Parasites Like Us

by Adam Johnson

  And as for the smell, I would soon come to be on intimate terms with the aroma of the pressure-cooked contents of hog stomachs. For now, the wind spared us. A tide of air, cold and cutting, raced straight for the inferno, shuttling food wrappers and white plastic bags, making antennas, fence slats, and old hunting caps bend toward the flames, like ears leaning in for savory news. The wind was enough to make pant legs clap, to rattle the cigarettes in people’s mouths. I caught a page of newspaper flying by. It slapped my hand, let me read the headline “Governor Orders Calm” before it was stolen toward the flames. Suddenly, from the direction of the fires, a smoldering pig came running. Pigs normally trotted around, ears jingling, surprisingly light on their hooves. This pig careened off parked cars, bolted between bumpers. As it passed us, you could see that the fat on its back was exposed and sizzling.

  Up until then, I’d been thinking about sanitation. It was obvious we’d been conscripted into some manner of lousiness, and I was wondering if we’d get rubber boots and gloves, if we’d have surgical masks and, I hoped, some kind of eye protection. But when that pig ran smoking past me, I understood that an engine of death had been started, and it looked wholly unsatisfied by everything it had been fed thus far.

  A young deputy approached the guys from our truck. He was one of Sheriff Dan’s boys, and I could tell he’d been itching for a juicy emergency like this all of his nineteen years. He lined us up, then handed each of us a “drag stick,” which was just a wooden pole with a steel hook on the end. His tone was so serious and considered that he’d certainly copied it, from church or a movie perhaps. He asked, “Who here is a leader of men?”

  He appraised us a moment, then stepped in front of me.

  Was he crazy? I shook my head no.

  One of the other inmates stepped forward.

  “I’m a vice-president for Merrill Lynch,” he announced.

  The deputy gave him an approving, paternal smile. “You’re just the man we’re looking for,” the deputy said. He handed the VP a metallic, flame-retardant suit and began leading him toward the pig fires, where conveyor belts were lifting twenty hogs a minute up to the blaze. I never saw the VP again.

  I was placed on a “drag crew,” which meant that several times an hour a semi trailer of pigs would back into the yard, at which point Sheriff Dan’s boys would shoot all the hogs, sometimes by walking among them, often by firing through the slats of the flatbed. Shell casings bounced off the guard rails as hogs inside skittered and slipped in their own blood. It took far too many bullets, in my opinion. When the deputies were done, we lowly inmates would climb into the trailers and drag the hogs, one at a time, to a loader bucket poised at the back of the flatbed, which would hoist the hogs high and drive them to the conveyor belts. Was more grisly work ever conceived? Was a grimmer plan ever undertaken? Certainly, but none I’d ever seen firsthand. Wounded hogs writhed and shuddered under the spell of death, and even hogs who’d lost their brains pedaled their hooves in slow circles, like blind newborn puppies.

  When the wind shifted, it would rain black oil that coated everything with creosote. Offal froze to your boots. When a bullet struck the casing of a hog skull, a shimmy of dust would lift, and the animal’s head would buck, thickly, as if it were nodding ye-e-s or no-o-o. The pop of the police pistol and the knock of bullet meeting bone are different sounds. “Knock” is the only word I can use. Think of a single, hard rap on a hollow-core door. That knock of death, higher-pitched than you’d think, had a knotty lack of resonance, and the sound seemed to emanate from the animal’s entire skeleton, as if the shock wave clacked through all the bone sockets.

  Despite all this, I can’t say I truly questioned the project. All those hogs were bound for awful fates anyway, I figured, and this kind of animal control had become routine: Earlier that year, ten thousand white-tails had been culled from New England to arrest the spread of deer ticks infected with Lyme disease. Then there was the mass poisoning of central-African bison to prevent the spread of rinderpest. And doves and pigeons all along the Eastern Seaboard had been thinned to stem the West Nile virus, which incubated in birds before being spread by mosquitoes. The CDC even claimed to have invented an avian virus that would kill infected birds.

  Only once on this first day did I near the area where the men in silver suits toiled. We’d just dragged another truck, and when the loader driver backed away, a wounded hog went wild in the bucket. I rode along in case the pig made a break for it. Bucket raised to block the intense heat, we drove the load to the conveyor belt’s hopper, and only in the moment when the bucket lowered and the hogs spilled into the hopper’s paddle wheels could the blaze itself be directly seen. Still-bleeding hogs tumbled wholesale into the pyre, their bodies landing on the bloated bellies of the blackening hogs below. Ribs by the thousands glowed like sticks of light. Most hogs burned inside out, flames spewing from open mouths, and when their intestinal cavities burst, organs spat segmented and steaming, unfurling like rubber hose.

  At the end of the day, our faces were black. When the last tractor-trailer rig backed out, we were ready to get back to Club Fed, where we intended to fight for the showers, eat like mules, and drop into slumberous dreams that this nightmarish day had never taken place. I didn’t have time for any of this slaughtering business. I still hadn’t prepared for my broadcast. Yulia was expecting my phone call. We had chorus practice to go to—opening night was less than two weeks away!

  But no trucks came to pick us up. Instead, we were led into Hormel’s main rendering floor, where cots lined the dormant disassembly line. Since all the hogs went straight to incineration, the room was a ghost town, dark and cold, reeking of antiseptics. My cot was between the gut carts and the giant autoclave that sterilized all the knives. On the wall above me was a display case that contained a cartoon drawing of a cross-eyed hog trying to eat a shopping cart, below which was mounted an assortment of the curiosities discovered inside porcine gullets: several spark plugs, tin cans, the remains of many shoes. There were jars of nails, and ball bearings and a surprising amount of glass. The oddities went on and on, as did the cartoons, and I felt truly awful for the poor pigs—condemned from birth, slaughtered wholesale, then subject to postmortem ridicule. Didn’t anyone know that the boar was one of the few animals that the Clovis couldn’t eradicate? No animal, it seems, was safe from the Clovis, not horses, sloths, llamas, camels, capybaras, prong-horns, or even pampatheres. Only two large mammals escaped the Clovis’ eradication frenzy—the bison survived because of sheer numbers, and the boar exists today because it is savagely smart and beyond formidable when aroused.

  Here we were asked to sleep, and sleep was what I wanted, achromatic and comatose. We were fed little tins of army rations, food that stood oily and stiff on my plastic fork, and then I lay back on my canvas cot, in a room full of men on canvas cots, only to stare wide-eyed at the metal roof. It wasn’t that the ghosts of ten million hogs kept me awake. It was the opposite: I felt a total absence of life.

  And who could sleep with hot bone chips raining down on the tin sheeting above? What human would slumber with smoking pig teeth bouncing off the windows, let alone the pock-pock of semi-automatic gunfire coming from town? When a pyre would surge, it shook the steel girders, setting aswing the butchering gear hanging above me. Pneumatic saws rocked from bright-yellow air hoses, and chains of hooks tinkled and winked as they swung in the dark. Then there was the coughing. The soot and smoke had played hell with my bronchial passageways, and I lay there wheezing, clearing my throat, pretending, like everyone else, that I didn’t have “it,” this illness we were attempting to stanch.

  What I did was this: I closed my eyes and traveled a great distance. I emptied my mind until all was white. Moving through this white, I came upon a house made of crystal. Inside, the air was warm and steamy. Crickets played a simple melody. Here, too, were many metal instruments, but these all shared growth as their purpose. There was a copper watering can, dimpled on its surface. Brass tanks h
eld nutrients. Hand shovels and rakes hung shiny from hooks on the wall, and a pair of silver pruning snips sat closed-mouthed on a bench. And, of course, there was green. I parted tendrils and fronds, trailers and vines, heading deeper into a room diffuse with glowing light. Condensation dripped like tonic from panes of warm glass. The smell of loam, thick and fecund, rose from the shelves of plants. In the back of the room, shrouded by ivy, was Yulia. She wore only her white sable hat, and she’d been waiting for me. When I neared, she held aloft a Chinese takeout box, one side stenciled red with a large-combed rooster, the other bearing a golden fish, recumbent in a pagoda pond.

  From this, with golden chopsticks, Yulia fed me mu shu.

  When I said mmm, she said, I am your fortune.

  * * *

  Thus my days in the Hormel plant went. I worked another shift on the drag crew, but as men got sick and were trucked in a slow stream to the infirmary downtown, I got transferred to different details. One the men called “shake-n-bake,” and another was “scrape-n-rake,” a crew whose particular duties I’ll spare you, except to say that sixteen hours on the dumb end of a debloating stick and you’ll be hoping for the infirmary yourself. Of course, a hospital was a surefire place to get sick, but I had “the cough” already, and I couldn’t help fantasizing about clean sheets and sponge baths, about adjustable beds, fresh-cut flowers, and chocolate pudding. I mean, a few weeks on your ass with the flu is not the end of the world. I even imagined that Eggers, Trudy, Dad, Farley, and I would all get sick together, that we’d recline in adjacent beds with thermometers in our mouths, arguing over the motivations of characters in daytime soap operas.

  Though we’d started with at least a hundred men, by the fourth night there were only a dozen of us left, all with lousy coughs and low morale. We ate C rations in our cots as men mused to one another in the dark. One man espoused a grand corporate-conspiracy theory behind “this so-called disease,” and he even itemized all the companies that would profit from the hog disaster. A pair of men sank into unbridled nostalgia, trading reveries about vintages of wine they had known, the clarity of water off certain Mediterranean beaches, or the succulence of various cuts of sushi. There were the hopeful, too—strong, grown men nearly paralyzed with hope. Teams of lawyers, the hopeful claimed, were at that moment filing motions of cruel and unusual punishment. As they spoke, calls were being placed from very important people. Writs of pardon were being drafted. Helicopters were en route to whisk them away!

  I tried to think of something I could say to these men. I seemed able to endure our hardship better than most, and though I generally thought little of the assembled embezzlers, insider traders, and profiteers, did I not regularly preach that they were people, too? I decided against pointing out the three-legged race they were running with speculation, nostalgia, and hope. I also passed on describing for them the great paradox of life, that for someone truly to reside within you, they must be wholly unavailable, and therefore we were not alone.

  Instead, I chose to hit them with the twin fallacies of humanity. Lying back on my cot, arms crossed over my chest, I announced to the dark cutting floor, “It is a common mistake for people to believe they live in times of great change, and it can only be vanity to think your lives, compared with the last several million years of humanity, are of great account. And take heart in the knowledge that only a fool thinks he knows when his life has reached its high and its low.”

  A ration can, still wet with fish oil, flew across the room, striking me on the ear.

  Chapter Ten

  The next morning, we were roused from our cots, and half of us were helped into the infirmary truck while the rest, the last six able-bodied men, were ushered into a white pickup. The truck was driven by a deputy whose name I can’t remember, a stocky guy who wore a military green biohazard mask that covered his nose and mouth with a creepy, snoutlike filtration canister. It was the first person we’d seen wearing any special kind of protection, and we all looked at each other like, What the hell?

  We rolled south, through the kind of open country that, on afternoon cruises in the Corvette, made me let the V-8 off its leash. Six of us jostled in back, everyone red-faced and freezing but me in my fire-blacked, blood-matted Clovis coat. Bare tree limbs waved against the sky, and farm implements stood to their ankles in snow. The farms were big on decorative windmills that pumped no water and grand doghouses that housed no dogs. I noticed the cattle were clustering around the barns and stock sheds, a sign of bad weather ahead.

  I remember we were just driving along when I saw the first body.

  As we headed down some road, it could have been any road, there it was, a human form, face-down in the snow. I did a double take—a man in a red hunting jacket was sprawled in the snow. I turned to the other inmates. They were all huddled together, trying to stay out of the wind. “Did you see that?” I asked. Nobody looked up, though I knew they’d seen a dead man beside the road. How could they miss it? I pounded on the rear window and yelled at the deputy to stop, but he just drove on. That person in the snow had met his end here, alone in this gully, and his family at home would never know what became of him.

  You poor bastard, I thought, and on down the road we went.

  Soon, we pulled onto a tractor path whose twin, rutted trails were iced over. We fishtailed across a farm demarcated only by the yellow insulators on the cattle fence, and finally the deputy stopped beside a Quonset hut that reeked of chickens. The structure was as big as an aircraft hangar, and you could hear a million chickens in there, gargling away. We got out of the truck, and the deputy handed us all short-handled hoes. The instrument was similar to an adze, with a long curved blade at one end of the handle, and a loop of leather to sling around your wrist at the other.

  I looked from the blade to the deputy. It was quiet, save for those chickens. “Surely you don’t expect us to—”

  The deputy slammed the tailgate shut. “You should be thanking me,” he said. “Some of those other prisoners—their work hasn’t been so pretty.”

  “You mean, less pretty than incinerating hog corpses and hacking live chickens to death?”

  The deputy looked me square in the eye. “Yes,” he said.

  From the farmhouse, an old man appeared, his mouth wide open, as if he was ready to shout something. He was wearing overalls, and his white hair flopped in the wind. He hailed us with a raised hand, though he was wheezing too hard to speak.

  The deputy turned to Bondurant, an inmate I’d dragged hogs with. He was supposed to be an honest-to-God billionaire, self-made through motivational speaking. “Go see what the hell he wants,” the deputy told him.

  Bondurant didn’t move. Mind you, this was a guy who hooked pigs in the neck like he’d hooked pigs in the neck before. Bondurant told the deputy, “I know what the old man wants. He wants us to not kill his damn chickens. I don’t want to kill them, either, not with this thing, not without a mask.” He held up the hoe. “Forget chickens. Where’s our masks?”

  On the heels of that, another inmate said, “Yeah, where’s our masks? Cheese and rice, I’m an accountant here. I’ve got to have a mask.”

  I didn’t want to pull rank or anything, but I had a Ph.D. “Yeah,” I chimed in.

  From behind his mask, the deputy said, “There aren’t any masks.”

  There was a tense moment. It felt like something bad was about to happen.

  Bondurant threw his hoe on the ground. “Well forget these things,” he said. “Let’s just torch that hut and get out of here.”

  That’s when the old man walked up. His mouth was wide open. He held a hand out as if to halt us, but the palm was glistening with the brightest, pinkest blood you’ve ever seen. He covered his mouth when a fit of coughing came, then lifted his hand, asking us to stop, please stop, because no matter how hard he moved his lips, the words wouldn’t come out. I took a couple steps toward the old man, till I was close to him. His turning, spectral eyes took me in. Ghostly and wide, his cloudy pupils said,
Enough. When he breathed, a mist of brilliant blood spotted my glasses. Warm and pink, it freckled my face.

  The deputy grabbed my shoulder. His eyes were intense, and that dark-green mask shuddered as he spoke. “Forget the old man,” he said. “Your pal’s right. We burn them.”

  “I thought it was the pigs,” I said. I was a little shaky. I couldn’t stop looking at the dots on my glasses. “The pigs did this, right? But we got rid of the pigs.”

  “Word came from upstairs last night,” the deputy said. “They say it’s probably a domesticated bird. They thought it came from the pigs, but now it’s likely a chicken or goose or something.”

  “A bird?” I asked. “It doesn’t sound like anyone has any idea what’s happening. There’s lots of birds. It could be any bird.”

  The deputy shook me. “Look,” he said, “forget about chickens. Forget turkeys and tweeties and every duck in Peking. This isn’t about one chicken hut. This is about us. Either we beat this thing or we don’t.”

  Bondurant said, “There is no infirmary, is there?”

  “No infirmary?” I repeated. I was light-headed. “Of course there’s an infirmary.”

  The deputy was quiet.

  “There has to be an infirmary,” I said. “Where else would the sick people go? Where else would they recover?”

  Nobody said anything for a moment.

  Then the deputy spoke up: “Just get the kerosene.”

  That’s how Bondurant and I ended up walking the length of the chicken coop, pouring kerosene on the floors. I was crazy, I tell you. I was sloshing it everywhere. They stacked the fresh eggs—a hundred eggs a flat, stacked fifty flats high, a whole wall of stacks—and these I sloshed with kerosene. Every egg glistened when I was through. And those stupid birds just watched. They weren’t even scared of us. Their dumb little heads nodded expectantly at everything we did, as if we were about to sit down and read them a story in which chickens got doctoral degrees and went to heaven. We soaked the whole place and then locked the door.