Foodchain

by Jeff Jacobson

  The original announcer came back on, still drowsy. “Thank you, uh…Mr. Spanky, for that…spirited introduction. But he’s right, you folks are in for a real treat here. These bulls are the real deal. Voted meanest bulls four years running in the North Valley Circuit. And first up is young Bartholomew Wilson, a sophomore at Whitewoods High School, trying for his second tournament championship this year.”

  Frank was nearly at the gates when one of the closest clowns, wearing green mop strings over his head, shouted at another clown, “You ain’t got enough sense to pour sand out of a boot if the instructions were printed on the bottom. I got a twenty that says Wilson is gonna eat dirt in less than six seconds.”

  “Then you’re as dumb as you look. You got it,” the second clown, wearing a red cape, shot back. Frank wasn’t sure, but he thought it was the same guy from the front gate.

  Frank’s steps slowed and he changed direction, heading for the fence. The gate across the ring sprang open and two thousand pounds of pissed off bull muscles jumped and twirled across the soft dirt. The kid on the bull’s back, Wilson, hung as best as he could, but his fifteen year-old muscles were no match for the backbreaking spinning and popping, and he was flung off into the dust.

  “Three seconds, motherfucker!” Green head shouted.

  Red cape shrugged, pulled out a twenty from his costume, and flicked it into the dust in the ring. “It’s all yours, dickhead.”

  Frank turned away from the gates and slowly ambled around the ring, past Green head, past the announcing booth, until he could see the loading gates. He took his time, peering at the wild bulls, noting their body stance, their breathing, their eyes. He surreptitiously pulled the remaining twenty from his pocket, folded it over, and kept it curled in his fist.

  Several riders tried their luck. Nobody lasted more than five seconds. The clowns thrived on leaping into the ring, catching the bull’s attention, and outrunning the animal.

  Finally, Frank found a bull he liked. He ambled slowly back and got two beers. He brought them both over to the ring and leaned against the fence next to Green head. “Howdy.” Frank nodded.

  The clown nodded back, scratching at his scraggly beard. It had been spray painted orange. Frank suddenly noticed his second beer. He held it out. “Thirsty?”

  “That’s goddamn white of you.” They clinked the bottles together through the bars and drank. “Who are you, some kind of junior G-man?” the clown asked, eyeing the black suit. He laughed, raised his hands above his head. “Don’t shoot!”

  Frank forced a chuckle, let a few moments pass. “Say, I happened to overhear you laying a little money down on a few of these riders. Thought I’d see if you might be interested in any other wagers.”

  “Could be, could be. What are you thinking?”

  “I think this next rider’s gonna hang on for a solid eight seconds.”

  “You think so, huh? Okay. Just how sure are ya?”

  “Twenty bucks sure. For starters.”

  The clown scratched at his beard, then his wig. “What’s the bull?”

  “Uh…it’s called Chopper, I think.”

  “Who’s the rider?”

  “Kid named Garth Ennis.”

  The clown nodded. “Could be close.” He watched the gate for a moment, as the Ennis kid settled on Chopper and the names crackled out of the loudspeakers. Finally, “Okay. You got it. Twenty bucks. Deal?”

  “Deal.” They shook on it.

  The gate burst open. Chopper spun and kicked and bucked, but his heart wasn’t in it. It looked like the bull was tired, tired of the heat, tired of the dust, and tired of jumping and twisting. Eight seconds later, when the buzzer sounded, Ennis was still on Chopper’s back.

  “I’ll be damned. Be right back,” the clown said, dropping from the fence with the other clowns and scrambling at the bull. They got Ennis off safely and lured the bull back through the gate. Green head came back, wiping at his face. Sweat trickled down through his white makeup, leaving streaks of tan skin.

  “Not bad. Not a bad call at all. How’d you know?” He pulled a twenty from his oversize shorts.

  “Lucky.”

  “Lucky, huh?” Green head leaned back and took second, closer look Frank, this time noticing the slack, dead left side of his face. He slapped the money into Frank’s palm through the fence. “Maybe so, but it don’t matter. You still won.”

  “Appreciate it,” Frank said. He went back to the stands and treated himself to a beer. The place suddenly didn’t seem so bad after all. He gulped down that beer, ordered two more, and took them back out to the ring. He handed one to Green head.

  “Name’s Pine Rockatanski,” the clown said.

  “Frank Winter.” He bit his tongue as he realized, too goddamn late, he’d given his real name. He blamed it on the beer and the heat.

  Pine chugged his beer and sprinted out into the ring with his ambling, bowlegged gait as another teenager got bounced into the dirt. Afterwards, he asked, “In town long?”

  “Not really. Just passing through, you could say.”

  “Well, if you’re gonna be around tonight, there’s gonna be some more gambling opportunities, case you’re interested.”

  “Depends. Mostly, I just stick to the horses. What’s the game?”

  Pine grinned and spit. “You’re gonna like it. Trust me. You a drinking man?”

  Frank looked out over the ring, watching as the dust hung in the still air. “Sometimes. I like to drink a six-pack before it gets warm.”

  Pine laughed. “Let’s roll.”

  * * * * *

  Frank met the rodeo clowns in the fairground parking lot at six.

  A late-model diesel pickup roared through the empty parking lot. Just as that pickup slowed to a stop, a second pickup appeared, immediately followed by a third. They hit the entrance fast, rear tires sliding, and raced each other to Frank’s car. He’d finished the rum earlier and flung it at the fence.

  The two pickups slid past the long black car in a storm of dust and flecks of asphalt. Frank walked over to first pickup and introduced himself.

  “You the one that took twenty off Pine?” The guy behind the wheel came across as a cowboy in an old cigarette ad. Sure enough, a fresh cigarette jutted from underneath a handlebar mustache, bobbing at the side of his mouth as he talked. He was the guy that introduced the bull riders, the guy in the rainbow Afro.

  “Yeah,” Frank said, almost apologetically.

  “Good. Dumbshit deserved it. Anybody that couldn’t see old Chopper was damn near dead was too goddamn dumb to look.” He stuck out his hand. “Jack Troutman. Pleased to meet ya.”

  Pine climbed out of the second pickup, yelling at the guy in the third. “Pay up motherfucker! That was all mine and you know it.” Without the clown getup, which made him looked sort of mischievous, now he looked like he was two steps short of a starting a cult. He still had the beard; most of the orange had been washed out, but instead of continuing up into his hair, it stopped dead in a thick tangle of sideburn at the top of the ear. The rest of Pine’s head was bald. The back part looked particularly shaved, as if the hair had gotten confused, and instead of growing on the back of the head, it was growing on his chin. Pine made the best of it, overcompensating, embracing it, as if growing a heavy beard was somehow superior to having a long tangle of hair, like Frank.

  “I got a better idea,” the other guy yelled back. “Come on over and lick my ball sweat instead.” He was the guy that had taken the money off Frank out front, and had worn the red cape at the rodeo. His pickup was at least twenty-five years old and looked as if it was being slowly eaten alive from the bottom by a fungus-like rust.

  “That dipshit over there is Chuck,” Jack said.

  They congregated near Jack’s tailgate as he broke out a twelve pack of Coors and a bottle of Seagram’s 7. Jack and Pine might have been brothers, all sharp angles of lean bone. Plenty of scars. Cowboy hats. Cowboy boots. Wranglers, tight around the hips, several inches too long, bunc
hed around the ankles. Belt buckles the size of a baby’s head. Their knuckles were scabbed, swollen. Calluses and ragged fingernails. Tattoos. Bad breath.

  Chuck ignored Frank and glared at Pine. “You still owe me ten bucks.” Chuck was stockier than Jack and Pine, but his skin looked slack somehow, like it was several sizes too large. He had a flattop and acne scars dotted his flabby cheeks. Wore workboots instead.

  Everybody ignored him.

  Jack’s twelve pack was gone in about twenty minutes, but it wasn’t a problem. Chuck had a case of warm beer in his pickup. They took turns pissing in the gravel and telling stories. They boasted about women. Card games. Fights. After a while, the clowns got all nostalgic and proud and took Frank on a tour of their hometown.

  Jack drove, Frank rode shotgun as guest of honor, and Pine and Chuck rode in the back and chimed in once in a while through the open back window. They drove past the high school; Jack was the only one who graduated. The town had three bars, empty, depressing places. They hit all of them, then drove up to the Split Rock Reservoir Dam, where Jack and Pine had lost their virginity, both to the same girl. Jack and Pine teased Chuck about still being a virgin, something that Chuck loudly and repeatedly denied.

  They drove past the house with the dead tree and the giant satellite dish. The children were gone. “Fuckin’ Gloucks,” Jack snapped at the disintegrating house. “Worse than fuckin’ garbage.” He hit the gas and wandered aimlessly up and down the quiet streets, and Frank pieced the history of the town together.

  Whitewood had seen better days. The valley used to be rich, renowned for its wild rice. Exported it all over the world. But after a flood several years back, the rice started dying, as if the soil itself was diseased somehow. The rice would grow for a bit, under the protection of the irrigation water, but then it just slowly started to rot, until all that was left was the flooded fields chock full of muddy water and decomposing rice stalks.

  * * * * *

  Jack spit into a flooded rice paddy. The water was utterly black under the stars. They had stopped to take a piss by the side of an empty strip of blacktop that cut through two rice fields, each the size of several football fields. “See them lights?” Jack nodded at cluster of yellow lights at the base of some dark hills to the south. “That’s where our boss lives. Horace Sturm. His great-grandfather started the town. He’s a good man.”

  “A damn good man,” Chuck echoed.

  The others agreed and raised their beer cans. Frank raised his as well, eyeing the lights.

  “He’s dyin’ though,” Jack said.

  “Don’t say that,” Chuck said. “He’s fightin’ it.”

  Pine turned to Frank and said, confidentially, “Cancer.”

  “Fuckin’ brain tumor,” Jack said. “You only fight that so much.”

  Frank thought of the odd, fierce little man in the restroom at the fairground.

  “Doctors took it out, but they say it’ll probably come back. Bigger,” Pine said. “He went through a shitload of chemo. I mean, a shitload. Doctors wanted him to stay in the hospital, but he said, fuck that, I’m goin’ home. If I’m gonna die, then it’ll be at home. Not the hospital. And he’s been home, so far.”

  “How long’s he been home?” Frank asked.

  “A month,” Jack said, proud. “He’s gonna beat it.” They all took a drink, watching the lights across the black water.

  * * * * *

  The auction yard squatted at the top of a low hill on the north side of town. The large building rose to a steep crown in the center, its sharply angled shingles a glossy green in the moonlight. Heavy stones anchored the walls into the earth, giving way to dark slats of oak. The rest of the building sloped off to either side, long and low. Frank couldn’t see any windows. The parking lot was full of pickups.

  He caught the faint, guttural roar of a crowd.

  They parked near the end of the parking lot. The clowns pointed out where they lived—a large gooseneck trailer at the edge of the property. They finished the bottle of Seagrams and cracked open one last beer. “No alcohol inside,” Pine explained. “We work auctions four days a week. Saturday nights, usually, we got dogfights. Tuesday nights, Sturm rents the place out to the spics for cockfights. Tonight…tonight only comes once a year.”

  The roar reverberated out of the building again.

  They went inside. The floors were stone, the walls dark wood. The main room was large, with high ceilings. Five sodium vapor lights hung over the circle in the center of the room, bright enough to bleach the color out of skin. Stadium seats surrounded the center, aluminum slats that echoed with a shrill, hollow sound as cowboy boots dragged across the metal. The seats were full of men; ranchers and farmers and fieldhands. Frank smelled sawdust, sweat, and underneath it all, the sour, yet tangy aftertaste of a steak that’s just a shade rare—the smell of spilled blood.

  Eight gates formed an octagon in the center of the room. The clowns marched right on down and leaned against the gates. On the opposite side, one of the gates was open, leading to a tunnel under the stadium seats. Off to the side was a large chalkboard, displaying a round robin style elimination. It only had last names. The last three spaces were vacant.

  Underneath the chalkboard, a plank lay over two sawhorses where a guy sat in front of a ledger and a chipped metal cash box. A second man stood at the chalkboard, carefully writing names across the last two lines. The last two names were Glouck and Sturm.

  Frank hung back from the clowns and made his way over to the table. “What’re the odds?”

  “No odds here. Just even money,” the guy sitting at the table said.

  “I’ll be back.”

  The guy shrugged. “I wouldn’t wait too long, mister. Window closes in…” He peered up at a clock enclosed in steel mesh above the chalkboard. “Three minutes.”

  Frank nodded. “I’ll be back.”

  The other guy walked over until he was standing above the tunnel. He held up a bullhorn. Reading off a sheet, he spoke in a flat, emotionless tone. “Welcome to the one hundred and fourth annual summer fights. In the championship fight, we have thirteen year-old Ernie Glouck at one hundred and fourteen pounds…” There was a smattering of applause but the clowns started booing, drowning out the applause. “Versus thirteen year-old Theodore Sturm at one hundred and twenty-three pounds.” There was a lot of cheering for Sturm. The clowns went nuts, applauding, whistling, shouting.

  The fighters appeared. Theodore Sturm had his blond hair cut short, but it looked expensive, too perfect, as if the artful spikes had been shaped and gelled by a professional hairdresser. His lips were drawn in a thin slash. His nostrils were wide and pumping; eyes flat and hard. Well-defined muscles wriggled up and down his arms. Frank figured the kid had been hitting the weights for five or six years solid. Theo’s taped fists popped the air in a flurry of combinations, right, right, left—left, right, left, left. The kid was quick; Frank gave him that much.

  The man behind Theo was the same little guy from the restroom at the fairgrounds. Horace Sturm hung back, dark and squatting in the shadows, a goddamn midget Grim Reaper in that black, flat-brimmed cowboy hat and ankle-length duster. Frank watched closely, then checked the clock. Two minutes left.

  Ernie Glouck followed Theo. Ernie had a severe buzzcut, so short Frank could see worms of scar tissue like mountain ranges on a relief map, exclamation points of pain across the kid’s skull. Like Theo, he wore shorts and a T-shirt. But while Theo’s shorts looked like expensive boxing trunks, maybe even silk, Ernie’s were oversize jean cutoffs. They hung below his knees, drawn up tight around his narrow hips with a length of extension cord.

  His two moms followed Ernie. They looked like somebody had put two shapeless housedresses on a couple of dull and pitted hatchets and walked them around. Five or six older brothers darted between the two mothers, offering strong words of advice and thumping the scarred skull. Ernie flinched easy. Too easy, Frank figured.

  He pulled out a twenty, flattened it on the
bare plywood, and said. “That’s twenty on Ernie Glouck.”

  “Twenty on Glouck. Name?” the guy at the table asked.

  Frank said, “Winchester.”

  The guy wrote down the name and slipped the twenty into the box. Frank headed up the stairs to a nearly empty bench at the top. Just as he sat down, the rest of the men rose to their feet. Their right hand came to a rest over their hearts.

  Frank finally realized that they were looking at the United States flag that hung vertically above the sodium lights just as everyone started in a slow, jagged rhythm, “I pledge allegiance, to the flag, of the United States of America. And to the republic, for which it stands …” Frank got to his feet and mumbled along. It had been a while, and he couldn’t quite remember the words. “…with liberty, and justice for all.” Everybody sat back down. All talking stopped. The hollow sound of hard leather soles scraping ridged aluminum ceased. Nobody breathed.

  * * * * *

  Theo and Ernie walked into the ring, eyeballing each other. The gate closed behind them. They backed into opposite corners, Theo bouncing on the balls of his feet, Ernie rolling his head on his neck.

  Horace Sturm approached the ring, eyes cloaked in the shadow from his hat. Several silent moments crawled by, until finally the guy with the microphone held up a large bell and hit it with a hammer.

  Frank could only hear the rustling of the boys’ bare feet in the sawdust and their quick, shallow breathing as they slipped away from the gates and approached the center of the ring. Neither wore boxing gloves, just medical tape that bound their fingers into tight fists. They circled each other for a few seconds, bobbing and weaving, feinting and rolling their shoulders, sizing each other up. Ernie threw a half-hearted jab with his right, easily blocked by Theo.