Pray why do you so fear me child
When death will see us reconciled
And what was tamed again runs wild
Beyond the abattoir

 

A Hawk Circling the Wind
By Christopher K. Miller

 

Information can be penned.  But wisdom rests in the action of the spoken word.  That is why ours is not a written language, but an oral tradition, demonstrated as it is passed from mouth to mouth, hand to hand, generation to generation.  We tell stories.  That is why you cannot read.  We save our most powerful stories for when snow covers the ground.  That is the best time to hear them.  That is how the world ends.

Once, buffalo shook the grassy steppe.  Wolves howled beneath a tracker’s moon.  Eagles hunted from the sun.  And humans cried in battle.  And all of our spirits roamed together and we knew our names.  You do not know your name.  They call you Jack or Jackie, or—because you are fat—Porky Pig or Miss Piggy.  You eat only animals that never see the sky.  You pull carts filled with coins for machines that promise riches without work, and you watch TV.  That is why you are fat.  Nobody loves you. That is why you do not know your name.

Johnny, who negotiates casino contracts and also does not know his name, invites you into his office to smoke rollies and drink Big Daddy Merlot through a straw from a box—and to tell you that the coins are about to be replaced with writing.  “So I guess you know we’re upgrading to barcode slots,” he says.

But you did not know.  “Will it still feel like I am losing real money?” you ask.  The wall to your left is tiled with video panels that you once thought were windows.

“Shit, I don’t know,” says Johnny. “What’s real about money?  Players like the barcodes because they don’t have to get their hands dirty.  Management likes ‘em because… well, because coins are a pain in the butt.  But mainly because people tend not to cash out.”  Johnny’s desk is littered with documents that he uses as blotters and coasters.  “See, an old lady might ring out her last six quarters, but she won’t print a ticket and then wait in some long cashier lineup.  She’ll just play ‘em and get lost.”  His cigarette rolls from the ashtray, and starts a smoldering hole in a form stamped with a government fire safety logo. “That’s what it’s all about,” he explains, “getting that last nickel.”  Johnny picks up his cigarette and douses the form with a splash of merlot.  “What a waste,” he says.

A man with no thumbs who has been winning at baccarat fingers another black chip down a cocktail waitress’s top as she performs for him in the VIP washroom.  “Maybe I could learn to deal the cards,” you wonder.

“Nah,” says Johnny, “I thought about that.  Even talked to a few of the pit bosses. A dealer’s gotta stand too much.  Plus you’d block the cameras.  Plus you got too many folds and crevices to tuck things away in.  And to put it mildly, the thought of frisking you gives security the creeps.  I mean it’s nice the noble red man doesn’t have facial hair—we must save a fortune on razors and aftershave and all that—and maybe if you didn’t smoke—like what, about three packs a day?—maybe then you’d have more of a… well, more of a human voice I guess… it just weirds everyone out that they can’t tell if you’re male or female is all.”  He pushes the box of wine to you.

You drink from it.  Then you light your next cigarette off the butt of your current one before taking a final fingertip-scorching drag and snuffing it on the soggy government form.  You can see Johnny is confused about which of his personalities to use on you.  “I’m afraid I cannot be of much help,” you say.  “I’ve forgotten myself.”  Then you drain the box.

Johnny takes a new box from his bottom drawer and stabs it with a letter opener.  “Even if we weren’t moving to barcodes, we’d have to find you something else,” he says.  “Those tow-motors weren’t made to haul asses like yours around.”  Then he pokes the straw into the box’s wound and starts sucking.

An obese woman who appears to have been dropped from a great height onto an electric scooter defecates in her adult undergarment so that she will not have to leave a machine that might pay out.  A young factory worker who has just lost the rent to a dealer’s five-card twenty tries to cover split eights with his wedding band, and is refused. You imagine a mosquito.      

Johnny gauges the amount of wine remaining by hefting the box.  “How would you feel about chaperoning escorts?” he asks.  “We got a couple new ones.  Sweet ladies, real heartbreakers.  It’d mostly mean just driving ‘em back and forth from the hotel.  Maybe let the riskier clients get a look at you, sort of give them a feel for your involvement if you know what I mean.  Stuff you in a goose-down coat, and I bet you’re a pretty daunting… person.  Like that whole androgynous thing you got going could work for you, make you seem ominous.”  There’s a formality, almost ceremony, in the way Johnny pushes the box of wine across his desk to you.  “So whaddaya say?”

“You want me to become a pimp?”

“Nah, nah, the casino does the pimping.  You’d be more of a bodyguard-slash-chauffeur.  Plus these aren’t street whores we’re talking about here.  These are some high-class call girls—businesswomen.  No one’s jerking ‘em around.  They make heap big wampum.  I mean, we’re not in the prostitution business anyway.  They’re just affiliates.  They get an obscene hourly plus keep all their gratuities, which, since they’re mostly just comped out to high rollers, is probably a hell of a lot.  Shit, I’d say you should get into it… if you have a snatch I mean… and maybe lost a couple hundred pounds… and were better looking.”

The baccarat player returns to the table to lose so many hands in a row that he needs a marker to cover his commissions.  The obese woman plays adjacent machines as they are abandoned.  The young factory worker begins to remove his clothes—carefully, meticulously—folding them and placing them on the blackjack table’s maroon felt.  You know Johnny is fishing.  So you just smile.  Then you accept his offer by again draining the box.

Driving the casino’s two escorts around is better than towing its coins.  They are pretty.   Their names are not Pandora and Eve.  They have only chosen these names to distance themselves from their heritage.  They are twins.  It is hard to guess their age because they try to look worldly and weathered.  Cocaine helps in this regard.  They tell you that they dye their hair and shave their “pussies” in order to look tanned instead of native.  Also to look less native they wear fake buffalo-fur boas, spiked cowgirl boots and short suede skirts with fringe and beadwork. On the way to each job, they sit in the backseat doing lines off makeup mirrors. They like to tease you.  Eve covers your eyes with her hands.  “Could you possibly drive any slower?” she asks. Her lacquered nails scratch and tickle your face.

You slow down even more and tell her that it is your job to keep them safe.

Pandora wraps her arms around your neck.  “You shouldn’t be allowed to drive below the speed limit in this car,” she says.  “I looked it up on the internet.  It’s got a hemi with 430 horsepower.”  Then she drops her hands to your chest and squeezes. “Nice tits,” she says.  “Do you work out?”

You tell her that Johnny has told you that, whenever possible, this car uses only half of its engine. Then you tell her that you exercise a little, but mostly you are just naturally well endowed.  They both laugh and take turns feeling you, trying to guess.  Eve thinks you are a man.  Pandora thinks you are a woman.  They are different in other ways too.

But they both like stories.  On the way to work they tell you one about a boy who, from the time he could talk, claimed he could fly.  But his people never believed him.  And so as he grew older his faith grew tiresome, and he was ridiculed.  Then, when he became a man, he climbed the mountain that was once a bear; for forty days he climbed this mountain.  And then, from the peak of its nose, from higher than the clouds, he spread his arms and flew down to the earth.  And as his people watched, they knew they had been wrong.  Eve tells the words to the story, and thinks it is sad.  Pandora tells the silences surrounding the words, and thinks it is happy.  But they both cry.  Neither can remember where they first heard it, only that the teller was very old and that it was snowing.

Tonight, instead of to a hotel, you are taking them to a local farm, a huge factory farm with its own abattoir.  Johnny has explained to you that the owner is involved in a legal dispute with a national meat-packing company who claims that some of his pork was returned by the Japanese and that this rejection has hurt goodwill in their North American and European markets as well.  Pending the outcome of this matter, Johnny has advised the owner to store three harvesters and four transport trucks on reservation land.  This way, if there is a large judgment, the plaintiff will have to go through the tribal court to seize and liquidate this equipment.  And since the reservation benefits from both its use and storage revenue, and also since the tribal judge follows what is in his heart instead of what is on paper, this will not be easy.

At the farmhouse, even though they have been snorting cocaine and drinking vodka coolers, the women are quiet.  In the distance, steel barns light up the night like small subdivisions.  You press the doorbell.  A chimed melody echoes from inside.  Because you are upwind, you cannot smell the stench wafting up from the reservoirs beneath the barns or the pigs crowded together in the computerized pens above, or the terror of those in the abattoir’s stockades waiting for the morning cut.  But there is a scent that does rise up to you, against the wind, a mingling of disparate spirits.

A gaunt man answers the door.  He is wearing a cream silk half-slip with a lacy hem and tiny satin bows sewn onto its bodice and straps.  He too exudes the scent not carried on the wind, that same contaminated spirit.  Pandora and Eve peek from behind you like small children.  “I come at no extra charge,” you tell him, “because you are a valued customer.”  His eyes make circles of the mascara he has drawn around them like war paint.  In the cold moonlight, his glossed lips purse in the rictus of a kiss, oily and black.  A young sow screams from the tight confines of a farrowing pen as she delivers her first pork.  Beneath dark stubble, a thin white scar connects his left ear to his chin.

Eve kisses you on one cheek, Pandora on the other.  Even though they have never done this before, it feels as if it is a ritual between you.  But you suppose that even a ritual must be performed for the first time.  “I’ll wait for you,” you tell them.  Then they remind you that this is an all-nighter.

You wait in the car anyway, and listen to the yip and wail of coyotes in the woods behind the house until someone turns up a stereo inside and their song is lost.  And you fall asleep.  A Barn Owl shrieks.  A hawk drops from the stars, sinks its talons into your heart, and carries you aloft.  Far below, you can see the barns’ tiny corrugated structures punctuated by fans, vents and antenna.  The hawk circles faster.  A whirlwind forms below you and reaches down to become a vortex, a tourbillion—faster and faster—a tornado, a twisting catheter and conduit—a straw that stabs down into boxes, draining them one by one. The Barn Owl shrieks again.  And you wake up.

The barns are less than a quarter mile of gravel laneway from the house. But you take the car anyway.  The smell inside the farrowing complex is so powerful that you pass out on your feet.  When you come to, you are choking and have vomited down the front of your goose-down coat.  The automated feeding and watering systems appear to have failed.  In one stall, piglets nurse from their dead mother.  In another they are being eaten.  As your presence is sensed, squealing pleas and exhortations rise into a crescendo of hopelessness and suffering that physically pushes you back out into the night.

You remove the car’s gas cap and wipe it on a serviette salvaged from the litter of the seven Egg McMuffins that you had for breakfast.  Then you hold the serviette over your mouth and nose and enter the main hog barn.  But here the smell is not as bad.  The feeding systems appear to be working.  Each hog has stapled to it a tiny metal tag, a marker that allows the computer to track and control its trough time.  The strong cannot usurp the weak here.  None are sated, but none are starving.  The floorboards are slatted so that feces can fall or be trampled down between them.  All are hungry.  All turn to face you, their eyes eerily human and beseeching.  You notice a small black patent leather pump with a broken heel wedged between two slats. On the drive back to the house your tires dig trenches in the gravel as you use the entire engine. It has begun to snow.

Even though the house is not locked, you hit the door with your body, so hard that it splinters off its hinges and falls inward.  Inside, the music is too loud to be heard.  The smell reminds you of the farrowing barn.  Bile rises in your throat, making your eyes water.  It is a large house with many rooms.  As you move from one to the next, motion sensors turn lights on and off and make you feel as if you are being followed.  In the kitchen, a large gray rat drinking from the sink’s dripping tap like a pet pauses to study you with yellow eyes.  Otherwise, the first floor is deserted.   As you climb the stairs to the second floor you notice that the fetid smell has grown weaker.  You turn and head for the basement.

It is a large unfinished basement.  Fluorescent lighting makes everything seem raw and clinical.  Even before you reach the bottom of the steps, through a forest of roughed-in 2x4s and wiring, you see him.  At first you think the carcasses hanging from some of the rafters are meat.  When the first great ships appeared on the horizon, many of our people could not see them. They could not accept what their eyes were showing them.  Some of the studs have been drilled and run with copper piping.  Penciled notes have been written on many.  They are framed too close together for you to squeeze between, so you must find the doorways.  It is like a maze.

The farmer does not see you until there is only one wall separating you.  Pandora and Eve each hang by an ankle from blue electrical wire.  Their skirts have been thrust down around their hips, and you can see how they have shaved themselves to look less native.  The farmer’s pretty half-slip is splattered with gore.  He has gutted them like deer.  Their insides, which are the same as all people’s, hang over their faces.  In one hand the farmer squeezes the handgrip of a short plastic pole with forked prongs that hiss and buzz as he prods their entrails.  In his other hand he holds himself.  The way their arms and free legs dangle makes it look like they are flying down from the ceiling.  Their blood has formed a puddle on the cement below them.  Their lacquered fingernails have been removed.

At first he tries to jab you with the pole’s metal fangs.  It is like a hornet’s sting when he succeeds.  But when you grab its shaft, he releases it and runs.  He is skinny.  So he can run between the studs.  He can run through the walls like a ghost.  Because you are fat, and also because your lungs are polluted, you cannot catch him.  On the main floor you see the entryway’s light go on as he leaves the house.  But by the time you get outside, he has disappeared.  It is still snowing.  There is snow on the ground.  In it you can see his footprints.  And so you track him.  You track him to the farrowing barn.

This time you are ready for the smell.  You can hear the sows’ lamentations as he moves around.  Their cries follow him like the lights in his house. You follow their suffering to the other side of the complex.  There you see that many of the pens have women’s bodies in them. 

The farmer approaches you.  “Now do you understand?” he asks.  But you do not answer. He begins to circle you, slowly, from a distance, like a hawk.  “Do you understand?” he asks again.  Again, you do not answer.  He moves closer, dancing, fluttering around you, reaching out as if to touch you, then backing away.  He circles you like a moth.  “It’s important that you understand,” he says.  Many of the bodies are missing limbs.  In a pen that is too narrow to even turn around in, a sow chews on a woman’s foot.   He touches your elbow.  You are like a flame that he cannot resist.  You take his hand. “Yes,” you say. “I think I understand.  Now walk with me.”

Hand in hand, like lovers, you walk together to the main hog barn.  Again, all eyes turn to study you.  But now the pigs are silent.  They understand.  Even before the farmer has understood, they understand.  When the farmer also understands, he begins to scream.  And when the farmer begins to scream, the pigs begin to scream.  Their voices join together just as their spirits have.  Because you are fat, you are strong.  In your arms, the farmer kicks and scratches like a little girl.  He calls you a freak.  He pleads with you.  But still you throw him into a pen with forty pigs.  It seems appropriate to you that the first thing they do is emasculate him. The computer has taught them to share.  They have already been castrated.  They take turns consuming him.

You need tobacco.  It has been hours since you last smoked.  Then it occurs to you that every ritual must be performed for the last time as well.  And so you leave the barn and return to the house, which is quiet now.  In the basement you cut them down.  You carry Pandora over one shoulder and Eve over the other.  You climb the stairs with them.  Again the house lights follow you.  The rat still drinks from the tap.  Out in the yard you remove your coat and lie down with them.  You lay Pandora on one side of you and Eve on the other, with your arms around them, looking up.  It begins to snow harder.  Snow fills the air with flickering starlight.  It covers you.  Together, you become a mountain of snow.

They ask you to tell them a story. At first you cannot think of any, but then you remember one that was told to you when you were a child and rode a yellow bus.  It is about two men possessed of demons so that all were afraid to approach them.  But then a man who was not afraid came to them and ordered their demons out, and into a herd of swine that fed nearby. Eve wants to know what happened to the two men, and you say that either you cannot remember or it was never told, but that perhaps they found other demons.  Pandora wants to know what happened to the swine, and you tell her that they ran off a cliff into the sea.  Eve thinks it is a happy story.  Pandora thinks it is sad.  They both want to know what happened to the man who commanded the demons.  And you tell them that because of his belief that you should love your enemies, his people tortured him and put him to death so that he would be an example to others.  Neither knows whether the story is happy or sad.  But they both cry anyway.

By false dawn you stop shivering and grow warmer.  Because you are fat, you are still alive.  Your breath has melted the snow away from your mouth.  Ice covers your eyes like lenses.  High up in the sky, higher than the clouds, a hawk slowly circles the wind. Their voices soar down to you.  Climb! Fall!  Their bodies are cold now. The sun rises, turning the falling snow into glitter. Stand and live!  The wind stills; above you, the hawk floats with its wings spread wide.  We know your name.  They whisper it down to you.

 

END