The Convalescent (16 page)

Ján lifts the heavy lid.

Half of a pink tongue lolls at the chin, but the rest of it, the head and feet, the belly-mound, look normal. It looks like it’s sleeping. On its face, a chilling, sordid grin. Ján reaches in, picks up the carcass, and holds it in his arms like firewood. “Start draining immediately,” he says. “Right now the meat still has
élet
, the life, in it. Are you with me?”

The boy nods.

Ján places the carcass on the chopping block, then moves to the back corner, where a tall, three-legged structure nearly ten feet high is leaning. It looks like a gigantic tripod. The skeleton of a teepee. The legs are made of a creamy, pinking wood. Wood the color of white people. Nailed onto one of the legs is a handle and a reel. A thick strong wire runs up to the peak over which hangs a large and frightening hook.

“This,” he says, “is the real secret. It’s called a Coat Rack. You can’t buy them in the United States. Clint Eastwood has one.”

János Pfliegman beams at the prospect of sharing something with Clint Eastwood.

“You hook him to the wean, then crank the winch,” he says, spinning the reel and handle. “You hang him on the Coat Rack, then you stick him. Pigs drain easier that way.”

Ján removes his expensive Italian loafers. He brings out two pairs of rubber boots. The boy slides his feet in and the stale boot-air puffs out. His father goes back to the butcher block, and with both hands he carries the pig, upside-down, to the Coat Rack. The ears flop like fins over its eyes, covering the whole face except for the rubbery, can-shaped snout. The boy watches as his father cinches a rope around the feet, and hangs the pig from the hook. The little legs stick outward, straight as sticks. Upside-down, the convex belly spins.

“Crank him up,” János says.

The boy grasps the winch and turns the handle. The body slowly rises. His father hands him a six-inch knife.

“Now stick him.”

The boy closes his eyes and, with a lame thrust, he sticks the pig. Immediately the barn is filled with the rich odor of overripe fruit. He feels slightly nauseous and does not want to open his eyes. When he does, he sees blood spurting from the cut, ebbing in thick intervals.

“Thickening,” his father says. “Another benefit of the carbon dioxide. You don’t want blood going all over the place. Blood’s oily. Stains. Hard to clean. This way it all lands on the dropcloth.”

Ján unhooks the carcass and carries it back to the butcher block next to the white box. He gives the boy an apron and a small knife, looking at him with excitement, if not, the boy thinks, a little pride. “Hold on to that tool,” he says. “Get used to the feel of it. I’ll do most of the cutting today, and watch me do it. You can practice in a minute. I’ll get you started on a smaller cut.”

The boy watches his father cut the meat, explaining which meat-parts are which. He watches his father’s fingers dance briskly around the meat and bone, making the job look easy. His hands fly over the animal quick and neat, like he was put on earth to do it. But as he works, the boy grows tired, so he glances over at the white box. The cold metal. He looks back at his father hunched over the meat, working the offal, and then with both hands, he lifts the heavy lid to find another life extinct.

One of Janka’s glass jars, full of cloudy, pickled water, is tucked into the far corner. The masking tape long ago faded, but the boy leans in and reads the label:
Hal
. (Fish.) He looks closer at the jar and makes out something that looks like a fish floating heavily inside it. The body of the fish is narrow, small and blue, with a larger head. The skin, furried from the pickling, seems to hover around its own body. The boy wonders what it’s doing there; why Ján keeps it in the white box. He lifts the lid all the way up and light shines in. He notices a face: thin openings of what look like mouth and nose. Two large round eyes, gray in the water. The boy knows that the hal is dead, but there is also something about it that is living. He stares at the eyes and swallows nothing down his throat. He tries to figure out how to feel. He wants to know why the fish is there, but he also knows that looking at the fish makes him sick, so instead he looks at János Pfliegman, at his father’s hands flipping the meat parts—tossing the leaf fat, the cracklings—and then he turns and vomits all over the peeling, floral linoleum.

“Useless!” Ján yells. “
Szanálmas idióta!
Close that lid and get over here.” He tosses a piece of meat on the block. “You cut the meat now.”

A lump grows in the boy’s throat. He coughs, but the coughing does not relieve it; it feels like his lumpy head, and then he feels horribly lumpy everywhere. He does not know which is worse, to cry or be sick. He bites his cheeks.

“
Cut it!
” his father shouts, and whacks him on the head with a fist.

The boy doesn’t move.

So Ján jumps over and forces the knife into his hand. He squeezes, hard.

The boy looks at the white of his father’s hands, wrestling, and then with his little teeth, teeth as sharp as lemon seeds, he bites them. He runs out of the barn, into the horsefields. He stays away for two days, hiding in the long grasses. He doesn’t eat. He doesn’t drink. Which is fine. As long as he never has to cut another piece of meat again.

(Which, as it turns out, he doesn’t have to.)

When he returns to the farmhouse early on the third morning, the kitchen light is on. He peeks in the window, and sees both of them inside. They are sitting hunched over the table by the stove, not moving or speaking or eating. They do not look up when he walks in.

“Where
you
been,” Ján says.

The boy reaches behind his back and holds up Grandfather ákos’s violin.

His father begins laughing. It is a wild laugh. Unleashed. He bolts from the table and runs out to the front porch, where the laughing turns to violent sobs—

The boy looks at his mother, her own eyes dry as bones.

“It’s too late,” Janka says. “He’s dead.”

Tonight, after all the meat has been sold, I settle into my Reading Center, put on the Bach cassette, and the fugues begin trickling. It’s cold, with a soft, unremarkable rain outside, but the inside of the bus is snug. Mrs. Kipner hops out of his tin can and lands on my bed. His bad eye is still white and low, but the good eye is healthy as ever, black and shining. The rest of his body is healthier too: the white spots have almost completely vanished, and he’s slimmed down considerably. Now he hops in and out of the tin can with no trouble at all.

I unwrap an Evermore and leisurely pick up
Your First Hamster
. The small, apricot-colored hamster looks at me in a mischievous manner.

“Oh
you
,” I want to say.

It’s a cozy scene, everything as it should be, until a fat drop of water splashes onto my blanket. I look up.

The diamond-shaped crack in the ceiling has gotten bigger. I’m certain of it. It looks like the entire panel needs to be patched, if not replaced. Come fall, I’m thinking of redecorating. Nothing like the busses in
This Bus Is Your Home
, with the chrome wheels, fresh paint, full-size beds, and abundant electronic devices, but I can imagine a few small but meaningful improvements: perhaps a new burner for the stove, a lamp for my Reading
Center. I look at the corrugated rubber flooring and wonder if I could get away with a primal sort of carpeting—

Then two headlights appear across the field.

Cars very rarely drive on Back Lick Road at night, so I turn off the lightbulb and the tape-radio, and climb on top of one of the seats. I peer out the window. The car pulls itself slowly along the road, crunching pebbles with its enormous tires, shuddering to a stop at the edge of my field. Wide beams illuminate the grasses. Moths hurtle toward the lights as though drugged. Three men spill out, hoisting a fresh sign out of the backseat.

They produce mallets.

When they’ve finished pounding the sign, I think they’re about to get back in and drive off like usual, but instead they turn toward the bus and start crossing the field. The headlights throw long shadows and their enormous chins swell. They’re all wearing the same dark suits and carry important-looking manila folders in their hands. They curse in the distance. Their trousers are soaking wet, they complain, from all the rain.

I crouch down at the back of the bus.

“
Hsss
,” rattles Mrs. Kipner.

Seconds later, they bang on the door that isn’t really a door. It doesn’t lock, but you’ve got to pull the lever from the driver’s seat to make it open. The Subdivisionists don’t know this.

“Mr. Pfliegman! May we speak with you?”

“Jesus, this is creepy,” another whispers.

“Who
lives
like this?”

If only other Pfliegmans were here. Hair and teeth falling out, eyes squinting. They would quietly encircle these men. They would kidnap them and drag them behind the bus and, axes raised—

“Mr. Pfliegman, we have a document for you, and we think you should read it.”

Something is wedged beneath the door of the bus.

I hold on to the floor, cold and wet, with my palms. Next to me are two cardboard boxes, one of which contains hundreds of crumpled up, gum-size Big M labels. The other contains the Carly Simon cassette tape. The picture on the tape is a woman with long blond hair that hangs away from her face as if freshly blown. A large, terrifying mouth. Looking at her, a sharp pain
appears on one side of my abdomen. My lungs compress and my throat scratches and it’s everything I can do to keep from coughing.

Helpless, I emit a suffocated sound:

“.”

The Subdivisionists don’t notice. I could be a squirrel, perhaps. A chipmunk. I could be a dying bird.

“It has to do with your bus, Mr. Pfliegman,” one of them says. “We know you’re in here. We really think you should speak with us.”

“Before this becomes a matter for the
authorities
,” says another.

They all murmur favorably at the word.

I hold my breath to keep from involuntarily speaking again, reach into another cardboard box and pull out one of Grandfather Ákos’s coats. I bite the wooly sleeve.

The Subdivisionists, meanwhile, are negotiating whether they should throw themselves against the door of the bus—it might bend like a fan, they reason—but on better judgment decide against it on the chance that it could, in some unbelievable court, be considered Breaking and Entering. One of them bangs the door. “You’d better read that document, Mr. Pfliegman,” he says. “As far as we’re concerned, you’re trespassing.”

“I’m telling you,” another says. “He’s not here.” He kicks the side of the bus for proof. “All right?”

“All right, let’s do it.”

In three deliberate ticks, the Subdivisionists turn on their flashlights. One remains at the door, shining the beam into the windows. The light reaches into the interior of the bus, illuminating the corrugated rubber flooring—

I scurry underneath my mattress.

The Subdivisionists split off and move down both sides of the bus, the beams of their flashlights dancing around the windows, and then, without warning, one of them slams his mallet into one side of the bus. It sounds like a shotgun. I start to jump up, but catch myself in time. I listen as they move to the front and smash the snout, the headlights. They even attack the grill, stomping on the bumper. It groans like a harpooned whale. They jump up to bust the windows, climbing on the tires, until one of them accidentally slips and falls.

“It’s glass,” he cries. “He’s got glass out here!”

One of the Subdivisionists has found the Frog Pond. He tries to walk off the mirror, but it’s wet and he slips again, this time twisting his ankle.

“Help me up!” he cries.

But another Subdivisionist’s leg is tangled in a long piece of grass, and can’t move. “What the—” he says, and tugs and curses.

From the tousle with Richie Bis, Marjorie’s blade is sharp, a fresh edge. It coolly slices him across both hands.

“The fricking thing just cut me!”

I try to lift the handle to the Emergency Exit, but it’s too heavy, or it’s stuck, rusted to the metal, so I throw open a window and start hurling things at them. Anything I can find. I hurl the boots without laces, the stained coffee carafe, the pots and pans. I sweep my arms under a seat and discover the stale loaf of bread given to me by the well-meaning Virginian. Out it goes, soaring blindly in the dark and punching a Subdivisionist clean across one side of his large chin.

“Run!” he cries. “Back to the car!”

His partners untangle themselves and follow, tripping over each other. I grope under a seat and grab the brand-new towel rack, still in its original packaging—I tear off the plastic with my teeth and pull it like a sword from a sheath. It’s silver in the light, glowing like a thing that realizes it’s about to become of use. I move quickly toward the front of the bus, tripping on the tails of the coat, waving my sword, pull open the lever to the door, and burst out of the bus. But the Subdivisionists have already cleared the field and are piling into the sport utility vehicle.

I quickly limp toward them. A Pfliegman in the night—

“Drive!” they shout. “Drive!” They slam the doors, spin their huge tires, and take off down Back Lick Road, but not before turning their headlights upon a little man in an old wool coat, kicking up his heels, holding a cold, stale loaf of bread up in the air like it’s a winning trophy.

During the settling of Hungary and the unsettling of every other nearby established European nation, everyone pretty much ate the same two things: meat and
ját
. Ját was a tough, fist-size ball of hard dough the color and consistency of chalk which we gnawed on. Which we tried to swallow whole and choked on. The eating of ját was an hourlong, teeth-aching endeavor, but it was all we had. Because of the unsympathetic weather, everyone always had colds, or were catching colds from stealing and gnawing on other people’s ját. Sometimes, if there was not enough meat, porridge was made for the women and children, but the porridge was only ját broken into bits and boiled in water. To break a piece of ját, you had to take your axe to it, or throw it hard against a stone wall, cracking it into a dozen splintered pieces. Ját makes an obnoxious sound when hurled against a stone wall, which is how it got its name. “
These were days
,” Anonymus explains, “
when the linguistics of people in the rural regions were heavily influenced by onomatopoeia
.”