Michael Martone - Four for a Quarter - Fictions

COWS ON FIRE

I am thinking about these cows, thinking about what is going on inside them. They are first calf heifers, all pregnant, two dozen or so strolling my way across the loafing shed, chewing cuds, all their big black eyes rheumy already, rolling to a stare, staring at the scoop shovel of feed I've got balanced against my flexed knee. I am thinking about what is mixed up on purpose in the feed mix, the chemical, PBB, that is killing them slowly without them even knowing, and the calves inside them curling up tighter, frying, drying up, the stem cells splintering, splitting up all wrong, sputtering, the threads of DNA all fraying inside the cells, twisted, busted, losing their train of thought, forgetting to remember the remembering of parts, the blueprint turning blue. It is Christmas, and the experiment the heifers are part of knows no holiday, the dosing to continue through the long winter break.

Outside the barn, it is snowing, of course, the snow a kind of fabric, a white drifting silence we can all drift through. The snow accumulates in the shadow of the fencing, floats on the frozen surface of the ice in the corrugated troughs. Hearing the shovel hiss through the grain in the bin the herd turned toward me, began to drift itself, the sound all the stimulus it needed now, all those stomachs thinking, thinking of food. As they move, the knocked-up cattle are lowing. The cattle are lowing. No babies wake. No sounds but the shuffling sawdust, the snuffling and sneezing as they move. The chemical attacks the big cathedral lungs, the naves drowning in fluid, forgetting how to bail. I've filled mangers. The mangers are filled with hay. She is in the adjacent barn feeding the control group of identical cattle, mucking out their stalls. Later, I will hear her fire up the Deere, use the power-take-off to run the chain rake through the gutters, fork the spoiled straw into the spreader. Leaning on the Dutch-door, I'll watch her, later still, make a pass or two through the fuzzy air, hauling the manure over the field, the green tractor's lights blazing, the shit illuminated, flying through the steaming steam, flung by the blades of the red spreader. We've given up our holiday to help out, knew if we were back home we wouldn't be able to stop thinking of these cows dying in measured increments. Out in the world away from the campus, the chemical had gotten into the feed supply, a fire retardant mixed into the silage, a co-op's goof, the poison churned to milk inside the cows, the tainted milk poured out on the ground, cattle everywhere put down. I think of the farmer, what was he thinking, as he walked the string of cattle tethered on the lip of a pit he'd just dug, drilling a bullet in the big brain of each cow as he passed. And I think of the scientists here whose experiment this is, who are at home, right now, in front of a fire each of them poke, thinking of the ways the chemical works through the guts of the animals, how it gets swallowed and coughed up, combines and divides in the grinding up of the ground-up feed, how it gets absorbed, how it does its slow soluble work in the limpid pockets of the ruminant body. The cows nuzzle me from behind looking for more, their tongues scraping the folds of the hard Carhart jacket, wanting a taste, a taste of the dust. The barn is cold. The heifers blow clouds of steam from their wet muzzles that hover like bubbles of thought. What are they thinking? I think of the balls of calves caved up inside them, dying hearths, turning to ash, and the destroyed cattle at the bottom of those pits, the storm of lime snowing down on them. And later after all the chores, all the domestic husbandry, we will go back to her place, make love in the dark, the stink of the barn on us both, the sweet smell of the shit, the general spoil fermenting, turning off all the thinking, going to that thoughtless place within us, then, and then her hot slick blood on me, the time of the month, after I've pulled myself out of her, her blood drying and turning cold on my shrinking shrinking skin in the dark.

EAT MOR CHIKIN

I think of him thinking inside the cow. He is inside the cow thinking. He is supposed to be handing out the coupons he holds in his hoof. Instead, he stands off to the side at the entrance of the food court, near the dozen trash bins lined up in their stalls. Inside the cow, he regards the worker, the big fiberglass head listing to the right, as the worker extracts the stuffed sacks of spent paper napkins, slimed pressed-board plates, sweating cups, plastic cutlery from the bins buried behind the wagging tongues imprinted with “Thank You.“ “Thank You“ after “Thank You“ repeated down the whole row. The sacks sag, the melted ice from the drinks, the dregs of sauces, sopping salads, as the bags are lifted from one bin and dumped into a bigger bin on wheels. The cow, a Holstein, black and white, reared up on its two rear legs, its front hoofs clutching fans of coupons, regards the man in the jumpsuit, snapping open a new plastic sack to replace the plastic sack he has just emptied from the bin. He lines the empty bin again, stores it away behind the swinging “Thank You“ sign.

Inside the cow, he is thinking of insides and outsides, I think. The tables in the food court are filled with hundreds of people eating, moving the mounds of food off the paper plates with plastic forks, spoons, lifting the food to hundreds of mouths. Looking out from inside the cow, he actually sees through an incision in the cow's throat, a slit covered over with a screen of gauzy black-and-white fur. The head of the cow is more like a hat perched on top of his head inside the cow's head, looking out the slit cut into the cow's throat. The spot, he will tell me later, where one would insert a knife right after slaughter to drain the animal's blood before the butchering.

He is working for a fast-food franchise that serves only chicken. The chain's advertising adopted animated cattle as spokesmen, employs three-dimensional life-sized cows vandalizing billboards with the misspelled command to eat mor chikin, the graffiti awkwardly applied by hoof.

Inside the cow, he is to direct the milling people mulling over the growls of their stomachs, thinking about the illuminated menus of the food court, to eat mor chikin. The sandwich board he wears is printed with that child-like hand, the cow-like hoof. Later, he will tell me that he thinks it's funny that inside the cow, the cow is sandwiched inside slices of sandwich board, the sandwich sign urging the reader to eat more sandwiches. He thinks that he becomes, inside the cow, another sign, a menu that the people in the food court consider, attempt to decipher, as they decode the messages emanating from their stomachs. In what way are we hungry? he thinks they are asking as he asks himself the question again and again inside the cow.

In the neck of the cow, there is the slit so he can see, but there is no opening for him to eat. The cow's mouth is not a real mouth. The tongue extending out of it is fabric stuffed with batting. Later he will tell me how during the long hours inside the suit, drifting through the corridors of the mall, children pulling the cow's tail or rubbing the rubber udder on his stomach as if to make the cow let down, he imagined himself a manifestation of all the different insides of the animal, its skeleton, its mass of arteries and veins, its trunks and branches of nerves, its nodes of lymph, its backwaters and oxbows of guts and guts and guts and guts.

When it is time to eat, he can't remove his head, the cow's head, in public. I see him inside the cow in the distance. The cow's black-and-white head extends above most of the shimmering car roofs in the mall's parking lot. Inside the cow he must turn the whole body left and right as he turns back and forth to look for me inside my car in the parking lot. The head above the shimmering roofs and hoods of the parked car does not pivot on its neck. The whole cow cranes this way and that. I have parked over by the war memorial with its display of mottled hulking tanks. Inside the cow, he sees me, waves his now empty hoof. He slowly makes his way through the maze of cars to mine. He leans over the hood of my car once he arrives, catching his breath. He is thinking, looking deep into the pool of polished metal, his reflection, the cow's reflection reflecting back to him through the slit in the throat. Before he gets in the car, he removes the head, twisting it off like a deep-sea diver's helmet. He stores the head in the backseat and gets in the front to eat the lunch I've brought him, hamburgers with the works, waffle fries, and black cow shake from a competitor's place.