Right To Die - Jeremiah Healy (20 page)

"With the atheists."

A vigorous nod. "I went to see him a couple of
times. At these speeches. And I hung around afterward, to talk to
him. I thought, after what his people had been through, over in
Germany with Hitler and all, Eisenberg would understand. He'd see
what's happening in this country."

"But he didn't."

"He's in bed with them! He gets up and talks
about this stuff on the same stage with these people, even has dinner
with them. For him it's like this intellectual exercise, like he's
just talking about something that's not real instead of fighting
something that is real, that's horrible and threatening us all."

"Eisenberg's not fighting like you are."

"Of course not! The things he writes, he told me
himself, they get edited by the people at the magazines — or
journals, whatever they call them — that print his stuff. And who
do you think the editors are?"

"More atheists."

"Finally. They're everywhere, like I said."

"Another speaker at this debate last night. Ever
heard of Maisy Andrus?"

"That slut! She killed her own husband! I don't
even mean pulling the plug and just letting him die. She took a
needle and shot him up with poison. It was all over the papers. She's
this big-time law professor, marries a tennis player, thinks people
forget. Well, I saved every article about her. She thinks people
forget? I'll never forget."

"You feel this strongly, how come you weren't at
the debate too?"

O'Brien hunkered down. "I was thinking about it,
but I couldn't. Had to work. Our fiscal year ends in a couple of
weeks. They need me to check things. All kinds of things."

"Who at work can I call about that?"

His head whipped up. "Why?"

"Because I'm asking you politely, that's why."

"I mean, what does this have to do with my
letters to the bishop?"

"Maybe I can just call the personnel manager."

O'Brien cowered. "No. No, call . . . call Carla
Curzone. She's my . . . our head bookkeeper."

"Give me the number I should use."

He rattled it off, adding the extension as I wrote it
down.

"Only . . ."

I said, "Only what?"

"Do me a favor, okay?"

"What?"

"Don't tell Carla you're from the po1ice."

"Don't worry. I
won't."

* * *

"Bad pizza?"

Nancy watched me carefully from across the glass
coffee table in her apartment. On her haunches, she wore a New
England School of Law sweatshirt over denim shorts and grasped a beer
mug by its handle. Renfield, Nancy's cat, watched me expectantly from
under the table as I picked at the slice on my plate.

I said, "No, the pizza's fine. Just a lousy
day."

"How so?"

I summarized it for her, starring Louis Doleman and
Steven O'Brien.

Nancy said, "It's no fun to be that close to
crazies."

It bothered me that I was probably bumming her out,
since she had to deal with crazies a lot more often than I did.

"John?"

"Yes?"

"I found a surefire way to get over that."

"Over what'?"

"Over being around crazies too much." Nancy
took a mouthful of beer.

"What is it?"

"You seek out a no-nonsense, normal person and
get deeply involved in an absolutely rational discussion."

"The cure sounds worse than the disease."

"No, really. Logic, deduction, P implies Q. It's
the secret." I tossed a piece of sausage to Renfield, who played
croquet with it until he realized the ball was edible. "Okay.
How do we start?"

Nancy set down the mug and made her eyelids flutter.
"I'll show you mine if you'll show me yours."
 

=17=

"NOW, JOHN, THE RACE ITSELF IS TWENTY-SIX
MILES, THREE hundred eighty-five yards. You can't think of her as one
distance, though. Nobody can really handle that. You got to break the
course down into chunks. Think of her as four six-mile runs with kind
of a victory lap at the end. That should be manageable.

“
Another thing. Talk to yourself when you train,
eh? Tell yourself what you want to do and why it's important for you
to do it. Concentrate and reinforce those goals and reasons. During
the race you're going to be doing the same thing. Don't worry about
what people think. Sometimes talking to yourself is the best
conversation around.

“
One more thing for
today. You're aiming at your first marathon, lots of people'll say,
'Don't make it Boston. Because it's in April, you'll have to train
all winter, and the course isn't flat enough.' Well, I say bullshit
to that. The beauty of Boston is the crowd. All along the route
you've got folks two, even three deep, clapping and cheering. Little
kids with card tables, handing out cups of water and orange sections.
No, Boston's as good a first marathon as any, and better than most.
Drink it all in, John. Remember, you'll never run your first marathon
again."

* * *

Directory assistance had a phone number for Ray
Cuervo in Marblehead, a harbor town about twelve miles north of
Boston. Trying it, I got Cuervo's tape message. A silky, sales-pitch
voice, the Spanish accent coming across only on certain words, the
English idioms perfect. It told me that if I needed to reach him,
he'd be at the Sarrey Co-op plant, giving a 603 area code. I took out
a map of New Hampshire and found Sarrey just about where I remembered
it, a little north of the Massachusetts border. It turned out to be
only an hour and ten minutes from Boston up Interstate 93 and a
couple of scenic country roads that hadn't yet yielded to suburbia's
manifest destiny.

The plant itself was three stories high and roughly
square. The tall windows were recessed into an old facade of gray
brick, giving the impression of a structure that had been built for
one purpose and converted to another. I drove a circuit around the
plant. On one side was a receiving dock, a Mack tractor-trailer just
pulling away. On the second side, facing west, the windows were
boarded up. On the third side of the building was another dock, this
one with men loading boxes into the back of another trailer. The
fourth side fronted a parking lot for a hundred cars, maybe fifty
vehicles in it on a Wednesday morning. I left the Prelude next to a
large sign saying SARREY CO-OP PACKING — BEST VEAL IN THE EAST.

Inside the main door was a staircase and a blank
concrete block wall. The stairs seemed more inviting. At the top was
a door standing ajar and a catwalk. The catwalk curved out of sight
toward sounds like a carpentry shop in high gear.

The doorway led to a minimalist office, a young woman
in a lumberjack shirt and jeans behind an old partners' desk. She was
drowning in a sea of multipart invoices and order forms. As the
woman flailed through the paperwork, the bangs of
her hair fell to her eyes.

I said, "Excuse me?"

She looked up through the bangs like a sheepdog.
"Help you?"

"I'm looking for Ray Cuervo."

"He's down on the kill floor with the rabbi."

"How can I find it?"

"If you're not in the business, mister, maybe
you don't want to know."

"Please?"

The woman blew out a breath, more to clear her hair
than to show exasperation, I thought. "You're not dressed for
it." She pointed to the catwalk and said, "Follow the walk
around. You'll know it when you see it. Might want to stay on the
walk for a while, get used to things."

I thanked her and moved around the walk.

Below me, about forty men and women were wearing
white butchers' outfits, yellow aprons, and black hip boots. At one
end of the huge room, a worker prodded a calf from a wooden corral
down a concrete ramp. Another worker affixed shackles, trailing
chains from the ceiling, to the animal's hind legs. As soon as he was
finished, a woman touched a long wand to the calf's temple. It jerked
spasmodically and went down like a sack of potatoes. The shackler
cranked something, and the calf rose by the shackles, hanging upside
down.

The chains moved the calf forward to a burly man in a
full beard with ringlets of sideburns. He was dressed like the other
workers except for a yarmulke on his head. With one clean slash of a
big knife, the man cut the calf's throat. He stepped away from the
torrent, joining another man who was holding a clipboard. As the man
in the yarmulke sharpened the knife, the man with the clipboard
talked with him. I pegged Clipboard to be in his early thirties,
about six feet tall and slim, with wavy black hair and a black
mustache.

The calf began to move slowly along the line, workers
gutting the animal and sorting the organs. Next, two women and a man
skinned the calf with hand-held rotary saws like a pathologist would
use on the skull during an autopsy. After they finished. one of them
brought the hide to a washing machine, taking other hides out and
heaving them down something like a laundry chute. At the next station
for the carcass, the head was taken off and put on a rack next to
twenty or so others, the tongues protruding. Then the rest of the
animal, still hanging from the shackles, went off to a room from
which I could hear water jets like a car wash. All in all, the
process seemed pretty humane, kind of a reverse assembly line in
which each part seemed destined for further use.

The only problem was the blood smell. A warm, steamy
thickness to the air, like being in a kitchen when someone was
steeping the wrong kind of soup.

"Hey?"

I turned around.

Clipboard, stripped to a dress shirt, tie, and
slacks, was standing on the catwalk ten feet from me, grinning. "Ray
Cuervo."

"John Cuddy."

"Come on into my
office. We can talk."

* * *

"Sure you don't want some coffee?"

"No, thanks."

Cuervo sipped from his paper cup. We occupied two
metal chairs in a cramped room. The shelves above and behind his desk
held some looseleaf binders and a couple of photos in frames. One
photo showed a house with beige stone walls and an orange tile roof,
the walls bordered by small trees, kinds I was pretty sure I'd never
seen before. In another photo, an adolescent Cuervo was standing near
a man who resembled a dark-haired Cesar Romero, both wearing hunting
gear. An elaborate telephone and a fax machine took up most of the
desk.

Cuervo hadn't asked me for any identification, so I
hadn't yet brought up why I was there.

"This your first time at the co-op, John?"

"It is."

"We've got a great operation here. Only the
second true growers' co-op in this part of the country. We patterned
ourselves after Penn Quality out past Albany. Veau Blanc?"

I nodded as though I knew what he meant.

"Toughest part was coming up with the financing.
The growers around here, like everywhere else, would just sell their
calves to the packing house, never had much idea about the business
side of running a plant themselves. But once we got them to see the
advantages of fair price and fair grading for their product, they
came up with their share of the front money, and we're in business.
Doing eight hundred calves a week most weeks now, and that's not bad.
Penn's a shade ahead of us, but they started before we did, and
they've got this all-star named Azzone selling for them. It'll take
us a while, but we'll catch them."

To keep him going, I said, "Where are you
concentrating?"

He set down the cup. "Boston, for now. With
veal, you know, you're pretty much selling to the supermarket chains
and the restaurant distributors. And you pretty much have to hit the
ethnics, your Italians, your Jews. I was lucky to get into the
business, since it's mostly a family trade. But I'm from Spain
originally, and a lot of the Hispanics in the New York/Boston
corridor like their veal."

"You ever visit the restaurants on Newbury
Street?"

"Newbury? You mean, like in Boston?"

"Yes."

I seemed to put him off track. "Once in a while.
Couple of small accounts there. That where you are?"

"A few blocks away."

Cuervo came back on track. "So, what do you
think of our operation?"

"Impressive."

"Damned right. State-of-the-art equipment and
sanitary standards. You saw the schochet down there?"

"The what?"

"The rabbi, like."

"Oh, yes, I did."

"You don't run a clean plant, you don't have to
worry about the government inspectors. The rabbis, they'll close you
down first. Only use the front quarter of the animal, but you got to
have them."

"Even so, it didn't look like you waste
anything."

"Right again, John. The heads we send to
Mexico-they go for the brains and the cheek meat down there. The
hearts, the Italians, they stuff them. Kidneys to the fancy French
bistros. The rest of the dropped meat we send off to Europe. The
hides to Japan for tanning, then to Italy for gloves and shoes."