me if he peeked into the windows, a sweating monster seeking shade. It is early August and there hasn’t been rain in weeks, just that asshole sun, exposing himself to us relentlessy, never having the decency to cover up with a cloud.

I have given up on my crops. I haven’t even looked at them for five days. When Roopey begins to mention them I cut him off, screaming insanely with fingers in ears. I will look up and he will still be talking, staring at the floor, face gleaming with sweat, one of his beers from my ice box in his hand. I look down at the paperback I have been reading, one of the many from a box I bought at Agatha’s garage sale, and wish I had a third hand to throw it with. Roopey hasn’t given up on his crops but he doesn’t have as many as I do. He deals mostly with beef cattle, runs his own slaughter house. Sometimes he’ll have his run right after slaughter, not bothering to clean up very well afterwards. I have to close up all the windows and kill the flys that came in with him. Then we sit there and roast in my cabin, his ass sweating even more on the mantle which I successfully avoid looking at for hours until after he has left, letting it dry, although I have noticed a stain beginning to appear.

Today I have laid a burlap bag on his spot. He says “What’s this doing here? You out of potatoes?” and sweeps the bag aside with his big clumsy fingers. That’s all he needs for a segway into the crops but he doesn’t start. I take my fingers out of my ears and pick up my book again. “You still working on that slab I sold you last week? Need more yet?” he asks. “You saw it when you got your beer. I’m still good.” I answer. It is Tuesday, one of the days he doesn’t butcher, so he is clean save for the dust caked sweat which I can bear and the windows remain open and I can catch the rare breeze that gets by that bastard sun when he isn’t paying attention to my cabin and my suffering.

“Get through that box yet? I’m sure Agatha has more. That’s all she does all day too ya know.” I am sick of Roop’s conversation. This usually occurs about a minute after he sits down, the conglomerate slab just beginning to absorb his liquid filth. I couldn’t run like him if I wanted to. The well I share with the Sprankles and Coreys is close to dry. Every evening at exactly quarter after seven we meet, Pete Sprankle, Fred Corey and I with our gallon jugs, two each. Three days ago, Fred couldn’t make it so he sent his daughter, Gretta, instead. I still haven’t recovered. The next night when I got my two gallons I pushed out of the small talk and when I rounded the corner of my trail, I guzzled the life back into me. The life fluids which I had wasted were crusting in a rag sealed in an empty paint bucket in the corner of my closet. If only that sonabitch Fred knew what he did to me sending his daughter instead. When I couldn’t concentrate with my reading I knew it was something that would have to be done sooner or later, and so I’d get it over with. She was wearing cut-off jeans, cut off just below where her thighs began it seemed. And a small red shirt that she had grown out of but was still wearing, revealing her stomach. She was also barefoot and her toe nails were painted pink. Any other time I would have thanked Fred silently but this was a bad time and I could hear the sun laughing every time I finished and dropped the rag back into the paint bucket and closed the lid tight. The sun wanted me dead. Yesterday I tried to fight it, but every time I tried to read Mystery on Corello Shore, there she would be, bending over to fill her jugs, smiling and talking about how she has been riding the tractor alot lately. I wondered if Pete was going through the same hell but I would never know and if I did, it wouldn’t help at all, most likely make things worse, knowing that he was thinking of her too. So I put her out of my mind the best I could and felt my heart start pumping horribly when seven o’clock came around and it was time to hit the trail. But that was the only time she went and although I didn’t think about it all that much until now I guess I was kind of dissappointed.

It finally rains and I look at my crops in the morning, brown and wet. So I start slaughtering for Roopie. It is something I never imagined I would have to do. I would look the other way on the first swing. The hack where the neck meets the shoulders. This I made as clean and accurate as I could and at the last second I’d turn my head. Then it was easy for the animal was dead and there was no turning back. Since it was dead it might as well be used for food, made worth while. At that point after the slice and the instant collapse and thud of a ton of animal, at that point I was doing something good. I was making every scrap count. I was making this beast’s death a worthy one. Roopey paid me three dollars an hour and all the meat and vegetables I could carry home. He also invited me to dinner if I ran twice around his acres with him. This was tough but worth it. We would lather up with olive oil to keep the son of a bitch horse flies off and then, because the sun was up again and avoiding the few clouds, I would feel the olive oil, blood, guts, and brains slide down my body on a river of sweat. Roop was fat and slow and it was more excruciating than fighting off the libido demons to hold back and stay with his pace with the creek at the end. The first loop we would run by it and along it for a while and I would hold my hand up to shield it. It is not there. I cannot see it. The second time around, my heart starts to race, I can taste the copper in my dry throat and when the time is right, I start sprinting, my arms and legs and chest screaming in pain but I have learned to enjoy this for it means that creek. And when I jump, my mind pauses, suspended in the air, I am inside one of the most vile bodies on earth, the creek holds me there for a second longer than the law of physics allows, preparing for my contamination.

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