My Year of Meats by Ruth L. Ozeki Page B

of magazines on guns, ammo, and hunting for sale. They filmed bars with firearms displayed in glass cases like works of art, next to the stuffed heads of the animals they had killed. One crew even visited Wal-Mart to show how easy it is to buy a gun over the counter. A newspaper article attempted to analyze the profound feeling Americans have for guns by comparing it to the Japanese attachment to rice, and a TV show offered lessons in idiomatic English, explaining that freeze was not just something that was done to meat.
    “Do all Americans carry guns?” was a question my Japanese friends used to ask me. “What kind do you have? Where do you carry it?” I became a documentarian partly in order to correct cultural misunderstandings like this one, and it made me crazy to see them so effectively reinforced.
    Hattori was killed because Peairs had a gun, and because Hattori looked different. Peairs had a gun because here in America we fancy that ours is still a frontier culture, where our homes must be defended by deadly force from people who look different. And while I’m not saying that Peairs pulled the trigger because he was a butcher, his occupation didn’t surprise me. Guns, race, meat, and Manifest Destiny all collided in a single explosion of violent, dehumanized activity. In the subsequent civil trial, evidence that had been suppressed during the criminal trial was introduced, including Peairs’s affiliation with the Ku Klux Klan. The civil court found him guilty.
    I started collecting local stories and would test them on the boys as we drove around in the van. If they liked a story or found it surprising, I would use it in the show. I was a full-fledged director now, and I’d promised Ueno I would do my best to satisfy the “unique sensibilities” of the Japanese television audience; since I wasn’t Japanese, I used the boys as my barometer. Traveling across America, they were astonished at how deeply violence is embedded in our culture, how it has become the culture, what’s left of local color. We are a grisly nation.
    In Green River, Wyoming, a bartender told us a story about a rancher who was traveling into town, when he spotted a campfire. As it was growing late, he rode closer, glad of the company and the promise of a good meal. Sitting there were two scruffy-looking men, stirring a large pot full of delicious-smelling stew. The rancher asked if he could have some, and reluctantly they agreed. He sat down and ate a bowl, then, finding it quite tasty, he asked what it was. “Pigeon stew,” they answered somewhat curtly. They were not very sociable, so rather than linger, he rode on into Green River, where he stopped at the bar for a drink. The bar was crowded. Seated to one side, he overheard some townspeople discussing a doctor back East who was looking to purchase clean human skulls. On the other side, a couple of cowhands were talking about the mysterious disappearance of a local rancher named Lloyd Pigeon.
    “Sooo da ne ... ,” said Suzuki, considering. “Cannibalism is interesting to Americans.”
    “We Japanese eat mostly fish,” explained Oh.
     
     
    Sloan used to love this stuff. He was an entirely modern, urban musician and had never been exposed to the macabre underbelly of small-town America. The crew and I would come back from a day on the sagebrush steppes, clambering about the buttes, scrabbling down riverbeds, jumping barbed wire, hopping tracks, searching for the perfect shot of the lowering skies, and I’d find Sloan lounging in a local bar like the one in Green River, buying drinks for laid-off trona miners and railroad men. It was great, like having a researcher in the field. He’d cull stories, then feed them to me later in bed.
    Bed with Sloan. He was a masterful storyteller, but that was only a small part of it. First I have to explain. I had hit my adult height by the time I was fourteen and spent most of my adolescence freakishly taller than my classmates. My first sexual