Swallowing a Donkey's Eye Read online

  In accordance with official Farm Tour Protocol, we do our best to ignore the parents. So Jonah and I stand there, a couple of animatronic scarecrows, holding our pitchforks in one hand, waving back at the kids with the other, and we spread our lips and cheeks into the biggest smiles you’ve ever seen, all like we’re supposed to.

  Jonah talks through that smile again. “I’m really sorry for not waking you up last night, man. I feel terrible about it.”

  I don’t say anything, and I try to convince myself that I know my smile is fake.

  3

  LET’S-GET-DRUNK-AND-INSEMINATE-NIGHT

  I’ve come to a radical conclusion to the question of why Farm has us all wear the same overalls, besides the obvious cost benefits, uniformity, and all that happy horseshit. I’m talking about some outside the Skinner-box thinking, and here’s what I got: it’s to help ease the consciences of the tourists. If they see all us lower-than-low wage schlubs wearing the same nice, clean overalls, it’ll be easier for them to forget we’re not just part of the Farm scenery and machinery, easier to forget we denim-clad humans are dirt poor and miserable. Our overalls makes us a them, a collection, not individuals, certainly no one who needs pity, compassion, or, Farm gods forbid, love. Them are unworthy. Them are faceless, feckless, forgettable, flawed. . . .

  But good goddamn this woman standing in front of me is smoking hot in her white, dress-overalls.

  She flips her long brown hair like it’s a luxurious burden and says, “Hi.”

  I say, “Hello. Are you new?”

  “I’ve always been new.”

  I laugh, although I don’t know what that means.

  She asks, “What do you think of this?”

  I have no idea what she’s talking about. Doesn’t matter. I’ll tell her this is great. This is the most magnificent this in the history of this, and whatever this is, I’ll kiss it, touch it, and fuck fuck fuck it. Yes, it has been that long. In my hornier-than-Hugh-Heffner condition, I blurt out, “What do I think of what?”

  “Let me finish. Jesus. At least pretend you want to listen to me before trying to get into my pants.”

  I’m not dumb enough to mention that she, technically, isn’t wearing pants. Instead, I just say, “Sorry.” It’s a word I regurgitate far too much in this place. “The music is too loud, and I wasn’t sure what you’d said. Go on.” The music is a mechanical, industrial: fast, electronic, processed.

  Everyone complains about this night. They complain about the music, the feel-nothing condoms, the cheap Farm-produced hors d’oeuvres (finger hot-dogs tonight, too orange, like miniature pylons), the equally cheap hard cider, mulled wine, vodka, and beer, and mostly they complain about having to wear their Farm-issued white, dress-overalls while trying to get laid. But they’re all here. Even the Chicken put down his feathers for one night. He’s actually hanging out with Jonah. They’re talking to the two women Jonah and I talked to six months ago. Those six-month-ago women are still laughing at, staring, and touching Jonah’s tattoo. Six months ago just happens to be the last time I did any talking to.

  The woman standing in front of me smiles lopsided, like a rip in a shirt. Her arms fold across her ample chest. The metal buttons and clips jingle on her overalls straps. To my libido it’s the dinner bell. Me as that Russian guy’s dog again. I’m ready to be social.

  She says, “Okay. So even though you were right and I am new, I came up with a nickname for tonight. Wanna hear it?”

  One lousy night a month we’re corralled into this dance hall for our beloved Farm Social Night. Or, you could choose one of the many nicknames us Farm servants have dubbed this most unspontaneous of whimsical events: The Meat Grinder, The Cattle Call, Stud Night.

  I say, “Let’s hear it.”

  “Let’s-Get-Drunk-And-Inseminate Night.”

  “Not bad, but I don’t think it’ll catch on.”

  “Ah, what do you know?”

  I stuff my hands into my pockets and wrap a paw around the Farm-issued-and-required condom. Despite the car-wreck music around us, I hear the cellophane-wrapped condom crinkle in my pocket, and I think about the small stack of unused Social Night party favours sitting on my dresser. I say, “Very little, actually.”

  She looks around the room and I know she’s looking for someone better, someone who doesn’t look fifteen years older than my twenty-two. Everyone in the room seems otherwise engaged and the night is getting old, old, old.

  At this point I don’t fucking care. Sure, she’s attractive, but what’s another month without insemination? I say, “Looks like you’re stuck with me.”

  She says, “Tell me your name. I know everybody.”

  I play along. I tell her.

  She doesn’t hesitate with her response. “Really? Is your mother’s name Mary by any chance?”

  “Yes,” I say, too shocked by her response to do anything other than tell the truth. I should’ve lied. I suddenly don’t want this person or anyone else in this place knowing anything about me.

  She moves in and her mouth is open wide enough to swallow me. She’s all teeth, and says, “I hear poor Mary isn’t doing too well these days.” She grabs my hand and pulls me away from the crowds and toward the exit.

  “Wait? What did you say?”

  “Shut up, you’re spoiling my mood.”

  What could she possibly know about my mother? Besides her name.

  4

  PISS-GIRL AND MOMMA’S BOY

  When Mom took me grocery shopping, she wouldn’t let me out of the kiddie-seat in the shopping cart. A paranoid practice she insisted upon well past my he’s-too-big-to-be-riding-in-the-cart phase. The metal squeezed and pinched my thighs and left raised welts on my brown skin, especially if we had one of those carts with a bum wheel that spasmed in every direction at once. I’d fight tears, squirm in my seat, then would adjust the plastic bags of produce on my lap to make sure I wasn’t squashing the blueberries, but there wasn’t much wiggle room in the cart. I’d complain, and loudly, and she’d just tell me that being uncomfortable for a short time was better than being kidnapped by some psycho.

  Those old shopping trips strangely occur to me as I let the woman I just met lead me out of the dance hall and into the hallway.

  I say, “My mother. What’s wrong?”

  “Oh, a momma’s boy. On most nights that’d be cute. But not tonight. You’re coming to my room right fucking now.” She flips her brown hair again, reloading.

  Other couples with locked hands or lips or even hips spill out of the exit and flow around us like we’re a broken dam in a river. I say, “I’m not moving until you tell me about Mary.”

  She stomps her foot on the floor, squeezes my hand, and swears under her breath, but regains composure quick, too quick, like someone hit a reset button. She pushes me against a white wall and clamps her legs around my right thigh, grinding her crotch into my leg. I feel her warmth through our layers of overalls and my rooster is instantly at attention. Mommy or no Mommy.

  That shark smile of hers is back and just inches from my face. She says. “Word around Cronin Street was that she was days away from being evicted.”

  Cronin Street. That’s where Mom lives. That’s where I used to live. Missing last night’s Calling Time was worst-idea-number-one.

  “You’re lying.”

  “Don’t you want to know what I’m going to do to you when we get to my room?” There’s more grinding on my leg. She undoes two side-buttons on my overalls, and I think I’m going to pass out.

  “No,” I say. I think. I think I say no.

  “You’re going to sit on my bathroom floor and I’m going to piss all over you, mamma’s boy.”

  For a moment, I see myself doing this. Going to her room, squatting on the floor, or probably squatting in the tub so the clean-up is easier, her with overalls off and panties (if she’s wearing any, which I’m guessing is doubtful) around her ankles
, her hovering above me in a lover’s squat, and then she pisses on me and I’m getting pissed on, and it really doesn’t sound so bad. Then I think about how I’ll stink afterward and my dress-overalls might get all messed up in the heat of passion, and I know I’m as crazy and damaged as anyone else is.

  “Um . . .”

  She stuffs her hand into my overalls and grabs a handful of me. She talks and growls real low, I’m talking subterranean low, an earthquake just starting its shakes and shimmies. She says, “And then, maybe, we’ll see. Maybe I’ll fuck you senseless. Absolutely senseless. You’ll feel it in your toes. Maybe I’ll fuck your toes and your elbows and anything else you got. I’ll fuck your ears. I’ll fuck your chin. Fuck, I’ll even fuck those love handles you have hidden in those overalls. You’ll be a puddle of goo. You’ll be a pissed-on little bitch whimpering for mercy. You’ll be a helpless baby sucking at my tits. You’ll be calling me Mommy. . . .” She’s still talking about all the nasty things she’ll do to me and she works me inside the overalls, but the Mommy shit gets to me.

  “Stop. I can’t go anywhere until you tell me what you know about Mary. It’s important. Please.” I pry her hand out of my crotch. I do all I can to convince myself she’s bullshitting me about Mom. That it’s all part of some fetish game. She found out Mom’s name and addy from somebody at Farm, maybe Jonah, and she knows I missed my Calling Time last night and she is just fucking with me.

  “I told you, evicted. Soon to be homeless. She’d been living with a junkie anyway, so it’s her own damn fault.” She tries to stab her hand back inside my overalls but I block her and then wiggle my thigh out from between her legs. She grabs my hair and says, “Enough, let’s go.”

  I try to be strong. Like I don’t need her your-Mom-is-homeless shit tonight. Like I don’t need her. My voice is full of helium and lust, and I say, “I think I’ll pass on the piss bath. I get enough of the submission thing in my day-to-day life, thanks.”

  “Too late. I’ve marked you, and I’ll piss on you, you fucking sissy, eventually.” She licks the side of my head, from chin to ear, and says in a mock lilt, “Bye bye, mamma’s boy.”

  5

  A GOOD BM IS EVERYONE’S FRIEND

  Last night, me and my painful erection walked back to my dorm. Alone. I decided piss-chick was lying; she had to be. I was going to forget about my mother and piss-chick and go back to my dorm room and take care of myself. It was going to be that easy.

  Instead, the sounds of fucking filled my floor’s hallway. Groans, slapping skin, squeaking bedsprings, breathless oh-my-gods and some real cheesy sounding stuff like oh yeah, oh yeah, baby, all of it muffled behind closed wooden doors and it all sounded fake, like it was coming out of old, scratchy speakers. And when I made it to our quaint corner dorm room, there was a white sock on the knob. The Jonah-is-inside-and-occupied signal. Maybe I should have just gone home with piss-chick.

  So I didn’t sleep at all last night. I could blame the insomnia on Jonah and his fuck-fest forcing me to try and sleep on a mouldy couch in our dorm’s game room, but I spent the night thinking about Mom. I shouldn’t have skipped out on calling her and I shouldn’t have skipped out on her just like my father had. I spent the night thinking about how I was no different from anyone else because I didn’t learn anything from my history.

  Now it’s fifteen minutes before my shift starts. I press the little red button, calling for the elevator. No dice. It’s shut off. Of course it is. So I walk up the tight spiral staircase to the BM’s office, which is in the rafters of Barn 5. The wrought iron is rusty and shakier than a bad excuse. The staircase yo-yos me up and down, side to side, walks the dog. Flecks of black paint break off under my hand as I grab the railing. I’m a good thirty feet above the ground. Jonah, down below somewhere, says something snarky about a violent death plummet and processed Farm beef.

  I stumble and fall into BM’s office, his all-windows office. I see the whole Barn operation from up here: cow stalls, milking units, slaughter pen with its conveyor belt and sluicing floor, chicken pens and hen houses, everything.

  BM is bent over a golf ball. He putts. The white ball rolls evenly across the office’s real-grass floor (took Jonah and me two weeks to rig the sprinkler and drainage system) and drops in the middle of a hole between my feet.

  BM says, “I am the man!” Then he scurries and squats behind his desk.

  “Nice shot.”

  BM wears a tomato-red bowtie. All he ever wears are bowties, and they piss me off. Like that touch of character somehow makes him more of an interesting person than the rest of us non-bowtie-clad plebs. Like wearing that isn’t-he-eccentric nonsense doesn’t mean he’s an uncaring asshole just like the rest of us. Maybe I’m reading too much into a bowtie, placing value on a symbol that doesn’t symbolize anything.

  Hey says, “Hey, buddy, how you doing this morning?”

  Told you he’s a bowtie-wearin’ asshole. His jocularity is an act. It’s as bogus as the animal sounds. I’d respect him more if he was the same belligerent BM I met on my orientation interview more than three years ago. I’d respect him more if he’d still say fuck you to my face.

  I’m still breathing hard and heavy from the stair-climb. I spill into a chair in front of his desk. The plush chair wobbles on its chopped legs. I sit a good two feet lower than BM and his desk. His chicken-head hovers above that bowtie, which looks clown-sized from this supplicant view. I want to spin the tie, see if it doesn’t start rotating like a propeller and lift BM’s ass off his chair and send him flying around the room like an oversized mosquito.

  I say, “I have a quick question about my salary disbursement.”

  He gives me his wire-thin stare, his mouth a rumour beneath that ludicrous handlebar mustache. “Okay, kid, let’s hear it. What can I do for you?”

  “If it’s possible, I wanted to see if my mother is still receiving the payments I have directly sent home.”

  “Two days a week I’m allotted fifteen-minute periods to devote to employees’ financial files. I’ll look up your disbursement figures then and get back to you. All right, buddy?” His stare relaxes, his wrinkled and loose skin softening into a smile. Fucking guy is warped. He’s giving me a look he’d give a friend. Guy doesn’t even know my name, just my employee code, but I bet he’s imagining that I’m his friend right now, the friend with a problem for whom he’s bending over backwards. He wants to get up and pat me on the back, talk about baseball, tell me a tasteless joke about women or his favourite ethnic group. He wants me to retort with good-natured ribbing about his tie or his mustache, that dead caterpillar under his nose. Goddamn it, he’s smiling and happy, genuinely happy that he has a codified and documented answer to his buddy’s question, a solution to the little problem in his office.

  I’d give my left nut to wipe that There’s no problem here, pal look off his face.

  I say, “But . . .”

  “Hey, did I show you this? This is us on our little beach trip last weekend.” He slides me a framed picture of him and his three grandkids. I am not part of his us. I pretend to give it a good look. BM and his progeny are doing something really expensive and supervisor-salary-like. This is BM being BM. This is BM keeping that overlord-underling bond and order friendly but stronger than his denture adhesive.

  I say something like, “Very nice, they’re growing like weeds, they look just like you, you must be proud . . .”

  “Thanks. I knew you’d get a kick out of that, kid. There’s nothing more important than your family, right?”

  “Right. And that’s sort of why I’m here. So my disbursement issue: this really can’t wait. Please, I know it’s probably just a couple of clicks away on your computer and there’s still a good ten minutes before the shift starts.”

  BM holds up that chicken-foot stop hand. Facial reading now reporting: disappointment. I’m still his buddy, but now I’m his numbnuts, dumb-fuck pal. The one who can’t fix a flat tire,
the one who’ll never get married and never get anywhere, but he’ll take care of me, like a mascot. He says, “Your shift starts in ten minutes, but mine started an hour ago. I am working here, kid. I don’t come here for my health. Ha!”

  If I was indeed his friend, not an imaginary one, I’d say this: Thanks for reminding me you can leave Farm, you pasty, clock-watching, dehumanizing, condescending, bowtie-wearing, syphilitic retarded hunk of engineered cow dung. Because I’d say something like that to a friend who could leave Farm on a whim, afford to take his family to some resort, and who wasn’t willing to spend thirty seconds looking up my financial records. But I’m not his friend, and I need this information, so I say, “I didn’t mean to imply you weren’t working.”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t hold it against you. I can’t stay mad at you, pal. You’re too cute. Ha!” He’s enjoying this now, that bag of rabies and all that’s vile and dirty.

  “My mother may be in trouble. I heard that she’s on the verge of becoming homeless.”

  “You ‘heard?’ Speak plainly, son. How exactly did you get this information?”

  Fucker has called me pal, buddy, kid, and now son. “A newbie co-worker told me Mom was about to be evicted.”

  “How does this co-worker know?” There’s something in his mustache right below his left nostril. Some yellowish brown thing, like a piece of bruised apple, or partially chewed doughnut cud. It’s trapped, intertwined into those thick, pepper-gray hairs. It’s disgusting but I have the urge to pluck the unidentified-fly-hair-object from the mustache and hold it inches from his face and tell him how this putrid crumb, not the bowtie, is the symbol of his character, his unyielding, unrelenting ridiculousness as a person. Then I’d tell him to shave his mustache, because it’s what friends do.