The hurricane screams sounded like the time in Florida. Reporter for the Times on assignment into the eye of the storm. Hurricane Andrew battered the coast in violent fashion, and it was my design not my duty to stand outside the motel room belching frantic words into the microphone while my pal, Andy the Cameraman, stood in the relative safety of the doorway and filmed me. Being slammed. The pitch of the wind-scream more than deafening, it frightened us to death. But in the interest of some romantic vision, swirls of Hemingway and Thompson and Frame, I stood there and received my punishment. The screams, the high-pitched diabolical groans, the frantic mania of nature, I took back with me as memory. We have those screams on tape. You can hear them. We, Andy and I, often watch video and be shaking our heads. We post the screams. Lucky to be alive. And it was not the stop sign that flew by my head that I remember, that I see now on film, not the bovine billboard that spun and slammed into the side of the motel, not the tractor trailer that slowly then swiftly tipped over and slid on its side along the soaked street, not the houses absorbed by the slashing sea: it was those fiendish sounds. They haunt my sleep. They protest murder, they portend, they accuse.
Esmeralda when she died sounded like that furious typhoon howl. Houghton, too. You see deaths like theirs in horror movies. Again Andy filmed it. Again I breathed in the middle of the piercing, bellowing nature, in the mud and shit of life, fear, and death row. They got pretty fat on death row.
Desperate guys searching for inspiration. Possibly. The night before we’d been in the city dancing to the rock band and the hip-hop crew, live jammers and drug fiends. You are not drunk on liquid LSD, therefore able to watch the slide of the men and women as they drink and drink and soon their tongues no longer function and the pitch raises another level and the barmaid feeling good because she’s making some money tonight. Not my fault I’m a friend of the band. Andy, again, shooting pictures and his nose runs with pure drunkenness. I wonder, as I sit back on the pew-like bench, leaning my head against the wall, if we’ll make it. We have a plan. When you have high minds and big heads and consider yourselves adventurers, yet unknown, poor, converging on being a slob, being one, you’ll do anything for inspiration.
Your own Magellan. Some kind of Marco Polo. David Koresh with the Bible go down in flames. Shoot people from the bell tower. Shoot heroin into your veins. Something, anything, for the story, the story of your life. Heck, after we killed them I hitchhiked back to Santa Fe simply for the fuck of it. There had been animated discussion about how we were going to kill them. We’d always wondered what it would be like to kill a living being, a large living being not some rat or cat or b-b gun squirrel, and we knew you could get away with it. I mean, you can’t just kill shit. Drive into some city, pick a random person, follow them home to their neighborhood, and shoot the poor bastard. I’d thought about it enough times eventually had to write the story down, down before I’d ever done the thing.
The stories were ok, published somewhere, but now I can share the real thing. I’m not at all reliable, ever, but murder is murder and my mom is also dead. I watched her die, seven days by her side. Anyway, there I was, drugged once again, pushing three in the morning and the plan called for us, this whole gang, to be up by eight in order to do the deed. Wondered if we would make it. As I gazed at Andy with his sagging bottom lip, and Matteus with his forehead on the table, and James hunting women like a wolf, and members of the band screaming and sweating, unconcerned with our impending battle, others sagging into dementia, I was doubtful. Only one- Kim- remained sober and eager, anticipatory, and well, professional. He was asleep, I knew, back at the farm, and he would wake us all, I knew, hungover and puking and angry, he would wake us all.
I helped load the van and drive the van and install the collective mess back at the farm. We stayed up some and played with the dog and wrestled in front of the fire with the dog and hid under sleeping bags so he would search for our mongrel head, hunting dog a burrowing dog, eager and yelping and it didn’t know how much killing would occur today. Kim had sharpened the knives, I saw. Andy told me killing Esmeralda would be easy. I fell asleep eager for the adventure upcoming. How I felt flying into Bosnia; like the time in Kurdistan and the time at Tienanmen Square and the time I was led into Tibet by a Buddhist guide and even the time the Rolling Stones allowed me to go on tour. To get the story, to share the details, nooks and crannies that most people would never experience.
Some farmer in Iowa, I’m certain, wouldn’t give a hoot about this story. He’d laugh at our neophyte dribbles and he’d tell us, in a haw, that he’d killed plenty of them goddam hogs before. More than Smithfield, Virginia. Ain’t nothing to it; it’s a simple matter, really. Remember Wilbur, man, I mean, he was about to go. Realism, cold, calculated - action in a practical world.
But not for bourgeois city kids reared on Cheerios, malls, and cafes holier than thou.
Heck, it was probably three hours of sleep I got, no more, when Kim began banging on a bell the bastard. I knew it was coming, so did we all: the mattress on the floor guys, in front of the fire, the couch guys, guys with scored girls from the night before, locked away in bedrooms, those who promised they’d make it from the city, those who at three still drinking doing lines looked you in the eye said “I’ll be there.”
See, we needed teams. You can’t just walk up and do what we were about to do alone. Unless you used a gun but that’s not what we’re about. All of us knew it was coming and Kim screamed, ranted about like I don’t know what, and called us names. He said he knew we wouldn’t be able to do it; he knew we would slack off and sleep the morning away; we’ve got a big day ahead of us, gentlemen, let’s get to it.
The knives sharpened. Coffee brewed Kim did, god love him god thank him. Rooster cocked his doodle do and it lent humor to this occasion. Mid-December day, cold. No snow yet; the ground hard; sky clear with crisp winter cloud wisps in the distance, moving to the sea moving to some warmer clime. Kim had firewood ready, under the cauldron, the cauldron like picture a cauldron of course filled with water and the pickup parked nearby. We walked as a crew toward the site. In our dirtiest throwaway clothes. This city gang, it was laughable. One drove to Burger King to get sausage croissants and more coffee. One, a friend who stumbled into this caper, required borrowed clothes, set of farmer overalls, to cover his fine slacks. He commented on the shoes and what could you do? Some of the night-before girls stood around in blankets, unsure about what the hell was going to happen. They were pale and drunk, sort of pre-puke.
Matteus the German loaded a corncob pipe and began smoking it. He said, “Like a man.” Somebody, Kim or James, started the fire under the cauldron. There was a proper thermometer for gauging the temperature inside the large kettle. Needed to be between 155 and 165 degrees. We thought of Jeffrey Dahmer, but not in the way we would in six hours. Now he was just a whacked crazy-man who’d accomplished unfathomable deeds; later he’d be a somewhat skewed hero, man viewed in a new light, at the very least possessing a new appreciation for his endeavors. I know that you’ve never killed someone three-hundred and fifty pounds, much less two of such. You’ve never tasted blood, you supermarket hunter, you omnivore you don’t even understand how much you thirst for blood. Dahmer had to work hard.
Yes, Kim started the fire under the water and in an hour it would be hot enough. James had the book. The book we’d use to do the job properly. You can get the information over the internet, of course, along with information about building bombs and stashing bodies and all of that. James, though, found this old, ignored, beaten-up book in the library. Published in the Forties. Black and white photographs with demonstrations. The book was surprisingly well-written. I was being judgmental. Not like it would be today. Do you know how to pop the aitch bone? I doubt it. We learned that day.
We did not possess a gibbet for our lynching, so we employed the large branch of a pitch pine. Kim rigged rope earlier, to check, to know that the branch would hold five hundred pounds of still struggling weight. Shaking, you know, twitching. Spasms along the line. We wanted to see those bastards hanging; we had a black one and a white one. The black one’s name was Esmeralda and we had grown, over the months of her living with us, to like her. The poor girl. Her mate Houghton was a white boy and he was feisty bastard. He weighed more than Esmeralda. Hymen joked about this execution. We would eat, boy, would we have food to eat. Dahmer ate his victims, why couldn’t we? We at least wanted to try it, to get the story, to report to you properly.
Kim set up a white table next to the cauldron. The cauldron and the table stood next to the pitch pine gallows. Pile of firewood. Men and women gathered around. We didn’t know what to exactly do. I mean, there were ideas flowing around, we were discussing the impending task as learned peeps might, to do this or to do that. How would we take them down? One of the main questions. We didn’t just want to shoot them in the head with the twenty two. Simple Esmeralda and Houghton wouldn’t know the bullet was coming, then they would plop in the mud dead, and how fun would that be? We wanted some action. We wanted to kill with our bare hands. Like fucking indigenes from some once upon a time. We had to taste bloody action, like brave warriors, men of another age.
Andy stooped around here and there and shutter-bugged like a man possessed. His film camera on a tripod near the gallows as well. Hymen stood and joked and rubbed his belly. Kim busied himself with further preparations. I was not a team leader. Though an active participant in the killing I was essentially a stander-by. Matteus stood in the bed of the pickup and smoked his pipe. He laughed nervously on occasion. We didn’t know how to do this. Instead of shooting them we wondered about bashing their foreheads. You know, walk casually up to them, hey how you doing? doing all right this morning? great day this December isn’t it, not too cold, yeah, well... and then BASH! Like some kind of freaks. You’d better not miss the mark or there’d be hell to pay. Might get jumped by the tandem. Worse, they might escape and run like hell for the woods then we’d have to form a posse and hunt them down; believe me, hunting is not what we had in mind for the day. Killing, sure; hunting not so much. So what do you do? Bash the forehead? Poor girl stunned, wobbles some then you jump her and tie her legs and drag her to the pitch pine branch?
It’s a lynching really. It was decided that we would do the proper, active thing: we would tackle the three-hundred and fifty swift pounds with teeth and nails and we’d overpower them and we would, while hollering and grunting and holding them down, tie their legs with skill and style. That’s what’s supposed to happen. When’s the last time you tackled somebody that big and heavy, and angered, filled with mortal fear, and fast and loaded with teeth? Having settled on this tactic, however, I began pacing, wondering, trying to picture it. I’d forgotten what kind of force is necessary for such a tackle. I raised this particular question. James nodded, understood, the others milling about with new realization, and had me tackle him. “Come on, take me down!” he shouted and I made like highschool playground and attempted to tackle him.
Wrestling ensued; James resisted; I fought hard and finally brought the man to the hard ground, had him succumbed and noted in my mind, in my very fiber, what kind of power and energy the task required. Extinguishing life with your bare hands. Seemed reasonable enough. Then I pondered the actually violent act of killing something, anything: picture if you will all possibilities. Take a beetle, for example. You need to crush the beetle with true, profound violence in order to actually cancel life. Imagine what kind of act it would take to kill a cat with your own hands. The final twist of its neck would be overtly savage. Anytime you snuff life your final act must be vicious. It’s insane that necessary ferocity. A cat, a beetle, a mosquito? What’s the last sentient being that you’ve killed? Recall the act, recall the true aggression. Now, walk up to three-hundred and fifty fast-moving pissed off pounds and kill it with your bare hands.
We went through a mock killing, replete with knife slice through juggler demonstration, with a discussion about the teams and angle of attack. When the teams were ready, we formed a circle, like a football team, our hands in the center, and yelled in unison “One, two, three Bay End!” Then we broke into the predetermined units, each with four guys. We stalked. And it was funny. The girls from the bar watched wrapped in blankets; some not sure what the hell we were doing, some grossed-out by the thought of blood, some curious, some bewildered; a few amazed at the sight of this glorious, primal madness.
James opened the gate to the muddy shit-filled pen.
No way we were going in after them in this ankle-deep shit, slops, and mud, the idea was to coax them out with gifts of food. In the book, see, and as a rule- a rule and an understanding that all real men and women know, all farmers and hunters and killers of beasts, all native hunters of old and survivors in the wilds of the past, Navy Seals and kibbutzim, a rule that supermarket hunters do not comprehend- that you are not supposed to feed the poor bastards prior to their slaughter. The food bribe was sufficient enough to call immediate action from Esmeralda and Houghton and the two left their home without caution. We’d worried about that.
Now the guy and the girl were eating and James and Kim looked at all of us, at the assembled, and said, “well, this is when we do it.” Do what? Hell, look how huge they are. NFL hogs blew away the combine. There’s no way. I’m not going to do it; you going to do it? Hymen laughed despite himself. Matteus the German appeared nervous. Our blood was pumping with an honest sense of battle. This was adrenaline. Perhaps a group of bored men looking for inspiration, perhaps something deeper, more meaningful, transcending masculinity or femininity, connecting animal and mind, genetics and environment, culture and ideology.
We closed ranks. Esmeralda and Houghton ate content and had no idea. I wasn’t going to make the first move, and I know Matteus the German and Hymen weren’t either. For a while we appeared as circus dorks around Dalmatians. Finally, somebody conjured a meek grab for an ear, a head, an ankle and Esmeralda easily stepped away and began jogging in circles. Arms clutched for something, without confidence or focus, cautious and even fearful: not the kind of movements of bloodthirsty killers. Esmeralda ran round her home followed stutteringly by Team A. Houghton sprinted into the shit-muck. Circles, stammerings and general confusion and the girls must have been thinking: these our men?Finally, like a true heroes, the leaders of great adventure, Kim tackled the black girl and James the white boy, tackled them hard like it was necessary for life and death, like you truly were a gladiator and had to kill to live, an honest, violent tackle and both hogs hit the dirt.
Captivated by adrenaline and instinct and little thought I jumped on to the back of the girl. The hurricane scream began to pierce. I was brought back to the coast of Florida and to Andrew and to deaths and billions of dollars of damage and that goddam flying billboard and the sound, the penetrating sound of evil and mortal fear, the anger of our fucking lives, the deepest, desperate circles of hell. The hurricane scream incessant. I couldn’t believe the sound. And it continued, both of them squealing, screeching, wailing the last of their possible wails.
Damn us! What were we doing? I committed everything to this task, every muscle ripped, my blood tearing through extended veins, heart about to burst, like an aggressive teenager taught to do so, like a warrior where warriors really exist. I screamed at the girl: “You are going to die today!” and lay into her with everything I had. Andy too, on her head, holding her neck and head down as she screamed. And mud and shit flying everywhere and the screams. James tried desperately to tie her back legs; succeeded momentarily, then kicking they came loose again and Esmeralda squirmed forward, pressed against the fence of her only home, dragging us with her. We engaged our might. Over James’s head I was able to see the other team with Houghton on his side.
They’d already tied his legs and were now dragging the typhoon beast toward the pitchpine gallows. All four of them struggling with their burden. Back in the shit, we made valiant attempts to subdue this obese sow and yet she continued to fight. I yelled at her more, with gnashing teeth, summoning a fair amount of meanness. I was able to note in the midst of the roar, filled with the raw pumping action of life and war, that I didn’t have any problem, now, killing this animal, this life force. I’ll kill her, I’d do it again and don’t you ever piss me off at a traffic light, motherfucker or I’ll kill you. I became a monster; ready to eat still-beating hearts; ready to paint my body in warm blood.
James tied the legs and now we as a team lifted her, still screaming, and began to carry-drag carry-struggle her toward the cauldron and her fated mate. We could not carry her in one go the fifty yards; I’ve never experienced such a ripping workout in my life; true, I’m out of shape; but I did climb to Everest Base Camp and walked across Australia, was an athlete in college and I know what it’s like to get to that edge, where you feel pain yet you push onward. And with three-hundred pounds between four men and fifty yards? Should be easy. Five steps, put her down and rest, ten steps in one more heave-ho, set her down; curses all around, look at one another, looking at the winter sky, searing pain my heart will stop, this December day, it will stop and I will die.
We arrived at the tree and the boiling water and Houghton and the firewood. Kim’s team already had the branch rope through the feet rope tied, and they struggled to affect a proper hoist. Matteus the German, smoking a pipe now in his teeth, suggested the truck. They slung the rope over the branch, secured it to the trailer hitch, and Hymen jumped in and moved forward a few feet. Houghton rose off the ground, still alive, lifted still twitching and struggling and screaming anathema, imprecations, condemnations. Cyclone sounds and I cringed, enveloped in its awesome power, and at the same time reveled in it, waves of sound, expressiveness, mortality.
Kim crouched in front of Houghton and a few held the pig steady; he brought his knife to the spot thought he’d never done this in all his life, at no time had he ever done what he was about to do. James held the book open, the bible of this death, the testament of butchering, this cosmological sacrifice. Are you sure? Yes, right there, right there, yeah. And an insertion! Louder screamed the swine. Now kicking and twitching and they struggled to hold him steady. Blood spurted like you’d heard it might, like it’s supposed to, like a professional would want it who wanted blood to drain, like in the movies. Gore. Why we wore old clothes, farmer clothes, throw-away clothes. Blood fell in spurts on my shoes. No shouts of nasty, nothing triumphal either. We watched in awe. Houghton began to drain.
Next it was Esmeralda turn and apparently she’d decided she wasn’t going down today, not for any of you guys, not for Team A or Team B or any motherfucker otherwise and just you try to take me down today, this December day. She struggled and fought and I thought: this is how I’d want to go if it were my time, captured by a lynch mob, encircled by assholes; this is how I would want to fight. No lamb led to the slaughter. She fought, she kicked, and she shook free from her leg ties and was about to make a bolt for it. Five men jumped her and held her while James secured again the rope. A tempest bellow. A struggle and mortal fear and I cannot believe I’m doing this. This is nothing like seeing a guy shot in Kurdistan; nothing like the girl hit by a car in Cambridge; nothing like war footage this war nation has made us watch. This from the depths of the vast expanse of life. It is bloody.
Soon we had Esmeralda hanging next to her mate, her only friend in life, and Hymen requested the honor. He marked the spot with a fucking sharpie, looked at Kim questioningly, received an affirmative nod, and inserted. Blood spurted yet not quick enough a messy cut was it and shouts to reinsert and he panicked and handed the knife to Kim. Kim went in and made some violent swirls with the knife and now the blood rightly flowed. We stood back from its release. The two dangled from the pitch pine branch and they were bled.
Lifeless still were they. Swinging gently. Drained. James read from the book. You dip them in the cauldron the water 165 degrees, I checked. Andy snapping away, taking photographs, body like yoga. Dip the pig’s shoulders and head in the vat, a team pulls like crazy four of them and raises the poor animal, the other team swings her to the white table. Then you begin to scrape. You scrape the swine hair and the outer layer of skin, scrape until that fat porker is clean and smooth, you dip again and scrape again and it’s hard work. The fun of killing over and now you work. The labor took all day, the sun crossing the winter sky, girls in blankets leaving and coming back again and leaving and taking the dog for a long walk. Lunch brought while the work still going, men pulling ropes and the two lifting and lowering into the hot water, back to the table, head first then rear end. Scrape all the way down to the hooves with sharpened blades. Naked and clean. Then you swing the first one over, the completed one, the fire still hot under the giant kettle and some one goes off with the tractor that ordinarily plows the fields and that someone a novice city boy and he bounces and jounces across winter fields and cannot, for the life of him, contain his smiles; that someone retrieves a frontloader full of firewood and stokes the fire. Dip and re-dip and Matteus the German continues with his smoke, watching from the truck. I borrow a smoke and chew on the pipe stem like my grandfather or like I suppose my grandfather had. Then the girl and the guy are naked and the knives dull.
A man, I think it’s Matteus the German, with his pipe of sweet-smelling tobacco, shouts “to the freezers, men!” Not yet.
First transpired the part that makes most queasy. Armed with The Book, open to a page, James stood as a street preacher might stand and coached Kim with the first cut. Handsaw leaning against the pitch pine. That’s for the spine. Kim sliced skin and flesh around and around the neck and wiggled the blade some and the head fell to the ground. The court butchers of Satan. One holds the head by an ear triumphantly. Alls I know is the first head- Houghton’s- placed in the grass and his tufted ears splayed and Andy screamed with his camera flashing “no wonder the ears are a delicacy.” The sun low on the horizon now; we’d been working and killing all day. His snout appears to be made of putty, rough-hewn by the hand of an artist: set to smell buried grub for ages. The guy bled and the head off, and now a precise incision down its belly, in a straight line. James reads about tying off the anus. The initial incision retraced in a deep cut and there tumbled the steaming, stinking insides.“Release the offal!” another pronounced shout.
This must be done gingerly. You can’t cut the intestines or any significant organ. Nick an intestine and you will have a smell you will. And you may spoil the meat. I contemplate all the butchers of all the lands and shake my head; I go over those who make sausages and read about the methods in The Book and shake my head. It’s copious toil. “Slice the connective tissue there,” James reads. Kim obliges. The others peer over; halfway down a most interesting move is required: one must reach into the carcass with an entire forearm, blade pointing up, and slice the thing from within this last section. I’m watching a friend of mine with his arm inside the steaming beast looking like Han stuffing Luke into his tauntaun on Hoth. This move, even in Kazakhstan, or Hoth, or after a hurricane motel on the coast of Florida, would I not do. The last cuts are made, connective tissue severed, and the aitch bone popped- the aitch bone firmly tapped with the blade handle- and the offal falls to the ground or in this case a plastic basin.
Kim then sawed the carcass in half, along the spine, with the handsaw, sawing as if you’d work through rough lumber. Houghton now in two sections dangling from the branch of a tree. Matteus the German smokes his corncob and contemplates. Andy the cameraman shoots and shoots. Blood and guts, the warm heart and raveled intestines and liver and stomach and lungs. We dissect like the time with the cat in college, or the frog in high school; we for the first time appreciate, truly understand, the efforts of the odd murderer Dahmer. Or when the mafia disappear bodies with saws.
Then it’s revealed, in a sidebar, that Andy the photo man went to school in Minneapolis with a young effeminate Black kid and this Andy was reading Time Magazine one day, in innocence, and he happened upon a photograph of this effeminate young man and was shocked to find that this comrade, this fellow student, was eaten whole in some city apartment. Andy’s revelation brings forth shocks and gasps; we continue to saw Houghton. The entire process is of course repeated, in haste for the sun’s setting, with Esmeralda. The two halves become four. The four large chunks, with legs attached, still to be hefted by a strong human, and swung from the bloodstained table to a sack and the sack swung to the back of the pickup truck. Esmeralda head severed and placed next to her mate’s in the grass. Andy the photographer stands over them and takes shots, this angle and that, last light of day, a beam, shining on the pair’s heads. The ears, they tell me, large and tufted and now I understand, are delicacies.
Esmeralda quartered decorously and flung in sacks to the truck. Ropes still hang from the pitchpine branch. I’m surprised the branch held and announced my surprise. James with the tractor and the frontloader digs a deep pit, a grave, back and forth, the hole deeper and the mound grander, and into the pit we tossed the remains: the heads not for show not to be jammed on a stake and the guts and the tumbling intestines. He rolled the mound of earth back into the pit and drove over it and tamped it down and smoothed. Kim drove the truck to the main house. The gang assembled heaved the chunks of flesh into sinks and the teams washed the chunks. Then, red and flashing and meat, Esmeralda and Houghton placed on shelves in three freezers.
Ropes still hang from the branch; it’s dark now and the dog tied to his runner; somebody’s already wiped down the white table. The cauldron standing, steam rising from the hot water and embers glowing underneath. There’s no more firewood left. I inspected the stained earth and the enclosure their home, their mud-shit home in their one life a comfort, and recalled the earlier battle. We froze the meat and members analyzed the cuts on the butcher sheet in The Book, surprised to learn about the pork chop and its association with the backbone; we learned about ribs and tenderloin and ham-hocks, we talked about bacon and smoking meat and the party come the thirty-first. Then both teams, friends and comrades and adventurers, possessed fully with the realization that we did indeed undergo a life experience, a formative thing, went out to dinner at a local joint to celebrate. Most of the gang ordered fish and beer and fried clams and the television carried the football game and the waitresses were young and cute but Hymen, this Hymen, could not contain himself and who knows, he said, when I’ll be back here, and he without batting an eye and with a fair amount of eagerness, with solicitude and respect for the process, ordered a plate full of pork chops with mashed potatoes and apple sauce and we ate and laughed and slapped hands and entertained recollections and impressions of the day and inside each of us, I know, emerged a visceral emotional understanding that would otherwise have remained absent. Hymen sliced into his chop and said, shaking his head, Esmeralda, Houghton, Esmeralda.