William Boyd - On the Yankee Station - Stories

There were shouts of alarm from the deck, but everything happened too quickly. Within moments they passed the spot where Pfitz had gone down; bubbling crazy water, a slick of oil, and men claimed to see the pale shape of the Crusader slipping ever deeper beneath the green surface of the sea.

Pfitz never came up and there was no further trace of the plane. The end of the catapult was found to be slightly warped and scarred, and the accident was put down to yet another malfunction. The day’s mission was aborted while the mechanism was taken apart.

Lydecker stood on the edge of the deck and looked out to where the rescue helicopters futilely hovered above the oil slick. Groups of men stood about and talked of the accident. Lydecker’s heart was racing and his eyes were bright. Pfitz and his napalm somewhere at the bottom of the South China Sea. He felt good. No, he felt magnificent. He wanted to bite the stars.

“So you are still a virgin,” Pierre-Etienne said triumphantly, stubbing out his cigarette.

It had to come out, Eric thought. They had been talking earnestly about sex all afternoon. Under cross-examination Eric had mentioned an older girl-cousin called Jean and suggestively introduced the notion of a seaside holiday and a sand dune picnic à deux . He had tried to keep the details vague, but conversations of this sort remorselessly turned towards the specific and Pierre-Etienne and Momo (Maurice) had been unsparing in their search for the truth. They had really pinned him down this time. Yes or no, they demanded; did you or didn’t you?

“I don’t believe it,” Momo said. “You never?”

Eric shook his head, trying to smile away his blush. They were sitting at a café in the main square of Villers-Bocage. It was market day and the place was full of livestock and people. Momentarily Eric’s attention was distracted by the sight of a red-faced farmer in the typical knee-length Normandy blouson, energetically tugging on the tail of a cow as if he were trying to wrench it out by the roots. Eric winced.

He looked back at his two companions. Pierre-Etienne was the same age as he; last Easter he’d spent two weeks in England at Eric’s home. Momo was Pierre-Etienne’s brother, a little older — nearly seventeen — plump and trying to grow a moustache. Eric didn’t like him that much; his air of amused tolerance towards the two younger boys was extremely irritating. Momo had a girlfriend of sorts, Eric knew, but he’d never seen Pierre-Etienne with one.

Eric sipped his Diabolo-menthe . He adored the chill green drink, clear and clinking with ice cubes. It was the best thing about France, he decided. He’d never learn the language, he was sure, and as far as he was concerned it wasn’t worth the last two weeks of his summer holiday. Pierre-Etienne’s father was the director of the Villers-Bocage abattoir, and as a result of his job the family ate meat for every meal; every sort and cut imaginable: pork, veal, beef, kidneys, heart, brains, revolting spongy tripe, lamb, oxtails, trotters, fatty purple sausages, all of it pink and undercooked and oozing with blood. Eric was returning directly to school in three days and he sometimes found himself longing for shepherd’s pie or a thick Bisto stew.

“But surely you’re one — a virgin — too?” he said to Pierre-Etienne in half-hearted counter-attack.

“Of course not.” Pierre-Etienne looked offended.

“But you don’t have a girl-friend,” Eric said. “How could you?”

“No,” Momo said, “he don’t have a girl-friend, but he has Marguerite.”

“And who’s she?”

Marguerite Grosjean shouted goodbye to her mother and eased her bulk into her tiny 2-CV. As usual her mother didn’t reply. Marguerite lit her fifth Gauloise of the day. She sat for a moment in her car. It was only half past five and Villers-Bocage was just ten minutes away through early morning mist. She puffed on her cigarette and scratched her thigh. Her mother leaned out of the upstairs window and shouted at her. It was just a noise. Her mother ran out to the car screaming abuse. Marguerite flipped down the window. Arcs of spittle from her mother’s mouth spattered on the glass. Marguerite let it go on a few seconds. It was like this every morning. Then she started the engine and drove off, leaving the small dishevelled figure, still shaking with rage, alone in the yard.

She arrived at the abattoir a little early so she went to the nearby bar and ordered a café-calva . The waiter brought her the drink. He was new to the café. He smiled and said good morning but Marguerite appeared not to notice him. He found this somewhat unusual, as he had taken her against the wall at the back of the café only three nights ago when she came off night shift. He said good morning again but she didn’t reply. He shrugged his shoulders and walked off, but he kept the tab. It wasn’t much but it was something. One of the butchers who worked in the abattoir had told him about Marguerite and all the butchers, farm-hands, meat packers and lorry drivers. You just need to ask, the man had said, that’s all, a simple request, and he had tapped his temple with a forefinger. The waiter had met her on her way back from the toilet. The butcher had been right.

He thought of asking her again, just now, to see if it was really true, but the clear morning light was unkind to the fat woman so he went on wiping the tables.

Eric, Pierre-Etienne and Momo stood at the back of the abattoir looking over a wall at the stream of departing workers from the morning shift.

“Which one is she?” Eric asked.

“That one there, the big one, going in the car.”

Eric saw lots of cars and quite a few large women.

“Which car?” he asked.

“That one,” Momo said, pointing to an old 2-CV being driven away. Eric couldn’t really see the driver, just a white face and black hair.

He felt a thump of excited pressure in his chest. “What do I have to do?” he asked.

“You just go and tell her what you want,” Pierre-Etienne said.

“Is that all ? Just ask?”

“Yes, it’s all.”

“But why does she do it? Do … do I have to pay her or anything?”

The two French boys laughed delightedly. “No, no,” Momo said. “She do it for nothing. She likes it.”

“Oh,” said Eric knowledgeably, “a nympho. But are you sure? You’re not lying? She does it just like that?”

“Everybody is going to Marguerite,” Momo said with emphasis. “We have gone.”

“Bloody hell. Did you?” Eric asked Pierre-Etienne.

“Of course,” he replied. “I have been three times. It is easy.”

“God,” said Eric quietly. The ease of the whole venture astonished him. It really was going to happen. “But I still don’t understand why . What for? Why does she do it?”

Marguerite parked her car at the back of the abattoir near the packed cattle pens full of grunting and shifting beasts. As she walked into the room where she worked the familiar pungent ammoniacal smell of guts and excrement tickled her nostrils. She took her plastic overall off the peg and buttoned it tightly across her massive chest. She stepped into her gumboots and pulled the white cap over her wiry black hair, just beginning to be streaked with grey.

She heard the men arrive, the jokes and the early morning banter. A few stepped in for a moment and said hello. She stood looking at the huge stainless-steel basins. She leant back against the mangle. She wasn’t thinking about anything, just waiting for Marcel to wheel in the first tub of shivering, gelid, brown and purple guts.

Then she heard the familiar sound of the slaughter begin. The compressed-air phut of the humane killer as the retractable six-inch spike was driven into the animal’s skull. The clang as the side of the pen fell away to let the beast tumble down the concrete incline, the rattle of its hooves on the cement. Then there was the whirr of the hoist as the carcass was lifted up by a rear leg and almost simultaneously the splash as the blood poured from twin slits made in the throat. It took barely a minute for the skin to be removed before the buzzing circular saw carved down the length of the suspended body, opening it wide. The first today was a cow; she recognised the second splash — this time of milk — as the udder was halved by the whining blade. Then there was the slithering, slopping waterfall as the insides fell out. The moan of the overhead rails — as the carcass was swung down the line to the butchers and the cavernous refrigerating plant — was punctuated by the thumps and splashings of the second animal being killed.