Chapter 1: Beer and Blood
The concrete was cold through his coveralls, but John didn’t shift. He just stared at the black water, his big hands resting on his knees like two lumps of meat waiting to be processed. The pull-tab hissed and foamed. He passed the first can to Elena without looking.
She took it. The aluminum clicked against her wedding ring—a thin, cheap thing she never took off, even here. She drank, a long and practiced tilt of her head, her throat working silently. She didn’t thank him. She never did. That was part of the ritual, too.
A dead fish floated past, belly-up and ghostly white in the gloom. Its eye was a milky marble. John nodded at it. “Look. Captain of the ship.”
Elena followed his gaze, her expression not changing. “It’s a carp.”
“Captain Carp, then.” He took a swallow from his own can. The beer was cheap and bitter, but it did the job. It started the fog, the soft static that blurred the edges of the day. The stench was always there, underneath the beer and the river-muck: a thick, metallic smell of blood and bleach and fear that seeped into your pores. It was in the weave of their coveralls, under their fingernails, in the roots of their hair. You could stand under a shower for an hour and still smell it.
“Lynch was on the kill floor today,” John said, scraping a callus along the rim of his can. “Slipped in the chute. Went down hard. Whole line stopped for ten minutes while they hosed him off.”
“Is he okay?”
“Got a shiner. Mostly his pride.” John’s laugh was a short, dry sound. “They wrote him up for the stoppage. Safety violation.”
Elena pulled her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms around them. The gesture made her look young, which annoyed him. She was twenty-two, but sometimes she seemed like a kid playing dress-up in grime. It was the eyes, he figured. Too big for her face, always watching. “I chipped another tooth on the line today,” she said, not looking at him. “On the back-left. Feels weird with my tongue.”
“Told you to get a mouthguard.”
“Told you I can’t afford it.”
He didn’t answer. The wind shifted, carrying the low, constant groan of the cement plant across the river. It mixed with the hum of the abattoir’s refrigeration units, a sound so deep you felt it in your molars. The reeds rattled, brittle and brown. This was their spot. A scar of a place for scarred people.
“Your old man call today?” he asked.
She shook her head, took another drink. “He’s on days. Probably passed out by now.”
“Good.” John meant it. He didn’t like the old man’s voice on the phone, the wheedling tone that asked for money Elena didn’t have. He liked being the one she complained to. It made him necessary. He finished his beer, crushed the can in one fist, and tossed it into the river. It landed with a dull plunk and floated, joining a small congregation of other cans and debris. “You wanna get out of here?”
“It’s Tuesday.”
“So?”
“So, you get paid Friday.” She stated it flatly, a fact of their universe. Tuesday meant her cramped apartment, the one with the mildew smell the landlord wouldn’t fix. Friday, after the checks cleared, sometimes meant his place. A six-pack of something stronger, the grimy glow of the TV, and the heavy, wordless exchange that followed. He provided the beer, the buffer against the silence. She provided a presence. It wasn’t tenderness. It was an economy.
“Could just go for a drive,” he said, but the suggestion was weak. His truck was low on gas, and the thought of all that empty dark highway was worse than the thought of going home.
“I’m tired, John.”
He looked at her then, really looked. The fine lines of exhaustion around her eyes, the way her shoulders slumped forward like they were carrying the weight of the day’s thousand carcasses. There was a faint spatter of something dark on her neck, just below her ear. It might have been rust. It might not have been.
A tightness gripped his chest, a familiar cocktail of frustration and a strange, ugly pity. He reached over, his thumb rough against her skin, and rubbed at the spot. She stiffened, but didn’t pull away. Her skin was cool.
“You got blood on you,” he muttered.
She finally turned her head, her large eyes meeting his. There was no fear in them, just a deep, hollow patience. “It’s always blood, John.”
He held her gaze for a moment longer than was comfortable, his hand still cradling her jaw. He could feel the delicate bones beneath. He thought about the steers in the knocking box, the way their eyes rolled white just before the piston fired. There was a trust in that animal blindness, right before the end. He saw none of that in Elena. She was all calculation, even now. Especially now.
His thumb traced the line of her jaw down to her chin. It was a possessive gesture, and he knew she hated it. He needed her to hate it a little. It proved she was still paying attention.
“You should let me take care of you more,” he said, his voice lower.
“You do take care of me.” Her reply was automatic, toneless. A recited line in their play.
“Not like I could.” He leaned in, the beer on his breath mingling with the abattoir smell. “This life… it’s eating you alive. I see it. You need someone to…”
“To what?” she interrupted, not unkindly, but with a finality that made his jaw clench. “Drag me out of it? You’re in the same river, John. You’re just pretending you’re on the bank.”
He pulled his hand back as if burned. Anger, hot and sudden, flashed through him. She saw too much. That was her problem. He cracked open another two beers, the sound violent in the quiet. He thrust one at her.
She accepted it. The transaction was complete. The unspoken debt, for this moment, was paid.
They drank in silence for a while, watching the Captain Carp slowly sink. The sky turned a deeper sludge-gray, twilight bleeding into the perpetual industrial gloom. When she stood, brushing concrete grit from the back of her coveralls, he stood too.
“Walk you to your car,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
They walked across the cracked lot, past the chain-link fence topped with razor wire. Her shitbox Honda was parked under a flickering sodium light that buzzed and popped. Moths beat themselves to death against the hot glass.
She unlocked the door, the sound echoing in the vast, empty lot. He put a hand on the roof of the car, leaning in, blocking her way. He could see the fatigue in every line of her, the desperate need to be alone. He couldn’t let her go with just that.
“Friday,” he said.
“Maybe.”
“I’ll get the whiskey you like.”
She gave him a small, weary smile that didn’t reach her eyes. It was a concession. “Okay. Friday.”
He waited for it. The peck on the cheek, the brief squeeze of his arm—some token to seal the promise. She just slid into the driver’s seat, pulled the door shut, and started the engine. The car coughed to life.
He stepped back, his hands going into his pockets. He watched her reverse, the red taillights bleeding into the dark as she turned toward the road. The loneliness that settled over him then was a physical weight, colder than the riverbank concrete.
He turned and walked toward his own truck, his boots crunching on gravel. From the shadow of the main abattoir loading dock, a figure detached itself. It was Donny from the rendering side, a gaunt man with permanently yellow-stained gloves. He was smoking, the cherry of his cigarette bobbing in the dark.
“Hey, John. That Elena?”
John grunted, fumbling for his keys.
“Pretty thing,” Donny said, his voice sly. “Quiet, though. Always seems scared of her own shadow.”
“She’s not scared,” John snapped, the anger from the riverbank finding a new target. “She’s smart. You’d know the difference if you ever talked to something that wasn’t already ground up.”
Donny held up his stained hands in mock surrender, chuckling. “Easy, big man. Just making conversation.”
John unlocked his truck, the door groaning open. He didn’t look back at Donny. He looked down the empty road where Elena’s taillights had vanished. The quiet she left behind was different now. It felt like a challenge. Like a space he was supposed to fill, but didn’t know how.
He got in, slammed the door, and sat there in the dark for a long time, listening to the idle grumble of the engine and the distant, weeping sound of a steer in the holding pens.