Chapter Seven: Spare the Brains, Spoil the Bladder

When the herd is ready for slaughter, Dad and the wranglers drive them to San Malinche’s stockyards. But we needed to eat, too, so once or twice a year we butchered one of the older females that wouldn’t be worth much at slaughter. The meat was stringier and less tasty than the meat that was sent to alphatropolises offworld, but it was money we didn’t have to spend on food.

Normally, a woolly slaughter would be a great time of year, like a holiday or when the carnival comes to town. A slaughter would be cause for all sorts of cooking and boiling and grilling. The Saldañas were often invited over to help with the butchering, and so I got to play with Rocket Girl and her brothers. I wasn’t fond of her brothers mainly cause my old man was fond of them. But we’d put away our differences for a little while and play games with the bones. This time, it was different. This time it was Old Jack. That meant the Saldañas kids and I had to stay inside while the men (meaning the wranglers and Dad; Mr. Saldaña died before we arrived in the Underworld) went out to the slab to process him.

Every few hours, the “kids” got to haul meat. There were flank steaks and shoulders and the biggest ribs ever seen. Round meats, sirloins, ground-up meats. Each time Boca summoned us, there was another pile of meat at least as tall as a man. By the time the butchering finished, all told there was over eight thousand pounds of mammoth meat.

Nothing was spared. Dad collected oil in drums to use as lubricant, but we also used it to grease the pans and make soaps and butter. The musth we turned into cleansers for the house and perfumes to sell at San Malinche. (Musth is kind of like bull mammoth sweat, but more tar-like. The bulls overproduce it when they are getting ready to mate, but their bodies keep it year-round.) The bladder was carefully removed and drained. (Believe it or not, people drink mammoth urine on other planets. Gross, right? They drink it because it’s supposed to be good for the skin. If I was ever on another planet, and they made fun of me for slaughtering moths, my comeback would be “yea, but at least I don’t drink its urine!)

We drained the urine into large barrels, which Dad would later deliver to a San Malinche processing plant that was owned by Evan’s dad. After the barrels were filled, the bladder was dried. I had to wipe it down every six hours with brains to keep the tissue from ripping. Once the bladder was dry enough to be malleable, Dad showed me how to mold it into a storage bin. We placed the bladder-bin in the garage, and that’s where we put all of Cerbie’s tools and kits.

Dad was so proud of his bull mammoth, so sometimes I found him tearing up while he slaughtered Old Jack. Like all ranchers, Dad paid respect to his bull by displaying him. Using Big Betsy, Boca maneuvered Old Jack’s tusks against the front of our house, just like Dad wanted it. Now everybody who came to visit the Cavazoses would walk through a set of giant mammoth tusks. His ribs I helped post into the ice. We used them to make a walkway between the house and the garage. We tied a tarp down over the ribs. Once ice formed over the ribs, we would have a solidified walkway.

Old Jack’s hide was prized. Everyone wanted a piece. His grayish white fur was a welcome addition to the usual palette of browns, tans, and reds we saw every day in the dugout. Dad and Mrs. Saldaña had first choice. Dad wanted a new jacket, and Mrs. Saldaña wanted a blanket. She made me for us sarapes, pants, caps, and hoods from Mammon’s hide. Eventually almost every article of clothing was gray-white, and one day, much to my Dad’s chagrin, his whole outfit was color-coordinated.

Making hide clothes takes a long time and was a difficult task. On top of all the tanning, drying, and oiling to prepare the hide, Mrs. Saldaña also had to remove the outer coat and long hairs (unless somebody wanted fringe). Then everything had to be sewed and treated.

Every morning Dad boiled another woolly mammoth body part. He’d add parsley to the heart or mustard to the liver. The intestines were turned into a stuffed-intestine delicacy called maggis. At the end of the day we would put everything out in the freezer. Course, when the day-to-day is somewhere near a million degrees below freezing, your freezer isn’t much more than a giant igloo carved out of the ice. Compare that to Dr. Seguín’s home.

One morning before school, Dad woke me on the comm. He was at the slab, butchering some more of Old Jack.

“I want you to go with Boca out to the dead cows. I don’t want to hear anything from you. I already spoke to Boca about it. You’re going to take the harvester that the Saldañas left, and you’re going to help Boca harvest what’s left out.”

“But I’ll be late to school.”

Dad pointed a giant butcher’s cleaver at me and said, “Needs must when the devil drives, mijo.”

Mijo is a Spanish word for son. Really, it means my son, but from Dad’s mouth, the word had a more military feel to it, like saying, “move it, Private.”

Boca and I went out on the ice plains to the slaughter. The moths lay as they died.

“Es una lástima,” Boca said. He preferred Spanish.

“It’s pitiable. And it’s a mystery. I mean, if it wasn’t helados, who was it? Dad never said.”

Boca, if you remember, knew exactly who had attacked our mammoth herd and why. But like my father, he was telling me nothing.

“Si no estaba destinado a ser, no estaba destinado a ser. Siempre habrá misterios en el mundo subterráneo.”

Let me translate: “Mateo, chill and don’t worry about it.” It’s a rough translation.

“But there is something you and Dad aren’t telling me. I see it in your faces and I hear it in your silence.”

“Si su padre es mantener algo de usted, que tiene buenas razones, Mateo. Su padre es un buen hombre que vive en un mal lugar. A veces la maldad que se filtra en el cuerpo, y que es cuando se necesita una brújula moral como tú. Es entonces cuando tiene que ser fuerte para él. Bueno? Ahora, tráeme las cuchillas de carnicería.”

This was a good thing for me to hear, if I had been paying more attention. I remember it well now, but back then, I didn’t want to hear it. So I won’t translate it. He did call me a moral compass, though. I want to point that out because I want to ask you something. Are you surprised? After everything you have heard about me being an outlaw and a space pirate and a revolutionary, does it shock you to know that I was “un buen hombre que vive en un mal lugar,” a good person in a bad place? Or do you think that now I am changing the facts to protect my legacy? Like a serial killer who protests he is innocent all the way up to his execution?

I got the blades for Boca. First, we removed the ivory and the ovaries, which we would sell on the black market. After we got back, Dad would give the wranglers twenty pounds each of meat in exchange for carving up the carcasses. He’d tell them it was their bonus this season.

In addition to the usual trailer, we had the Saldañas’ old harvester. The harvester was an over-sized meat and bone grinder. I maneuvered the harvester next to the dead moths. Then Boca detached the harvester and drove it on top of the naked, cut-up carcasses.

The harvester was really two trailers combined. The first trailer had a vacuum, like a giant mosquito’s proboscis. The vacuum was full of turbine-like blades that chopped up whatever was sucked up. The chopped-up pieces were shunted into the ring-toothed grinder, which reduced everything to meal. Much like a crop harvester, everything that was processed was shot into a secondary trailer behind it.

The turbines made a sickening sound as they eviscerated the woolly cows. The gray trailer was covered in red splatter and gore. It was the kind of thing that kids on other planets would probably cringe over. Some of them might vomit, even. Not me, though. As you know, this wasn’t my first slaughter.

Finished, we returned home. In the barn, the wranglers had the glamorous job of sacking all the guts while I finally got to school. I went into the living room and turned on the console. Still covered in moth slaughter, is in my desk at the back of the room with the other rancher’s kids. I sat next to Rocket Girl.

Mr. Ochoa was already well into history, talking about how the planet was originally divided into five areas. Each area used the religious naming conventions from a different dead religion or mythology, like Greek mythology for our area.

“Where have you been?” Rocket Girl messaged me.

“With Boca harvesting the cows. You fixed the harvester really well, by the way. It no longer sticks between first and second gear.”

“You are very smart,” I added.

She read that and blushed. Thank the five hells.

“Thanks,” she texted back.

I was trying to think how to ask her out. I’d been working up to it for, what, five years now?

“Hey, have you noticed how Hel is absent?”

I looked at the empty seat on the front row. “I think her school days are over,” I typed.

“No. She is better than that.”

“Actually, no. She has a brothel to run.”

“I wish I could be an independent businesswoman. I would make a company that builds rockets.”

“Rocket Girl Rocketeering. But since this is Mala-Mundial, maybe it would be better to call it Rocket Girl Racketeering.”

She giggled, and my heart fluttered. She reached down and held my digital hand. It was only briefly, and it was VR, so we weren’t actually holding hands, but still, it mucked up my mind. I didn’t listen to another word from Mr. Ochoa’s mouth. I tried. Good grades could lead to scholarships, which could take me offworld. But my mind was completely pre-occupied with Rocket Girl’s brief touch for the rest of the day.

It wasn’t two weeks later before we started receiving messages from the bank and the government. I guess word gets around, and when people find out you have no calves, they come collecting. Dad knew we wouldn’t be able to make payments on the dugger and the wells. He tried to preserve some of Old Mammon with the hopes of artificially fertilizing some of the cows, but the blade slipped and we lost everything.

“What are we going to do now?” I asked him after supper when I was supposed to be doing my homework.

“I don’t know, Mateo. But we’ll get by. We always find a way.”

Two months later, though, Dad still hadn’t found a way. None of the other cows were pregnant. Even if they were, woollies take something like 18 months before giving birth. That was a long time between births.

To make ends meet Dad sold the dead cows’ ovaries, which were ground up and packaged as fertility drugs on Mars. The ivory was valuable as a jewelry, too, but even on the black market this was not enough money to sustain a ranch for a year. He never did sell Old Jack’s tusks for ivory, though. He kept them bolted to the front entrance of the dugout.

Dad got desperate. He tried to sell two of the females as males. When that didn’t work, Dad let a few of the wranglers go. A few others took off cause they could smell the Mala-Mundial in the wind. Dad started going into town for supplies, though he always left late and never came back with anything.

Next Chapter: Chapter Eight: No Such Thing as Betrayal in the Underworld