Cruddy - Lynda Barry [9]
The father slammed his hand down on the kitchen table and made the forks and knives jump. He said, “I’ll challenge anyone to come up with better tasting meat. That shit what’s coming out of Chicago now? Out of those big houses? That ain’t meat. I don’t even know what to call it. It’s what you get when you pack half-dead cattle nose to asshole, scare the living hell out of them with shock prods, blow their brains out with a bolt gun louder than a cannon and then hoist them up to bleed ’em on a chain line.”
“Uh-huh,” said the mother, yawning and stirring a tiny spoon into a jar of Julie’s baby food. Julie was sick. Something was very wrong with her. She was giving off smells.
The father was taking straight pulls out of a bottle of Old Skull Popper. “With line crews, it’s output, output, output. They don’t cull. A carcass comes down the belt with tumors as big as your head and worms wiggling from hell to breakfast and you know what they do? Send it down the line. Let the next bastard worry about it. They got the inspectors in their back pockets, they’d stamp USDA on a dead rat. You know what USDA stands for? You Stupid Dumb Ass. That’s what a customer is who buys that shit. Them line men piss right into the pickle vats. I know for a fact they do.”
“Except it’s a ‘Y’,” said the mother.
“What?”
“‘You’ begins with a ‘Y’.” said the mother. “Not a ‘U’.”
The father stood to inherit Rohbeson’s Slaughter when Old Dad died. He was next in line. He was the only man in line. The last standing Rohbeson. “And he just sold it out from under me. Never said word one. I was out there running things, up to my nuts in blood and sawdust every day, telling him we were going to turn it around. ‘Those big packing houses got nothing on us, Old Dad. The stores are going to come back begging, Old Dad.’ And all that time he was nodding, blowing smoke up my ass.
“We could have goddamned turned it around! You know that half the cuts we do you can’t even find anymore? A whole world has just died out and no one gives a damn about it. Pretty soon you won’t see an independent butcher anywhere. Gone. Shit. Gone.”
“Uh-huh,” said the mother.
“I’m glad the bastard hung himself. If it was up to me I would have left him swinging with the carcasses right where he was. I would never have cut him down. I would have bled him and dried him and made him a goddamned mascot. A goddamned tourist attraction. Come on down over to Rohbeson’s Slaughter and meet Old Dad. Get your picture taken with him and have a free hot dog.
“Bastard sold it all out from under me. Paid off the mortgages. Packed what was left over in three Samsonite suitcases, cash money delivered to settle the last of what he owed. Note said, ‘Sorry, son. But at least I’m not leaving you in the hole.’ ”
“Well, that is something,” said the mother. Julie’s head was hanging forward. She was asleep and her face was sweating.
“SOMETHING?” screamed the father. “It’s SQUAT! Not even a goddamned life insurance policy! SQUAT!” His hands bounced some additional slams onto the table and then he stood up.
This was our last dinner together. We were eating chipped beef on toast.
“You better start looking for a job,” said the mother. “We’re supposed to be out of here by the first.”
“JOB?!” shouted the father. The night went on like that. And the next day the wife of Ardus Cardall was rushed into St. Martha’s, the tiny hospital where the mother worked. Someone had blasted her arm off point-blank with a hunting rifle. When the mother came home from work she was squinting hard at the father who squinted right back.
He said, “Marie Cardall. She going to make it?”
The mother said, “What do you think?”
The newspaper version of the story said witnesses saw a man in Elkwood-issue coveralls near the house the night an escapee bulletin went out on the wires. Marie’s car was stolen and no one knew what else. She was shot with her husband’s rifle. The newspaper version said her husband Ardus was being questioned about it.
“His alibi is tight,” said the father. “Can’t get much tighter than being in jail yourself