1
FIRST I READ THIS STORY about a man in Zambia who hung himself after his wife heard a noise and found him screwing one of their hens. Then I read about
an eleven-year-old Japanese girl in Sasebo who sliced one of her classmates to death with a box cutter during lunch and showed up for social studies
covered in blood. Then I ripped my computer from the outlet and threw it through the open window, whereupon it fell some thirty feet to the sidewalk
below and shattered with a dull thud. The sidewalk was empty. The hen was slaughtered.
I told Chongo these stories at work while we were cutting up a special order of thirty-five chickens for a Memorial Day
barbecue. He made his typical childlike smile and giggled his childlike laugh. He said that Mexicans knew better than to behave like this. He said I was stupid
for ruining a perfectly good computer. We kept cutting—wings, drums, thighs, backs and split breasts, over and over—and he kept talking.
"Work hard, compadre. Keep busy and there's no time for stupid mistakes. What busy man thinks to fuck a chicken?" Chongo was low man on the totem
pole in the meat department. He worked the shit shift, closing, from 1-10 PM. In the mornings he painted houses and came to
the market with evidence of that hard work all over his shoes and in his hair.
I was on the sofa, rubbing on Jessie's rosebud, when Chongo knocked at my door. It was Wednesday, summer, lunchtime,
sunny, after the delta fog had baked itself into a gentle smog, and Chongo had never been to my apartment before. He had no way of knowing my address. Jessie
wasn't even close to finishing but the knock threw her right out of focus and I knew better than to keep rubbing. When I answered the door, Chongo
was covered with wet white paint and he was crying like a baby. Jessie stared at him with hate in her eyes and said, "I was just about to come, you
greaseback." Then she locked herself in the bathroom and turned on the fan.
I put my hand on Chongo's shoulder and pulled him toward the sofa. "Don't mind her, compadre. Sexual issues."
Chongo revved up another batch of tears and, through them, told me how lucky I was to have her. This was a clue.
"Hold on there, amigo. Let me get a blanket before you paint my couch with your tiny white ass."
When I went to the linen closet, I had just enough of an angle to make out the desk in the spare bedroom. I could
see the printer and the lamp and the lighter patch of wood where the computer used to sit. It occurred to me that this might snap Chongo out of his
mood, so I called to him and he walked up next to me beneath the door frame.
"See that desk, that light spot in the middle? That used to be my computer."
Chongo laughed through his nose and shot snot into his mustache where it mixed with his tears and made the sparse
black hairs look shiny.
"That spot right there is the lunacy of the white man, Chongo. That's what we do when life fails to meet our expectations."
Chongo choked back his torrent of fluids and said, "Life is life, compadre." Then he wiped his face on his shirt, replacing
the snot mixture with streaks of white paint, and another thought occurred to him. "Who has time for expectations? I thought that bitch loved me and look
at me now."
It made sense. All of that sweet talk over a blonde girl from Monterey, weeks of it at the chicken counter, and I'd known
all along this day would come.
I wrapped an arm around Chongo and pulled him close for a quick, manly hug. He barely came to my shoulder, so I said
into the hot air above him, "Maybe you should throw something out my window. Trust me, it feels good."
Chongo shook his head like it was the stupidest idea he'd ever heard and we both walked back to the couch. On the
way, I heard Jessie let out a deep moan from the bathroom.
2
HALFWAY THROUGH MY FIRST SHIFT WITH CHONGO, he told me that he once lived in a one bedroom apartment with four women. Actually, it was five, he said, but
one was black and she didn't count. Then he picked up a chicken heart from the pile collecting next to equally measured piles of livers and gizzards and ate
it raw. It wouldn't be the last time I saw him do this.
Chongo means monkey in slang Spanish. It's a mean word. Every time a customer made any fuss, Miguel called him Chongo
under his breath. If the chickens weren't cutting clean, he'd call them Chongos and hack away at their tiny limbs. This was the meat department. We were butchers.
Racial sensitivity did not rank high on our list of priorities. Miguel got the nickname Chongo in a heartbeat and I think he liked it. He liked stupid white men using
his language for once.
I wasn't there when the girl from Monterey first appeared. Jessie had me scrubbing the period stains out of her panties on my
day off, and when I told this later to Chongo, he assured me that the girl from Monterey's pussy was as clean and white as heaven itself. She had ordered a
quarter pound of ground organic turkey and a single sausage of pork, basil and sun-dried tomato. She had ordered for one. Chongo told her that he used to teach
kindergarten, which might actually have been true but was totally out of context, and then he asked for her phone number. Jim, the shift supervisor, told me he
just about severed a pinky when he heard that one. The girl from Monterey demurred, declined, and left the store with Chongo declaring his instant puppy love to a bunch
of men in vinyl gloves and bloody smocks. She would come back every Thursday night between 7:30 and 8:30 for two months before Chongo finally got her
to say yes. We all met her and we all wished she'd stuck with no.
3
JESSIE PUNCHED IN FIRST and headed for grocery, no wave goodbye. She would come home smelling of parsnips with wild hair and skin so sweaty and smooth that
I knew I'd take whatever crap she wanted to throw at me that night. The hair on her legs was long and fine and my fishy calloused fingers couldn't stop stroking
it, working their way slowly up toward that supple flesh around her thigh. Like Chongo with his Monterey girl, I'd imagined nibbling on that thigh for two months
before I finally got my chance.
Morgan and Jim were cutting salmon steaks and Chongo was doing dishes. This was the day after his crying jag in my apartment.
Chongo was quiet, listless, not calling anyone or anything a dirty monkey and this gave the whole counter the wrong feel. It felt like what it was for once, a big
refrigerator of dead, splayed animals. Chongo scraped some ground beef from the corner of a tray and ate it without even bothering to see who might be watching.
"Is Jessie working today?" Morgan had a crush on her, but who could feel threatened by a thirty-year-old man with the county's
largest collection of comic books and zombie flicks.
"Yea," I said, "and she wants to meet you by the dumpsters on her lunch break. She has a lot of questions about your meat."
Jim laughed, but Morgan took a second like he was stuck in contemplation.
"What do you think he was thinking, getting all worked up over this?" Jim had a whole chicken balanced in his slimy hands. The
farmers sent them to us partly rendered—no head, no claws, no feathers. They dug out the internal organs, stuffed them in a paper sleeve and
shoved the sleeve back inside the hollow body of the bird. Jim was staring right into this hollow and thinking of Zambia.
I slipped into some gloves and set into a box of seniors, the big chickens that get a few extra weeks to flap and cluck outside
their metal cages. "It's a natural urge, Jim. Different people express the urge in different ways." Then I sang that line from that sitcom: What might be right for you,
may not be right for some.
"Still, the logistics alone are astounding."
"Where there's a will. Hey Chongo, what do you think about the African hen-fucker?"
Without looking up from the sink, Chongo said, "Black and white. The devil comes in two colors."
No childlike giggle for the rest of the shift, just chickens and dishes and a steady stream of customers, not one of them from Monterey.
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