This Is Not Your City by Caitlin Horrocks Page B

he acted like he’d seen a miracle. Did my mother sew, he asked, had she taught me, and I wanted to laugh but then he’d ask what was funny. It wasn’t something my mom would care about, the way other people looked in their clothes. When Mouse got boobs I was the one who had to tell her that she needed a bra. The elastic had gone out of my old ones, but I could drive by then so we went to Wal-Mart and charged some things. It was a nice afternoon, doing that together.
    Mouse lives in St. Louis now. She’s going to college, studying biology. She sends me postcards, always of the Arch, the Mississippi River, things I already know how they look like. I’d like to see her campus, the streets where she lives, but she’s never volunteered. She says she has a boyfriend who’s studying business, and I thought about writing back how Leo has a business, too, but then she’d ask selling what. Lyssa, she writes. Mango of my eye and possum of my heart. How goes it? I took summer term classes so I’ve got more finals already. I don’t think I’ll be able to make it for a visit. How’s what’s-his-face? It’s cold and rainy in St. Louis. Hope the weather’s better in Neosho. Love and Squalor, Mouse. She always signs the postcards Love and Squalor, and I know it’s a joke, but I don’t get what’s funny.
    Leo only bunches part time. He works days over at National Beef. He’s one of the top guys there who’s not management, a
twelve-dollar-an-hour man. He started off down the chain, but now he’s a knocker. He stands up on the catwalk with a bolt gun and lets the cows have it as they come down the chute. “Pow, right between the eyes,” he told me. He talks big but I don’t think he enjoys it all that much. He stands eight hours in his rubber coverall, goggles, his hair tied back and stuffed under a net. The slaughterhouse has been losing money so steady they’ve got the line speed up to a cow every nine seconds, trying to do in volume what they can’t do in beef prices. Down the chute and up by the ankles, Leo’s quick hand on the bolt gun the only thing saving the cows from being butchered alive. “Goddamn angel of mercy,” Leo says. “What kind of a life does a cow have, anyway?” He says top line speed is 400 an hour, which means Leo can kill 3,200 animals in a day, minus his breaks, two fifteenminute ones and a half hour for lunch.
    I work twenty hours a week at the Goodwill, mostly sorting donations. I’d work more if they had the hours for me. It’s nasty work in lots of little ways, but since Leo’s work is what it is, I can’t complain to him. We have to keep the stuffed toys wrapped in plastic for two weeks in the back, to suffocate any lice that might be on them. We have to check the clothes for stains, like old blood the color of sweet potatoes on the insides of women’s pants. If the clothes are stained too bad to sell, they’re shipped out in big bundles to somewhere else, somewhere in Africa or South America or something.
    Leo ate his potato last, scooping out the halves and then rolling the skins up into tubes with salt and pepper inside. He ate the tubes with his hands, like brown paper hot dogs. I got out ice cream bowls, a half gallon of vanilla and the kind of chocolate sauce that hardens on top of the ice cream. “I’m glad it wasn’t the rottie,” I said, “who scratched you. She’s a pretty one.”
    â€œPretty ugly. She’s a dog.”
    â€œAll your pretty uglies.”
    â€œYou too, Miss Lyss. You can be my favorite. My prettiest ugly.”
    I tapped my spoon against the hard chocolate. Underneath the shell my ice cream was already melting.

    â€œI’m just kidding,” Leo said.
    â€œStop messing with the gangrene. You’ll make it worse.” He was rubbing his knuckles up and down on the edge of the table. When he’s