RIDING WITH THE LOCAL USED COW DEALER - 11

Then Steve drove among the buildings

at the rendering plant in Norfolk, back to the place he'd unload. He backed his truck into a shed with a door big enough to drive a semi through. He got down out of the truck and waited near the back of it while the load was pulled off. I sat in the cab of the truck, breathing through my mouth. That helped a little, helped me stand the stink of it. I kept swallowing back everything that wanted to come out of me. The concrete floor looked greasy. Rancidness came up in waves from it. I kept breathing through my mouth.

"Only had nine beef today," Steve said when he got back into the truck. "Yesterday, I had sixteen. That's nothing compared to what I haul off the feedlots when I'm busy."

Steve drove the truck back into the sunlight, into the fresh air, you might think it was fresh air after you'd been in the shed. He waved at the big yard in front of us. "One winter they had over ten thousand dead beef laying out here," he said. "The pile went clear up to the top of that light pole. When a semi drove around the other side of the pile, you couldn't see it. That was such a bad winter."

Steve went back into the shed to talk to another trucker. I was sitting in the truck out in the yard. There's a common, dirty starling out in the yard, short-tailed and ugly; yet it looks brilliant in its surroundings, a green irridescence about its head and neck, almost a fiery redness to the brown of its body. I was starting to think it looked pretty. "Come on, Tom," I had to say to myself, "it's just a damn starling." When he got back to the truck, Steve said the other driver hauled in hogs from off to the west of Norfolk. "I haul the most dead beef into this plant," Steve said. "He hauls the most hogs."

Barn swallows darted and cut the air above the yard. It had been a grey day, there was a momentary brightness on the belly of the swallow, an orangeness that was brilliant in the greasy drabness.

"All of us dead stock drivers get along," Steve said. "We have a comradery. We're competitors, but we're all in the same boat."

When he was just out of high school, Steve said, he had worked quite a few years as assistant manager at a big hog confinement operation. "We had to do everything there," he said. "You had to be a vet and a mechanic and everything else. That was good - needing to be able to do everything. I grew up on a farm, you learn how to do everything. You learn to be resourceful."

The day done, we were headed for home. Done early. "This is all the truck I ever desire to drive," Steve said. "I wouldn't want to drive an eighteen-wheeler. That's a lonely job."

"But we can never plan what's gonna happen," he added, as if he were knocking on wood.

"There's still a forty mile drive home after I've dumped the load," he noted. "I'm the guy closest to Norfolk. Some of these fellows have an hour and a half, two hours to drive home after they get done. One of them has to drive three hours home after he unloads."

The truck tires roared, tearing off miles of pavement. The engine wound up and smoothed out, wound up and smoothed out as Steve went through the gears. The road curved one way, curved back the other. A left turn, a long, slow bend. Then we were a mile, a mile and a half from Steve and Cindy's house, a smooth road, an easy glide from here, we were headed home like a horse running for the barn.

We've gotten done early, and Steve's going to get some fence mended, do some clean-up around the farmyard, make some repairs in the house. The truck tires roar and sing. An airplane comes into view, loud and close to the ground.

"That guy sprays crops," Steve says to me. "You have to be half nuts to do that. He comes pretty low over the horizon."

It's all perspective, I suppose. What you see depends on where you sit. It's obvious Steve likes where he's sitting.

Comments

[beth]

My hometown had a rendering works (for glue) and a dogfood plant. All day long, big trucks full of dead animals would drive through and turn at the entrances to the plants, and all day and all night my town smelled of cooking flesh. People who open cans for their pets, or stick something together with glue, have no idea...

[Tom Montag]

Hi, Beth--I agree. And I would add that a lot of the people who eat beef have no idea, either. That's part of the joy of presenting Steve's story this way - now we know.