Old Glory (26 page)

“And no blacks.”

“Right. Twenty million hogs, no blacks, and let’s hope it stays that way.”

He told me about his business. “We kill two and a half, three million animals a year.” The hogs were gassed, then stuck in the throat; the cows were killed with a “captive bolt.” “We used to have rifles, but the bullets went all over the goddamn place.” The bodies were then carried on conveyor belts through the plant, to be dismembered, cured, packaged and sold; at the front end of the Packing Company there was a meat supermarket selling fifty different brands of bacon, lard, sausages and frozen joints and steaks—all those pictures of tranquil dairy farms and cheery farmers’ wives which decorated the plastic packets were really disguised versions of the Wahlert production line. He’d “gone into” kosher, too.

“Now, that’s some racket. Those rabbis have got it sewn up. They got themselves a
union
. They come down every Monday in a microbus from Chicago. Eight of them. Not proper rabbis. Not teaching rabbis. They’re just kind of butcher-rabbis.
Shohetim
. I guess they probably do
circumcisions too. They all hole up for the week in some kind of rooming house, and they have to get back to Chicago for sundown on Friday. That’s part of their religion. Know how much they make? Fifty thousand bucks apiece. There’s no way you can get into kosher without them
shohetim
, and hell, do they know it! Now I want to get into that Muslim thing,
hari … halli …?
”

“
Halal.
”

“Right. So I guess we’re going to get the mullahs’ union in here too. The Muslims, they’re real particular. They won’t take the throw-outs from the kosher. Hell, it’s all much the same thing—
halal, kosher
, I guess the Muslims just want to get their own union in on the act.”

I was fitted out with a white coat and taken through the factory. At the far end, pigs’ bodies were coming in from the slaughterhouse on an overhead belt. Strung up by one hind leg on a hook, they looked disconcertingly human. Blood from the gash in their throats dripped into a long steel conduit, where it swirled and eddied like a river. The pigs went by at a fast walking speed, three feet between each corpse, their front trotters stuck straight out, their pink ears limp as cabbage leaves.

It took them a remarkably short time to stop looking like pigs. We followed them, along steel catwalks, up companionway ladders, down corridors paved with dark red tiles to mask the blood. At every turn there was a man in an apron with a saw, a slicing machine or a knife. In order to be completely disassembled, a pig had to make a journey of perhaps seventy yards, lasting just a minute or two. At the end of his trip, he would be boned, jointed, packed in little paper trays sealed in cellophane; some of him would be smoked, some rendered down for lard; his guts would stand in cardboard boxes lined with plastic bags.

“Is there any part of a pig or a cow that you can’t use here?” I had to shout over the noise of the pulleys and belts and machines.

“Nope,” said the man who’d been detailed to show me around. “Take the pancreas. That goes to Holland to make insulin for diabetics. Beef tongues—they go to where you come from, London. What there is of the rest—it ain’t much, but it goes to make pig food.” He didn’t seem to notice any possible irony. “You like sausages?” he shouted, reaching into a steel cabinet the size of my London living room. “Try one!” It was all I could do to keep from gagging at the sight of the thing; I held it near my mouth for as long as I could bear, then stuffed it into my trouser pocket. My guide, a step ahead of me, chewed happily on his own sausage.

“Don’t you ever get back home after a day here and find you can’t face the sight of a beefsteak or a pork chop?”

“Nope.”

It was a relief to reach the retail store at the end of this fantastic process of surgical deconstruction. The air was full of soft Muzak. Women wandered among the open refrigerators, toying with shiny packets of ham and bacon and beefsteak. “We kill two and a half, three million animals a year,” Wahlert had said. In that time his factory should be capable of depopulating sixty cities the size of Dubuque and turning their inhabitants to grease, tallow, frozen meat and pig food; in three years, you could get through New York … in less than twenty years, the whole of the British Isles.… I reported the results of this bit of mental arithmetic to my guide. He blanched, backed away and stared frigidly at me; I saw a homicidal lunatic reflected in his eyes. He seemed reluctant to shake hands with me when I thanked him for the tour; and it was only when I was back on the street that I realized—or rather, felt—to just what depths of bad taste I must have appeared to have sunk. For the horrid sausage in my pocket had been leaking hot fat down the side of my leg, and it showed. Appalled, I fled to the Julien Hotel to change my trousers.

At dinner, Ms. Alpine was trembling with zipped-up excitement. Her eyes had an overbright glitter to them, as if she’d just taken a snort of cocaine. She darted and pecked around her food. Spearing a baby carrot, her fork rang loudly on the plate.

“There’s an aurora borealis tonight,” she said. “We can watch it from my house. It looks right out over the river. You can see half of Illinois and Wisconsin from up there—”

I once knew a rather spotty young man whose chief passion in life lay in his collection of rain gauges and barometers; but Ms. Alpine had not struck me as that type at all.

“I’d never have taken you for a meteorologist.”

“No, not
that
. Something else. I got good news today. God, I’m so happy.”

“What’s happened?”

“I can’t tell you. Not in this place. Later. People might hear. You know what small towns are like.…”

I tried to distract her with tales of the meat-packing plant, but she was off on a mental trip elsewhere. We rode up the bluff in her car, with the great white houses gleaming in the dark.

“He’s got three million,” Ms. Alpine said in a stage whisper as the automatic transmission sighed on the incline and dropped to a deeper, rumblier note.

“Who?”

“My ex. My lawyer got the figures out of his lawyer today. Three
million bucks.” Her tone of voice made the money palpable. It seemed to lie around us in heaps in the car; we were lapped in dollar bills, each one with its severe portrait of Washington and W. M. Blumenthal’s fussy, copybook signature.
ANNUIT COEPTIS: NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM
.

“I knew the bastard had some. But three
million
 … Ever since we split, he’s been saying he was broke.”

Her house was, as she’d said, right on the top of Alpine: a floodlit ranch whose stucco had been got up to look like Mexican adobe. She led me through to a long, split-level room at the front. A cocktail bar ran its entire length. So did a picture window. Below us there was a sheer black cliff before the mansions began; then, a mile away, the wide polished ebony of the river.

She twiddled a dimmer switch behind the bar and fixed the room in shadowy candlelight, then pressed a hidden button to bring up a television picture projected on a cinema-sized screen behind us. A football game. The players in their colors packed and charged, larger than life, silent as moths.

“What you want to drink?”

“What have you got?”

“Everything.” She gestured at the room, and laughed. “Nothing succeeds like excess.”

A brief spatter of rain tinkled on the glass of the window.

“How much of the three million will you get?”

“Half.”

“Why? Why not just ask for what you actually need?”

“That sonofabitch. He took four years out of my life. The shit I had to take … Did I tell you I used to have my own radio show before I married him? Me and my goldfish?”

“Yes, you said.”

“Well, I’m going to get my compensation.”

“At the rate of nearly half a million dollars for every year?”

“You can’t put a value on human life,” she said. “I’m just getting my fair share.”

“What are you going to do with it?”

“That’s what I been thinking about all day. As soon as that settlement’s tied up, I’m going to go to Tahiti.”

“Why Tahiti?”

“
No one
in Dubuque’s been to Tahiti.”

“To live? Or for a vacation?”

“Oh, just a month, maybe two. Then I’m going to get out of this dumb city for good. After New Year’s, in the spring, I’m going to move to Chicago. I’m going to do what I want to do for a change. You know
the first thing I’m going to do? Buy furs. I want mink. A lot of mink. Then I’m going to sit around and invest in S. and B.’s.”

“—In your furs.”

“Right. In my goddamn furs.”

We searched the sky for the aurora, but there was nothing to see. Banks of low cloud had blotted out the moon and stars. I thought I saw a distant, streaky glimmering, fogged by rain, but that turned out to be only the streetlights down in the Flats. The football players on the screen, flickering gaudily in purple and yellow, were stranger and brighter than any aurora borealis could have been.

I had made a poor confidant for Ms. Alpine’s dreams of her new life. She leaned on her bar, cupping her face in her hands, staring at the silent game. In the dimmed light she looked like a pretty college student. The role of strident divorcée didn’t suit her: she was an uncertain freshman in this course in vengeance and greed. But it seemed sadly probable that she’d eventually graduate
summa cum laude
.

“I guess I’d better call you a cab,” she said, reaching for the phone without taking her eyes off the players. I’d misjudged her. She wasn’t a freshman; she was a sophomore, at least.

On Saturday morning, the river below Dubuque had turned into a racetrack for powerboats. They shot past me in swift flashes of psychedelic paintwork, their noses high, their streaming wakes gripping my stern and making me ride them like a surfer. I left the main channel and took to the sloughs on the left-hand side of the river. Wisconsin had ended, and Illinois just begun. Watching the charts for wing dams, watching the water for bars and stumps, I inched down the twisty, still canal of Menominee Slough, so narrow that in places it was completely arched over by trees. It was snake and snapping-turtle country; almost every piece of fallen timber by the water had a sleepy reptile in residence. In a week or two they would start hibernating; now they were just indolent and dusty, enjoying this last remnant of summer weather. I had to duck to pass through a curtain of low twigs and had an unpleasant fantasy about black rattlers dropping into small boats out of trees. Menominee wriggled a few times more, then opened into the broad lake of Dead-man’s Slough. It was dotted with fishing boats. Each one held a complete black family. The men wore dungarees, the women broad straw hats with brims three feet across. Everyone held a motionless fishing pole out over the stagnant-looking water.

“Any luck?”

“Ain’t done nothing yet.”

“What bait are you using?”

“Night crawlers!”

I had wanted to visit Galena, Illinois. Once it had been a major steamboat port, but the Galena River had silted up and left the town stranded four miles inland of the Mississippi. I pulled in at Shubert’s Landing and found another black family unpacking their tackle from an old red Chevrolet. They’d come from Chicago. They hoped for a haul of catfish. Their trouble was that they had no boat, and the water by the bank was shallow and overfished. I said they could borrow mine for a few hours; I was going to Galena for lunch, and wouldn’t be back until four o’clock.

At first the man thought I was trying to pull some ingenious kind of confidence trick.

“How much money you want, mister?”

“Nothing. Just look after it for me. Then I can leave my bags here without worrying about them.”

“You saying that you giving us your boat for
nothing
?”

“Until four o’clock, yes.”

“Okay, mister.” But he looked at me in much the same way that my guide had done at the end of our tour of the Dubuque Packing Company.

Galena was at the end of a long and hillocky country lane. Poor town: it had been the victim of a whole series of booms and crashes. It had got its start as a famous lead mine. In mid-nineteenth-century America, everyone with a gun loaded it with bullets from Galena. By the end of the Civil War the seam was more or less exhausted. The steamboats left the town behind, and when the railroads were built they avoided Galena’s little Tuscan hills and kept to the bank of the Mississippi. Galena’s latest boom had been caused by an enterprising group of Chicago decorators and architects. They had restored the town and turned it into a museum piece for tourists, a handsomely painted exhibition of Illinois-Queen Anne, Illinois-Romanesque, Illinois-Second Empire, Illinois-Italian Villa, Illinois-Gothic and Illinois-Doric.

For just a year or two, Galena had been rich again. Then the oil crisis hit the place. It was barely possible to get to Galena and back from Chicago on one tank of gas. “No one’s traveling anymore,” said a disconsolate clerk in a gift shop where I bought a pair of dark glasses to replace the ones which, an hour before, I had watched disappear, winking, into the depths of Deadman’s Slough. Now, Galena looked like a movie set recently abandoned by the production crew. Even on this sunny Saturday there were few tourists about. The paint on the restored houses was beginning to crack; the short-order restaurants, done up in “historical” ticky-tacky, were mainly just short of customers. The only
place in town that looked as if it were still in business in a big way was the Steinke Funeral Home, a gigantic piece of cake icing with steamboat decks and balustrades and columns. It looked as if, bit by bit, the Steinke Funeral Home were finally taking care of Galena.

I found some local people drinking in a back-street bar. None of them worked in Galena itself; they commuted up to Dubuque or down to the “Quad Cities” of Rock Island, Moline, Davenport and Bettendorf. As we talked, an old man with a flappy rubber swatter wandered up and down the bar, chasing blowflies. So ingrained was the habit of going hunting that if you couldn’t pot a squirrel or a coon or a duck, the bluebottle was a respectable object of sporting pursuit. In almost every bar I visited there was the same old man in his duck hunter’s camouflage cap, sidling with a flyswatter into the middle of one’s conversation.