Pick-Up Artist

Nick Mulgrew

On the mountain pass the trucks overturn. Each time she prepares to cycle up this hill, she dreams about what they might have spilled. She doesn’t wear the bib and jersey of those in the city who ride bicycles for enjoyment or for sport. She wears whatever she is wearing. Usually it’s jeans. Usually they itch.

There are six or seven people she competes with when there’s a spill. She lives closest to the pass, but the others know the traffic police, and so she must strain to arrive for first pickings. She can feel the meat in her legs, and with every year the feeling becomes worse. Yet even in her toil she likes it here, in the winter green: among the fynbos, the hills that rise like her heartbeat as she lane-splits the stationery engines. The bush reminds her of hair. Wetted, it smells like shampoo, and today there is drizzle as she ascends closer to low clouds, water beading on her forehead. All is slick as she takes the rising gradient, straining her eyes until she comes to the place that gives the cars and their drivers pause. Before the final curve of the pass, her breath deep and hot, she finally sees the truck, and as she approaches it, it gives her pause, too. What has fallen out: they are meat, but they move.

This is new.

— —

Once it was avocados – greenskins, hard as cricket balls, grown to ripen on supermarket shelves on the other side of the world, in places where movies are made. (She wrapped her own in newspaper.) But usually it’s apples at this time of year. Young, meaty, they taste of rain. April fruit, rolled down sandstone ridges by men paid to drive eighteen hours and not to sleep, but who only could only abide by half of the job description. She wonders if this happens on other hills, in other places. She has often meditated on the specific pull of gravity on this hill – maybe that’s the cause of all these toppling trucks. The lullaby of the cresting concrete road, seduction on the sudden and long downhill that grants the first view of the city, the shore, its platinum gauze. The knowledge that the journey is almost over. Memories resurfacing of cross-country trips with long-dead parents, of backseat naps as the zebra-print of passing headlamps light their closed eyelids. She knows the feeling of descent well – well enough, she thinks, that she won’t ever fall. She hopes that today – as she does any day she works – the day will end with her careering down that hill on her bike, weighty as a stomach after Christmas, the baskets and ballasting plastic full of fruit to feed her family, to sell tomorrow to commuters at the hill’s base. Strange, she thinks – she never thinks to ask if the drivers of the trucks are alright. But that’s someone else’s job.

Almost every job is someone else’s. Around here there is no work, she says to her family. They know that what she means is that there is no work that pays for a person’s worth. There is always work, of course, but she has never believed in the dignity of working for the sake of work. There is no inherent virtue in breaking rocks, tending vines only to be paid in their fermented juice, as if that’s what she would buy anyway.

People do what they must in this economy. Some brave the cold waves for abalone. Some take proteas from the nature reserves. She hears that some even paint. Her point being: every system has leaks, and she must drink from their drips. Orange juice in June, peach spring sunrise, hanepoot in the new year.

It’s not stealing, she defends. It’s symbiosis: after all, the traffic only want the pass clear again, the range’s only crossing, conduit from valley to coast, farm to dock. When she tells newcomers at church what she does for a living – that she’s a pick-up artist – she’s the only one who laughs at the joke.

— —

They’re not apples, but they are round, and they’re bruised. This is new.

On the overturned truck is the logo on egg cartons, on pink and shrink-wrapped meat, frozen in with giblets. But these birds have heads and feet. Some have toes still attached to those feet, others bloodied nubs, tags of scale and bone that are only the suggestion of limbs. Those that have feathers don’t have many. To her they don’t look much different from how they do in the freezers, although she can’t be completely sure – after all, she can’t afford to buy them, to take them home, to dissect. She supposes they were bred to be meat, so those that bred them think it’s sensible if they live like meat too.

It is impossible that so many birds could have been in just one truck, but she can see no other vehicle. There are hundreds, possibly thousands, covering the road, mostly unmoving. They do not stray into the bush, where other birds live. Some don’t move, simply because they have been crushed by the truck, by the weight of other birds escaping from the wooden boxes that once stacked and held them. Some are trapped in their boxes still, some impaled on shattered wood. Those birds are no longer birds but meat, no longer meat-to-be. The others roost together on the tarmac plain, a clucking mass of pink flesh. They look with eyes that do not dilate, flap with wings that cannot fly. She can’t tell if the blood on some of the living ones is the blood from the dead ones, or their own.

The bike kickstanded, she runs her hand along the wicker rim of its basket. She could fit maybe two of the birds in it, tops, maybe one each of the dead ones stuffed into old shopping bags. She clutches the plastic in her fist, but she doesn’t step into the sea of birds. She should, she knows: she has always dreamed of being able to eat meat when she wanted it. She has forgotten its taste, its tooth-gripping fibre, the way it fills a stomach. Many have. So she expects the dead ones to be fought over when the others arrive. But, venturing closer, she realises she is not the first to arrive. Like her, her rivals only stand at the edge of the ocean of birds. They watch.

In their stead it is children who run to the birds, ruddy parents in tow, their warm cars left purring behind in the lengthening traffic jams. They scurry to collect the birds, to hold them as they peck with mistrust at their arms, flap weakly. The children don’t want to clear the road – they want to rescue the birds, to coo and cuddle them. But then what? she thinks. To take them where or for what? In any case there are too many birds for the children and their opaque intentions, for their parents to take as pets, as warm dinners-in-waiting. She supposes she could pick up a few of them herself, to take them home, keep them in the concrete back garden, feed them pips and peels. New fruit, borne of leftovers. Maybe they would lay eggs. But these things, they hardly seem alive. Have they always been this way, she thinks, long before the truck tipped?

In the distance she can hear an ambulance. A child screams, then many. Closer to the truck, one of her colleagues is stepping on the heads of injured birds. Among the choir of wails, they crunch. Maybe, she thinks, he needs them to look like what he wants to eat before he takes them. She expects him to pluck what little coverings they have left, to stuff them into bags as she ought to. But he doesn’t. Instead and sullenly he throws their bodies into the fynbos, where they land with a brushing sound, disappearing into the scrub for the peregrine and the caracal to find. She watches her colleague dispatch and hurl twenty before he walks back to his own bike. The red-faced children continue to scream, their parents curse him. They say it’s cruel; they say it’s a waste. These birds were on their way to death anyway, the man says. Better it be swift, and now.

He wears brown boots; the insides of the birds’ heads stick to the soles like mud.

— — 

At the last turn of the road down to her house, she comes off her bike. This is not new, only forgotten. She has not done this since she was a child, learning to ride on a bike with no brakes other than her heels. Sitting on the side of the road, she blows out the small dark stones embedded in the skin of her wrists, tries to ignore the bee-sting heat in her hip. Regarding her tipped bicycle as the cars pass by, she realises her mistake: her baskets are all empty. She is not used to being free of that weight.