One Good Deed(71)

“Yeah, but I’ll be moving on soon. So Pittleman owns this place?”

“What about it?” Dill tapped his cigarette out on the bench next to Archer, uncomfortably close.

“So, you know anybody here that worked directly for him?”

“What you mean by directly?”

“Meaning more than killing and butchering hogs.”

“Why you want to know?”

“Just wondering.”

Dill grinned in a way that never came close to reaching his eyes. “That was you in the joint too, Archer, thinking ’bout shit too much. You got to learn to leave things be, boy. Ain’t healthy otherwise.”

“So, is that a no?”

Dill made a show of closing up his switchblade. “That means it ain’t your business. And put it outta your goddamn head.”

They went back to work, Dill sledgehammering and Archer cutting and sawing.

The man next to Archer, who had shown Archer the ways with the tools of butchering said, “Heard you talking to Dill.”

“That right?”

“You asking about Pittleman?”

“I was, yeah.”

“He was an odd bird.”

“So you knew him?”

“There were some here who knew him. He had his fingers in lots of pies, they say.”

“Man had a lotta businesses, that’s true.”

“You know a man named Malcolm Draper?”

“I’ve met him. Why?”

“He’s around here a lot too. And he ain’t butchering hogs.”

“He runs Pittleman’s businesses.”

“He runs something, all right.”

Archer was about to ask another question when Dickie Dill came into Archer’s workspace holding his sledgehammer.

“Hey, Archer?”

“Yeah?”

“Thought I’d give you a look-see at what it is I do here.”

Another man came in dragging a fat hog by a leather cord. The terrified beast, perhaps sensing what was about to befall it, was squealing and pulling against the tether with all its strength. Its hooves were digging into the wooden floor and creating an unsettling clatter as it struggled to survive.

All the men in the butchering room, including Archer, stopped what they were doing and looked that way.

The other man faced the hog, knelt down, and pulled the leather cord to the floor, forcing the poor beast’s head down and keeping it stationary.

Dill circled around behind the hog and raised his sledgehammer, the look on his face one of unadulterated excitement.

A moment before metal hit skull, Archer closed his eyes.

The sound of the sledgehammer crushing bone was nearly as horrible as the dying squeal made by the unfortunate animal.

When he reopened them, the hog was lying dead on a floor full of hog scraps, bleeding from its crushed head, but also from its nose and mouth. Its one blood-filled and lifeless eye looked up at the man who had just killed it.

Dill held up his homicidal tool in triumph.

“And now you know how it’s damn well done, boy.”

The message conveyed was perfectly clear to every man in the place. And most particularly to Archer.

“Knowledge is a good thing, Dickie,” said Archer, drawing another funny look from Dill.

Archer went back to his butchering.

When pay time came, their wages were short by half. When some of the men began to protest, a couple of large steady-eyed fellows carrying shotguns walked into their midst and calm quickly returned.

Archer had not sat next to Dill during the ride back, but the latter had kept his gaze on Archer the whole way. The men spent the trip back to town complaining about the short wages. The gent who’d taught Archer the cutting method leaned in and whispered, “That man Dill ain’t right in the head. Think somebody hit him with a sledgehammer maybe when he was a baby.”

“Well, if they didn’t back then, somebody might want to think about doing it now,” replied Archer.

After the truck dropped them off, Archer started walking away, looking once over his shoulder to make sure Dill had headed off in the opposite direction.

Ernestine had arrived at her house ahead of him. She was cooking up some chicken in a pan on her electric stove when he walked in the back door.

“Funny,” she said, a smile playing over her lips. “I had somebody look at the lock today and they said it was just fine. Though it did show signs of being breached.”

Archer took off his hat, glanced at the lock, and said, “Well, you can never be too careful.”

She reached into her apron pocket and pulled out a key. “How about I give you one of these instead?”

After a dinner of fried chicken and corn on the cob and soft peas and doughy rolls washed down with lemonade, Archer proclaimed it one of the best meals of his life.

“How was the slaughterhouse?” she asked, after her smile showed that his compliment had pleased her.

“I have no plans to make it a career, if that’s what you’re asking.”

She laughed. “I hope not. I think you’re meant for bigger and better things.”

“We only got half our wages, though, so the money problems for Pittleman are real enough.”

“That is totally astonishing to me. He seemed so wealthy.”