Sunday Barbecue
Garrett Mok

I had five or six beers by the time Jim, who used to work on cattle ranches and pig farms near the Mexican border, finished telling me about all different types of barbed wires and cattle brands. We got drunker and decided that we should have a barbecue soon, forgetting that we were both broker than the proverbial door knob. Jim then started telling me about the goatsucker. It's about as tall as a five year-old tod, with two enormous fangs sprouting from a monkey-like head. This creepy thing sucks blood out of not only goats, but chickens, dogs, calves and other small livestock. And, not only does this abominable thing suck blood, it sometimes cuts open the animals and performs neat little autopsies. One Mexican senorita tried to chase a goatsucker with a straw broom, and it leaped over a pinon tree and disappeared. That's twenty feet, straight up.

"You shitting me," I said.

"No jose. This mo'fucker's a lizard Dracula with wings."

"It would make a perfect pet for Lacy, though."

Jim cracked up.  Lacy was my ex-girlfriend. We broke up, supposedly, but we still had great sex once in a blue moon and fought afterwards like two boxing kangaroos.

In the midst of Jim's and my goatsucker speculations, the AM radio broadcasted just-broke news about a highway accident. Five eighteen-wheelers, some hauling cattle and some wood, collided on I-20 just outside Forth Worth. Disoriented cattle were limping up and down the interstate. We sipped some more Coors and took this in.

"You like T-bone steak?," Jim said in a minute, his eyes blinking like a pair of mating fireflies.

"Yeah," I said. "So?"

"I like round steak. Rump's good too. Roasted." He stood up from his lay-z-boy and stretched his back.

I pulled on the Coors. "Bar-b-q'ed baby back ribs."

"Sirloin. Pan-fried with Vidalia onion." He started pacing to and fro, excited about something. "Damn."

"Rocky mountain oysters." I didn't have my heart in this one.

"Damn, I did that too. Castrating."

"Steak tartar," I said.

"What?"

"Raw chuck steak with a quail's egg on top."

Jim stared at me, and I stared at him back. "Free cows waitin' for us, exit ramp off 45," he said. "Palmer."

I drowned the Coors into my mouth. It was an insane idea. But Coors was whispering in my ear, Fuck it, amigo, do the dance.

Jim patted his belly. "I sure as hell am getting hungry for some Black Angus beef. Mm-mmm."

***

In our headlights, hundred foot-long tire tracks opened up the blacktop like criss-crossing veins. You could smell the singed rubber. Jackknifed and dismembered tractor trailers lay strewn like toppled Lego blocks. Then we saw the slow, stunned movements of cows, at first ghostly, then in flesh and blood, in between the mangled vehicles. Jim pulled his pickup truck off to the gravel shoulder, and started driving up slowly.

"Alive or dead?" Jim said.

"What?" I had my window down, and the outside air was at least ten degrees warmer from the animal and engine heat. I could smell cow shit and worse things.

"You want a live cow or a dead one?"

"I don’t know. Which ever’s easier to get."

"You know how to rope cattle?"

"Nope. You do."

There were about twenty state trooper cruisers, fire engines and ambulances altogether. Warning flares were laid out along the center divider and near the spilled tractor trailers. Jim parked his truck behind a still-standing trailer and we stepped out of the cab.

"Damn," Jim said. "I've seen slaughterhouses, but this is one bad motherfucking scene."

The musty odor of raw meat and sinew added to the smell of diesel and motor oil that lay beneath and around the jackknifed trailers, and blood, not mixing at all, scummed on top of it like giant amoebas. Broken pulpwood, boards and logs surrounded the couple of dozen dead cattle, with broken limbs, flayed skin, piled by the exit ramp. Some cows had gnarled and glistening metal parts driven into their flanks, and still alive. One had a broken two-by-four impaled in its belly, and the skin around the wound was flapping in the breeze. Gristle and milky film separated its hide and the purplish flesh underneath it.

About thirty feet away, paramedics loaded a covered body on a stretcher, probably a trucker, into the back of an ambulance. I wanted to get the hell out of this barbecue from hell. All the beer I had drank before could come back up any minute now.

Jim, a few feet away, had his bare arms wrapped around a calf’s leg and dragging the bleeding thing behind him like a primitive war trophy. The calf's head had been crushed.

"You taking that whole cow?" I said. "It must weigh a ton."

"You gonna fucking help?"

"I don't know, man. Can we do this?"

"Grab that son-of-a-bitch's hoof."

There were dead and dying cows all around me, and they were going into that ungentle night without a fight, without much noise.  I saw in the corner of my eye a state trooper cruiser door crack open and a boot slide out. The trooper came running over. I was all ready to say, "Officer, I know we shouldn't be doing this. Let me leave the carcass and take my crazy buddy and my sorry ass out of this tragi-bovine scene, and let you do honest work," but all the trooper wanted to know was whether we needed medical attention and which trucking outfit we worked for. Jim wiped his palm on his blood-soaked jeanleg and shook the trooper's hand, saying we were A-O.K., yessir.

Then the trooper got called away on his radio, so we were free to take as many dead (or alive) cows as we wanted.  We hoisted the dead calf onto the flatbed of Jim's Ranger XLT and climbed in the cab in our bloody clothes, breathing hard and wiping sweat from our brows.

Sitting in the bench seat of Jim’s pickup, I started thinking about women, or about the general lack thereof, which was the only guaranteed distraction from carnage. I wished for a land of naked lala, a multiplex of delectable pussies. I started working up a fantasy of a tits-and-ass factory where lissome women hung from industrial-gray rafters by rock-climbing ropes. They all had wrenches or power drills of some kind and were working up a sweat on their taut tan bods, naked under their overalls...

We passed a huge billboard that said, "If You Need Bail, Call Dale." Another mile down the road, yet another sign said, "If You Got A Flat, Call Pat." Rhymy names were getting way out of hand.

Country music wafted out from the Delco stereo, and wind whipped my cheeks, sobering me up.

"My uncle Tommy," Jim said. "His heart's fibrillating...he gonna die soon, I think." He got real quiet for a second.

"I'll have Dingo butcher the cow tomorrow morning," Jim said. Dingo was his brother-in-law. He ran a deli and had an industrial-size freezer. He was called Dingo because he had lived in Australia for a few years. Not to mention he was built like a fighting wild dog.

A modelly blonde rocketed next to us in a powder-blue IROC. She turned her head, which caught the low beam of a car behind her. Her pretty head got all halo-like, and her eyes caught mine for a sec, very neutrally. She probably saw the steaming dead cow in the flatbed, because she stared straight ahead and sped forward like a jackrabbit.

"Life is just a goddamm bowl of chili," Jim said next to me. Then he took a swing at the dashboard with his right fist, and cracked the sun-brittled plastic. "Who-a. Habanera."

"Watch the road," I told him, feeling none too hot. Maybe it was alcohol depression, but maybe not. Maybe this was how rocks felt, clouds, the dead cows, this emptiness--and the living's perennial attempt to fill it with meaning, with song, despite the massive, rampant, suckage of all there was.

What Jim and I did, is throw a barbecue in his backyard. We borrowed a ninety-pound pressure cooker from Dingo and barbecued that poor calf for some nine hours. Did the dry rub--vinegar, salt, pepper and brown sugar, with mesquite smoke for flavor. Dingo dropped off ten cases of Coors. Jim invited his neighbors.

"Where's that missus of yours?" Dingo said, before blazing out in his Chevy to pick up his pregnant wife, Jim's sister, Barbara.

"Ain't here," I said.

Jim had kept the AM radio news on as usual, and it reported that four people died in the collision last night, and about thirty head of cattle. I turned it off and put a Hendrix tape in the box. Grabbed a beer, and started carving meat. Some guy brought half a dozen catfish, so I threw them on the grill inside the cooker.

I was drinking, thinking, talking, barbecuing like a maniac and having a fine time. That is, until my warring ex-girlfriend showed up, smiled at everyone, changed temperature and charged in my direction. Lacy was about to blab-launch a heat-seeking missile right at my forehead, so I threw a pre-emptory strike by belching real loud, which stopped her mid-launch with an "O," all-systems-freeze.

"Partying again," she said after a moment. "You spoiled brat."

I gave her an evil look. She was raining on my parade.

"Yeah yeah. You drunk yet?," she was warming up. "You lazy bastard."

I was grabbing Jim’s Sigma 9mm with a magazine full of Black Talon bullets with one round already chambered, in my head, and at the same time thanking god that I didn't have such a weapon on me. I wouldn’t be surprised if Lacy did. She came from a formidable line of west Texas psycho-femmes who packed powder. I don't mean Mary Kay or Revlon.

"Stuff some hotdog in your mouth," I said. "Maybe that'll shut you up."

"That's right. I need some good weenie."

Tina, one of Lacy's divorced sisters, started carrying a Lady Remington in her purse not too long ago. One day, she gassed up her station wagon at a local Amoco and when she walked into the convenient store, her two year-old slung in one arm, to pay up, a young man who stepped in after her pulled out an automatic pistol and started shooting up the aisles, hitting cans of motor oil and a couple of piss-scared customers. At this point, Tina had put Donna down on the cashier's counter and had her purse open to take cash out. Instead, she grabbed her .38 and shot the loony in the head, point-blank. The first time she ever fired a gun. It was all over the Fort Worth Telegram & Dispatch. The store clerk said that Tina's arm was as straight as a razorback, and that her nails were clear-lacquered and perfectly trimmed. She was hailed as a heroine.

"Somebody should kick your ass," Lacy said.

I grappled the meat fork. "Why are you so mean to me?"

"Cos you are an asshole who doesn't know how to treat a lady." Lacy was close to tears. "Where's the fucking cooler?" she said, and stormed off to find herself some brew.

More neighborhood men showed up in Bermuda shorts and tennis shoes, and the whole of Jim's backyard was starting to smell like mesquite and meat, which was fine by me. Lacy's sister Tina brought her two year-old over. I sliced some baby back ribs from the calf, put them on a paper plate and threw a couple of hot corns in their husks next to them. I handed the plate over to Tina and told her that I was seriously considering engaging in some bridge-burning activity. Once and for all. Tina was animated, wistful-eyed, and I was instantly drawn to her, forgetting that she blew away a man with a revolver, a psycho puppy that he was, with her two year-old watching. She started feeding bits of barbecued meat into Donna's eager open mouth.

"You know what my drama teacher told me," Tina said after she lit a cigarette and took a drag. "Unless absolutely necessary, don't burn your bridges. It's something you do maybe once in your life. Like that bridge over river Kwai."

"Well, I'm doing it."

Tina asked me what I wanted in life beside burn bridges. I told her that I wanted to be a saint.

"I think it's sweet of you."

"I might be getting an ulcer, my liver's probably half-shot, I don't have much time."

"I waste a lot of time with low self-esteem, I have to stop it," Tina said. "I feel bad about myself and I go out and buy a new outfit, run up credit card bills. It's crazy."

She was staring at her baby girl, who was playing with Lacy, calmer now.

"It's such an IKEA color," Tina said.

I looked around.

"That lawn chair."

We watched Donna play with her aunt, my nemesis.

"Donna got real sick a week ago," Tina said. "So I sautéed rose petals for her. I know it sounds crazy, but it seemed just the thing to do."

I could picture Tina back in her empty house after the incident at the convenient store, empty of her trucker husband, empty of that one-time marital bliss and a thousand hopes to eventually disregard, empty but for her doting two year-old and her toys, bills, food to cook, beds to make, shoes to untie. She would drop her purse on the kitchen table, and a ‘thunk’ would unnerve her. She would unzip her purse to find the still warm .38 Special she used an hour ago to put a bullet in a man's brain pan. She saved her life that way, and that of her baby's, and perhaps a few hundred dollars cash from the convenient store. Maybe a brazen cop slipped her a card to call him up for "a drink." She hadn't expected her day to be like this. Not at all this way.