Cleaving Read online

  Not for the first time, he walks me through some basics. Unplugs the machine, then opens up compartments at top and bottom, points out how the blade is actually a large band of flexible metal, threaded around two wheels. When the blade is removed to be washed every day, it can be spread out into a circle so large I could stand inside it with arms and legs spread wide like Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Aaron shows me how the blade locks in and out, how to tighten knobs and click levers to make sure everything is safely in place.

  (Aaron is nothing if not a completist. His demonstrations on breaking down a cut of meat, making the perfect roast beef, or using the sharpening stone are dizzyingly detailed. He has been known to correct my stance for stirring soup in front of the stove.)

  Once he’s checked everything, and made absolutely sure I’ve committed to memory each detail of the machine’s workings and the entire process for breaking the saw down and putting it back together (which of course I haven’t), he walks me to the side, plugs the machine back in, and points to a big red button at the upper left corner of the apparatus.

  “So when you pull this red button here, the blade starts going around. You stand like this, at the side here. Never stand in front of the blade—something happens, you catch on a bone or it goes faster than you’re expecting, you fall in, it’s all over. So you stand to the side, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Now, get yourself up against the sliding edge here. Really push your hips against it. Anchor yourself.” He has the short end of a rack of pork loin chops wedged against the metal lip of the sliding plate. “Make sure whatever you’re cutting is resting in the most stable way possible, with the flattest part of the meat down.” He demonstrates, rolling the rack back and forth, up onto the tip of the rib bone. “If you cut it this way, balanced on end like this? It’s gonna catch on the blade, roll over, your hand is going to go flying, and something is going to wind up getting cut off. So—flat, like this.”

  With the machine still off, he shows me how he can use the pressure of his hips to move the plate from front to back, holding firmly onto the meat at a respectful distance from the blade, lining up with it to slice right between the ribs and through the backbone. “Leaning away all the time, smooth movements, not too fast or too slow. And when you want to stop, just push the red button down again. Got it?”

  “Got it.” Not entirely sure that I do.

  “Okay, give it a try.”

  “Um. Okay. A little scared.” But as he moves aside, I take his place at the edge of the machine, press the tips of my pelvis bone to the lip of the plate, take hold of the rack and press it down flat.

  “Don’t be scared. Respect. Respect the band saw.”

  “Done.” I take a breath, pull the button out. The saw starts up with a whine, and I start cutting. In a matter of moments I’ve cut off half a dozen chops. The smell of singed bone is sharp in the air. My fingers are getting awfully close to the blade. I don’t have the guts to cut the last few. I push the button and let the saw whir to a stop. Aaron cuts the remainder, demonstrating a far more casual attitude toward the machine than he has tried to inculcate in me. But I guess when you’re teacher you can take shortcuts.

  Aaron really fancies the idea of having an apprentice. And I, unreformed honor student that I am, fancy being one. One thing I think both of us enjoy best, though it goes unacknowledged, are his poker-faced attempts to gross me out, and my resistance to each attempt, iron-stomached and staunch. The pigs’ heads that come in a cardboard box with the rest of the usable offal every time we receive a few sides of pork provide him with various opportunities to break my resolve. The first time we get some, he pulls them out of the boxes and lines them up on the table.

  (Josh, of course, cannot resist holding one of the heads up to his face like a mask, just because. I take his picture.)

  “All right, we’re going to cut out the cheeks.”

  I do not blink. “No problem.”

  Pigs’ cheeks are just like our cheeks, fleshy rounds. Feel along on your own face, if you like, as I describe: cutting from the hinge of the jawbone, dig the knife up under the ridge of the cheekbone, down to the arc of the upper teeth, curving around just short of the corner of the mouth, and back under, following the jawline up again to the hinge. You’re left with a palm-sized clump of meat and fat, not exactly round, which Josh can sell to restaurants in the city because pork cheeks, as it turns out, are some of the most luscious things imaginable. If you can ever get your hands on some, you can prepare them just so:

  BRAISED PORK CHEEKS

  2 tablespoons vegetable oil

  1 tablespoon butter

  4 pork cheeks

  2 medium onions, coarsely chopped

  6 peeled garlic cloves

  6 plum tomatoes, coarsely chopped

  2 sprigs fresh rosemary or 1 teaspoon dried

  2 sprigs fresh thyme or 1 teaspoon dried

  2 bay leaves

  Salt and pepper to taste

  2 cups dry red wine

  Preheat the oven to 325°F.

  Heat the oil and butter to “almost smoking” in a heatproof casserole over medium-high heat. Brown the cheeks on both sides and set aside. Toss in the onions and garlic and sauté until they begin to color a light gold. Add the tomatoes and seasonings and cook, stirring, until the tomatoes have begun to give off liquid, a couple of minutes. Add the cheeks back to the casserole and pour in the wine. Bring to a boil, cover, and place in the oven. Cook for three hours or so, until meltingly tender. Serves four.

  Bring to the table alongside polenta or egg noodles. Don’t tell your more squeamish guests exactly what it is they’re eating.

  Aaron demonstrates how to cut out the cheeks the first time, and then I unhesitatingly pick up a knife and set to. I’ve found since working here that I have a surprisingly strong stomach for this stuff, compared to most folks who come into the shop, even some of the folks who work here. But one thing does worry me. So the next time Josh walks by, I wave him over, making sure Aaron is out of earshot.

  “So, is it possible that I could, you know, cut through into, like, into the brain? Seems like brain is something I want to avoid. Or, I don’t know, the eye?”

  Josh stares consideringly down at the head. I show him how it seems to me that when I’m cutting at the top end of the cheek I’m getting awfully close to some sensitive areas.

  “I don’t think you could do that.” He doesn’t sound entirely certain.

  The shop is full of customers; it’s afternoon on a Friday, always a rush time. Josh looks over his shoulder at the bustling line. We’re not an apologetic bunch at Fleisher’s, but at the same time, we do try to have a little concern for our clientele, some of whom can be a tad squeamish. Jessica can’t even count how many complaints they’ve had from scandalized mothers who’ve been at a loss to explain to their small children the sight of men in white coats walking from the truck parked out front through the shop doors with whole, skinned lambs hoisted over their shoulders, eyes wide, teeth bared, and tongues lolling. (The lambs, not the men.)

  “If you do, though, this is what you do.” He says this with uncharacteristic understatement, nearly whispering. “Slowly put down your knife, take off your apron, go to the bathroom, and puke.

  “That’s what I’d do.”

  But I don’t ever cut through into the brain, and pretty soon I’m de-cheeking pig heads like a champ. It’s actually work I enjoy, in a perverse way. I like grabbing the heads by the ears and pulling them around to face me. Like exposing the sharp teeth, getting a glimpse of what the jawbone looks like beneath the flesh. Like the neat packages of meat I wind up with.

  “Good job,” Aaron says. I might be imagining it, but I think I can see the wheels turning as he tries to decide what to throw at me next. “Cut off the ears too. We’ll smoke them for dog treats.”

  “No problem.” They come off with two quick saws of the knife, exposing the white tubes of the ear canals.

  “G
ood.” He walks into the kitchen as I move on to more pedestrian work, bagging livers and kidneys for the freezer, breaking down some of the sides, which I still can’t do in anything remotely like one minute, twenty-five seconds, but have gotten pretty comfortable with. Shoulder off loin, loin and belly separated, loin off round, all the pieces piled into a repurposed grocery cart to be rolled back to the cooler, looking pleasingly grotesque, a psychotic’s dream of a shopping trip.

  A while later Aaron returns, and I can see by the glint in his eye, belying the businesslike set of his face, that he’s come up with a new challenge.

  “Okay, Jules. Just talked to Josh. We’re going to make headcheese.”

  “No problem.”

  Now, in my opinion, headcheese is maybe the most unfortunate misnomer in the culinary world. For while some people might get a little queasy over the definition—the meat picked off the boiled head of a pig, shredded, seasoned, and set in aspic—it certainly is less disgusting than the images conjured by putting the words head and cheese in such close proximity. I already know this, and figure I can handle whatever is coming, since it will involve no unidentifiable pale curdy substances from inside a pig’s skull. “What do we do?”

  “First we have to brine these heads for a week. There are some big white plastic buckets in the back by the sink. Go get a couple, and I’ll tell you how to make the brine.”

  So, following Aaron’s directions, I mix up a combination of water, salt, cider vinegar, and spices in the buckets. When I grab the first head to dunk into it, though, it becomes quickly obvious that they are not going to fit.

  “Well, we’ll cut them in half on the saw. You can do that, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “There’s a trick to it.” Of course there is. “I’ll show you.” Aaron takes a head over to the saw, stands in front of the saw blade (I thought we weren’t supposed to stand in front!), balances the head on the ridge of its snout (not the steadiest, flattest way to hold it) with the mouth facing toward him, and leans forward (leans forward!) to open it up, pointing out to me the sharp front teeth at the front of the ridged palate.

  “These teeth are actually harder than the steel saw. So you have to stop before you get there and slide it back, then finish the job with a cleaver. You could break the saw blade on those teeth, and if that thing comes loose, snapping around like a whip? It’s all over.”

  I carefully do not react to the stunning images he has brought to mind. “Gotcha.”

  “Okay. Go ahead. I’ll watch you do the first one.”

  I’m just about to pull the button to get the saw going when Josh comes up, aghast. “What the hell are you doing? If you cut through there, you’ll expose the brain. It’ll contaminate the brine.”

  “Jules is going to remove them,” replies Aaron without a hint in his voice that he is taking any pleasure at all in the imminent prospect of having the apprentice scooping out pig brains.

  Josh’s eyebrows shoot up nearly to his hairline as he says, “O-kaaay” in a high-pitched singsong thrumming with skepticism.

  So the saw comes on and, gripping the head by the exposed cheekbones, leaning in, determinedly refusing to entertain notions of somehow stumbling forward and slicing my own face in half, I carefully run the thing through the whirring blade, up through the chin, to just short of where I imagine the lower set of front teeth to be, and back away from the blade again, pushing the red button to stop the dangerous spinning. Grabbing hold of either side of the slice I’ve just made, I pull the skull down and apart into two halves, joined by the bit of front palate and lip still uncut.

  “Done.”

  It’s actually a pretty impressive sight, this head split in half, exposing the shape of the inside of the mouth, the row of teeth, the impressively thick bone of the skull (no, I was definitely never going to cut through that accidentally while removing a cheek, and I finally believe Hans’s assertion about the small-gauge bullet being in no danger of penetrating this bone), and the two halves of the brain, surprisingly small, nestled pale and moist like oysters in their shells. Before Aaron can prompt me, I scoop each half out with cupped fingers. “And done.”

  Jesse’s looking on, fascinated and a bit appalled. “Wow.”

  I just hold the brains out to Aaron. “Do you want to keep these for anything?”

  “You can throw them away,” he says nonchalantly. I do, tossing them, equally nonchalantly, into the trash. All this nonchalance is, I will say, partly put on, but neither am I particularly disgusted by what I’ve just done. The brains were tidy things, looking just as brains should look.

  “See? Easy as that. Now you’ll just cut through the front bit with a cleaver.” He moves the nearly bisected head over to the table next to the band saw to show me. “When you swing the cleaver, always keep your other hand behind your back. Don’t want your hand anywhere near.” Aaron doesn’t say, but I think he’s at least a little impressed with me. At least he damned well ought to be.

  I get through the four heads we have, sawing and scooping and cleaving. I’m not very good with this last, just as I’ve never been good at hitting a baseball with a bat or a billiard ball with a cue. The idea of a cleaver is that it’s about blunt force rather than razor sharpness. It is for hacking, for breaking through bone. Swing it hard from above your head down to the point that needs separating, an action that requires both strength and precision. I generally can manage only one of these attributes at once, if that. With my right hand tucked self-consciously behind my back—the instinct is to hold the meat down with it, but Aaron is right, my aim is far too wild to risk getting my hand anywhere near my swing—I cleave. Takes a couple of tries. First I am too timid, then I am off the mark. Luckily, a few messy, asymmetric chop marks make no difference in this case. I load the heads into the buckets of brine, put on the covers, and label them with the date, written in Sharpie marker, on a length of masking tape. They will sit in the corner of the cooler for a week or so, unmolested.

  For that week Aaron comes up with no particular challenges to my intestinal fortitude. He feeds me a bit of raw beef fresh from the grinder, both of us popping a pinch into our mouths at the same time. “It tastes sweet, right?”

  It does. “Yeah. It’s good.”

  He cooks up a steak “black and blue”—very briefly over very high heat so that the outside is charred dark, the interior still cold.

  “Just the way I like it,” I say. I’m not even lying, exactly. Exaggerating perhaps, but maybe not even that.

  Then it comes time for Headcheese, Stage II. First thing on a Tuesday morning, Aaron lifts the pigs’ heads from where they’ve been brining. The flesh is now pale and bloated and smells somewhat unsavorily sour. In the biggest stockpot in the kitchen—a remarkably large object, probably two and a half feet in diameter and tall enough that, when it’s set on the stove, I have to stand on tiptoe to peer in—we bring several gallons of pork stock to a simmer, then slip the heads in, until the pot is filled to the brim with gruesomely grinning, fleshy half skulls, eyes still in their sockets, cloudy now and shriveled, bobbing in the rich broth. There they quietly bubble away throughout the day; in the evening Aaron fishes them out to cool on large trays overnight.

  The next day we pick through the trays, the meat now falling easily off the bone. We lift out jawbones and skulls, and also the ridged hard palates, stray teeth, knobs of cartilage, shrunken eyeballs.

  The eyeballs give me a little trouble, I have to admit. But I’ll be damned if I’ll show it. I industriously run my fingers through the remains of the heads while Aaron strains the broth through a cheesecloth and boils it down some more until it is gelatinous, sufficient to, once cold, hold the meat I’ve picked clean in suspension.

  By the time the headcheese has been made up, the shop has already sold all the chops and roasts and pig’s-ear dog treats culled from the last four hogs Josh bought, and he’s due for another delivery. This time when the pork sides come in, along with their accompanying cardboard box
es full of extra bits, I start right in on unwrapping the heads, pulling them out of the boxes by the ears, slapping them down on the table, and cutting off the cheeks. There’s an order in from the city that needs to get filled right away, in time for the next morning’s delivery. Aaron is beside me at the table working on his side-breaking time. (“Breaking sixty seconds today, Josh!”)

  I’m halfway done with my third head when my knife slips into a little pocket of something soft, and an unexpected ooze bursts forth, something approximately the color and consistency of guacamole, leaving an avocado smear on my knife as I pull it away. For a moment, I just stare in puzzlement.

  “I… um… what’s… um?”

  Aaron glances over and freezes as if he’s just seen a wild animal readying to pounce. In a slow, even voice, he says, “Throw the head away now. Go wash your knife and your hands.”

  I belatedly emit what I think could actually be called a squeak, dropping my knife to the table with a clatter. “What is it?”

  “It’s a… an infected gland, or.… Just throw it away.”

  I do. Hurry back to the sink and scrub both my knife and my hands with scalding, soapy water, unable to repress a whole series of convulsive shudders.

  Aaron’s already laughing at me when I return to the table. “You shrieked like a little girl, Jules.”

  “Oh, please. You were freaked too.” There’s a tone to his teasing that I like, though. He’s covering up his disgust by poking fun at mine.

  “ ‘Eek!’ ”

  “Shut up.”

  8

  Meathead Holiday

  “WHAT A PRETTY little whore you are.”

  “Shut up.” I stand in this unattractive stranger’s foyer with my hands against the wall, skirt hitched, and legs spread, staring at a grimy layer of paint. “Just do it. Now. Whatever you want.”

  I’ve finally gone over the deep end, I think as I hear a condom wrapper being ripped open behind me. After some months of dickering, I’ve made good on a sad fantasy I’ve been distracting myself with since D stopped speaking to me. It’s not about pleasure or comfort or desire. It’s about contempt, for myself, and for any man stupid enough to want me. Contempt feels like relief.