Free Love and Other Ways of Dying by Michael Paterniti

respectfully absent, so as not to be embarrassed by what would have been our inevitable gushing. Either way, his nonpresence here was strange. His kitchen was silent and empty, the counters gleaming. The Pacojet sat unplugged in the corner; the silver foam canisters stood neatly in a row.
    I imagined him in his room then, his head on a pillow or bent quietly over a book, his ever-moving mouth silent, his ever-darting eyes giving in to night, the sorcerer at rest. Of course he’d had no intention of checking with us after our meal. After all, what was he going to do with our happiness? It was ours. Andso we kept it to ourselves as we traveled back down the mountain, passing the bent Johannesburg trees that made their own music in the wind, passing through the night into town, to our sleeping baby boy and each other, our world having ended and begun again.

EATING JACK HOOKER’S COW
    G O WITH HIM . G O OUT INTO the feed yards with Jack Hooker. His daddy was a cattleman, he was a cattleman, his son today is a cattleman. Go out to the feed yards near Dodge City, Kansas, out into the stink of manure and the lowing slabs of cow, into the hot sun and rain and driving snow with Jack Hooker and know what it means to be a man.
    First, a man looks like someone who’s lived a while. Looks like Jack Hooker. Has a neck like Jack Hooker’s, the back of it all tanned and crosshatched. A man has hands like Jack Hooker’s, calloused but soft with pity on the rump of a steer he’s sizing up for the slaughterhouse. He walks like Jack Hooker, with that same authority, that same plain movie-cowboy grandeur, his shoulders rolling slightly, his arms moving with the smooth swivel of his hips, his body blading through air as he crosses the parking lot of a motel. As if he might be there in body but always somewhere else, too—out in the yards, lost in an ocean of cattle.
    See, a man like Jack Hooker looks on a heifer that stands twelve hundred pounds off the hoof and feels majesty. He shakes his hand on a deal that brings a new herd of a hundred head to his yard, and he feels grace. He sees God in a Black Angus that carries his meat in the flank. And he fights Satan himself when his cows go down with fescue, their tails, sometimes their feet, just falling off, littering the ground. What salvation is offered him here on earth, what afterlife, comes by seeing a glimmer of himself in a son who rises up in the yards like his daddy did.
    And what everything comes down to for a real man like Jack Hooker is this one thing: America is a cow. It might sound funny if you’re not from Jack Hooker’s world, if you sit in those city offices trying to figure out how to take a piece of Jack Hooker, how to tax him and strip him bare, but America is a cow. And that’s how America got to be America and that’s what America is and that’s what America will always be.
    But now, here’s where it gets tricky. Used to be you had a yard full of cattle. You fed them up to a good weight and herded them onto pots, the trailers that take them to the slaughterhouse. Honest work by good people. But now in those slaughterhouses, you can’t find many people wanting to do the job. Jack Hooker did it once. Wasn’t pleasant, but he did it. But now it’s the Mexicans and those Asiatics. All these yellow and orange and black people stunning the cow and hooking it and flensing its hide. All these yellow and orange and black fingers inside every Angus and Hereford cutting them open, scooping out the viscera in slimy piles, all these yellow and orange and black hands sawing these cows in two, crushing up the bones, vacuum-packing their parts for the country to eat. That smell, that rancid, stomach-churning smell of melting cow, used to be a good thing, as good as the smell of money, but now it smells foul. Comes down on Dodge City like human flesh gone bad.
    And what eventually happens here is that these yellow and orange and black people get a good wage—maybe eight, ten