Kill Floor

Rose drew her hand to shield her face from the anticipated blood splatter. What she had seen in videos. The pig was raised by its hindquarters, hooked to an assembly in the rafters, the gears of which were laden with grease. The heavy chains that whickered melodically as they dangled in anticipation became taught as it was hoisted. Abe held the knife firmly, steadying the swaying pig that was fighting fervidly despite her obvious exhaustion and anxiety. Rose surveyed him in disbelief. Her mind was saturated in the chaos, beaten down by the reality that came in the putrid stink of pig piss, manure and fear. She had felt something for him, prior to watching him clutch the knife staring glassily at the helpless animal. She had never seen him kill and after a few weeks, she had thought him incapable of doing so, though she knew he was one of them. They all were them. A professor once taught her it is dangerous to see life in those terms — us and them. But life taught her it was naïve to believe it was any other way.

Sometimes it had been as though they worked somewhere else and in some way he made the immorality of their occupation seem somewhat emotionally bearable. They had never talked to each other, but they had shared glances and what she believed to be affectionate smiles as they passed each other throughout the course of their shifts in the drab warehouse or in the equally morbid breakroom. There was nothing she could do now, she thought. He was bigger and stronger than her. He was wielding a large butcher knife and his gloved hand was trying to get the pig steady enough to slit her throat. She chastised herself for seeing compassion in that he apparently sought a clean cut. That his deliberateness exemplified mercy. She forgave herself for her callow delusions with reassurance that she wouldn’t feel for him further anything but the disdain he so obviously deserved. 

They both wore standard white coats, but Abe’s was stained pink as testament to his status. His years of horrible service, she rendered. Discoloration is like stripes on a Nazi SS man. You don’t get either for being a humanitarian. After a while working in the slaughterhouse you can’t get the blood out of your work coat, or off your boots, just as you cannot get the scream of the dying animals out of your head. Rose woke up at night hearing them — that piercing squeal of a sow torn from her babies. Or the cry of orphaned piglets. Her coat was virgin-white. She had only been at the slaughterhouse for two weeks and she couldn’t imagine working there any longer. Today was it. Once she saw Abe kill the pig, she knew she wouldn’t be able to do it anymore. She would have to do something else. She would ask for reassignment. Although a stranger ― one of them ― he was the only redeemable human being in the plant, her sole connection to humanity and she had decided she couldn’t cut that thin thread or else they would have to pump her full of antidepressants again as they did when they told her she was crazy, but curable, in the kindest of words. There was something in his eyes she could not describe, but now they glassed-over as he caressed the animal’s head looking over his shoulder placidly. She stood there because the foreman had ordered her to go to the kill floor and watch. She knew he was suspicious of her. Her job was to pull a motorized pallet jack of carcasses from one place to another and to clean blood off the concrete floor with a mop. She reached down and rubbed the pendant of her necklace and reassured herself of her purpose. She recalled the foreman telling her she was too pretty for this place, offering her something in the office. She declined and said she hated numbers. She dreaded papercuts and spreadsheets.

The foreman looked on from behind them, grinning snidely at the back of Rose’s pretty head, his face gurned reflexively. His red-cropped hair piled in a patch on top and the pink flesh of his head exposed under the bristled peninsular sides. He was tall and thin and hunched over, bent as though his back was permanently warped. His family had owned the slaughterhouse for the past hundred years. In the last twenty it went from processing two hundred pigs a year to ten thousand. The strain of that expansion was evident on all the managers who had been there before and after. His face was smooth and hollow and his cold eyes never seemed to possess an emotion, even when he laughed and joked with the workers, which usually was hostile and teemed with bitterness. His father was the same, only older and more austere. Their sociopathic genetic disposition was as obvious as their pink-stained souls which they could not remove like coats, Rose had written privately. “You can’t be compassionate working here,” she recalled being told by her trainer. “Don’t worry. The horrible things you see will be normal after a few months and nothing will seem so bad ever again. That is how it is. You get used to it.” The trainer was on unpaid medical leave due to carpel-tunnel.

The foreman rubbed his knobby chin and told Abe to hurry, there were other pigs to be processed. He chastised him for not using the other eleven chains that swayed eerily. Abe didn’t seem to notice. He didn’t take his eye off the animal, though occasionally, he glanced up the chain as though God were in the gunk of the grease. He looked at the pig reverently and rubbed its head to calm it which caused the foreman to balk and chortle at his apparent sentiment. Rose couldn’t figure why there was only one pig hoisted when so many were due to be processed. She had never been on the kill floor. Abe looked like someone who had snapped to her. 

“Rose, go hold it,” the foreman said flatly. She didn’t understand what he said. “The pig. Go hold the fuckin’ pig.” 

Abe looked at her as she approached but he was not there. Perhaps, it is what they do when they kill, she said to herself. No, she knew better. She heard them laugh of it. Abe was different. She approached slowly and half-hugged the large sow, trying to pacify the frightened animal who had been betrayed by those who had fed and housed her. She winced in pain and fright. A row of nipples from which piglets had recently been weaned leaked onto Rose’s hand. 

Rose waited for the inevitable. She reached up and fixed her pendant one more time. The sow stopped screaming and its left eye was fixed on Abe as though in a trance. That was what he was waiting for. The room was dim and hot and the fluorescent lights buried in the rafters flickered and hummed. The electric saws in the other room droned like angry hornets. What lived, lived in the light. What died, died in the dark. There was no light when they killed the pigs. It was always in the night. And the concrete of the kill floor was stained with a mark no mop could remove.

She heard Abe mumbling the Lord’s Prayer when the foreman impatiently barreled forward towards him, slaughter gun in hand to shoot the pig. Abe swung his arm out and caught him, taking the much taller man to the ground. He looked at Rose and nodded for her to lower the chains from the wall assembly without saying a word. She couldn’t believe it. She froze. The foreman had busted his head and began to scream but Abe had control of him with his left hand and let go of the pig and knife and knelt down and jammed his balled fist in the foreman’s mouth and pushed down as hard as he could into his throat. Rose found the switch to the gear assembly and let the pig down and it thrashed and screamed trying to break away from the loose chain. The chain whipped violently against the concrete. But no one could hear it. Rose watched Abe choke the foreman with his fist until he no longer moved. His eyes were wide-open like boiled eggs staring at the grease of the chain assembly, at the flickering fluorescent lights, at Jesus. The knife lay to his side. The slaughter gun to his other. 

“Open the side door and let her out!” Abe called trying to contain his adrenaline. He yanked his fist from the foreman’s throat and wiped it on his chest. Rose stood there for a moment in panic. Abe calmed the pig again and unlatched its ankle. “Do it now!” 

She raced for the gray door that was about twenty yards across the kill floor. Abe slapped the pig and it followed her. What would it do when it got outside? she thought. There were miles of woods and no factory-farmed animal that knew only automatic feeders and fluorescent lights could survive without being discovered and either returned to the slaughterhouse or used for a hog roast. What the hell just happened? Her mind was fractured, she thought, and this was not real. This is what happens when subjected to severe trauma, when you haven’t the ability to switch off compassion and be a killer. None of this is real. Who is he? She hit the door hard, slipped and then opened it. The pig followed and was out the door with her. Waiting outside was an open horse trailer with an idling diesel truck before it. Two people in black masks grabbed the pig and quickly tethered it, leading it up the ramp into the trailer where there were a dozen more pigs. There was a gate between the ramp and the trailer and another masked person opened it in time for the pig to enter. An apple tumbled down the ribbed ramp and rested in the parking lot. They didn’t say a word. Rose looked at them in disbelief. Her first thought was that they were some sort of poachers. Then Abe came out of the door to ensure the pig was safely secured, waved to the masked persons, and jerked Rose back inside. 

“What the hell was that?”

“Animal rescue. We can’t save them all but we save a dozen here and there.”

“Where do they go?”

“Everywhere. Animal sanctuaries up and down the east coast. Some as far as Florida.”

“You are going to get caught!”

“Some day.” He grabbed Rose’s pendant and pulled the necklace off and put it in his pocket. “But not like that.”

“You knew?”

“Everyone knew. That is why they didn’t let you see anything.”

They were confronted by the foreman’s body on the kill floor. “You killed him.”

He shook his head at her dismissively. “No. This asshole had a heart attack. So go call 911. Get help. Now!”

She ran and looked back and saw Abe kneel down by the foreman’s body and begin CPR. She could hear him counting as she ran to another room where there were dozens of migrant workers with knives and bandaged hands cutting and separating pieces of meat from the carcasses of slaughtered pigs and throwing them into separate bins. They don’t pay Americans well enough for that kind of work. People desperate for a wage are all they can get. And when you are desperate for a wage compassion is often mitigated by hunger.

She screamed it. The foreman is having a heart attack. Help! Dozens responded and found Abe doing everything he could to save the foreman’s life. It was too late. The ambulance came and took the body away. Paramedics assured Abe he did all he could do and patted him on the back. The foreman’s father shut down the operation for the night so they could grieve their loss. The truckers slowly pulled out onto the black highway with empty trailers and the migrant workers wondered if they would get paid for the night. They walked in a swarm through a dark field to a nearby motel where they were staying six to a room. They gathered around an Our Lady of Guadalupe candle and prayed for their jobs. The parking lot was nearly abandoned but for the moths in the security lights and the cracks in the pavement. Rose could see a police officer talking to Abe a hundred yards away by the back door as she sat on the hood of her car with her face in her hands. Activism was never supposed to be easy. She wondered if they would charge her with murder. She wondered why Abe’s coat was pink if he wasn’t one of them. She saw the policeman shake his hand and slowly pull away in his cruiser. His tires sounded as though they stuck to the hot asphalt. He stopped in front of her car.

“You okay, Ma’am?”

She nodded, yes. She did not speak a word for fear her voice might betray her, or her words might give her away. He nervously nodded back and drove off. She watched as his taillights disappeared on the highway thinking falsely their distance would give her comfort. She watched Abe stand there for a moment by the back doors, the apple by his feet. He picked it up and chucked it as far as he could. She watched it splatter a few hundred feet away. He lit a cigarette and climbed into his truck and drove away. He passed her without stopping. Without even looking over. Maybe he didn’t see me, she thought. Or he didn’t want to see me. She hoped he would turn around but his taillights faded and left her with no resolution. Not that there was any to be had. She took a deep breath and realized she had inadvertently forgotten to take off her white coat. Her laminated identification was clipped to her lapel and she held it in her hands and stared at her name and photograph. Then she rubbed her eyes and drove home. She would ask for a reassignment in the morning. And she would burn her coat that was soaked with a thousand squeals and a stench she would never stop smelling.