ELADATL. Sesshu Foster
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Jose’s detailed directions, without which I probably would have ended up lost somewhere, driving into some unfortunate alternate reality of sci-fi Los Angeles, never having the opportunity to join the UFO Club of Greater East Los Angeles, to miss out on ever finding my destiny. I went to the farm to kill chickens. Or roosters, rather, because the hens serve the purpose of laying eggs and therefore don’t need to be killed, but the roosters just fuss and fight all the time, and harass and rape the hens, and need to be killed. Because I am a chicken eater, and I eat chicken every week, I felt it was my duty to help Jose and Liki cull their chickens. By the time I got there, up on the hillside by the shed, they had the big pot heated to exactly 140 degrees, or whatever the exact scientific temperature is for immersing the dead chickens in extremely hot water so that their feathers slough off as easily as feathers fall out of a torn pillow, and Jose and Liki were already at work, cutting the roosters’ heads off, letting them bleed out in buckets, throwing the bodies into a big pot, which was (it was immediately apparent upon entering the area) releasing a stench of chicken death, of scorched dusty feathers, of bird blood, bird fear, punctuated now and then by the snapping off of yellow chicken feet, also tossed into a bucket, to be later thrown away, because no one—except Olga—wanted to cook or eat chicken feet. Liki handed me an apron and a knife. “There’s gloves if you want them,” he said.
Liki’s Chicken-Killing Machine consisted of a piece of plywood onto which he had screwed a plastic orange traffic cone, upside down. At this point, there was a wash of blood streaming down the plywood into the bucket where the heads ended up. The cone made cutting the rooster’s head off easy. You stuffed the rooster head first into the cone, so the head protruded out of the bottom. The roosters blinked, mouth open, wondering what the hell. They were so trusting. They’d lived their lives on this hillside, fighting with each other and raping the hens, endless free food, safe in the wire pens (once in awhile menaced by raccoons or coyotes who dug underneath or climbed overhead), and now they were hung upside down, with their head sticking out of a traffic cone? What was that awful smell? Why is there blood on this board? They don’t try to peck at you. This is uncomfortable, you pulling my head like this. You pull their neck out, stretch it for the knife and cut off the head. The body flaps and kicks. Blood spurts out and drips toward the bucket. Toss the head. After the body stops moving, pass it to Jose and Liki who are scorching the feathers and removing them. That’s the dirty job. After the dark feathers are yanked out, the outer feathers and long wing feathers and underfeathers, with that stench of filth and death, pale goose-pimpled naked chicken skin revealed itself, and I had never seen it before, but after the feathers came out—out of the same pores the feathers came out—long filaments of pale mucous extruded in spaghetti-like secretions.
No wonder we like our chicken fried crispy.
Many years later, decades later, after Swirling Alhambra disappeared and the others were killed, after Sergio died, I was walking across the parking lot of a mini-mall. I had gone jogging in the hills in El Sereno, and my knees were killing me, and I was thinking that I was going to have to give up jogging, that I was getting older and closer to death—all those gloomy thoughts that I was always torturing myself with in a self-centered way, especially when I was working out. Except, of course, I felt pretty damned good afterward, cooling down, walking through the last light of the afternoon, twilight falling, car headlights streaming by on Huntington Drive. I passed giant piles of used tires towering over the fence of the bright yellow tire shop that I admired for its large plastic sign, which had been painted over and re-lettered so many times that when it was lit up, it was a perfect gibberish. The mini-mall parking lot was half-empty in the dusk. The jiujitsu students were taking a break in the parking lot. The tall dark woman in her late twenties who was apparently the lead black belt of the group glanced at me. I’d spoken to her once or twice somewhere, probably at a meeting at the Eastside Cafe. She was giving her group a break out in the hot summer dusk, and they were chatting while she stood looking stern. They were mostly young people—nobody as old as me. One storefront was empty, between a pharmacy and a “health food store” (window filled with supplements) and some curandera’s office. I ducked in the doorway of the empty storefront for a look; the door was flung open as if the store had been looted or abandoned. The fluorescent lights were on, and debris was scattered in corners of the place. Was the economy in such disarray that landlords could no longer even police their properties? It wouldn’t be surprising as a sign of the further downturn in the ever downward spiraling of dust-empire America. “You want a future? Go to China and see if you can make it there!” said some former storefront psychic-turned-politician on the front page of the L.A. Times. I walked through the empty storefront and out the rear door, which I’d expected to lead to a parking lot behind the buildings, but I found myself in a hallway full of medical equipment: gurneys, examination tables and computers, boxes and boxes of stuff, paperwork, stools, cabinets large and small, all stacked the length of one wall. I found a suite of rooms in the rear of the building, an abandoned medical clinic that was occupied by the group I’d only heard rumors about, Bugs Not Bombs (at least that’s who I’m pretty sure it was, that’s who I supposed it was based on what they were doing). With their little logo of an electrified cockroach. Anyway, somebody must have recognized me from somewhere, from those community meetings or whatever, somebody nodded at me (they didn’t kick me out, as I walked through they ignored me—it was like I was some ghost, vestige of old days, neither a threat nor of any relevance), I walked through, heading purposely toward the rear exit, as if looking for the rear exit, which indeed I was. This group, Bugs Not Bombs, was a bunch of hacktivists targeting war machine NSA spy computers and police state war computers and Rand laboratory defense contractors, etc. They were going about it casually, as if marinating carne asada for a barbecue. They conferred quietly, talking in low tones, glancing at me now and then as if waiting for me to make my exit—which, just as casually, I did. I had the feeling they were doing their usual thing, using computers abandoned by a failed medical clinic, sending off a viral malware or spyware and waiting for signs it was working its way through systems, firewalls, servers and clouds. “I think it’s working,” someone said. They were quiet, waiting. I opened the door to exit, and paused. They seemed tense, awaiting a signal. (Maybe the signal was going to be cop cars roaring into the parking lot just outside this door, or an alteration of numbered patterns on the screens?) I exited, closing the door behind me.
THEY SAID SOMEONE WILL COME
Sergio pumped the camping stove, a backpacking stove with a cylinder of kerosene that had a pressure pump arm that he had to pump to prime the vaporizer, the nozzle, to emit kerosene vapor could be lit with Strike Anywhere matches. That was how he understood it to work, even though it was always trial and error in the beam of a flashlight, dust motes wafting through its pale light inside the vast dark of the hangar, random punctuations of the interminable night.
One valve had to be open, or both—he always forgot the details of the correct sequence to follow, it always took a long time to start the stove (he was never certain it would start)—
The match got too low, and he flinched and flung it into the darkness, shaking his hand.
He could hear his breathing.
After the (he stopped to listen, but he could only hear his own breathing, couldn’t see anything beyond the beam of the flashlight aimed at the stove perched on the corner of the rusty steel desk)—after the stove was lit he would pour water in the pot for tea.
But first he had to get it lit.
It was always like this getting the stove started. He had never decided finally and absolutely once and for all that he should get a new stove. The trouble was that this one always worked. He’d told Jose and Swirling more than once that he needed a stove if he was going to be sent out on solo reconnaissance missions. They always agreed to anything he asked for, since he was dependable (that in itself somehow seemed a miracle) and took care of everything on his own. Then they’d given