Moo (53 page)

“Wait!” cried Bob. “Wait! Where’s Earl? Where’s the hog!”

The man turned away. “Don’t know, kid, but you gotta get outta here. If you got a problem, go over to the physical plant or something.”

Bob ran toward the building, or he ran two steps toward the building, but big hard hands grabbed his shoulders and turned him around. The man’s face, which he stuck right in Bob’s, was red and angry. It shouted, “Get the fuck out of here, kid!”

“Listen to me! There’s a hog in there!”

“He’ll be bacon soon enough, kid. If you get in the way again, I’ll call the cops!”

Bob backed away.

M
RS
. L
ORAINE
W
ALKER COULD HEAR
the demolition from her office, even with the windows closed. Old Meats was, after all, right in the center of the campus. When she glanced out the window, which
was newly reglazed since the riot, she could see a puff of dust in the otherwise clear air above the demolition site. Mrs. Loraine Walker knew that the horticulture garden was falling victim to the budget cuts that had required the destruction of Old Meats, but that particular horticulture garden, pleasant as it was, was unauthorized. The authorized site had remained, through the years, flat, untended, arid, ignored despite any number of directives addressed to that little man, sent by Mrs. Loraine Walker over Ivar Harstad’s signature.

She spoke aloud to herself. “He was warned,” she said. Which did not mean that she felt no regret about the garden. One thing she had learned lately, something she had mentioned to Martha only the night before, was that sometimes it was necessary to suspend two or more contradictory thoughts in your mind at the same time. What it led to was a degree of softening, didn’t it? Someone who acted on principle all the time, as Mrs. Loraine Walker was in the habit of doing, inevitably felt uncomfortable with this blurring, this softening. Mrs. Walker squirmed in her chair.

To tell the truth, everywhere she turned lately she was confronted by something that made her uncomfortable. Safe herself because of her investments and her job tenure, she saw clearly that Ivar was not safe. A fugitive fondness for him prevented her from retreating wholeheartedly into the argument that those were the wages of the job he’d taken on willingly. And there was Nils, too, a bland, complacent, provoking man, the sort whose self-satisfaction always seemed to be asking for it, but now that he had gotten it, Mrs. Walker couldn’t uphold her moral standard. Every time he shambled into the office, looking despondently for his twin, she softened yet again. She got him coffee, she listened for the umpteenth time to the news that the Hellmich woman had sent him a letter from Bolinas, California, she gentled her voice instead of sharply setting him straight when she said, “Well, Dean Harstad, perhaps the relationship was doomed from the beginning—” and patted his shoulder when he said, “All my dreams—” in that pathetic way. And then there was Elaine Dobbs-Jellinek. Given Mrs. Walker’s carefully thought through and extremely well founded antipathy to the woman, you would have thought that the sight of her felled by a rioter’s stone, which Mrs. Walker had seen through this very window, the sight of the woman lying still and white on the steps, splayed out in her red coat, her hands spread in surprise so that her red fingernails throbbed against the snow like so many drops of blood, well, you would have thought
such a sight would have carried an element of satisfaction, but Mrs. Walker had felt only horror. Mrs. Walker glanced at the window as if, like a movie, the scene might suddenly flash across it again.

Then she stood up and reached for her coat. Perhaps there was a reason she wanted to go have a look at the demolition of Old Meats, but for once in her life she didn’t know what it was; for once in her life she acted on simple desire.

A
LL
K
ERI WAS THINKING
about was getting to her 11:30 statistics class. She hadn’t even bothered to button her coat or put on her mittens, and her neck and fingers were tingling in the cold. She dodged right, then dodged left, avoiding the seething streams of students rushing to classes on the side of the campus that she was just leaving. Then, of course, there were other clots of students, talking, kissing, teasing each other, and flirting. There were professors with briefcases striding right down the center of the walks and people on bicycles shouting, “On your left!” as if, were you to step into their path, your injuries would be your fault. Even though the walks were partly covered with ice, there were also Rollerbladers—one swept around Keri from behind and zoomed ahead—he was in her class, in fact, and always wore his skates right onto the elevator and into the room. Ahead, in the distance, she could hear the rumbling collapse of bricks and mortar, but she didn’t register the noise, much less wonder what it was.

W
HEN THE CLAM BUCKET
took its first bite out of the wall of Earl Butz’ suite, Earl had been awake for quite some time. The first thing he’d done upon hearing the distant thunder of Old Meats coming down was to kick his straw into a comfy mound and curl up in it as best he could. As the noise got louder, he shook his head at it, did his best to bury his ears in the straw, but then it didn’t cease, it only amplified. Earl stood up and paced his quarters restively, hardly aware of the shooting pains in his legs and trotters. As the din grew overpowering, he consulted his limited memory for a precedent, but none occurred to him. In the end, he was reduced to cowering, without a shred of dignity, in the corner of his pen most distant from the racket. While he would have preferred even then to at least give the appearance of ignoring it all, he could not do so. Then the clam bucket broke
the wall, let in the dusty bright light of day and a vision of the blue sky upon two alarmed and staring black eyes. Earl pressed himself against the solid and reassuring back wall.

The air was cold. Earl gasped as the clam bucket took another bite and widened the hole. A new sensation rolled over his pale and bristly hide, the refreshing sensation of chill. It woke him right up, right out of the frightened stupor he had been declining into. He raised his snout and momentarily closed his eyes, then he staggered back to his feet.

While Earl would never have claimed that anyone was neglecting him lately—Bob still came five times a day, still kept his pen clean, still turned the radio on for him, still fed him his special mix, still scratched his back with a stick and chatted with him while he worked—it was clear that some je ne sais quoi had gone out of their whole common endeavor. Just as Bob was hardly ever weighing him anymore, or conducting other measurements, Earl himself was only going through the motions, chow-wise. True, he was going through ALL the motions—chewing, swallowing, digesting, and eliminating—his intake had not fallen off. But he didn’t pay much attention to it anymore. Had Dr. Bo Jones been stateside to reflect upon the matter, he might have concluded that Earl had been bred to eat himself to death before he was a year, or at most two years, old, and as a result of death being delayed, Earl had run past the possibilities of his genetic endowment, and was now only marking time.

What was clear to Earl as the clam bucket took yet another bite and let in yet more light, air, and chill was that the change he had been waiting for was upon him, and that he had better seize his opportunity while he had the chance.

Even so, the clam bucket itself was a powerfully daunting sight, and Earl had to summon all of his inner resources to withstand the fear it aroused in him, the way it swung and crashed against the remaining walls, the deafening grinding noise as it clamped down upon and ripped away what had constituted the immutable limits of Earl Butz’ world. Most hogs couldn’t have stood it. Helplessly distant and frantic, Bob Carlson assumed that Earl himself couldn’t stand it. But as frightened as he was by the unusual movement and noise of the object, Earl’s Christmas vision had prepared him for what it disclosed—the outdoors. As soon as he saw it, he wanted to get to it, and he fully expected to find what he had found there before—a welter of fragrances, of green grass and happy hog farm sights and
sounds. The bucket swung and bit, arcing closer and closer to where Earl cowered against the wall. Finally, it swung against the bars of his pen and slammed them to the floor. A few moments later, all the rumbling, roaring, and crashing subsided into silence, and all Earl could hear was the outer breeze and some distant shouts. His mound of straw lifted and blew around the room, and Earl stepped forward two or three tentative paces.

B
OB
, who had been running back and forth with his hands over his ears, saw the crane operator open the door of the cab and climb down, his lunch in his hand. The other men, too, came out of their trucks and headed for the trailer the company had brought in. Bob waited until they were all inside with the door closed before edging toward the building. He knew it was stupid—any of the unsupported standing walls could topple at any minute—but all he could think of was Earl. At the barricade the men had thrown up, he paused to look right and left, then he clambered over.

M
RS
. L
ORAINE
W
ALKER SAILED
into view of the big old abattoir. All was silent. She checked her watch. 11:45. She made a mental note to call the demolition company and find out if the university was being charged for time and costs or by the bid. Across the site, standing in the middle of Ames Road, she noticed that little man from the horticulture department with his head down and his hands in his pockets.

K
ERI WAS
walking slowly, all alone, back toward Dubuque House. She had not made her class, and the statistics professor had locked the door, the way he always did, just at the tick of 11:30. She was looking at her feet, but as she went behind Berkeley Hall, just on the side where they were tearing something down, she noticed the dust in the air and glanced up.

C
HAIRMAN
X
KEPT
telling himself that he couldn’t waste his day watching this, and in addition to that couldn’t stand any more of the
twisting pain in his chest that accompanied the sight, but even when the men were eating lunch and the machines were silent and still, he couldn’t seem to tear himself away. In a life based on the principle of passionate resistance, it did not seem to him as though he had even once staved off a single evil. Quite the contrary. The forces of greed, carnivorousness, exploitation, technology, and monoculture were everywhere more firmly in control than ever before.

E
ARL
B
UTZ CAME OUT
running. It was his only hope, his deepest instinct. Head down, trotters blazing, squealing like a wild razorback on the remotest Asian steppes, he blew past the giant machines, hustled over the slurry of snow, mud, and perennial roots they had made, and shot like a bobsled through a hole in their fence. Then he was on open ground, the whole campus before him. No, it was not green and fragrant, it was white and sterile. Had he expected what he knew—the farmer and his wife and dogs, other pigs, cats—he was disappointed. Here was nothing he even dimly recognized. But there was no turning back. His little home, safe and warm, was destroyed. Earl instinctively understood that he had to throw himself upon the frozen bosom of the world as he found it and hope for the best.

B
OB SAW
him. He had wanted to see Earl so much, to know whether he was still alive, that he couldn’t quite take in the actual sight of him, as big as a Volkswagen Beetle but much faster, rocketing past. He raised his voice, as if Earl were a dog, and shouted, “Earl! Earl! Come here! Come here!” But coming on command was something he had never foreseen that Earl would need. He turned and clambered back over the fence, but Earl carried a lot of speed for such a large hog—over seven hundred pounds. As fast as Bob could go, Earl far outstripped him.

M
RS
. L
ORAINE
W
ALKER SAW
him, and saw him for what he was, the secret hog at the center of the university, about whom she had been dismissing rumors for a year. He lumbered past, his high squealing underpinned by labored breathing, his white hide streaked with red where he had scraped himself. Something about the enormous, barrelling,
frightening animal struck her as poignant. Even as she jumped back, she held out her hand as if to pat him on the head.

C
HAIRMAN
X
SAW HIM
, but only from a distance, and from behind. Still preoccupied with the garden around the building, Chairman X barely glanced at the swiftly receding paleness of Earl’s haunches against the paler snow. He did hear the agonized squealing, which seemed to set the chill dry air to reverberating, and seemed, to Chairman X, to be the sound of his own grief, singing all around him.

T
HE CAMPUS WAS
not empty. Even though many students were in class, there were plenty abroad, present to stop and gawk at the flying hog and the kid running after him, but Earl had no interest in them. He looked neither right nor left as momentum carried him through space and time into a future that wasn’t prepared to receive him. As if understanding that, as if admitting the resulting perplexity, Earl slowed down. And when he slowed down, he was forced to reckon with the damage that his wild run had wreaked upon his bones and sinews. The fact was that he who was bred to eat and lie around was not bred to gallop. The new and excruciating variations on his old shooting pains nearly brought him to a gasping halt.

But they did not. If he couldn’t run, he would walk. He lifted his head and staggered forward. It was then that he saw Keri, standing transfixed on the sidewalk beside Berkeley Hall. Was he drawn by her green coat? By something about her odor? By an instinctive animal recognition that she had served a year as Warren County Pork Queen? He made his way toward her even though his trotters were burning and freezing with a pain that seemed to rise up from the very earth itself.

Keri stood her ground. The giant hog, a Landrace, probably, but bigger than any she had ever seen, more like a dining-room buffet than a hog, seemed to roll toward her somehow, and then stop just in front of her. He looked her in the eye, then leaned forward, as if to smell her, then fell forward onto his knees. His shooting pains focused and concentrated themselves in his left foreleg, and then exploded deep in his chest. He took a labored, heaving breath, and suddenly jerked over onto his side. His whole body trembled.