Foodchain

by Jeff Jacobson

  Jack and Frank were the last ones to the meeting. Everyone else was waiting in their pickups, in an unspoken agreement to wait for Jack. Nobody would actually get out of their pickups yet; that would be breaking the rules. Stepping out of a man’s vehicle, hell, then it’s required you approach the owner of the property. That would mean facing Sturm, and Sturm didn’t look ready to talk just yet.

  Everybody respected Jack. So they waited for him, cleaning fingernails with pocketknives, squeezing blackheads on their forearms, smoking cigarettes, or just blankly staring at the fields.

  Frank wasn’t sure he had a handle on how many respected him. Even now, after three weeks in Whitewood, Frank still couldn’t quite figure out whether the clowns were actually that stupid, or they whether they were just fucking with him, stringing him along until they flat-out killed him.

  Sturm didn’t say anything to anybody except, “Follow me,” and marched out to the barn. The barn, once open and hollow, was now choked with supplies. The empty stalls were now overflowing with boxes of all shapes and sizes, as if the dirt floor had suddenly sprouted a cardboard fungus overnight.

  Sturm broke down the inventory soon as everyone was inside. He pointed to the first stall, stuffed with stacks of ammunition. “I opened fourteen credit card accounts under fourteen different names. What happens is, you buy too much ammunition with the same account, a red flag goes up. Then you got Mr. Mr. King Shit Federal Man sniffing around your financial concerns. Maybe asking the reason of your purchases. Well, I got news for him.” Sturm cocked his index finger and fired off imaginary shots. “This is America, land of the free. And I’m brave enough to say fuck you. That’s right. This is business. I will not pay one goddamn cent of any goddamn tax from here on in. This is my business. And you, my employees, you will not pay one goddamn cent for any fucking tax they come at you with. You will all reap the rewards of these hunts.”

  Sturm introduced the rest of the barn. It was stuffed with fifty-three boxes of liquor—mostly whiskey, bourbon, tequila, scotch, gin, and tequila—five Army tents, four giant generators, twelve lanterns, two portable showers, sixteen kegs of water, four axes, two cords of firewood, three gas BBQs, and enough knives, tables, chairs, bar supplies, and cigars to keep a small army comfortable for weeks. “And we got sheep in the corrals out back, case anyone gets excited.” Again, nobody was sure if Sturm was making a joke or serious. Frank suspected that Sturm was joking, and didn’t know how to deal with the lack of laughter. “Case you got the shits, we got approximately four hundred rolls of toilet paper. The portajohns’ll be here in three days.”

  The rest of the stalls held, tiki torches, mirrors and washbasins for cleaning and shaving, furniture for the tents—couches, beds, tables, chairs—and on each of the tables there was bug spray, condoms for the hookers.

  Sturm had led them around the barn, and now they were back at the door. “Any questions. Anybody think of anything we forgot?”

  “I know we got the barbeques, but I don’t see anything else for cooking,” Jack said. “These guys, these hunters, they’re rich old boys. Can’t see them eating off the grill with their fingers.”

  “True, true. They ain’t that type at all.” Sturm smoothed out the dirt in front of him with the flat leather sole of his right cowboy boot. “Fact is, I’ve made an arrangement for an outside party to handle the food situation. You are to treat this party with the utmost respect and offer them any and all assistance if necessary.”

  “Just who is this outside party?” Jack asked.

  “The Glouck family.”

  The clowns recoiled as if Sturm had just told them they’d be eating dogshit for dinner.

  “Fuck them. Fuck all of them,” Jack said.

  “You questioning my decision?” Sturm asked quietly. He didn’t wait for Jack to respond. “Anybody here questioning my leadership?” Sturm kept moving his foot in a slow, circular motion, smoothing the soft dirt directly in front of him. “If so, then let’s have it out right fucking now. Any dick licker here got a problem with my decision? Speak up. Any employee of mine has himself a problem with the boss, the only man that signs every goddamn check in this county, then step up and say what you have to say.”

  Sturm kept the flat sole of his boot drifting effortlessly back and forth across the dirt, the sharp toe like the movements of a stalking rattlesnake. The dirt was smooth as the hood of his Dodge.

  Sturm’s foot was really the only thing moving within the barn. Even Sarah, down at the far end, had enough presence of mind to freeze, to breathe slow and easy so as not to attract the attention of a predator. Everyone was as still as the lion hide stretched tight against the corrugated roof, slowly cooking in the heat. Especially Jack. He’d seriously overstepped his bounds and he profoundly regretted his transgression. He kept the brim of his hat aimed at the ground, watching everyone out of the corners of his eyes.

  Sturm’s foot sank into the surface of the dirt like a semi tractor settling into a still pond in slow motion. He searched out every man’s eyes. Jack was the last to look up. Looking directly at Jack, Sturm said, “But say it like a man. Be honest. Let’s have it out. Right fucking now. Or, so help me god, you will either do your fucking job or I will hurt you.”

  Sturm waited about the time it takes to unlock and open your front door, then finally said, softer this time, the sandpaper grit of his voice much finer now. “I didn’t like it at first neither. But you listen. You all know what I got in my head. Nobody knows how much time I got left. I am not a patient man. I am a man who needs things done.” Sturm let that sink in for a moment. “The family will handle nearly all of the food—with only the exception of when we BBQ—but even then, the family is responsible for dressing and butchering the animals. And they handle everything else, the dishware, the tablecloths, the wait staff, the cleaning of dishes, pretty much anything related to the food. So let’s have an understanding here. That family has their place. They understand that. Every ruling power has its serfs. You goddamn hotheads, you don’t think. You don’t use the mind God gave you. Beer, pussy, and fighting. That’s it. Hell, I know. I been there. My boy, he’s about to understand that. I’m asking you to trust me. Not just with this family, the goddamn Gloucks. Not just them. No, I’m talking about the future of this town. I’m talking about the hunts. Thanks to Frank here, we have ourselves a genuine opportunity here. So you are either with me, or you can get the fuck out.”

  Nobody said anything. Sturm walked over and ripped open a box. “That’s it then. From now on, you listen to me. I’m goddamn running this show.” He started pulling bottles of Jack Daniels out of the box, all smiles now, as if black clouds had passed over the sun momentarily, but now the light was back, sizzling and brighter than ever. “This calls for a celebration.”

  Everyone took a tiny, hesitant breath.

  Sturm tossed bottles at the men. “We got ourselves a lot of hard work ahead, but you done good. Tonight, you earned yourselves a good time. Theo’s got a keg on ice in the back yard. Let’s go outside and have ourselves a drink.”

  * * * * *

  Two blocks east of the park in the middle of town, the First Lutheran Church of Whitewood stood guard over the corner of Fifth street and Elm, a heavy, rectangular building flanked by two strips of dead grass. It reminded Frank of a fortress; tiny stained-glass windows were sunk into the thick concrete walls and it didn’t take much imagination to picture rifles sticking out of the slits. Even the steeple was short and squat, plopped on the roof like a relative who’d had too much pork stuffing on Thanksgiving. The steeple was capped off by a wooden cross; the redwood timber, black from over a century in the sun, was two feet thick and over ten feet tall.

  Four pickups congregated in the street below, headlights splashed against the granite steps and double oak doors. The men gathered on the steps, beer cups in hand. Pine and Chuck had thoughtfully loaded the keg into the back of Chuck’s pickup. Chuck drained his cup, belched, and started taking a leak against the wall of the ch
urch.

  Sturm watched this silently for a moment from the open toolbox at the back of his truck. He spit, then jerked a crowbar from the toolbox.

  Everyone flinched as the crowbar bounced off the concrete wall next to Chuck in a burst of burst of concrete chips and sparks. The stream of piss dried up and died.

  “Show some respect, dammit,” Sturm shouted. “I was fucking baptized in this church.”

  Chuck carefully zipped up, ashamed. The crowbar had landed in the puddle of urine, so Chuck wiped it off on his jeans before he handed it back to Sturm who was stomping up the steps. “Sorry, Mr. Sturm. Won’t happen again.”

  Sturm took the crowbar. “You gotta take a leak so goddamn bad, do it on the fucking lawn. Christ Jesus.” He jammed the tip of the crowbar into the gap between the double doors and shoved the other end sideways. The wood split and cracked with a sound like bacon grease popping. Sturm swung the doors wide and tapped the blade of the crowbar on the steps, knocking off the splinters.

  “Theo. Get my chainsaw.” Theo ran to the truck. Sturm eyed the men. “You wait here. Show a little respect, for God’s sake.” When Theo ran back, huffing and lugging the thirty-pound chainsaw, Sturm and his son melted into the darkness of the church.

  There was an unspoken decision to wait down the steps at the back of Chuck’s truck. More beer was drained from the keg. Boots scuffed the asphalt. Sideways glances were cast at the church.

  “Gotta say, I dunno ‘bout that fucking family helping us out,” Jack said softly, trying to salvage a little pride. “Didn’t think we needed any help. I wasn’t trying to start trouble. I just don’t fucking know about that family.”

  “Me neither,” Chuck said, still smarting from the ass-chewing over taking a piss on the church. “Far as I’m concerned, they should have left town with everybody else. Hell, I got half a mind to go on over and burn their house down.”

  Jack shook his head. “Mr. Sturm says shit, I say how much, that’s a given, but I honestly can’t see what the hell he’s thinking here.”

  “They had their shit together, that’s for sure,” Frank said, and instantly wished he hadn’t. That was goddamn dumb. He should have paced his drinking better, shouldn’t have hit the Jack Daniels that hard. He should have saved it for later instead, like he’d been doing the other nights.

  “Who had their shit together?” Jack demanded.

  Frank shrugged. “We had dinner over there last night. Me and Mr. Sturm.”

  “No shit?” Chuck asked.

  “No shit.”

  “Why?”

  Frank shrugged again, wondering how the hell to climb out of this hole. “You could say it was an audition. A demonstration, I guess. Very professional.”

  “Professional? Them? Bunch of fucking vermin.” Pine said.

  “Well. Food was damn good.”

  “So why weren’t we invited?” Chuck asked.

  From deep inside the church, the muffled whine of the chainsaw growled to life.

  “I can understand Mr. Sturm being there. But how’d you happen to get invited?” Jack asked, resentment slowly creeping into his voice like the sleepy spiders crawling up the vet office walls.

  “Hell, I know,” Pine said. “It was Annie, wasn’t it?”

  Frank could feel the dynamics of the clowns shifting slowly, as if they were squeezing their anger, their resentment, their confusion out of their minds and pushing it towards Frank. They couldn’t turn their emotions loose on Sturm, and so Frank became the target.

  “’Course it was. Fuck me. Of course. She gave you one for free, didn’t she?” Jack said. His dry lips had split in three places. “Chuck told us all about it.”

  Frank felt the anger rolling at him, just gentle nudges at first, like rising waves pushed before a storm, but growing stronger. The whiskey and beer in his head decided he should push back. Just a little. After all, he knew something about all of them. None of their dicks had ever touched Annie’s lips.

  “Yeah. It was Annie. She invited me.”

  “I fucking knew it,” Jack said, and drained his cup.

  “Goddamn. You’ve been hitting that shit hard. Got any money left? Or she give you another one for free?” Chuck refilled Jack’s beer. “You ain’t gonna get all possessive and jealous on us now, are you? I mean, let’s not forget, she’s a working girl. Gotta let us have a piece, right?”

  * * * * *

  Frank had been practicing smiling in the mirror in the bathroom at the vet office. He’d get an image in his head, something disturbing, something awful, something like the animals trapped in their cages out in the desert zoo, or Sturm gutting the tiger on Main Street, or Theo fucking the lion, and work at forcing the muscles in his cheeks to stretch up and out. In the beginning, it looked like he was trying to shit a bowling ball. When he got better, it started to look like a truck had parked on his foot and he was too drunk to really notice. He’d refocus his eyes, shakes his head, clutch the sides of the pitted porcelain sink, and grin at the mirror again and again and again.

  The practice paid off. The clowns bought it. They hooted and hollered. But Frank didn’t say anything; he let their imaginations do all the heavy lifting.

  Sturm appeared in the church doorway, holding the chainsaw. “Damn thing’s sunk into the wall. They sure as hell knew how to build ’em back in the old days. I’d need a goddamn tow truck to get it out.”

  “We can get you one,” Chuck called out, wanting to make up for pissing on the church.

  “Nah. Ain’t worth it. I got a better idea. Watch your heads.” He ducked back into the darkness.

  Everyone turned back to Frank.

  “Still,” Pine pointed out. “What makes you so special?” He looked around the group. “I mean, it ain’t like he’s done anything half the fellas in town haven’t done. So why were you invited…and we weren’t?”

  “Yeah, what is it makes you so special?” Jack asked.

  The clowns clustered around Frank, pinning him against the church steps, watching his smile close, his eyes closer. The anger was back, stronger now, the waves nearly knocking Frank off his feet. The practiced smile wasn’t going to hold them off this time.

  Again, instead of fear, Frank felt his own anger rise and crash into the waves like a clenched fist. He shrugged, one final time. “I dunno. All I can say is, she must of liked how I tasted. Well, that…and I made her come.”

  “Whoa.” Jack’s voice had become the temperature of morgue steel. “You’re saying…you’re saying you touched her.”

  The whiskey in Frank’s head said, “Yeah.”

  A cracking, splintering noise made them all look up at the steeple. Sturm kicked out one of the louvered shutters and climbed out onto the roof, dragging the chainsaw behind him. “Anybody got any rope?” he shouted.

  They shook their heads.

  “We can go get some,” Chuck shouted.

  “Hell with it,” Sturm yelled back. “Stand back.” He inched his way up the steep roof to the cross, fired up the chainsaw, and without hesitation, sank the spinning teeth deep into the wood. He sawed into the base horizontally, cutting about two-thirds of the way through, then again with a downward angle. He knocked out the pie shaped piece, then went at it from the other side. The immense cross shuddered and slowly toppled over to the right. It hit the steep roof, slid down it like an icicle, sliced off the edge of the roof, and soared off into empty space, arcing through the air upside down, until it hit the dead lawn with deep crack that the clowns felt in their bones. The bottom crashed down in an explosion of dry grass and dust.

  “Good enough. We’ll bolt that sonofabitch back together,” Sturm hollered.

  They waited until Sturm and Theo got back downstairs. It took all six of them to carry the cross.

  * * * * *

  Sturm tore open the bag of quick dry cement with his teeth and dumped the gray powder into the wheelbarrow. Frank grasped the handles of the wheelbarrow and jogged with Sturm along the walkway between the house and garden o
ut into the back yard to the bare patch of dirt.

  Jack unspooled the hose from the garden and started to gingerly spray the soft gray powder but Sturm snatched the hose away and sent a river of water full blast at the cement, working it up and down, giving the cement a quick soak, but not overdoing it.

  Jack pushed Frank out of the way and attacked the cement with a long handled hoe, only this blade had two circles cut away in the middle, allowing the now liquid cement to seep through the holes. He swept the hoe back to him and shoved it way, over and over, as if trying to rip long jagged strips out of a pool table.

  Sturm barked out something that sounded like he approved, but it was lost in the scraping of Jack’s hoe along the bottom of the wheelbarrow. Sturm turned the hose towards the grave and started soaking the ground. Frank found a shovel, the same one that Sturm had killed Fairfax with, and started digging as headlights appeared from around the house. Pine and Chuck carried the keg out to the grave.

  The hole was four feet deep when Frank hit something soft. Black liquid dripped off the shovel blade in the flashlights. Frank figured that was deep enough and stopped digging.

  Again, it took all of them to carry the cross out to the back yard and drop the bottom into the hole. Theo came out of the barn with several long two-by-fours, and used these to brace the cross upright while the men held it in place. Sturm feverishly shoveled wet cement into the hole.

  One by one, they gradually let go of the cross, letting the two-by-fours maintain the balance. Sturm emptied the wheelbarrow, then got on his hands and knees and swept his palms over the wet, sticky cement, smoothing it out like with the dirt in the barn before. Frank saw a tear hang from Sturm’s nose for a brief second before splashing down into the cement. Frank turned away, giving the man some privacy.