Reincarnation Blues

by Michael Poore

  When he got to the afterlife, after that particular Polish life, Milo found that Suzie had a perfect copy of the entire pornography collection.

  “You risked your life for this?” she asked.

  The expressions on her face were dramatic and varied widely. Some of the drawings and photographs were quite surprising. Some of them involved ponies.

  “When people try to destroy art or thought,” Milo explained, “it makes all forms of art and thought valuable. It’s a slippery slope once we start saying what people should or shouldn’t see. It’s a real evil, a thing with substance and power. I was helping to preserve people’s chance to see and to choose.”

  “I see,” she whispered. “I understand.”

  For a solid month, every time he turned around she had one of those books open.

  “I’m fighting evil,” she’d say.

  “Rozumiem,” he’d answer, in Polish. “I understand.”

  COVINGTON, OHIO, 1948–1972

  When a soul has been born almost ten thousand times, birth comes easier.

  Milo recovered in good form from all the squeezing and the sudden brightness. Of course, he didn’t understand right away who or what he was, any more than any other infant did. But time passed, and he learned.

  He learned emotions. Sometimes he was filled with huge, sunny goodness. Sometimes he was apprehensive or calm. Sometimes he raged. When he raged, he was fed. He noticed this.

  Aside from a certain smartness and confidence, Milo was mostly like other babies all over the world. But something in his brain—that wonderful brain—was different. Something like an OFF switch. The switch, like the rest of his brain, wasn’t finished forming yet.

  What was it an OFF switch for?

  Unknown.

  —

  Milo lived with another person, called “Mommy.” They lived in a trailer on a farm. Mommy (whose name was Joyce) worked for the Smoker family, who owned the farm. She helped with the cows. There were a hundred cows, and Joyce was always busy.

  One morning when he was three, Milo was left to wander in the barn during milking time, within sight of his mother. He heard something scratching in the corner, behind a rusted manure spreader, and discovered a giant, nasty-looking silverfish.

  The insect stared up at him through glossy, awful eyes. In its last life, it had been a pimp.

  Milo picked a rusty nail out of the dust. With a look of mild concentration, he stuck the nail through the silverfish and pinned it to the boards beneath.

  The insect spasmed, like a dry leaf throwing a fit.

  All kids do things like that. Then they feel bad. Milo’s OFF switch kicked in, preventing the bad feelings. (It did not prevent a hard-to-breathe feeling he often got when he was frightened or excited. His mother called it “asthma.”)

  Five minutes later, the milking was done, and Mom was ready to move the cows out for the day. “Milo!” she called.

  “Coming, Joyce!” he answered, and ran to meet her, to take her hand.

  He left behind a systematically dismembered silverfish: Wingless, wings arranged in a row. Legless, legs arranged in a row. Headless, the head in his pocket.

  —

  In fifth grade, a girl named Jodi Putterbaugh moved to Covington. Her parents, like Joyce, worked on a farm. She got on the bus the first day, walked straight to Milo’s seat, and said, “You look like you might be in fifth grade.”

  Milo nodded. He was busy reading a science-fiction book.

  “Do you mind if I sit here, so I’ll know when to get off the bus? My mom says this bus stops at three different schools, and I’d hate to accidentally get off at the high school. My name’s Jodi Putterbaugh.”

  “Milo Wood.”

  She sat down next to him and left him alone with his book.

  Milo couldn’t focus on his book, after that. He thought about Jodi Putterbaugh sitting next to him, with her long brown hair and cow eyes. New switches started opening all over his brain. The hard-to-breathe feeling raised its head, just a little.

  The OFF switch stayed quiet, studying the situation.

  —

  On the playground later, after a long September rain, Milo was stomping on worms when he heard a sharp “Oh!” behind him.

  Jodi Putterbaugh, looking stricken.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “You’re killing worms. Why?”

  Milo didn’t have an answer. He didn’t like the way Jodi was looking at him.

  “Maybe I won’t do it anymore,” he said.

  She nodded but kept walking away. Milo started having a tiny little heartbreak feeling, but the OFF switch shut it right down.

  —

  Jodi’s family started an organic farm on the north side of Covington, raising food that was chemical-free. They raised pigs for pork but were very nice to the pigs while they were alive. Jodi invited Milo and some other fifth-graders to her birthday party in June.

  “That’s Henry,” Jodi’s dad told Milo, when a loose pig nuzzled his leg and began chewing on his jean cuffs. They were all sitting at a picnic table, eating yellow cake.

  “You name your animals?” Milo asked. “But—”

  “We’re going to kill them, yes. But that doesn’t mean you can’t show respect. Lookee here.” And he got down on his knees and took Henry’s head in his hands.

  “Look in his eyes,” said Jodi’s dad. “There’s somebody in there. Henry’s alive in his head, just like you and me. He appreciates kindness.” (Mr. Putterbaugh was right. Just a year ago, Henry’s soul had been a retired painter in Buenos Aires. His kindness to his neighbors had been legendary. His short, happy pig life at the Putterbaugh farm was a reward, not a punishment.)

  “I’m going to change the way the world treats animals,” Jodi told Milo.

  It’s funny, the things that cause people to fall in love. In Milo’s case, it was Jodi reaching over and squeezing his hand. Later, under an apple tree, at that perfect moment of dusk when the lightning bugs are coming out, they said, “One, two, three,” and kissed each other on the lips.

  Milo heard a whispering deep inside his head just then, as if, say, there were ten thousand old souls trying to be heard and offer advice. The voices seemed to approve of the kissing.

  It’s going to be all right, said the old souls.

  —

  The old souls were wrong. The dead switch knew how to wait.

  Years passed. Fred Smoker, the owner of the farm, took Milo hunting with his own sons. For Milo’s first kill, Smoker marked his forehead with blood. When the blood touched his skin, Milo moaned a little. He couldn’t help it. And he didn’t tell Jodi.

  The Putterbaugh family moved away, pushed out of business by a gigantic new Dinner Bell meatpacking factory over by Casstown. Milo’s heart split wide open, but the OFF switch came out of hiding to squelch the pain.

  Something was wrong, his old soul sensed, in a sleepy, overconfident way, but didn’t know what.

  Milo learned farm chores from his mom, and these developed into paid work as he grew and filled out. He lost his virginity to one of his mom’s friends, Debbie Fair, out in the woods one night.

  Then, suddenly, he had a high school diploma and an apartment of his own—a room over the Lucky Mart Gas and Sundries, right on the edge of Covington. He was a person. He planned to save money and go to college before long. The plans made him feel good and made his soul feel good. His soul reminded him that you had to make money in order to save money, so he needed some kind of job.

  Fair enough, agreed Milo. He got drunk with a meat-packer named Tom Littlejohn one night at Walt’s, and Tom got Milo a job at the Dinner Bell plant, killing cows. (Ah, shit, said his ancient soul.)

  He carried a stunner, a kind of air hammer, and a hundred times a day he held the muzzle between a cow’s eyes and—

  SsssssPOP!

  —a steel slug punched through the cow’s skull and stunned its brain. Sometimes this killed the cow outrig
ht. Other times the cow might just tremble and roll its eyes at you. Milo’s dead switch engaged automatically during work hours; he could kill an animal no matter how it looked at him.

  One time they had a three-hundred-fifty-pound Duroc hog named Orlando, to be specially butchered for a charity dinner at the Cincinnati Oktoberfest. Don Sweeney, the senior hand on the killing floor, tried to knock Orlando out with the air hammer, but Orlando bounced back up, squealing with rage. Sweeney came vaulting out of the pen, laughing, “That’s enough for me, boys!”

  Milo grabbed the hammer from Sweeney and hoisted himself over the wall. Before Milo could even get balanced right, Orlando came grunting at him, pig feet flying, jaws agape (he had been a pig for six lives in a row and was really good at it).

  Milo was focused, fearless.

  SsssssPOP!

  Pig and pig-slayer went down together.

  Milo got up first and gave Orlando another slug (SsssssPOP!), right in the eye.

  Gore jetted all over his smock.

  Still the mighty pig whined and kicked and looked as if he might make it back to his feet. Milo leaped up as high as he could and came down on the pig’s ribs with both feet, driving his heels down.

  Snap! Crack!

  Orlando screamed and thrashed.

  In one final, fluid motion, Milo reached behind him, picked up a nine-pound sledgehammer, and smashed the pig’s jaw.

  Again, the hammer whirled and smashed. When Milo backed away, chest heaving, eyes dead, there was nothing left of the pig’s head. It looked like rags and Jell-O.

  “Jesus, Milo,” said Sweeney, in a tiny little voice.

  —

  At home in his apartment later, Milo shook as if he’d been in an accident.

  You should feel something, whispered his old soul.

  Milo tried to cry. His breath shuddered. He sat there for an hour, shaking, trying to be normal.

  —

  He would go to college for engineering, he decided. After a month’s research, he found a program that would cost four thousand dollars a year. Five years at the slaughterhouse might give him what he needed to start, without having to bury himself in debt.

  That’s good, said the wise voice. More!

  Milo put his plans in writing, complete with a timetable. He contacted the college about financial aid, about meeting with an admissions officer. He felt more like a person than ever.

  To celebrate, he spent his college savings on an air rifle.

  —

  He began going for walks in the woods at night, sitting for hours in the trees along Route 41.

  It seemed as if the only time he could ever get his mind to spin down and be still was when he crouched among the insect noises of the night woods with his rifle to his shoulder, lazily tracking cars as they passed.

  Breathe in. Breathe out. The rest was silence.

  For his birthday, he bought himself a telescopic scope and an insulated set of winter camos.

  In midsummer, he did something that surprised him.

  Hidden fifty yards from the road, he fired a shot that cracked the windshield of a passing Toyota 4Runner. The truck swerved, then sped up and vanished toward Springfield.

  Aw, shit! That was dumb. That was serious. It was the kind of thing that drew attention.

  Milo checked the papers the next day. Nothing.

  Was he disappointed? Relieved? He didn’t know.

  —

  That same day, Milo went down to Zwiebel’s Market for baloney and horseradish sauce and ran into Jodi Putterbaugh.

  He stared at her over a pyramid of Miller beer twelve-packs. He knew she was familiar, but couldn’t quite…

  “Do I know you?” asked Jodi.

  She was cute, in an off sort of way. Dressed in sweats.

  “Not sure. I’m Milo Wood.”

  “Oh, my God, Milo! Milo, I’m Jodi Putterbaugh. From fifth grade!”

  Sometimes our memories make us do strange things, especially if we are strange people. Milo said, “Hey, Jodi,” marched around the beer pyramid, grasped her by the arms, and planted a huge kiss on her lips. Not just a friendly kiss, either.

  Obviously that long-ago dusk, with the kiss and the fireflies, had been lurking around in his head.

  Woo-hoo! crowed the ancient souls.

  “Okay,” said Jodi. And they put their arms around each other and stood there by the beer for a time.

  —

  Where had she gone?

  Iowa. Then she was in the hospital for years, having hallucinations and, finally, brain surgery. She was dumber now; did it show?

  Her parents?

  Dead.

  “Shit, Jodi. I’m sorry.”

  He was sorry. It got past the switch.

  Jodi said, “Thanks. I’m going to be driving a school bus, when school starts up in the fall.”

  —

  Meeting Jodi Putterbaugh at the store and then having grilled cheese and Cokes with her at K’s made Milo have to get his thoughts in order. For that, he needed quiet.

  Night found him in the shadows by the highway. Thinking. Breathing.

  Waiting. Pulling the trigger and—crack!—starring the driver’s-side window on a little blue Mercury Lynx. The driver kept his nerve, didn’t swerve, but sped up.

  That shooting made the paper. The cops also mentioned a previous report, a Toyota. Someone called him “the Route 41 BB Sniper.”

  Why’d they have to go and put “BB” in there? Made him sound like a little kid.

  He went and got a real rifle and real rifle bullets. He threw all the bullets but one out the car window. That one bullet, he kept in his pocket.

  —

  They had dinner at the Brewery, looking out over the Miami River.

  Man, she looked nice. Not just cute, like that first day at Zwiebel’s. Now she’d had time to grow in his mind, and he’d made room for her there. She made it hard for him to breathe, that’s how beautiful she looked, wearing a blue dress and an enormous mum in her hair. The mum looked like a second head.

  He had gone out and bought a tie.

  “Do you miss living on a farm?” he asked her, over salads.

  Jodi nodded. “Yeah,” she said, “except for the work. I miss the animals, but you have to work really hard to live on a farm. Does that make me lazy?”

  “Nah,” Milo answered. “There’s different kinds of work, is all. Different kinds of energy.”

  She gave him a nice kind of look then. He’d said the right thing. For a minute, spearing the last of his lettuce off his plate, he felt the rightness of his life like a boat sailing on clear water. But it made him nervous, too, because he had to tell her sooner or later where he worked.

  They talked about college. They were both saving up.

  “Maybe we could take a class together over at Edison,” Jodi suggested. “To try it out. A class about poems. I know you probably don’t want to take a class about poems, especially, but it can be interesting sometimes if you look at the way we put words together in regular life. Like last week I made a grocery list. It said—you want to hear what it said?”

  “Yes.”

  “ ‘Red lettuce and shoestrings.’ ”

  “So that’s like a poem?” asked Milo.

  “No. It’s just some things that wouldn’t come together anywhere else but on a list.”

  Milo shrugged. “Who says that’s not a poem?” he said. “Just because it came together at random?”

  Jodi’s face brightened. She leaned forward.

  “You actually get it,” she said, reaching out, touching his forearm. “I thought you might get it, and you do.”

  “I work at the Dinner Bell plant,” he told her.

  Their entrées came.

  “Jeez, Milo.”

  “Gotta put food on the table,” he murmured. It was just like when she caught him squishing the worms.

  “You know what they do with baby pigs they can’t use?” she asked. “I read about this slaughterhouse in Pittsb
urgh. They just pick them up by their hind legs and bash their heads on the floor. They have contests to see who can get the brains to splatter the farthest.”

  A single table candle burned between them. It was too tall, and unless he peered around the side, it left a bright halo in the middle of her head, and all he could see was the mum sticking out.

  It bothered him, the tone in her voice. The dead switch armed itself. So, she wanted to tell horror stories?

  “They had a contest once,” he said, leaning forward into the candlelight, “at Dinner Bell, with the steers. The air hammer went on the blink, and the night shift had to process two hundred beeves before they clocked out. So they went ahead and hooked the steers onto the overhead trolley without using the stunner. Which basically means they’re hanging upside down, totally alive and scared to death, instead of brain-dead like they’re supposed to be. And they had a contest to see how far they could process a beef before it died. They had one steer come down the line that had been skinned and had its, you know, its organs gutted and had gone through one steam-spray, and when it got to the guy who was supposed to cut off the flank steaks, it twisted and went, ‘Moooo!’ right in his face. I mean, it wasn’t even a cow anymore, it was just a meat thing, and it goes ‘moo’ like that. The guy quit.”

  He peeked around the candle to see if Jodi was shocked. She was staring into her lap.

  The dead switch snapped off. Better judgment flooded in. Aw, man…

  “Listen,” he said, “it wasn’t really a contest. The floor works like an assembly line—”

  Jodi winced at the sound of his voice. He shut up.

  They ate their dinner.

  Milo found himself making lists in his head.

  Things to talk about: Craziest things you ever did. Shoot cars on the highway.

  No! cried his old souls. He kept silence.

  Dinner forks. A picture on the wall. Picture that might be an eye or some water going down a drain. Hard to tell.

  —

  Milo drove out to his tree on Route 41.

  Why had he told Jodi that awful story?

  People sabotaged themselves all the time, Milo thought. For example, why was he driving out to the same tree, the same spot where he’d already shot at two cars? Wouldn’t they start watching this area? If the Route 41 BB Sniper were smart, he wouldn’t snipe on Route 41 anymore.