Torch
Synopsis:
Jackson Jacoby, a twenty-two year old boy without a mother of his own finds a plea in a newspaper from a woman, begging for her runaway son to return home. He calls, pretends to be the son, and embarks on a journey to visit this mother, spreading to strangers along the way tales of his participation in the human appendage trade, the history of his missing ear, and anything else that might validate his life like, he discovers, the love of a mother could.
Praise for Torch:
“A stirring novel, this extraordinary work plays upon the reader’s willingness to suspend disbelief and turns it on its ear. From the opening imagery set in the incinerator of a beef packing plant through a visit to a roadside museum of body parts through a seemingly interminable trek from a nondescript small town in the middle of the country to Delaware, the novel chronicles the encounters of a narrator who can’t keep his story straight with a cast of drifters many of whom are obsessed in finding their long-lost mothers. The narrator, Jackson Jacoby, tells anyone who will listen the story of how he lost his ear in a childhood torch accident. His storytelling, curiosity, and occasional empathy make him a compelling character. However, he is also prone to unpredictable turns of vandalism and cruelty. In a story he retells often (with slight differences in each new telling), he describes stealing an ear from a sleeping truck driver named Marion Garza and then attempting to sell it. In another example of Jackson’s deviant behavior, he impersonates a runaway in phone calls to the boy’s mother who is desperate for her son to come home. The mother, eager to believe she’s speaking to her son, plays along with Jackson’s ruse. The novel casts a similar spell on its readers.
Covering ground similar to the works of Sherman Alexie and Chuck Palahniuk, this is an author worth keeping an eye on.”
-Publishers Weekly
“Brilliant…one of the most amazing fiction concepts I’ve ever read.”
-Rayo Casablanca, author of 6 Sick Hipsters (Kensington)
“In Torch, Caleb J. Ross writes fearlessly, never shying away from the wild, insane places where his fertile imagination leads him. The first half a twisted take on small-town aimlessness, the second half the American road novel from hell, the book is ultimately a darkly comedic evaluation of a generation of motherless men.”
– Joey Goebel, author of Torture the Artist and Commonwealth (MacAdam/Cage)
Book Excerpt:
ONE: I Know Marion Garza
Travelers commented on the smell. Tourists qualified experiences with, “well, the food was great,” and it was, nobody would argue with that, but what they didn’t understand was that the smell meant home to many people. The smell meant friends, meant family, meant paychecks. The smell was an ingredient to the air, a reminder that we all breathe. The smell was a way to break into conversation with neighbors and strangers. “The air is heavy today,” Man One might say to Man Two. “Fucking stinks,” Man Three might interrupt. A conversation born. A history begun. Commenting on the weather was useless as most weather came blanketed by the smell. Those responsible for the stench looked forward to winter as it numbed the olfactory lobes. Clogged nostrils. The responsible got a few months off from faking pride in this pit.
This guy, Marion Garza, torched blood at the BWP plant when the incinerator broke, which happened weekly, and he didn’t complain as it was much less labor intensive than his normal contribution to the plant: slicing necks above the floor drain, “the gateway,” they called it. After the herd moves up the ramp through the giant yellow door each cow is strapped into a harness and ushered over a retractable floor. When the ground falls away the animals are left hovering. This lessens their struggle and allows the stunner to get close enough to knock the bitches. Think of a pneumatic power nailing gun, only the size of a small cannon and that’s how they kill the animals so quick. Right between the eyes. Fourteen hours a day some guy does this and gets home just in time to kiss his daughter, his son, his wife before he falls to the couch with clothes still sprayed by the dying pulse of the facial artery. To maintain mental stability a stunner works in six-week rotating shifts with enough time off to fill his head with hundreds of reasons to never go back to the plant. But they always do.
Sometimes the product doesn’t die immediately. “Nervous twitching,” the PR people tell local newspapers when a disgruntled worker vents to the wrong person at the wrong bar after ending a particularly brutal shift. “Just nerves still pulsing through the brain. They can’t feel anything.” To the PR group, to the public, words calm. To Marion Garza the “nervous twitching” has resulted in a broken maxilla, thirteen stitches along his right bicep, bruised ribs, a cracked bicuspid, and a cauliflower ear. The ear he claims is a badge from his nonexistent years as a semi-pro boxer in Chihuahua. You’d believe him with arms like his.
To stabilize a panicked animal Marion Garza has a single option: fight. To keep production high, the belts moving, he isn’t allowed to call the stunner over for a second shot. His only option is to wrestle the inverted animal—it swinging by its legs on a hook riding an overhead trolley—until he can hold the head still enough for a good slice through the aorta. His station really is the last resort. After necking, the animal rolls onto a belt splitting two sides of workers; eight arms at once separate the cow. Injuries here could dent human capital enough for prices to shift at supermarkets.
No more nervous twitching after Marion Garza. Fourteen hours a day he does this getting home just in time to microwave a Pop-Tart and fall to the couch. He showers when he has the strength.
But when the incinerator breaks the plant pulls one of the floor workers in to neck the animals while Marion Garza, an experienced flamer, falls to the collecting pool at the end of the gateway’s route. Here, he perfumes the air of the city with burning blood. He stands knee deep in the pool sweeping its surface with a reconditioned World War II man-portable M2A1-7 flame thrower modified with duel static tanks while fans behind him blow the spent air out into the world. Don’t think pollution. Think community.
Marion Garza is a quiet man so the solitude of the pool suits him. Despite the roaring machines and constant sizzle of rotary saws through bone, two could carry on a conversation via brief and focused outbursts during pauses in production, but Marion would rather not waste the opportunity on someone else. Silence, even relative silence, is a luxury he hoards. Flaming the pool he gets silence more than any other worker, except the leader outside perhaps, but working at the ramp isn’t something he could do with a clean conscious.
Most plants truck in cattle, right up to the ramps, from feedlots and backgrounding pens states away. BWP prides itself in being one of the only packing plants in the entire country to have both lots onsite. In backgrounding pens the cattle are taught to eat corn, problematic in many ways—the toxicity of the Rumensin injections given to ward off infections during grain introduction weakens their stomachs, or their liver is shot within months, or they develop acidosis, or when the Rumensin fails the cattle bloats which essentially suffocates them from the inside by expanding the stomach against the lungs—but corn is economical. In the feed lots they are fed for mass gain. All corn. Only the lead cow, El Niño, gets grass.
After fourteen hours some man without a name steps in to take over the torch. Marion Garza times his exit with a precision you’d be wise to fear. A mind like Marion’s, one that knows this much about the mechanics of a beef packing plant, is trained to absorb violence and trained to forget it. After fourteen hours Marion Garza adopts his own schedule, punching the clock, removing overcoats, changing boots, and to his late model Ford Festiva before the sun has a chance to reveal the proof of a new day. A hang-up anywhere means seeing for one brief instant the reality of the backgrounding pen and the feedlot and of El Niño, existing at the center of everything.
For a while BWP employed a prodder, a man who spent his days at the feedlot zapping the animals into an organized and obedient line, managing the herds up the ramp, through the giant yellow door opening to the kill shed. Realizing this may be a waste of money, the powers decided to train a single cow that could not only lead the rest up the ramp peacefully, but could calm the animals pre-killing-shed by setting an example, becoming a leader for the pack in a “look at my healthy coat and composed demeanor—don’t worry—they’re alright people” kind of way. This is El Niño. They call her a Judas Cow. She eats grass and sleeps between shows.
“Go quick,” the man without a name says casually taking over the torch. “The late truck just arrived. They’ll want you to stay.”
Thanks, Marion Garza might say if he were one to thank anybody. Instead he has the first three buttons of his white overcoat already unsnapped before the man can fully embrace the torch. He offers a shallow wave as he turns away, half-running.
Outside the stiff morning breeze dulls much of the burnt blood stench but brings with it the strong smell of oil and stressed brakes. The late truck has arrived and although Marion Garza has no fear of being called back in this far away from the time clock he runs to his car anyway, avoiding the cries of cattle trained to recognize this load of liquefied fat. Other trucks carry liquefied protein and together the ingredients are mixed with the corn creating sustenance capable of packing on up to five pounds a day. The cattle live only for these trucks.
At home Marion Garza microwaves a hamburger. He watches six minutes of Telemundo, a channel he hates for what it does to those who watch with religious regularity, and falls asleep in his chair, the empty plate resting on his exploding stomach.
When he wakes up the setting sun is peeking through a hole in the aluminum foil taped to his windows. Unable to find more foil he patches the opening with a silver gum wrapper, using the gum as an adhesive. He eats a bowl of cereal, drinks a microwaved cup of coffee from the evening before and stretches once before going to work. During the drive he wonders how the foil might have torn away; why his home seems to be breaking during the night.
With the incinerator still broken Marion Garza takes the torch from another unnamed worker and nods as the man leaves with a relieved smile. He wipes the sweat from his brow as it drips from underneath the white hardhat Marion can’t help but hate. On the floor, sure, a hardhat might protect from flying knives or an escaping hacksaw, but at the end of the gateway the old military flame thrower would only melt the thing, gluing the blackened putty to a worker’s skull. Sweat feels like dripping plastic, like a mold slowly building from the head down.
For lunch he brings half a Pot-Tart and a bowl of goulash he pre-mixed at home with maple syrup. He dumps the meal down quickly leaving a full thirty minutes before he must return to the pool. Instead of assimilating into the ordinary after-lunch crowd—a group of misshaped men with chucky beards who enjoy sharing tales of conquest, both sexual and familial—Marion Garza escapes to the roof with a cigarette and the subtle beginnings of a smile eager to justify his happiness with the cool breezes above.
The sun digs underneath him. For miles this small city is a grid of sporadic street lamps fighting against the absent sun. Marion Garza inhales deep, taking in smoke and the stink of manure filling the north pens. It will be cleaned in another three months, between backgrounding classes, but for now it floats ripe, almost visible in the air. Through his tight wool hat he can hear the erratic mooing climbing up from the pens below. But he doesn’t look. He just pretends the wails are a song of the hills, the sounds of a view he pretends to have chosen; pretends to love.
When Marion Garza was born his mother loved him enough to hide him in a garbage bag. She kissed him through the black plastic, unsure if she connected with a cheek, a head, an arm, or a shoe, then nestled him into her brother’s trunk before her brother made his annual tour of the southwest selling used clothing at gas stations. Border patrol was a joke back then. Not like today with “open-fire” laws and gun towers. Marion Garza’s mother died two months later from mastitis in her left breast. He doesn’t learn any of this until a few years after working for BWP.
Standing at the top of a beef packing plant he could see far enough into the horizon to know the curvature of the earth, far enough to acknowledge his own back as the land came around behind him, but not far enough to look beyond the possibility that his mother may have made some sort of awful decision.
Somewhere out there tires scream against a black street and everything is quiet after a quick collision.
Ten minutes pass before Marion Garza hears car doors slam, can hear mumbling and screaming for “anyone, please anyone, call an ambulance.” Five minutes more and the lot is swarming with the voices of BWP workers, each doing the best he can to communicate effective handling of the trauma given the language barrier. Disorganized as cattle, Marion assumes them to be. He hasn’t yet brought himself to investigate the accident even from the safe distance of the roof. It’s enough to hear the screaming, the glass breaking, the heroes commanding; it’s enough to smell the abused rubber float above the rancid air, to feel the two mingle deep within his lungs. It’s enough to know an accident has occurred without having to endure its sight.
Creeping down the scaffolding Marion Garza keeps his eyes squeezed to slits, blurring the world, keeping away the wreck, El Niño, the pens. He feels his way via the wall, steps high over possible stones or ill-placed tools. But despites these devices he can still hear El Niño quietly shifting cud. Even above the approaching ambulance El Niño grunts contention. She is a bright white blur no matter how much Marion Garza wants her dim.
As the woman screams through shards of windshield glass tearing away at vocal chords and arteries, El Niño stands outside of it all, ignorant to the trauma. The animal steps away from the heat, sounds her discontent loud over the growing flame’s roar. When Marion Garza trips over hidden train tracks, and falls to the ground, the cow turns away and lumbers to the furthest corner of her private pen. From there she drops to the grass and stares. Night and dawn Marion Garza must endure this ignorant beast for the few moments he has between his car and the necking pit. She is bright with healthy blood, free from the manure the other animals wear as coats. A true lifer.
He returns to the plant that night—the world’s day—and drives a railroad spike through El Niño’s left eye. An unnamed man near the ramp yells, but Marion will never stop for anybody.
The stabbing wasn’t pity. Don’t think pity. Marion isn’t one to feel sorry for anybody for any reason. It wasn’t about cruelty or liberation or food. It wasn’t a rule he finally brought to practicality or a lesson he had been taught and only then understood. It wasn’t about punishment either. He never believed in punishment—a false concept that breeds fear where paths fork. Make a decision and worship it. Let the congregation deal with the consequences. Killing El Niño was probably more of a control thing. Or a revelation. Whatever it was, we can be certain it was entirely personal. Nobody but that unnamed man saw Marion Garza kill El Niño. And if connections can be made, the man found dead in the back of a locked semi-trailer last spring, starved to bones and a railroad spike through his temple, could very well be that unnamed man.
I know Marion Garza.
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Awards:
Amazon.com Breakthrough Novel Award Semi-finalist
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