I had it. Its dead bones against my living bones, its dead flesh against my living flesh, and the bone and the weight cut in, I thought of a sexy cunt sitting across from me on a couch with her legs crossed high and me with a drink in my hand, slowly and surely talking my way toward and into the blank mind of her body, and Hank hollered, “HANG HER IN THE TRUCK!”
I ran toward the truck. The shame of defeat taught me in American schoolyards as a boy told me that I must not drop the steer to the ground because this would prove that I was a coward and not a man and that I didn’t therefore deserve much, just sneers and laughs, you had to be a winner in America, there wasn’t any way out, you had to learn to fight for nothing, don’t question, and besides if I dropped the steer I might have to pick it up, and I knew I could never pick it up. Besides it would get dirty. I didn’t want it to get dirty, or rather—they didn’t want it to get dirty.
I ran it into the truck.
“HANG IT!”
The hook which hung from the roof was dull as a man’s thumb without a fingernail. You let the bottom of the steer slide back and went for the top, you poked the top part against the hook again and again but the hook would not go through. Mother ass!! It was all gristle and fat, tough, tough.
“COME ON! COME ON!”
I gave it my last reserve and the hook came through, it was a beautiful sight, a miracle, that hook coming through, that steer hanging there by itself completely off my shoulder, hanging for the housecoats and butchershop gossip.
“MOVE ON!”
A 285 pound Negro, insolent, sharp, cool, murderous, walked in, hung his meat with a snap, looked down at me.
“We stays in line here!”
“O.k., ace.”
I walked out in front of him. Another steer was waiting for me. Each time I loaded one I was sure that was the last one I could handle but I kept saying
one more
just one more
then I
quit.
Fuck
it.