Summer in a Slaughterhouse

It’s the smell that hits you first. Even before you get out of the car, the stench is there. Pigs. Thousands of them. You’ve signed your life away for the next three months and it’s getting harder to remember why. You park the car and head towards the building with the Maple Leaf logo emblazoned on the front.

You get suited up: One shirt, white. One pair of pants, white. One full body slicker, yellow. One face mask, check. Ear plugs. Double check.

The smell of chemicals wafts up the corridor. The hum of machinery rings in your ears like a hummingbird. You walk down a long corridor towards the “Dirty Kill” side of the plant, as it’s affectionately known. That’s where you work. You see a freezer door is ajar, so you peek inside. Hundreds of pigs hang from the rafters, gutless, strung up by their jaws. Sweat beads on your forehead. You know this place better than you’d like. It fills your nights and haunts your days. This is a hard place, where time moves on its own accord. You’ve only been working the night shift for a month, but it feels like a lifetime.

You did it for the money. That’s the honest truth. You finished your freshman year at university and you were flat broke. An education doesn’t leave much room for financial security these days. Dad told you Maple Leaf was the best paying outfit in town and you really didn’t have many other options, unless you thought working for minimum wage bagging groceries sounded profitable. It didn’t and you knew that cash was a key concern in returning to school. You knew the quality summer jobs had already been snatched up and Maple Leaf really didn’t sound so bad in theory. You’ll probably end up packaging cuts of meat, like some giant delicatessen. It could be fun.

You hit a switch and the turbines start spinning. It takes them a second, but once they’re going you sure as hell better stand back and watch your step. The firehose is draped over a railing five feet away, awaiting use. You’re not really supposed to clean the machine with the turbines spinning. You could potentially trip and get your head slapped off by the rotating rubber paddles. Thing is, the boss has been checking up on you at the end of every shift and you haven’t been getting all your work done on time. Spraying down the machine while it’s running shaves off a good half hour, plus you don’t have to use the pitchfork nearly as much. So you turn on the hose and begin the grueling task of cleaning the dehairing machine. It’s spitting out clumps of hair fast and furious, splattering your faceguard. You wipe it away, keeping your hose on the massive spinning cylinders. For some reason, “Sweet Home Alabama” is stuck in your head.

You think back to your first day. Mac, a portly man with an offbeat charm, was assigned to train you. You remember him eating a sandwich, lazily sauntering as he showed you around. “It sh’all about spheed and effith-ciencthy”, he explained with a mouth full of ham. “This ma-sheen--”, big swallow “--dehairs almost twelve hundred pigs a day. You’ll only have two tools at your disposal for cleaning: a pitchfork and a firehose. Make sure to shut off the machine when you’re cleaning. God knows the last thing we need is some kid getting killed on the job. Make sure to use your time wisely or the boss’ll ride your ass hard.”

Mac reminds you of a sweaty John Goodman with a moustache. He doesn’t bother wearing a protective jacket or facemask, when both are required. You ask him why. “I could be covered in hog sauce or chocolate pudding, I really don’t give two shits either way.”

You take a look at the machine you’ve been assigned to clean. It’s large, almost two stories high. It looms over you, like a giant carinvore, hungry for sustenance. It’s a giant mouth and you’re the dental floss, doomed to clean its teeth, night after night.

Mac tells you that the dehairing machine is a necessity for any “self-respecting” hog plant. It has three large cylinders with rotating rubber paddles that remove the hair from a hog’s carcass. As the hogs are stripped bare, their hair is churned by a giant auger. It is moved and discarded through a chute at the end of auger’s run. There are three sections: the first is the tallest. You have to climb three sets of stairs to reach the platform on the top. On either side of the machine there are platforms you have to climb, one platform for cylinder needing cleaning. Once you’re on the platform, you open up the panel that covers the paddles and start scrapping out the hair (and whatever else is stuck inside) with a pitchfork.

*****

It’s time for your dinner break. You don’t wear a watch and for some reason, there are no clocks to found anywhere the plant, expect for one in the mess hall. You’ve started to rely on your body clock to determine what time it is. You’re getting pretty good at it. Your guess is never more than ten minutes off the current time (it’s a skill you’ll retain your entire life). You shut off the dehairing machine and head towards the dining area. You step inside a small white room filled with benches and remove your helmet. It almost feels cozy in here, compared to the high ceilings and cold steel found in the rest of the plant. There are three or four guys sitting in the corner, swapping stories about their weekends spent with their “bitches”. The dining area is divided into two sections: smoking and non-smoking. Smoking is one excess the peons at Maple Leaf allow themselves, since their nihts are otherwise filled with chemicals and hog shit. The smoking room is packed, but since you don’t smoke, you enjoy a quiet dinner alone in the opposite room. You like it better this way. Your pull out the food your mother prepared for you: leftover lasagna, tossed salad, some chocolate cake and a can of Diet Dr. Pepper.

You borrowed a copy of Crossfire Trail by Louis L’Amour from the library and you’ve been reading it with dinner. The bi-weekly community newspapers were getting stale. For thirty minutes a day, you’re completely removed for the hog plant in mind and soul, leaving the body behind. You exist in a band of hopeful Northerners, blazing a trail to the Californian plains. The protagonist, James Lyndon, is a lone rider, helping caravanning Northerners at his own whim. He allows himself no excess but deals with the cards life’s dealt him. You can relate to that. You pulled a mean hand when you took this job and you draw the same cards each night.

It’s time to return to work. You look at the clock. It’s a quarter to ten. You really should have thought through working a night shift. Many variables should have been taken into consideration before accepting this role: the chemicals, the hours, the people. You’re trying not feel bitter because your boss is trying to crack your spirit.

Krishan is your boss. You can tell he’s been working here for too long because he’s always pissed off. Always. His brow is constantly furrowed and he has a penetrating stare. At almost six foot six, he’s a tall man. He looks down on you literally and figuratively. His being exists in a constant state of criticism. You’re pretty sure the only time you’ve seen him smile was a week ago. You were walking towards the bathroom and didn’t notice an oily pig liver on the floor. You slipped, landed on your side and got the wind knocked out of you. You looked around to see if anybody noticed and saw Krishan standing in a doorway. A smug look sat perched on his face. Then he turned and walked away.

You hate that man.

*****

The amount of deadly chemicals at your disposal is frightening. A Native man who works a few stations down once told you that if you mixed hydrochloric acid and ammonia, you’d create mustard gas. It’d be as potent as anything used in World War I, he’d said. Both of those chemicals can be found in the storage room. It’s unnerving because you have to use hydrochloric acid each night to sanitize the dehairing machine. What if you were careless one night and accidentally poured the unused chemicals down the wrong drain, creating a massive cloud of yellow gas, leaving you deformed and begging for death? That’s some scary shit.

You can feel the clock closing in on the eight hour mark, so your night is almost over. You wrap up the firehose and tuck it behind a large pillar. You close all the doors on the dehairing machine and power down the machine. You look up and see Krishan walking towards your station. He greets you with a curt nod and begins a slow walk around the dehairing machine, looking it up and down. He stops and stoops down near one of the large pillars. He beckons you over. He looks perturbed. You’d think someone just took a shit on the hood of his car.

“Tell me, what is this?” He points to a clump of hair tucked behind the base of a pillar.

“It appears to be a clump of hair,” you reply.

“It does, doesn’t it? And so it appears that you were unable to do your job properly! Why don’t you take some pride in your work instead of wastin’ my time here!”

He rants and raves and all you can think about is going home. In this job, you deal with shit on all ends of the spectrum. Then something peculiar happens. As the spittle sprays and his eyes rage, you realize that Krishan is getting smaller. With each heated word, his body is slowly withering and shrinking.
He’s barely five foot.
Now he’s three feet high.
Two feet.
One.
His tiny eyes are bulging. He raises his arms up and own, as if trying to emphasize a point. You raise your boot and bring it down hard on the tiny figure beneath you. A squeal erupts from his body, along with a murky red mush, like you stepped on a tomato. You grind your foot down hard, like you’re putting out a stubborn cigarette butt.

You look up and realize you’re alone. You turn your head and see Krishan walking away, trench coat billowing, clipboard by his side. It seems your whimsical daydream blocked out the majority of his tirade. As much as Krishan tries to beat you down, you’ll see this job through to the end and by God, you’ll conquer this bastard.

Your shift is over. You head to the locker room, shed your yellow slicker and toss your undershirt into the laundry bin. A dull pain crackles up and down your spine. You roll your shoulders, providing a small comfort. You get dressed. It was a long night but you survived. You exit the building, leaving the long sterile corridors, hog carcasses and inflated egos behind you.

A cool summer breeze greets your face.