Pork Chop stuck her stubby pink forelegs out straight and planted her rear hooves in the gravel, refusing to go up the ramp. The square bell around her neck clanged. She had not been fooled by the slight, gentle young man with the curly blond hair who spoke to her in sweet tones and made soothing clucking noises with his tongue. She would not cooperate any more than this. She would not go into the truck.
The task of coaxing Pork Chop inside was made twice as difficult by the dog, a black Lab. George, the pig’s owner, said that the dog had adopted Pork Chop as a piglet, when she was about the size of a twelve-week-old pup. Now, the dog ran around and around the ramp barking at them, jumping up and hooking its front paws over the sides of the ramp from time to time to see if Pork Chop was all right.
Mitch sighed. Not one of these hobby farmers was ever ready when he got there. He was making this pickup for his father as a favour, a pain-in-the-ass trip at the end of a hot, back-breaking day that started at six, about thirteen hours ago. Worse, it was fixing to rain.
Hobby farmers like George just didn’t get it. Hunters, now they knew what was up. Of course, hunters brought in their own kills after dragging them out of the bush, but these hobby farmers didn’t want to see any blood. George was twice Mitch’s age and lived alone, and he worked in one of the big car plants in Windsor as a skilled tradesman, one of the top pay-grades in the dwindling union. Mitch had pretended to listen to George natter on for over an hour now, unable to think about much other than the fact that George made more in a week than he did in a month, maybe two. George was pretty proud of the fact that since he’d gone to the factory, he rarely had to put on a tool belt anymore. Most of the time, he sat in front of a computer, watching a robot do all the heavy lifting. Mitch couldn’t even imagine what that kind of work might be like, but he looked at George’s soft hands, and he listened to him talk and talk like an auntie at a church social, and he was fine with things the way they were.
Mitch did manage to absorb a few things from George’s stream of chatter. A few years ago, George had bought ten acres and built a “solar” home, a plain block structure with oversized south windows that looked like they leaked badly. Mitch had toured the house and barns earlier, sipping politely on a mug of bitter-tasting “all natural” homebrew while they waited for George’s older brother to show up. Mitch couldn’t remember the older brother’s name, just that he was a doctor, but probably not a real doctor, because when George mentioned it, it had sounded like a joke. Mitch didn’t appreciate being left out of the joke, as if they were trying to make him feel stupid, but he didn’t say anything. The brother had also brought his wife, a once-pretty woman who didn’t say much, but when she did talk she used big words. The evening seemed to be some kind of weird family event. He hoped his part in it ended soon.
Mitch pulled a short piece of rope out of the back of the truck and tied one end into a lasso.
“I’ll try to pull her in with the rope,” he said to George. “You try to push her in.”
The woman called the dog, and held on to the dog’s red collar. The pig didn’t want any part of the rope, either. She squealed and whipped her head from side to side, trying to back out of the ramp, but George and his brother blocked her path. Pigs were smart and sometimes ornery, but this pig was the most independent pain in the ass he’d ever seen. George had said that the pig had grown up roaming the farm freely during the day. She had only been penned up at night. It had been an experiment, a test run for a business called happymeat-dot-com. George laughed when he said this, but Mitch couldn’t tell if George was joking about that or not, either. George had also told him that while the new barn was being built, the pig had developed a taste for chunks of leftover drywall and other construction materials, hardly a healthy, chemical-free diet.
Obviously, this pig did not believe that she was a pig. She was sure she was a pet, or at the very least, in charge, which made her a big, fat problem. After a few tries, Mitch finally got the business end of the rope around her neck. He pulled with all his muscle and heart while the brothers pushed, but Pork Chop firmly planted her three hundred pounds and stayed put. They tried a few more times, performing a slow, sweaty, huffing-and-puffing dance a few inches up and back down the ramp, never gaining any real ground. After the fifth or sixth rally up the ramp, he stopped to catch his breath, leaning forward on his knees and slackening the tension on the rope just a little.
The pig seized her advantage. She jerked back and pulled the end of the rope through his hands, burning a red line into the flesh of his palms. Thrashing between the sidewalls of the ramp, the pig wrestled the rope off of her neck, then picked it up in her snout and tossed it into the yard. George cracked up.
“I guess that’s not going to work!”
George’s brother shook his head. The brother had seemed annoyed since he arrived. Mitch had to hold himself back, stop himself from getting pissed off at George. He turned away, feeling his cheeks burning.
He walked back into the closed box of the truck. Normally, he wouldn’t use this tool in front of these kind of citified “green” customers—they complained that it hurt the pig, as if butchering it and eating it would do it no harm—but the damn pig had left him no choice. He found what he was looking for in a forward corner of the dark truck, and stepped back out onto the ramp. It was getting dark enough to kick the sodium yard light on, and an earnest drizzle had started. The ramp would be slippery soon.
“Here. Use this.”
He tossed the cattle prod to George’s brother. The brother caught it effortlessly in one hand.
He bent down and grabbed the pig’s collar and twisted it. Not much leverage, but all he needed to do was guide it. The bell clinked, drawn up tight. The pig made soft snorting noises. He shifted slightly to the right, giving the pig clear passage into the truck.
“Okay. Anytime.”
George’s brother switched the cattle prod on and applied it to the pig’s right flank. The pig shrieked and—instead of running forward into the truck, away from the pain—bolted out of his grip and over the side, taking the side wall of the ramp down with her. At the same time, the dog broke away from the woman and raced after the pig, the two of them squealing and barking their heads off, racing around in crazed circles in the open yard.
George found all of this uproariously funny. Too funny. Mitch began to wonder about him. George’d been unusually talkative while they were waiting for his brother to show up. Mitch had initially put it down to shyness or nerves, but now he wasn’t sure. Had George been out behind his brand-new three-car pole barn full of fancy tools from woodworking magazines, smoking something he’d brought back from the factory? Mitch didn’t like being laughed at, but he guessed it was better than dealing with a crazy pig and a pissed-off customer.
“I can only think of one other thing.”
He didn’t dare look George in the eye, afraid his true feelings might show.
“You got a bucket?”
George brought out an old white plastic five-gallon paint pail from the barn, then emptied it and rinsed it out twice. It smelled as if it had been used as a piss bucket, even though there was a washroom inside. Maybe George was no better at plumbing than he was at rearing pigs.
The rain had picked up. It was fairly steady now, and the bare patches of clay in the yard where the grass had declined to grow were getting muddy and slick. The three of them chased the pig around the yard for what felt like fifteen minutes, trying to triangulate the wary animal. The dog circled them the entire time, not too close but barking relentlessly, mostly at Mitch, ignoring the woman as she tried to call it to her.
Finally, the pig must’ve gotten tired, because it ran around the corner of a shed without looking and Mitch jammed the bucket over its head. It was a tight fit, his first piece of luck. No matter how hard the pig tried to work it off, the bucket stayed put. Still, there was no sense wasting time. He guided the still-struggling pig over to the ramp, and jumped up in front of it. George and his brother came ‘round the back of the animal, but before they could manoeuvre it up the ramp, the dog came around the other side. It lunged, aiming its snout beneath the lower rails of the standing sidewall and nipped him on the heel—not hard, but it bit down enough to pinch him through the thin padding of his discount-store runner.
George started in laughing again, but his brother gave the dog hell and told it to go in the house. The dog slunk back to the woman and they both went inside.
It didn’t take long after that. With her friend the dog gone and unable to see, Pork Chop soon surrendered and allowed herself to be shoved up the ramp and into the truck. He yanked the bucket off and slammed the door on the shrieking pig. Then he pulled up the ramp, took it apart and loaded it on the ladder rack. He could hear the dog barking in the house.
“Can I getcha another beer?”
George offered. His brother lit a cigarette, briefly showing a slight scowl on his face.
“Nah. Thanks anyway.”
It was seven-thirty, and he just wanted to get out of there. His parents probably hadn’t waited supper, but his mother would keep something warm for him. As he pulled away, he could see the silhouette of the woman watching from the lighted window and a grinning George waving good-bye reflected in his mirrors.
The rain had slowed again to a faint, misty sprinkle. The pig kept up its squealing while they bumped along the half-mile of poorly graded driveway, but once they were out on smoother paved roads, it began to settle. All he could hear was a little agitated grunting and the occasional clank of the bell. That was better. He still had to drive halfway across the county, and some of the people in these fancy new “estate” subdivisions called and complained about things like a truck with a noisy pig driving through at night, especially a truck with Ed’s Custom Killing painted on the side.
Didn’t the woman, just before she went into the house, say something about never eating pork again? Where did she think her dinner came from? He didn’t get these people at all. Hunters, they understood. They knew the way things worked, and they weren’t afraid of it. He liked hunters. These other people, the ones that bought up the old family farms and kept the houses but sold off the land, or the ones that built some huge house that looked like a castle with turrets and gates and everything and carried on about “the simple life,” well, he just didn’t understand them. To be honest, he didn’t much want to.
Fuck ‘em. Let ‘em eat drywall-fed pork and start Web sites where they sold animals that were pampered and petted before they turned into steaks, chops and roasts, like it made any damn difference. Dead is dead.
Happymeat-dot-com? It had to be another one of their jokes. They were the big joke, he thought as he turned up the radio and drowned out the last grunts of the spoiled, unhappy pig in the back of the truck.
About the Author:
Kim Hutchinson is a writer and filmmaker. Kim’s journalism has been featured in magazines, on radio and television, and her short stories and poetry have appeared in The Adirondack Review, Amsterdam Scriptum, ShatterColors Literary Review, and Amarillo Bay. Her directorial debut is in distribution with Big Film Shorts in California.
