He tells us about his amazing sex life non-stop but to me it sounds like the death of a ball turret gunner. I never say that to him. Would he even know what I was saying? He tells Rabbi and I all about it. His sex life. The things his wife does to him. The things she demands he do for her. It’s all he ever talks about. He’s proud of his sex life. Then he razzes us about not getting any action. We need to spice things up, he says. Rabbi smiles, runs a hand through his beard, refrains from comment. The man cannot be provoked. I just laugh. I know Casey’s old lady. I don’t think she’s nice-looking. I would never say that to him.

Casey and I work together at the meat packing plant. We cut kosher beef all day long, under the watchful eye of a Rabbi we’ve grown close to (no idea what his actual name is though). It’s decent money, being a butcher. Our jobs are recession-proof. And we are in a recession, the one Obama inherited. But our jobs are stable. I work circles around everyone in that plant, especially Casey. Casey is in his early forties, at least fifteen years older than me, so it makes some sense why he’s slow. But he’s really slow—he talks too much. He’s a magpie. I’m a madman with a knife, hacking and slashing. I’m fast you understand. I’m a wizard on the band saw we use. People worry I might cut myself. I often do. Casey tells me to slow down. Rabbi just sits there watching me while stroking his phylacteries. He tells me I’m an artist.

“These other butchers are not artists,” he said. “You know how to make it look nice, to make it appealing. You have an eye for it.”

That means a lot to me since Rabbi’s brain is like something NASA would send to Mars to gather data.

I’ve been going to Casey’s house regularly since the high school football season started.  I go to see Jordan Smith. He plays tailback for the Bulldogs. He’s fast. He runs close to the ground, like Barry Sanders. We hang out at Casey’s before the game, Lisa might cook us dinner (terrible food), Casey would roll a joint (Mexican dirt weed) and we three would walk down a half mile or so to the football field, Canadian whiskey on our breath (and in Lisa’s purse). I’m the only co-worker to get invited to Casey’s house, since Lisa is a jealous god. I know how to act around her. I know how to behave around her. If Lisa ever got a hint of how Casey acts around the girls at work, the perverted things he says to the girls at work, pussies, dicks, cunts, assholes and such, she’d blow a gasket. I know this. I protect his secret. Plus, Lisa has the hots for me. I catch her watching me too long during conversations. I know the effect I have on women. Casey tells me that Lisa told him about me, if I don’t have a girlfriend, then there is something wrong with me. I don’t have a girlfriend.

There’s a game happening this Friday and Casey is telling Rabbi he should come.

“That’s the sabbath,” Rabbi said. “I can’t because it’s the sabbath.”

“There will always be sabbath,” Casey said.

Then Casey started baiting him with the Luger again. His grandfather had brought back a German issue Luger from World War Two, from a soldier he killed. If Rabbi comes over Friday, Casey will let him have it.

“Put it in a holocaust museum,” Casey said.

Rabbi shrugs. He isn’t going to come.

 

Things are rocky at Casey’s. I’ve been warned that Lisa is in distress. She’d caught her teenage son masturbating and had thrown him out of the house. This is not Casey’s son. Casey has three girls. They have no kids in common. Her son said he was praying, not masturbating. He told this to Lisa. He even had the bible to prove it. She still kicked him out.

“Lisa can be a cold-hearted bitch,” Casey said.

That was last week.

When I first arrive, I can tell something is wrong. They welcome me, but the tone of the welcome is flat. I guessed that there was a fight I didn’t see and that I had interrupted. Now I’m in the middle of it—it’s the hostile space between two planets. I’d seen them argue a time or two, and when they argued they attacked each other.

Lisa has a drink in her hand of course, but she isn’t offering to get me anything. I have to make my own drink. She’s not even trying to look at me on the sly like she usually does. There’s no small talk. We roll one, smoke in near silence and head out the door to the game. This weed is ineffective stuff, about as effective as a holocaust museum.

A paratrooper was supposed to land on the fifty-yard line to start the game off on the right foot, but he lands in an adjacent cornfield by mistake.

Jordan Smith has the game of his life that night. He carries the ball forty-nine times—a new record. He’s unstoppable. The other team is a catholic school. They’re known for their aerial assault—they launch the ball on every down. They have a black quarterback, as opposed to our black running back. These are two white schools I’m describing. White teachers, white parents, white students, white lunch ladies probably—I don’t know. Each has a single black player who’s the star of the team. The catholic school (the Crusaders, of course) has even brought their priest! He’s bundled up in a frock coat on the sidelines with his white collar showing.  That’s when I notice that Rabbi is on the visiting side of the field. He’s on the wrong side. He’s by himself. We had him come and sit with us.

Now it’s Old Testament versus New Testament. I can’t believe Rabbi is willing to miss the sabbath to watch football, but he may have been here for the Luger. He has a nose for antiques. We all have noses. We have big noses—I can’t leave that out. I’m aware that all four of us have huge noses. Larger than average. We bring the average up in that crowd.  The nose never stops growing, that’s what they say, it never stops growing. Sniff, snort, snore and other nose words that begin with s-n, those s-n words are ours.

We’re in the first row of the bleachers, down where we can see the cheerleaders when people aren’t walking in front of us with their candy bars and sodas. These cheerleaders have to be freezing. The way they’re dressed they have to be frozen. One cheerleader, the smallest, is refusing to be thrown in the air. The others are trying to pressure her into it, but she won’t do it. She refuses to be thrown in the air.

Things are going better with Lisa and Casey; they’re getting along. And we’re all just so surprised to see Rabbi that we’re in good spirits. His beard is blowing in the wind.

In the second quarter the sun is setting, and it’s quite a scene. We’re in farm country. There are rows of cut wheat surrounding the football field, and sloping hills. Black crows here and there. Barns even.

“If I knew how to paint, I would like to paint that,” Rabbi said. “I’d like to have the ability to paint, just so I could paint that.”

Then we see a doe and two fawns in the distance. That gets everyone excited.

At half time we moved to higher seats since we were pressed together like European countries where we were sitting before. The people we sit by are talking about taxes and pig raising, giving each other advice on how to raise pigs. At intervals they grunt like pigs.

“The lady who didn’t have any problems bought a pig,” one said.

“Oink,” the other one said.

Then they started showing each other places on their body where they had been bruised and bitten by their pigs.

Casey’s youngest daughter is in the marching band. He points her out for us. Then he tells us how he used to hide his kid’s toothbrushes when they were little. He’d ask them if they brushed, and when they said they did, he would confront them.

“How did you brush your teeth when your toothbrush is right here in my hands?”

He even did it to the mother too—his wife at the time. She wasn’t brushing either apparently.

They would start crying. He would make them all cry together.

Lisa sees her son walking around down by the concessions. She goes down to talk to him, but he won’t talk to her. He refuses to talk with her.

“I’m a bad mother,” she said.

The final score is forty-one to forty-five. We won. Jordan Smith scored six touchdowns.  My ears are ringing since after every score we were expected to ring these cow bells—hundreds of cow bells. The visitors also had cow bells which they rang after their scores.

On the way out of the stadium a kid, a ten-year-old boy, climbs atop a chain link fence and he manages to stand on it. That’s quite a feat. When he falls (everyone knew he’d fall), his head bounces off the pavement just like a football—in unpredictable directions.

 

When we get to Casey’s house, Rabbi and I try to count all the antlers—the deer antlers on the wall. Casey’s house is from another time, it’s anachronistic. There’s a fireplace in the bathroom. Casey’s bathroom, you could lock yourself in there for hours. Have a fireside chat. Do some great thinking, signal yes or no decisions with the chimney the way they select the pope.

Rabbi will not sit down. He refuses to sit. He looks at every chair like it’s a box car to the gas ovens.

Lisa is still upset.

“I’m not a bad mother,” she said. “I’m a good mother. Do you think it’s wrong, what I did to my son?” She’s talking to Rabbi.

Rabbi’s eyebrows move like iron filings under a magnet.

“Do you love your son?”

“Of course, I love my son,” she said.

Casey fired one up and passed it my way.

“Are you Humphrey Bogart?” Casey said. He’s talking about the joint; he wants it back.

“Every guy does that,” I said. “We masturbate before and after sex. Sometimes during.”

Casey betrays me and says he has never masturbated a day in his life. He’s serious.

“Are Jewish boys allowed to masturbate?” Lisa asks Rabbi.

“It’s not encouraged.”

Lisa gives Rabbi a distrustful look. Then Lisa says that when she walked in on her son, his face was red with exertion. All his blood was in his face. It was a not a bible-reading face, she said.

“Does Casey fool around at work?” Lisa asks Rabbi. “Does he flirt? Does he have anyone on the side?”

Rabbi’s being interviewed. We’d prepared him for this. She goes on and on about how lucky Casey is. Rabbi agrees that Casey is lucky.

“At work we call you the Mona Lisa,” Rabbi said. We actually call her the Moaning Lisa.

“That’s sweet,” she said.

Lisa is getting drunk, that’s clear. She’s slowing down. Once I looked her way, she had the eyes of an abandoned doll. But then she snapped back to life.

“Where are the goddam Rolaids?” Lisa said. She looks mean when she says that, like she’s swallowing an explosive mixture, like she’s in the middle of eating small children. The way she’s standing, I can see she has a small belly.

Lisa began touching Casey inappropriately. I got the feeling, the way Casey and Lisa were acting toward each other, that they weren’t wearing any underpants. She starts undressing herself in stages. They go into the bedroom.

 

The living room resembles a cave, with a low ceiling and dim lighting. Rabbi sits down at last and gains control of the television.

“She makes me nervous,” he said.

After flipping through a hundred channels, he settles for the History channel. It’s a show about ball turret gunners. The announcer is setting things up. “How did they convince men to enter the ball turret six miles from earth?” This show promises the answer.

Casey comes out of the bedroom, his hair mussed like a newborn. It’s like he decided to mingle with the human race.

“I almost forgot,” he said. “I want to show you the Luger.”

“You said I can have it,” Rabbi said. “You said that.”

Casey brings it forth in a shoebox, unwraps it from some felt. It has a certificate along with it.

“It’s a rotten gun,” Casey said. “It’s gone rotten, it will never fire again.”

“It looks like a toy, if I’m honest,” I said.

Rabbi fingers it at length. He won’t set it down.  He points it at a ball turret gunner on the television. The show is going through all the discomfort of being in that turret, mostly having your knees in your chest for hours on end. We watch jealously.

“If the Jews had the second amendment, Hitler would have never stood a chance,” Casey said.

“It’s Ghandi’s fault, for telling Jews not to resist Hitler,” Rabbi said.

Casey mentions some movie where they shove a pineapple up Hitler’s ass as retribution. It’s his favorite movie.

“Give the pineapple to Ghandi,” Rabbi said.

“Where is Lisa?” I ask.

“I’m trying to get her to sleep. I told her she’s drinking too much. She’s sick about her son,” he said. “She’s really sick.”

“Marriages are made to prevent war,” Rabbi said. That’s all he said.

“She started drinking at nine this morning,” Casey said.

Casey goes back into the bedroom, shuts the door on us even.

I hear sobbing coming from the bedroom.

“It must be exciting in that ball turret,” I said. One veteran on the television is saying how they all fought over who would get to go in the turret. They all wanted to be in there.

“Does this usually happen? Them going into the bedroom?” Rabbi said. His voice is only half full, as if the gun has mellowed him out.

“No,” I said. “But Casey’s a ‘yes’ man.”

“Does it bother you?”

“Does what bother me?”

“That they’re going at it in there?”

“No.”

“Me either,” he said. “All that…fighting.” You can tell he wants to say fucking. “It can be dangerous. But I’m not worried. Besides I have this if we need it.” The gun he means. He’s motioning with the gun. The gun almost disappeared in his hand; it’s like the gun is the hand of a child.

Rabbi and I go back to watching our TV show. Rabbi’s beard is in his lap. An old gunner on TV said, every time he climbs in and closes the hatch it’s like the first time. We’re on the edge of our seats, we’re huddled around the television, looking into it like we’re Neanderthals looking into a fire. Rabbi changes the channels during commercials which is like poking the fire with a stick.

We hear thuds. We hear thumps. Had they fallen out of bed? Should we leave?

There’s something patriotic that forces us to stay in the living room while Casey and Lisa have sex.

“Did your mind follow them into the bedroom?” Rabbi said.

“I think it did,” I said.

Rabbi turns the volume up to eighty to combat the bedroom noise. The noises of a battlefield are coming right at us.

I smoke a cigarette halfway down and put it out in the ashtray, it’s one of those bean bag ashtrays. It’s a dream for a cigarette to sit in one of those ashtrays.

After ten minutes Casey comes out of the bedroom. He exits the bedroom. His t-shirt is in his hands. He attempts to fasten his pants and falls forward. He’s sweating. His hair is matted on his forehead.  He’s disoriented.

“What are you guys watching? Why’s the TV so loud?” Casey said. The Hitler channel is teasing the next show, the evacuation of Dunkirk. Casey wants to watch the news. He’s big on the news, current events and such.

“Channel Three Rabbi.”

“Should I—can I close the door?” I’m talking about the door to the bedroom. It’s wide open.

“Don’t touch that door. That would wake her up. It gets too warm with the door closed.”

I can see clear into the bedroom. I’m enjoying the rights and privileges of a bystander. I have the privilege of viewing her body. I can hear on the news they’re talking about layoffs at the airplane factory. I smile involuntarily. It’s a smile I can’t get rid of.

I’m looking into the bedroom where there are six deer heads on one wall—there are twelve eyes on that wall. That bedroom is all eyes. All eyes on Lisa. Lisa is laying there; her skin is pink where clothes would be—she’s naked. She’s on top of the bed sheets. She’s laying on her side, curled up in a fetal position, passed out. I can’t see anything racy—she’s facing away from me. Her knees are under her chin. She looks the way you’d imagine someone trapped in the trunk of a car. She looks hog-tied.

I get up to take a closer look. In a way, she looks like a pig. I see short bristles of hair on the upper part of her back, she’s quite hairy. More so than I would like. I start looking at her as if she is a pig waiting to be slaughtered. I start butchering her in my head, finding all the cuts. In my mind it’s an anatomical exercise. The picnic ham, the shoulder butt, the hocks, the loins, the ribs, the back fat. I know just where to cut to find the seams. I cut her up snout-to-tail.

There’s an enormous sleek black cat on the window ledge over the bed. The cat jumps down and comes out of the bedroom.

“This is what we came for,” Rabbi said. He pets the cat.

His beard looks ridiculous to me just now with the black cat in his lap, the two are indistinguishable. His beard is so damn black.

“Hells bells!” Rabbi said seeing Lisa nude. “Do you mind?” Rabbi said to Casey. “Don’t you mind what he’s doing to your wife?”

What am I doing?

“Hell no! Feast your eyes,” Casey said. “What do I care?” Casey pulls down twice on Rabbi’s beard like he’s turning on a light in a basement.

I put my hands on my head, my head feels so small, that’s reassuring since my mind feels like one of those Easter Island statues.

After I had her all cut up in my mind, I tried to figure out the best way to arrange the various parts, in the most aesthetically pleasing way. I don’t know how to describe it but it’s like one of those still-life paintings from the old days by one of those painters we call the old masters. You see these paintings in the museums with the ornate frames, paintings of stacks of trimmed meats, wheels of cheese, mounds of nuts and fruits, an apple core standing in the foreground near some sausage links.

I start stacking food beside Lisa’s body parts. Nothing haphazard, it’s purposeful. A decanter of wine, a goblet with one ruby red drop of wine. There needs to be some wild fowl, so I added a dangling pheasant. Black trumpet mushrooms and a slab of funky cheese are next. Dainty connected links of sausage and a dark rustic loaf dusty with flour. An open bible, too. The entire scene is framed by the doorway. I’m proud of the bounty before me. Traditions of plenty, traditions of excess, left in my capable hands. All this food! All this beautiful food! There’s too much food. Before I know what’s happened, I see there’s too much food.