Here Come the Butchers

Sun dogs this morning beyond the mountains at the far edge of town. It tends to happen this time of year, January, my birthday. I celebrate with a bottle and a lime and a shined-up highball glass catching glints of morning through the big window at the front of my bar. Maybe more snow today? Bad for business. Bad for the boys, the slaughterhouse boys, fresh off the bloody floors. They need a public house to wind down, else it goes home with them.  More than a stench, it’s a sticky, liquid restlessness that comes from looking into scream-wide eyes on animals they’re about to kill. My stomach turns.

Something behind me sounds like paper flicking. I almost didn’t hear it at all. I have ghosts in my bar. One sits in a corner, head down, nose almost in his bourbon. His opacity depends on the amount of cigarette smoke in the air, and the perfect mix of music and darkness. So, right now, nothing. Maybe I’ll catch him at the side of my eye once a week, sad and drooping, hands spread on the table in front of him. Once I noticed two fingers missing, but that’s not uncommon in a slaughterhouse town. The blades know nothing but cutting, and they chomp, unceasing. A minor slip can provoke blood or amputation. The medic grabs his tourniquet kit and patches the guy for a ride down the mountain where the doctor either puts it back on or stitches it closed. God knows where the rest winds up.

Another sip of my drink, slow and smooth with a twitch at the end, I’m enjoying the lazy melt myself just like last week’s snow piles oozing quietly into the gutters. The picture-frame town through the window seems painted. From the intersection here at First Avenue, Main Street rides a few foothills east toward the mountain’s base. Two rows of low-rise shops end at Fourth Avenue where a traffic light allows access to the winding, gravel road zigzagging halfway up the mountain to the slaughterhouse, Lemont Meat Processing. Mr. Lemont has been dead for years, nobody knowing exactly what happened. Sometimes I suspect he’s another one of my ghosts.

I bought the ghosts when I bought this bar twelve years ago. “The Abattoir,” it’s called, always has been, always will be. It’s spelled out in ornate lettering on the wide, panoramic window in front of me. A time-hardened paint job and a lack of initiative keep me from scraping it off. Beyond that, the booze and my attachment to it keeps me here in this chair most days until noon when I go nap long enough to shrug off my demons. Just in time for the butcher boys to come trudging in.

I hear what they say, and I soak it all up, their life, how they live, how they cope with the things that no normal man should. Still don’t understand it. I’ve watched countless eyes blink out, dull, thousand-yard stares, settling into ambivalence and complacency like war vets and bughouse patients. They are calm and quiet on the outside, of course; but, on the inside, you can almost hear the swoosh. It’s a cold, heavy hammer swinging indiscriminate arcs round and round in their heads. And one day, I naively hoped not soon, a stillness, a comma, then fireworks, when the hammer meets a skull it cannot crush.

I should’ve known something was coming when they moved to the corners of the room with their drinks and their smokes, feeding a steady stream of coins into the jukebox to cover their conversations. The corner ghost now more visible than ever, face still down, strands of hair hanging over a knotted, gray brow, he sat amongst them, silent and ignored, but still there, a part of the plan as it hatched and festered.

And, so it begins, today of all days, my magical morning with sun dogs and birthday and allowing myself an extra drink or three, watching the day take shape through the window. People out and about, on the sidewalks and streets for groceries and so on.

Then smoke, two black plumes, like evil rabbit ears, from the top of the slaughterhouse, perched on the mountainside. Then come the boys, men actually. They’re fully decked in their elbow-length gloves and black aprons, sunlight catching their long blades and hammers as they wind down the gravel road toward Main Street. Then an explosion. What a mess.

At a distance, I see it before I hear it. The slaughterhouse, in its entirety, erupts and mushrooms into a million pieces. A shockwave bows trees for fifty yards on every side. Light bending energy smashes the plate-glass in front of me. Faster than I can see, a five-foot-long fang of glass slices through me and my chair, pegging the floor and holding me there, pinned like a bug in a shadowbox. I’m forced to watch the rest of the scene play out.

Blood pours from the sky. Offal, slunk, and assorted meat clods splatter down on the street. The men, the butchers, are off the mountain now, pulling people from cars, invading the stores. They sling their weapons aimlessly, catching throats and backs, heads and limbs of anyone who scrambles into their path. I can only assume that in their minds it’s not killing anymore. It’s not even active thought, it’s reflex, second nature. They move like machines. They stopped hearing the screams a very long time ago.

And here I am, as I always am. Losing blood fast, I can’t feel my feet, legs, or left arm. The red spray and debris tapers into quietness pricked only by quickly stifled shrieks. Then the first curlicue snow flurries start whitewashing the mess. The slaughterhouse boys arrive at my window, new lights in their eyes. Maybe not lights, but fire, primal flares that soot and ash their heads inside. I close my eyes and wonder what it’s like to be a ghost.

©2021 J. Brian Reed