Bootstrapper

by Mardi Jo Link

  Owen spends hours practicing his bass guitar, he plays the cello in his school orchestra, and he has learned to play keyboard, drums, and acoustic guitar all on his own, without lessons. He wants to be a professional musician. Late nights like this one are a big part of the life of a musician. A hard life, I imagine. And if that’s the life my son is dreaming of for himself, he might as well learn that now.

  Luke helps us load up the minivan with amplifiers, instruments, drums, microphones, microphone stands, and enough coiled extension cords for the whole band to rappel down Mount McKinley. I put Luke in charge of Will and then drive Aberration to the VFW. We arrive at eight. There are four other bands performing tonight, and as performers themselves, Owen and his band won’t get paid, but they will get into the show for free—a bonus, since these boys don’t have any money, and I don’t have the extra twenty-five dollars it would take to get them all in the door.

  “I’ll just hang out here with you guys,” I say to the band as we unload.

  Most of Aberration ignores this, focused as they are on plugging things in, turning things on, adjusting the feedback, but Owen is horrified. He’s trying to smile at me, but it comes off as a grimace.

  Mom does have her uses—arms strong enough to load and unload equipment, possession of a valid driver’s license and a minivan—but right now I’m pretty sure he’s feeling jealous of orphans.

  “But this is your first gig!” I say, reacting to his expression since he’s said nothing. “It’s like you were thinking I’d just drop you off and leave or something.”

  “Huh?” he says, grinning now. “I would think that might be considered normal.”

  My beloved firstborn is just tickled to death with himself as he says this, and negotiations ensue. He and I eventually agree that I will make myself scarce until midnight, on the condition that he not guzzle, sip, snort, shoot, smoke, inhale, or otherwise ingest anything I would find objectionable.

  “You are not too old to ground!” I warn out my minivan’s window as I drive away. Despite my outburst, and the groups of kids turning to see who this crazy woman is, Owen appears visibly relieved.

  I call Luke on my cell phone and check in. Everything’s fine; they’ve both finished their homework, the dishes are in the dishwasher, they’ve got their pajamas on, and they’re watching a video, Princess Mononoke. No, I don’t need to come home.

  I’ve been trying to get Owen to read something besides Rolling Stone and Spin magazines, and I’ve got some leverage now, so I head over to the library. I get there just before closing and check out a novel that I actually hope will hold his interest the way his iPod and a sheet of music do.

  And I’m just pulling out of the library parking lot at 9:30 when my phone rings.

  “Where are you?” a masculine voice on the other end of the line asks.

  The only men who ever call me up besides my sons are my father and Mr. Wonderful, and this isn’t either of them. At first I think it might be the police and that Owen is in some kind of heavy-metal trouble, but I discard that quick. Because although I can’t place the speaker, this is a voice I recognize. Somewhere in the background of the phone call, an engine revs.

  “Is that a metaphysical question?” I ask, sarcasm being my default setting these days, especially where men are concerned.

  “No,” the voice answers neutrally enough, “it’s a geographical question.”

  Ah. Now I connect the voice with its person. This is the builder. Pete. The builder I had to let go back in June for lack of funds. The builder who left all that sawdust a month ago. He’s probably calling to see when he can get back to work on the remodel.

  I describe my location and the errand at hand in these exact words: “I’m checking out a library book for my head-banging son who is getting ready to go onstage with Aberration at the VFW.”

  Another man might be confused by such a scenario or at least inquire after more details, but Pete seems genuinely unfazed. I might as well have told him I was planted on my couch, tipping back a Bud Light, watching rebroadcasts of Deadliest Catch like all good, self-respecting northern Michiganders did on Wednesday nights.

  “Perfect,” he says. “I’m right around the corner. I was thinking we could meet for a drink.”

  Are bars the place where most stalled remodeling projects are discussed? Maybe so. Or is this another kind of invitation? That’s a shocking thought and inspires several awkward seconds of dead air. The only sound comes from his end of the line, an engine again, but this time it’s idling.

  When I can speak, I babble on about what a “show” is and how I might be needed to apply direct pressure to mosh-pit injuries, replace blown amplifier fuses, or at least help coil up extension cords and drive the band members home. But I probably have time for one drink.

  And that’s how my minivan ends up in a parking lot two blocks from Owen’s debut. That’s how I end up walking into a dive bar that gets a lot of ink in our local newspaper as being the site of regular cocaine arrests, drunken fights, and domestic violence.

  Considering the rules I just laid down for Owen about steering clear of bad influences, does my presence here strike me as the slightest bit hypocritical? Of course not. Is it prudent to go into this bar late at night as an unarmed woman alone? No, it is probably not, but it is the closest bar to the VFW, and they probably have a pool table, so maybe I can even win a few bucks.

  And eighteen dollars in my pocket later, in strides Pete. He is wearing black leather motorcycle chaps over his jeans, carrying a leather jacket in one hand and a helmet in the other. So that’s what that engine sound was—a motorcycle.

  The bar is long and narrow and I am in the back, and so the effect of watching this man who worked on my house almost every day for more than two months walk toward me now is to wonder why I’d never really noticed how broad his shoulders are. So it’s true, then: I am still alive.

  “Last ride of the season,” he says, squeaking onto a bar stool like Clint Eastwood on his Pale Rider Appaloosa. Or maybe like Cormac McCarthy’s John Grady Cole, outside right now in my minivan, cantering over the pages of that library book on a magnificent but stolen bay.

  “I’ve got another helmet,” he says to me, lifting a finger in the bartender’s direction. “I’ll take you for a ride in the spring if you want.”

  Aberration will need to be picked up in an hour. My drunken wedding-dress donation caper aside, I normally won’t drive if I’ve had more than a single drink, so tonight I can think only in increments of one hour at a time. That’s all I have. That’s all I ever have lately, it seems.

  Here is a man who thinks in months. A man who knows what he wants whole seasons ahead of time. I must have been able to do that once too, but somewhere along the way I’ve lost the ability. That motorcycle ride might as well be planned for the next time I orbit the dark side of the moon.

  “Maybe,” I say. Because after the light-years of time travel into the future that is next spring, “maybe” is really all I’ve got.

  “Morning, Mom!”

  Owen actually beats me out of bed the next morning, eager to prove it was a good idea to let him play the show with his band. I’m the one that’s a little sluggish, and while I drink my coffee he helps get his brothers some breakfast and even reminds Will not to forget the homework he left on the counter last night.

  All three boys are getting ready for school and I let myself relive my hour with Pete. Owen wasn’t the only one who had a “first” last night. That was the first time I’ve been out with a man since Mr. Wonderful moved out. And it hadn’t occurred to me until now that although we talked about a lot of things—Harley-Davidson motorcycles and music we like and sport fishing and pool playing—we never once talked about the remodeling project. He didn’t even bring it up.

  Which seems odd but is just fine with me, because even though I’ve still got a new bedroom with no trim, a new bathroom with no tile or fixtures, and a new stairway without a handrail, I don’t have the money t
o address any of it.

  Soon as it is light out, I’ll get my mind off of him and onto the chore of food storage and cut the last heads of broccoli and cauliflower out of the garden, survey everything we’ve got stored, canned, and frozen now, and just hope there’s enough to help us get through the winter.

  As the chill walks its worried fingers up my legs, I do know that there is at least one bright spot in the larder. When I came in from the garden last night, I saw the light blinking on our answering machine. Word has arrived that Rocky, a piglet we’ve raised with friends at their farm in their pigpen, has topped 220 pounds. Soon we’ll have ham with our scrambled eggs, stuffed pork loin for dinner instead of stuffed squash, and bacon with our pancakes, bacon with our salads, bacon crumbled into steaming bowls of cheesy cauliflower soup, bacon with our … bacon.

  This is an approximation of Rocky’s weight, because no one put him on a scale; my friends just took a measurement around his baby back ribs and plugged the figure into a mathematical formula to estimate his weight. Two hundred twenty-something pounds is his “on the hoof” weight, and exactly what we were aiming for. Much heavier, and the meat will be too fatty for our liking.

  To everything there is a season, and it’s time to harvest our hog.

  “Today’s the day,” the telephone message from my friend’s husband announces. “You and the boys should come over for the killin’.”

  The imaginary bacon breeze wafting into my nostrils like a cartoon come-hither finger dissipates immediately and my appetite is in some jeopardy because his statement is not phrased in the form of a question. There will be a killin’, and we are expected to be present.

  After we bought Rocky and he was settled into his pen down the road, I paid a visit to the Traverse City Public Library to conduct swine research. My friends had never raised pigs before, weren’t inclined to read up on how to do it, and so the task of research fell to me.

  Turns out, raising a pig for meat is pretty easy as long as you design its living quarters to rival the maximum security at Leavenworth. In all matters of a porcine nature, it’s best that “pen” just be considered an abbreviation for “penitentiary.”

  You wouldn’t think that an animal with the silhouette of a basset hound and the shape of a dirigible would excel at Houdini-ish contortions, derring-do, and gravity-defying escapes, but woe to the rookie pig farmer who underestimates Sus scrofa domesticus.

  Until he topped 140 pounds or so, Rocky’s MO was to tunnel under the fence, roll sideways like a greased watermelon, airpaddle his girth up out of the dirt until he was free of the wire, and then it was full speed ahead toward the deep cover dreamed of by fugitives everywhere: the forest. Pigs are the Indy race cars of the livestock world and can work up some serious speed if allowed to bust into the open.

  Once they’re on the lam, it isn’t likely they’ll return of their own accord, either. Besides tasting great with a caramelized glaze, pigs have one singular skill: rooting in the ground for food. The woods around my friends’ farm teemed with mushrooms, tree bark, fungi, grubs, and apples dropped from long-forgotten trees, so I mused that Rocky was like Henry David Thoreau out there. He went to the woods to live deliberately, to see if he could learn what it had to teach him; then, when it came his time to die, to discover that he had really lived.

  Despite his muscular body, Rocky was not a prizefighter like his namesake, after all, but something more sophisticated: a philosopher. At least until my friend’s husband and I cornered him against a big stump and lugged him squealing back to his pen. At least until today and his impending “killin’.”

  I call him back: “I’ll be there,” I promise.

  But as I hang up the phone, a headline in a magazine article from my research pops into my head: “Ask yourself: Can you do the big ‘S’?”

  I’m pretty sure that capital letter does not stand for “Sissy.” I’m pretty sure it actually stands for “Slaughter,” and my answer to the question is a great big “No way.” I definitely cannot do the big “S” myself. But I can and will be a witness to it. The invitation to this experience also included the boys, though. Should Luke and Will be expected to watch Rocky die, too?

  On this I vacillate. Yes, because they helped raise him and are going to help eat him, and his death is a natural part of that process. No, because it will probably be gruesome and will make them sad; maybe so sad that they won’t be able to eat him afterward, in which case this whole pig-raising enterprise will be for nothing.

  I would normally discuss important parenting dilemmas like this one with their father, and we’d make a decision on the problem together. But lately we have been trying to work out a permanent custody schedule, and there is so much hostility between us that we can’t even agree on who will pay for new school shoes. So discussing whether or not they should witness our pig being slaughtered is pretty much out. I decide to completely bypass their father this time and just ask the boys what they think.

  “I have some sad news,” I say to them, as if this animal we’ve raised for meat were a beloved old dog. “Today’s the day Rocky has to be put down. I’m going and you guys can come with me if you want, or just go to school and it will be over with by the time you get home. It’s up to you.”

  We’ve just finished breakfast, so maybe my timing is not the very best. There’s a pause while this news takes root, then three very different reactions.

  “You do know that’s murder, right?” Owen the vegetarian says, handing down my indictment and shoving his books into his backpack. I wonder if he is psychic and planned his attire for this particular day, because he’s wearing a green T-shirt with a graphic of a yellow baby chick above the words “I AM NOT A NUGGET.”

  Before I can defend myself, Will chimes in.

  “So, like, are you going to cut his head off?”

  His tone is disturbingly bloodthirsty, yet, I have to admit, practical, too. How exactly does one kill a pig that weighs as much as a man? I only skimmed that step in my research, and this is the first time I’ve really thought about the specifics of it. I’m pretty sure we won’t cut Rocky’s head off, but what is the preferred method? Lethal injection? Sharpshooter? Electrocution?

  “I’ll go,” Luke says, saving me from further contemplation. “But when you call to get me out of school, can you just say I’m sick?”

  He explains his request this way: any eighth-grade boy who values his order in the teenage universe does not want his friends to know anything about his family’s food-gathering methods if those methods deviate from a grocery store, a grocery cart, and a checkbook. We are deviators.

  I make the call and Luke and I arrive at my friend’s farm and are greeted by an eerie silence. No squealing, no axe sharpening, no nothing, not even songbirds chirping in their woods. Perhaps I’ve been too hasty in dismissing Mr. Einstein’s view of time, because it does indeed feel like this moment is make-believe. Like a Hitchcock movie just before the crows in the attic attack, just before the killer walks into that wheelchair-bound man’s apartment, just before young Mrs. de Winter figures out what is really going on inside that creepy estate.

  A gunshot shatters this calculating calm, and then another shot too, or else maybe just an echo.

  We walk down the hill to their barn and the pigpen and are greeted by the sight of my friend’s tall, broad-shouldered husband with his back to us, standing solid as a battle monument in a town square. His head is bent down toward the pigpen, his arms dangle at his sides, and in his hand is the dark shape of a handgun. Do I see smoke wafting from the barrel, or is that my imagination?

  “Sorry we didn’t wait,” he says when he sees us approach. “I wanted to get it over with.”

  There’s a letdown. I’ve prepared myself to witness death, and tried to prepare Luke for it, too. I’ve accepted that it is probably honorable, even, to participate in this final step in the process of growing and raising good healthy food for myself and for my sons. For a second, I almost feel cheated. But only for a se
cond.

  “Not a problem,” I say after a pause, and now relief that we don’t have to witness Rocky’s death after all floods through me like blood circulating.

  In the pigpen were two dead hogs, snuggled next to each other as if they were napping, each with a single perfect gunshot to the back of the head.

  I look over at Luke to see how he’s taking the sight of two animals so large and so still. It isn’t gruesome exactly, but it is final.

  “That’s a lotta meat,” he says, riveted.

  A discussion takes place about where and how all that meat will be processed, how much the butchering will cost, and the logistics of getting almost a quarter ton of deadweight hog to the butcher. I can pick which cuts of meat I want, butchering is surprisingly affordable, and the hogs will be loaded into my friend’s utility trailer and driven to a butcher shop in the next town.

  The meat will be especially tender, because we fed our hogs organic grain and vegetable scraps and supplied plenty of clean well water. But also because Rocky and his cellmate were asleep and fully relaxed when they died. Commercial hog farmers might turn up their noses at the idea that panic in the moments before death, and the adrenaline such panic produces, poison an animal’s meat making it tough and bitter tasting, but I do not.

  The deed is done, and when we get home I can answer Will’s logistical question. No, you don’t cut their heads off. You kill a hog with a Smith & Wesson .38.

  A week later the butcher calls. Rocky’s “on the hoof” weight of 220 is now 104 pounds of packaged meat ready for the ancient chest freezer in our basement. My haul includes the standard cuts of pork you’d find in any grocery store: ham, chops, wieners, sausage, roasts, ribs, and of course bacon—lots and lots of bacon, almost fifteen pounds. But when you raise a whole pig, you also get more mysterious-sounding cuts of meat, like picnic hams, side pork, belly bacon, leaf lard, stew bones, and something called ground shank. These are mostly fatty belly-side versions of their (literally) higher-on-the-hog counterparts.