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“Torment my eye,” I said. “It’s not like they drag the cows off to dark cells and wake them up for mock executions. The animals stand around, they moo, they eat grass, and when the time comes, they get killed. Their lives are a little shorter than they would be otherwise, but they don’t have to worry about starvation or predators and disease. Maybe it’s a decent trade-off.”
“Sure, that sounds great. Farmer Brown comes out once in a while to pat their rumps or maybe pick a little on his banjo while he chews on a stalk of hay. Wake up, friend. That idyllic farm doesn’t exist anymore, if it ever did. Small farms are being absorbed by giant corporations. They’re building what are called factory farms, in which the maximum possible number of animals are warehoused in dark buildings, pumped full of drugs to make it possible for them to survive in these u
“Yeah, if the public is so threatened, then how come the public doesn’t care?”
“The public.” He let out a dismissive sigh. “Remember ideology. The public is told meat is safe and good and healthful, and so the public complies.”
“So, what do you live on- eggs and cheese?” I asked.
He laughed. “No way. I’m a vegan, man. I don’t eat any animal products. None.”
“Oh, come on. You can’t stand to exploit the labor of a chicken?”
“If you could prove to me the chickens didn’t suffer, I’d eat their eggs,” he told me. “But you have no idea. Those chickens are packed into cages so tight, they can’t even turn around. Their beaks and feet get infected, and they’re in agony. Maybe even more than cows and pigs, chickens suffer unspeakable torments, probably because they’re birds and we care even less what happens to them. We are talking about animals that never experience a single moment of life without pain, fear, or discomfort. And those are the females. The males born to egg-laying populations are just tossed into sacks until they’re ground up alive and fed to the females. You want me to tell you about how dairy cows live?”
“Not especially. I want you to tell me how you live. What is there to eat?”
“At home, my kitchen is very well stocked, and I eat fine. But the truth is, if you’re going to be vegan, and you will be, you can’t eat out a whole lot unless you’re willing to be creative. But you can look at yourself in the mirror and know you’ve been doing the right thing. Plus, you get the added bonus of feeling more righteous than others. And it makes a great conversation at parties.” He gave me a knowing nod. “Women love vegetarians, Lemuel. They’ll think you’re deep. You get to college, start fussing about what you can and can’t eat, believe me, the women will start conversations about it and they’ll swoon over your sensitive soul.”
We took another pass by the trailer and saw it was now abandoned. No sign of cops or crime scene, so Melford turned down the stereo and parked at a strip mall lot with a closed convenience store, a dry cleaner, and something that called itself a jewelry store but looked, through the lattice of metal grating, more like a pawnshop. Taped to a phone booth next to the car was another missing pet flyer, this one for a brown Scottish terrier called Nestle.
It was only three blocks, cut mostly through the backs of other mobile homes, to Bastard and Karen’s house. The temperature had dropped to the mid-eighties, but the air was still thick with humidity, and the trailer park smelled like a backed-up toilet. None of this seemed to bother Melford, who knew where to find breaks in fences, where to cross over to avoid barking dogs- all of which told me that he had spent a fair amount of time casing this route. So maybe killing Bastard and Karen hadn’t been just some random act of violence.
We reached the back of the trailer- which, in fact, had no yellow crime scene tape- and Melford pulled out something that looked like a cheap ray gun from a Dr. Who episode- some kind of a handle with multiple wires of a variety of thicknesses protruding. “Pick gun,” he explained. “Very handy thing to keep around.” Eyes narrowed in concentration, he went at the back door of the trailer for just a moment before we heard a click. Melford pushed the door open while he slid the pick gun back into his pocket.
Now he took out a pen flashlight, which he flipped around the kitchen for a moment. “Huh,” he said. “That’s fu
I hadn’t wanted to look at them again; in fact, I’d taken comfort in the blackness of the room, which allowed me to shield myself from the sight of the no doubt stiff bodies, but I glanced over anyhow, knowing that it was what Melford expected of me. I stared, thinking that Melford’s deployment of the word fu
Bastard and Karen still lay there, eyes open, stiff as bloody and bloodless ma
By their side was a third body.
Chapter 10
MAYBE IT WASN’T FAIR, but I blamed my stepfather for everything bad that happened that weekend. And sure, it was at least partly Andy’s fault, but the odd thing was, it all played out the way it did because of the only two good ideas Andy had ever had, the two ideas that changed my life for the better.
He’d had countless bad ideas- that I should get new clothes no more than every two years, that I should wait until I turned sixteen before getting a learner’s permit, that I should clean out the barbecue each time he used it so the best pieces of charcoal could be salvaged for reuse. This one filled me with the most resentment, because when I came in from the garage, covered with sweat and soot, nostrils caked with black powder, coughing up gray phlegm, I found it impossible to deny the Dickensian bleakness of my life.
The first good idea came the summer after my freshman year in high school. Andy Roman had married my mother six years earlier, and I had been gaining weight steadily ever since. My mother said nothing while her son went from ski
If Andy knew about her little pill fixation- and he must have- he didn’t show much concern. Despite her fogginess, in which my mother sometimes wandered from room to room, clutching a plastic soup ladle or pot holder while searching for something she couldn’t quite recall, she managed to clean the house and make his meals- and that was all Andy required.
On occasion he’d try to interest her in his obsession with my increasing weight, but my mother just shrugged and muttered observations about growing boys. He wasn’t having it, and one day he a