First cut
“Geese,” she says, “have beating hearts.”
We are paralyzed in traffic, two people trapped in a delivery truck full of chilled meat, and this is what she chooses to get mad about.
What they do to geese in France. Paige is telling me about the stomach tubes they use to pump corn into these birds, about how their livers balloon to seven times their original size. And then the French, what they do is cut the livers out and sell them, for fifty bucks a pound.
“Sounds profitable,” I say, without meaning to.
She lights a cigarette, which she knows I hate. Smoke bleeds out from between her lips, spiraling out the passenger seat window towards the unfolding Nebraska sun. A fleck of ash dances across the dashboard.
“What’s it like?” I ask.
“What?”
“The liver.”
“Buttery,” she says. “But I’m never having it again.”
I’m thinking, at least she’s moving on from the thresher sharks.
At any one point, there’s always a creature that needs saving.
A mosquito sneaks in through the open window. She smashes it dead against her lap. Out the corner of my eye, I see the stain on her scrubs—red on blue, a former living thing.
“And she’s killing bugs,” I say, without meaning to.
She says something, but I can’t make her words out above the noise. All around us, a gaggle of cars erupts into a series of desperate honks. In the next lane, a convertible has its radio turned all the way up. An ad for the Marines comes on, urging young men to pawn their lives away for pride and country.
By the time we get moving, she’s already an hour late for work. We pass a black sports car in the service lane, its fender crumpled up against the side of a van like the cauliflower ear of a boxer. There’s smoke coming out from under the hood, smoke coming out from the inside of the car, and I keep my eyes on the road because I don’t want to see anybody cooking.
“There’s people in the car,” Paige says, and I don’t look.
“I think I saw blood,” she says, and I don’t look.
“There’s a flapping—”
“How’s things with Ethan?” I ask, my knuckles blanching from gripping the steering wheel so hard. In the rearview mirror, the accident shrinks away into a tiny swirl of smoke.
“We’re taking a break,” she says. “I wasn’t quite right for him.”
“If he hurt you, you know I’ll—”
“No. But thanks,” she says, and that’s the end of it. I allow the silence into the truck. We pass the roadkill-red trailers of the trailer park, pass the bent telephone pole that stands out from the other telephone poles. The grazing cows, a fixture in these parts, don’t look up at us as we pass them by. They don’t even blink.
She asks, just as I pull up in front of the hospital, why we’ve never gone out. I tell her that we have, every morning for almost half a year now. Ninety-seven mornings, I say.
And Paige says, “Like that counts for anything.”
The neighbor, the family friend, she gets out of the truck. The butcher’s boy, he goes about his meat deliveries like a dull knife that finishes its work. He’s no dentist like Ethan, never rescued an injured white-tailed deer off the freeway, never impressed anyone, never loved, never tried. This is who we are, the bit parts of a small town.
On the road, all I think about is killing the guy.
Ripping a bullet through his cheeks, so that she sees through him.
I want him gurgling out of his new dimples. I want him to beg. I want him skinned from chuck to flank to shank, and then tossed into the howling Platte, where the fish can get fat off of him.
What? I’m not afraid of blood. Not his blood, anyway.
When I get back to the butchery, nobody is talking. The grinder is sputtering some, and there is meat getting pounded on a chopping block, and someone’s rubber boots are squelching all over the damp floor, but nobody is saying a damn thing. It’s a quiet that is making my head hurt.
Above the din, Uncle Henry tells me that my mother’s locked herself away out in the back all morning.
I step past the dead meat to the small office space carved out of the refrigerator room. My mother is sitting in there, staring at a heap of tissues on her makeshift desk, each one balled up and flushed dark red with blood and sperm. It’s mine, and for a second I consider lying about it.
“I can explain.”
“Don’t,” she says.
“I’ll see a doctor this weekend.”
She adjusts her chair and exhales forever. There is a tautness in her face, like big invisible hands are tugging at her cheeks, threatening to split them apart any second now. Any second now...
“It was no accident. Your father—it was no accident.”
All I know is, the week before I dropped out of high school, my father took a drive and T-boned a median. I mean, he died by accident. As far as I know.
And here my mother’s going on and on: “It was no accident. I’m sorry. It was no accident. I’m sorry...”
Between sobs, the best she can explain is this—he just chose differently. From his father. From his grandfather. Those men spent their final years battling a poison that spilled blood into their seed, a poison that crept its way up from their manhood through to their kidneys before arresting their hearts. My father, she says, he chose differently. He chose the fast lane.
I remember the doctors telling me how he was a fighter. The bravest man they knew.
In her chair, my mother looks swollen, submerged under—grief or resignation, I can’t really say. She is this way because the problem is out of her hands, and it annoys me because she is this way.
I try telling her something, but all she says in response is, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry...”
The orderly trades me a number for my name. I sit in a waiting room reverberating with sniffles, trying to focus on an overhead TV screen with tinny noises coming out from it. This being Monday, half of those sniffles are probably made up.
What’s on is a commercial for some anti-depressant. In it, an elderly couple is setting up a campfire in the woods. Now, they’re roasting marshmallows and laughing. Now, they’re dancing awkwardly around the cinders.
The woman next to me points up to the screen and says, “Phromaxine has never, ever worked for me.”
Across from me, an old guy with his head hung to the side is drooling into the spokes of his wheelchair. Nothing in him moves, except for cloudy eyes that track the movement of people passing him by.
Here in the waiting room, most every head is bowed. People given up. People giving in. I’m thinking, maybe a medical opinion is the last thing I need.
Every once in awhile, a bell tolls and the bowed heads snap up like rat traps. A new number is called. An old number slinks out of the doctor’s office. And when the door cracks shut, the heads start to wilt again.
At any one point, there’s always a creature that needs saving.
Problem is, how long can you go on waiting for a savior?
I leave the clinic twenty miles behind, and drift into a patio bar by the Platte. Tonight, the water black and motionless, braiding its way towards the Gulf of Mexico without a word of complaint. By the time Uncle Henry gets here, the froth on my beer has long gone.
“So you didn’t get it checked out,” Uncle Henry says.
I say, “I didn’t get it checked out.”
We sit there watching men from the feedyard pounding on the oakwood tables with their meaty fists, make bold claims about the Huskers’ chances this season. Swan-skinned schoolgirls from Custer County chitter about being able to someday leave for the bright lights of Lincoln. All around us, blending into one big disembodied chorus, the crackle of the bar. The displaced accents. The toasts. It’s a glorious night.
Between gulps, Uncle Henry says, “Just so you know, it’s okay to be freaked.”
“Not this time,” I say. I tell him what it is I’m going to do. What I have to do. Without holding back, I tell him everything. About how I’m really just delivering a punchline. What I’m going to do, I tell him, brings the joke to an end.
“I don’t like it,” Uncle Henry says. “Not one bit. You’re sick. You need to get help.”
“Why?”
“Hell, I don’t know. Just seems like a bad idea to me.”
What Uncle Henry doesn’t see is this—you can go your whole life waiting for a doctor or a median to save you. For your number to be called. For someone else’s bad idea.
But not this.
This one’s mine to bury, or mine to shape into a meadowlark.
Which brings us to this.
There’s a lot of ice in the water. I mean, a boatload of ice. I made sure to get enough to fill the whole tub, because it made sense at the time. I made sure to bring the telephone in from the other room, and on the soap ledge is enough essential oils to keep an entire town smelling like paradise for weeks.
Did you know that essential oils have anesthetic properties? These ones are black cherry-flavored.
Up to this point, the closest I’ve come to doing anything like this is that one time I had to cut up a frog for school. I made it through with the apathy of a soldier under command, and cried until they called my father to come and get me. When he got to the principal’s office, the secretary popped her head in and said, “The butcher’s here.”
If I told you how it felt, you wouldn’t believe me. It’s actually a lot like eating spicy food. The knife I picked, a big serrated one from the shop, I’ve seen that thing cut through bone. Truth is, the actual process burns a lot less than what happens after. If you really must know, try plucking fruit from a tree, or cutting up a warm custard pie.
I’m even thinking, maybe after today, someone else at the shop can take the deliveries, because “the butcher’s here.”
I’m so tired. I’m discharging sweat from every pore into the blushing pink water. The oysters I’ve released, they bob freely on the icy surface, untethered buoys lost in a vast black cherry-scented ocean. Right now, I’m winding the telephone cord around my arm to keep it from falling into my own juices. Each number I push feels like a stab in the gut.
Over the phone, Paige says, “You sound like you’re out of breath.”
“Never mind that,” I say. “Let’s get dinner next week.”
And in the time it takes for her to reply, I can hear her breathing through the phone—and just like that, the cold is gone.
