Authors: James W. Hall
Up ahead he saw a man he’d been meaning to speak to sitting on an overturned washtub. Webb pulled over, honked twice, and Ladarius Washington lifted his head and flicked away his cigarette butt.
One more honk and Ladarius stretched himself and sauntered over to the truck, leaned in the passenger window. Webb and Ladarius had once been classmates in elementary school and on through the county high school, and they’d played on teams together, riding the team bus, banging heads and blocking each other’s jump shots. They’d been friendly enough back then, but eventually the social order kicked in and now it was just a wave howdy when Webb passed by. Sometimes Ladarius nodded back.
“Something open up at the farm?”
“Not a thing, Ladarius. Not a damn thing. Got all my slots filled.”
“With Mexicans.”
“Your people work the slaughterhouse. There’s always jobs coming open there. What’s wrong, you too good for butchering hogs?”
“Too bloody for me, too much screaming,” Ladarius said. “Rather work with the living.”
“Well, there you go. You can’t complain about not having work if there’s work around and you don’t have the stomach for it.”
Ladarius watched a flock of ravens pass overhead.
When they’d disappeared, Ladarius motioned at the sky.
“Air’s stinking again. Must be shit-spraying season.”
“Got to put it somewhere.”
“All the power and influence you got, Webb, you can’t get the wind to blow the other direction?”
Webb smiled politely.
“Just shipped out a few thousand hogs,” he said. “Another batch to the abattoir. I’m thinking I’ll spray their leftovers later on this afternoon. So, fair warning, old friend, better hold your nose for a while, you hear.”
“What you want with me?”
“Just say hello. Shoot the shit.”
Ladarius was silent, waiting.
“Oh, and I heard a rumor some white fella might be hiding out here in one of these shacks. Might be bullet wounds in him. You hear that same rumor?”
Ladarius seemed about to say something, then shook his head.
“What is it, Ladarius? You can talk to me.”
“Tell you what I told Burkhart the five, six times he been around banging on doors day and night with his bloodhounds, asking the same damn question, shouldering his way inside of peoples’ homes without no search warrant or legal right. There ain’t no white folks out here except the ones kicking up dust on this road.”
“So you didn’t hear a mess of gunfire in the woods back of Belmont Heights, that pine forest by the river, eight, ten days back?”
Ladarius frowned as if giving it some serious thought.
“Seems like I would’ve heard gunshots in them woods, living so near.”
“Seems like you would, yes.”
Ladarius wrinkled his brow as if trying hard to recall.
“No, sir, didn’t hear no shooting.”
“And never saw any of those punk-ass kids coming and going from those woods. Young troublemakers.”
“No kids, no shooting, no rumors like that, no, sir.”
Webb eyed him for a minute but couldn’t penetrate his dull-witted mask.
“If I was to give you my personal cell number, would you call me if you suddenly realize one or more of those rumors were true?”
“Would I call you?”
“Would you let me know about strangers out here, hiding out, plotting mischief against me and my business? The well-being of our fair city.”
“That’s a lot of responsibility,” Ladarius said.
“Make it worth your while.”
One of Ladarius’s girls, five or six years old, wandered out onto the porch chewing on her thumb and looking out at her father.
Webb scribbled his number on a yellow notepad and tore off the page, held it out. Ladarius gave the paper an insolent look, then reached out for it.
“Day or night, you see that rumor walking around, call me. There’ll be a chunk of change for you if you got it right.”
“Now, that would be my lucky day, wouldn’t it? Heavens opening up.”
“’Cause, Ladarius, on the flip side of my generosity is the fact that if I was to find out later on that those rumors were indeed true and some radical was hiding his sorry punk ass out here and folks like you knew about it all along and were aiding and abetting this snot-nosed criminal, well, I’d hate to think what havoc some kerosene might cause to all the kindling lying around here.”
Ladarius stepped away as Webb pulled back onto the road. In the rearview mirror he watched his old high school chum walk back to his shanty, adding to the litter in his yard a wadded-up yellow ball of paper.
ELEVEN
WEBB SLOWED FOR SOME POTHOLES,
then floored it through the rest of Belmont Heights and sped into the next neighborhood, the jam-packed trailer camp where the United Nations of Mexicans and Nicaraguans had their world headquarters.
A couple dozen wetbacks were lying around in the beds of their pickup trucks sipping beer and laughing, a few playing ragtag soccer in the rutted field nearby. All of them waiting to be summoned back to work by Webb’s foreman.
The stink that started back at Ladarius’s place grew stronger the farther west he went. “The smell of money” is what hog farmers liked to call that reek of swine manure and piss. Hydrogen sulfide, ammonia, and methane is what it actually was.
Hogs were prodigious shitters. Pound for pound they put out three times what a human did. In all, Webb’s eight thousand hogs produced ten thousand gallons of soupy manure every day. No way to keep the putrid smell from drifting with the wind. The prevailing breezes swept those particles east across the migrant labor camp and into Belmont Heights, where they settled and took root in the grain of the wood houses and the weave of peoples’ clothes and the fabric of their furniture, coated their utensils and pots and pans and dishes and glasses. A fine invisible mist of hog shit raining down on Ladarius Washington, his daughters, and the other fine people of Belmont Heights.
From time to time some of them complained about headaches, sore throats, burning eyes, ulcers, and blisters, and once in a while one of their sickly babies would cough itself to death and oh, lord, here we go again, there’d be a solemn vigil, a noisy march down Main Street or a bunch of signs posted on trees near town with pictures of the dead kid and angry messages about the hog stink they suffered from and how they weren’t going to take it anymore.
But they always did. What were they going to do? Write their fucking congressman? Hey, go on, give it a whirl. That was Webb’s advice. Write away, I’ll lick the stamps myself. Send it to Raleigh, to Washington, D.C., express your god-given outrage like any citizen of these great United States was entitled to do. See where it got you.
Find out whose side your congressman was on. Yours or Pastureland’s, the corporation that owned nine of ten hog operations from Raleigh to the coast. They’d find out quick enough who was running the world. Not Ladarius Washington, and not Webb either. It was Pastureland and their smug-ass bean counters who liked to call Webb every month and tell him how unproductive he was being, and how many more years he had before he’d paid back all the low-interest loans Pastureland generously provided him so he could expand and outfit his modern hog facility.
Back on his farm, Webb parked near containment shed number one, which he’d customized to be the nerve center of the farm. Rigged out with corrugated siding, vent stack chimneys, concrete floors, and high-tech feed monitors and blowers and misters that sprayed the hogs with a cool fog in the summertime. Hogs didn’t sweat, so the fog was a necessary cost to spare the weaker animals in July and August. With all that fancy equipment, it didn’t resemble any barn Webb had known growing up on his family’s hog farm. But it was the way things were done these days, and the only damn way to stay in the hog game.
Webb Dobbins’s farm was a seven-barn finishing operation, one of the biggest in the state. Three times a year he took delivery of eight thousand pinkish-white and cheerful piglets, spent four months fattening them from their arrival weight of about forty-five pounds to their target weight of two-fifty, then shipped them off to slaughter at the factory ten miles down the highway. Before each new drift of piglets arrived, he gave his men a two-day holiday, except for a couple whose job it was to scrub down the floors and walls and disinfect. Today was the second of those two days. The new passel would unload later on tonight.
He stood next to his truck for a moment, waiting for olfactory fatigue to set in. Weird but true, Webb had grown up on a hog farm, spent every waking hour for years within spitting distance of a herd of those even-toed ungulates, and the stink still could make him stomach-flopping gut sick.
A minute went by, then two, and his membranes dulled enough for him to walk out to lagoon number three. Filled ten feet deep with hog shit, four football fields long, it was one of seven lagoons on the farm. Holding his breath, he climbed the bank and worked up to the edge of the brown scummy pond and then set his feet, closed his eyes, and drew a long breath.
His bowels sank. He drew another breath, pulling it down like dope smoke, holding it in until he could feel the tingle in his nostrils, the desensitizing beginning to take effect. Another minute up there, looking out across the lake of shit, and he was about as acclimated as he was going to get.
With all the water flushing through the floors of the containment sheds pumped out here, all five of the ponds were at their brims. Time to flush them out before the next eight thousand arrived.
Webb walked along the pathway around its shore until he came to the switching station. He looked out at the ten-acre pasture, a flat, empty field where his father’s hogs used to graze, then reached up and pulled the lever.
It took a minute for the pumps to engage, then the giant sprinklers awoke on the tops of the steel poles and began to spray great beautiful arcs of hog shit out across the empty land. He watched them work for a while, the breeze whisking away some of the fine brown spray, then Webb made his way down from the pond edge and walked across the parking lot toward the containment shed.
Sadly for Ladarius and the rest of the folks in Belmont Heights, they got their hog shit stench in irregular pulses throughout the day and night, depending on the vagaries of the wind and farm’s spraying schedule, so their nostrils never reached the deadened state that Webb experienced by just staying put for a while at ground zero.
With his stomach settled, Webb entered the south entrance of containment shed number one. It was empty now, no squealing, no grunts, just the chug of the DeWalt high-pressure cleaner down at the far end where two of his illegals were spraying the walls and flushing the last pig turds into the louvered slats in the floor so the shit washed into the holding tanks below ground, where it would sit until he’d made room in one of the lagoons.
Burkhart, his foreman, was waiting for him down with the illegals. He saw Webb coming and slashed a hand across his throat and the Mexican running the DeWalt cut it off.
Burkhart was a sixty-year-old ex-Marine, his gray hair still in a tight crew cut, his chest chunky and his arms chiseled from a lifetime of pushups. He was Winston County’s duly elected sheriff, a job Burkhart, like every sheriff before him, considered more a hobby than actual work. He’d be living in a shabby double-wide on the outskirts of Belmont Heights if it wasn’t for his better-paying second job as Webb’s foreman and head of security.
Both the Mexicans bowed their heads at Webb’s approach.
Burkhart stepped to the side and pointed to the culprit, then gave Webb a maître d’s swoop of the arm. Have at it.
He moved close to the two workers, pushed one aside, then stepped even closer to the offender. He stooped forward, got his face near the man’s and said, “You understand English, even a little bit?”
“Little, yes, sir.”
“So Jorge, you were taking pictures too, like your buddy Javier.”
The man shook his head.
“No, sir. I no take pictures.”
“That’s not what I heard, no sir, it’s in total contradiction to the information I’ve received. You
comprende,
boy?”
He nodded uncertainly.
“Mr. Burkhart, may I see the evidence?”
Burkhart walked over to the metal lockers against the back wall, opened one of the doors, and came back holding out a silver watch. He handed the watch to Webb and Webb spent a minute examining it. Then he pushed it into the Mexican’s face.
“You recognize this timepiece, Jorge?”
“My name Jésus.”
“What I’m asking you, Jorge, is about this watch, this watch Burkhart found in your locker just now, hidden in the toe of an old boot. This watch right here. You see this watch, don’t you, Jorge?”
The man lowered his head and didn’t answer.
The other illegal muttered something to the culprit, probably translating.
“It not my watch, Mr. Webb,” the culprit said.
“So, you’re denying you ever wore this watch. This watch with a little bitty video camera in the dial. Right there, you see it, Diego? The camera, that little lens right there, you see it?”
Webb pushed the watch into the man’s face. He turned his head aside as if waiting for the blows to come.
“You been taking pictures in the barn and around other places on the farm, haven’t you, son? And then you gave this watch to those hippies living in the woods. You were acting as their spy, consorting with the enemy. You been engaged in treasonous villainy, boy. That’s how it appears. You got anything to say for yourself?”
His friend, the translator, gave him the Spanish version.
Webb looked at Burkhart and the old Marine shook his head. See the shit he had to deal with all day?
“I no spy, Mr. Webb.”
“Where’d you get this watch?”
“Someone gave him the watch,” the translator said. “He didn’t know about the camera.”
“So both of you are lying to me now. Two of my own men turning against me, playing footsie with people meaning to do harm to me and to this establishment.”
“No, sir, Mr. Webb. I mean no harm.”
“I put my trust in you, boy, let you wander freely about the property, and this is how you treat me in return? Because I know damn well you took some movies of the operations on the farm, and other top secret activities, then you carried that watch to the enemy. Isn’t this what happened, Juan?”