The Slaughter Plant

The morning break was almost over and I looked at the drawing of a
horse's head that I'd drawn on a notepad. It was pretty good. I'd
caught the nostrils flaring, and the eyes radiated a defiant, untamed
look. Not bad. Of course, I'd always been good at art. A guy has to
make a living though, so I ended up here, a foreman in a meat-packing
plant. My artwork now is pretty much confined to doodling. Throwaway
art. A guy's got to have money in order to pursue an art career-money
and/or influential backers. I couldn't come up with either one.

A knock at my office door called me back to business. I slid a
slaughter report on top of my sketch just before the door opened. It
was Mickey Kincaide, a slender, blond hair kid whom I'd watched grow up
a couple doors down from me. He was holding his knives, scabbard, mesh
gloves, and apron.

"I just stopped in to thank you for giving me the chance to work here,"
he apologized, his head down to avoid looking at me. "But I just don't
think I can handle it anymore."

I looked at him, surprised. He was a damn good worker as far as I was
concerned. A good kid, too. A typical case of a nice kid whose hormones
had gotten him into trouble. His parent were from the Old School. You
know, "You screw up and now you've got to make it right." Now the kid
was married to his 17-year old girlfriend and they have a young
daughter to take care of.

"What are you going to do, Mickey?" I asked him.

"I don't know," he replied dejectedly. "I'll find something else, I
guess."

"You know," I reminded him, "in this depressed economy, this plant is
one of the best paychecks in town."

"I know," he admitted, hanging his head a bit more. He pulled around a
chair with his foot and set his equipment on it. Then he dug into his
pocket and pulled out a piece of paper.

"I showed this to my old man," he said. "He called me "a damn fool" and
told me to get my head on straight. He said "god damn it kid, you've
got responsibilities now. Grow up.""

I looked at the paper in astonishment. "You wrote a goddamned poem
about quitting your job?" I asked him.

He nodded, then whispered, "Yeah."

I stared at him, catching a hesitant note in his voice. It sounded like
he wanted to say more, but was gauging whether I'd be receptive or not.
Finally he blurted out, "I showed it to Sarah, and she
understood."

"Your wife," I reminded him sharply, "is a 17-1/2 year old girl who
reads romance novels and still feels bad about missing her senior prom.
My God, Mickey, you were an "A" student. You had a helluva future ahead
of you. What the hell, if the two of you were so bent on screwing
around, why the devil didn't you have enough sense to at least take
some precautions?"

He hung his head but handed me the paper. "I brought this because I
figured it might make you understand why I'm leaving. I watched you as
I grew up," he reminded me. "I know that you went to college and
majored in art. Here," he insisted. "Read it."

THE SLAUGHTER PLANT by Mickey Kincaide

Terrified, the dumb brutes panic at being driven
They smell and sense the death that lurks beyond the doorway.
Their only escape from the electric shock probe though,
Is that ominous exit. A madness born of the fear of pain
Drives the beasts into the mechanics of slaughter.

A thunderclap rifle shot rocks its bovine brain.
The animal drops. Its hind legs are tightly shackled
And its body yanked ceilingward for the throat- slitter
To pierce its jugular vein with practiced barbarian finesse,
His rubber boots sloshing through a morass of blood.

At times then animal reaches the throat-slitter
Still weakly kicking, still clutching at existence
In its panic of uncomprehending pain.
Its doom has been pre-ordained though as it meets
The remorseless attack of the God with a knife.

Two hundred and eight-five head of cattle an hour
Will be processed with calculated precision.
That's the brutal, inexorable certainty
Beneath the din and the frenzied activity,
The callous constant movement of the chain of death.

The headers, bung-droppers, belly-openers, gut-snatchers,
Kidney-poppers, split saw operators, shavers, lard pullers,
Hock cutters, skinners, hide pullers, bone-grinders, luggers,
The blood-dryers, the cookers, the gang in offal pack,
All move in like jackals to devour the corpse.

They all participate in the rendering of life
Into lard, table cuts, boneless trim, fertilizer,
Gelatin and hides. All are hardened to the horror,
Helmeted like the SS Guards who took a smug pride
In their processing of so many "sub-humans" an hour.

"Good God!" I growled, half astonished and half-angry that he could
portray my livelihood in such a manner. "Is that all you see these guys
as, a bunch of goddamned Nazis?"

"Don't misunderstand me," Mickey protested. "It's not the people that
work here that bother me. It's what they become. Am I the only one here
who sees the horror in what we are doing? Have the rest of you become
so hardened? Don't you see that dreams are being slaughtered here,
too?"

"It's not a matter of being callous, or hard," I explained. I had to
pause and grope for the right words. "It's just doing what has to be
done."

Mickey gazed at me with a look that mingled disappointment and
contempt. I was failing to get through to him. Somehow I had to
convince him that his feelings were something to be overcome. They were
almost "unmanly."

"You know, Mickey, in all your experience with them, have you ever had
a kid tell you "I want to work in a packing house when I grow
up?""

"I didn't realize there was such a thing when I was a kid," Mickey
admitted. "I guess I just thought that steaks were always
steaks."

"I didn't know anything about packing houses either," I reassured him.
"But there came a time in my life when I had to go out and get a job to
support myself and my family. A guy learns to do what has to be done in
order to survive. Even if you don't like it at first."

Mickey shrugged. "Why don't you read the rest of it?" he suggested. I
could tell that he was uncomfortable with being preached to. He had
probably heard similar raised-voice rhetoric from his father. Why
should he stand here and take it from me? I did as he suggested and
began to read from where I had left off.

Their scabbards clanging against their bloody chain belts,
The helmeted Kill-floor crew files out for lunch,
Removing their mesh gloves, their wrist guards, their ear plugs
And their aprons before they wash the blood from their hands.
Fragmnets of their conversations soon filter through the
cafeteria.

They talk of sports...
"Think the Bucks have a chance against the Bulls tonight?"
They talk of women...
"I met this gorgeous bitch last night at Callahan's... man..."
And they talk of money...
"I put 18 hours of overtime in so far this week."

Apparitions of the men who pulled the gold teeth,
Led victims to the showers, stoked the ovens, took head count
Of the trainloads of frightened humanity being herded into camp,
They gaze upon the lunchroom scene and knowingly smile
With an understanding rooted in their death-camp kinship.

It was thus at Auschwitz, Ravensbruck and Belsen.
Carloads of human cattle were ruthlessly dispatched
With a businesslike Aryan efficiency, as blithely
As we kill now to placate a growling stomach.
So it will be in the next war to come as well.

I handed the paper back to Mickey who took it from me without
comment.

"You've got a gift for language, kid. You probably don't belong here,"
I told him, putting my hand on his shoulder as a gesture of friendship.
More or less, I was trying to tell him that I didn't take offense at
what he wrote and that I appreciated his honesty. I wanted to leave the
door open, in case he would reconsider and decide to stay on.

"I've seen your sketches," he said, lifting up the slaughter report to
show me my notepad beneath it. "You don't belong here either."

"It pays the bills. What will you do to live?" I asked him.

"I'll give McDonalds a try. Maybe Pizza Hut," he said hopefully. "I'm
young enough to work my way up to be a manager someday."

"You could do the same thing here," I reminded him.

"No, I can't," Mickey said. "I just don't think that I belong here." He
made a move toward the door,as if now all he could think of was
escape.

"You'll be back," I said. "You'll get tired of flipping burgers for
$4.50 an hour when you can make twice that much here."

Mickey turned toward me again, one hand still on the door handle and
said, "I won't be back. There's got to be more to life than
this!"

His total rejection of my livelihood and the friendly advice that I'd
tried to give him finally got under my skin. I lost my temper.

"Why!" I yelled angrily. "Because you demand that there should be? You
haven't even begun to be disappointed, kid. You're just a kernel of
corn that the millstone of life is beginning to grind on. When your old
lady is bitching because she has no money to buy your daughter's
formula, or when she turns her back on you in bed at night because you
didn't bring home enough money to buy her that pair of new Reeboks she
wants, then you'll be back! And damned glad to be back!"

"I don't think so," Mickey said coldly, as he pulled the door open and
slipped out of the office and into the hallway.

Silently I wished him luck. He would need it.

My notepad with the head of the proud, untamed stallion, his nostrils
flaring, his indignation at my attempt to capture him in a sketch lay
on my desk still. Yeah, I maybe could have been a pretty decent artist,
given a few breaks, but...what the hell.

I reached down, ripped the page from the notepad and crumpled it into a
neat little ball. From my desk it was just a short bank shot off the
wall into the wastepaper basket in the corner. Two points.

It was time to go back to work.

(this story first appeared in the Literary Magazine "Potato Eyes" in
1997.)