Foodchain by Jeff Jacobson Page B

bars, empty, depressing places. They hit all of them, then drove up to the Split Rock Reservoir Dam, where Jack and Pine had lost their virginity, both to the same girl. Jack and Pine teased Chuck about still being a virgin, something that Chuck loudly and repeatedly denied.
    They drove past the house with the dead tree and the giant satellite dish. The children were gone. “Fuckin’ Gloucks,” Jack snapped at the disintegrating house. “Worse than fuckin’ garbage.” He hit the gas and wandered aimlessly up and down the quiet streets, and Frank pieced the history of the town together.
    Whitewood had seen better days. The valley used to be rich, renowned for its wild rice. Exported it all over the world. But after a flood several years back, the rice started dying, as if the soil itself was diseased somehow. The rice would grow for a bit, under the protection of the irrigation water, but then it just slowly started to rot, until all that was left was the flooded fields chock full of muddy water and decomposing rice stalks.
    * * * * *
    Jack spit into a flooded rice paddy. The water was utterly black under the stars. They had stopped to take a piss by the side of an empty strip of blacktop that cut through two rice fields, each the size of several football fields. “See them lights?” Jack nodded at cluster of yellow lights at the base of some dark hills to the south. “That’s where our boss lives. Horace Sturm. His great-grandfather started the town. He’s a good man.”
    “A damn good man,” Chuck echoed.
    The others agreed and raised their beer cans. Frank raised his as well, eyeing the lights.
    “He’s dyin’ though,” Jack said.
    “Don’t say that,” Chuck said. “He’s fightin’ it.”
    Pine turned to Frank and said, confidentially, “Cancer.”
    “Fuckin’ brain tumor,” Jack said. “You only fight that so much.”
    Frank thought of the odd, fierce little man in the restroom at the fairground.
    “Doctors took it out, but they say it’ll probably come back. Bigger,” Pine said. “He went through a shitload of chemo. I mean, a shitload. Doctors wanted him to stay in the hospital, but he said, fuck that, I’m goin’ home. If I’m gonna die, then it’ll be at home. Not the hospital. And he’s been home, so far.”
    “How long’s he been home?” Frank asked.
    “A month,” Jack said, proud. “He’s gonna beat it.” They all took a drink, watching the lights across the black water.
    * * * * *
    The auction yard squatted at the top of a low hill on the north side of town. The large building rose to a steep crown in the center, its sharply angled shingles a glossy green in the moonlight. Heavy stones anchored the walls into the earth, giving way to dark slats of oak. The rest of the building sloped off to either side, long and low. Frank couldn’t see any windows. The parking lot was full of pickups.
    He caught the faint, guttural roar of a crowd.
    They parked near the end of the parking lot. The clowns pointed out where they lived—a large gooseneck trailer at the edge of the property. They finished the bottle of Seagrams and cracked open one last beer. “No alcohol inside,” Pine explained. “We work auctions four days a week. Saturday nights, usually, we got dogfights. Tuesday nights, Sturm rents the place out to the spics for cockfights. Tonight…tonight only comes once a year.”
    The roar reverberated out of the building again.
    They went inside. The floors were stone, the walls dark wood. The main room was large, with high ceilings. Five sodium vapor lights hung over the circle in the center of the room, bright enough to bleach the color out of skin. Stadium seats surrounded the center, aluminum slats that echoed with a shrill, hollow sound as cowboy boots dragged across the metal. The seats were full of men; ranchers and farmers and fieldhands. Frank smelled sawdust, sweat, and underneath it all, the sour, yet tangy aftertaste of a steak that’s just a shade rare—the