GENE FIRST MET Jimmy Tosti in the Marines, before Operation Desert Storm. Lance Corporal Gene Barnes had originally been trained to drive an AMTRAK, the amphibious assault tractor that carried grunts from ship to shore. Since the first Gulf War took place in the desert, the military retrained him to drive a tank filled with an assault squad.
Gene outfitted his tank like he had his AMTRAK, with stuffed animals such as Sycamore Squirrel and Lucinda Skunk near the controls. A sergeant once tried to tell him that populating a tank with stuffed animals was not official US military procedure. At the time Gene was cleaning engine grime from his nails with an oriental butterfly knife, which was not a proper US military weapon.
“Oh, really,” Gene said and stood up, flexing his huge farmer’s hands that were the size of diesel gears, with thick muscular fingers sticking out like large sprockets. His clenched fists were as big as howitzer shells, and the Marines had trained and shaped the rest of him. In high school he had earned a black belt in karate. But hometown friends and soldiers he shared beers with at Camp Pendleton all agreed the most menacing thing about Gene was the crazed look in his eyes—a look that said he would kill a person in a heartbeat and take a curiously detached amusement during the whole process. Gene cultivated this perception even though it wasn’t exactly true. He knew he could kill somebody if he absolutely had to, if he felt endangered and the person deserved it, but deep down he loved animals, especially furry ones, loved his mother, and tolerated most everyone else as long as they left him alone. The sergeant didn’t know the cuddly side of Lance Corporal Barnes and walked away, deciding he had bigger battles to fight.
Gene approached the military with a supreme lack of seriousness. Even during combat, with bullets whizzing over his head, he perched through his tank hole, and as the grunts ran out from the back and toward the front line, he lisped in his most feminized voice, “Go get ’em, tholdier!” and “Thock it to ’em, tough guy!” and “Oh, you’re tho rough and tough!”
Nobody, except Jimmy Tosti, the crew’s communications operator, said anything to Gene about his behavior because of the crazed look in his eye and the fact that he more or less got the job done, whatever the job was. A couple of years after high school, and after several minor arrests, mostly dope related, Jimmy’s interest in the Marines had been strongly encouraged by a St. Louis County judge who believed in creative sentencing. The war started right after Jimmy enlisted, and by then it was too late to back out. He had long ago concluded jail might have been a better option, and his goal was to spend as much of his time in the Middle East stoned out of his mind.
Jimmy Tosti probably should have pronounced his name “Taustie,” as in Austin or Boston, but the family pronounced it “Toastie,” as in Post Toasties, or toasted, Jimmy’s preferred state of consciousness. Gene’s lack of respect for the military, or at least for his comrades in arms, amused Jimmy Tosti greatly, but as a city kid he especially enjoyed Gene’s stories of growing up on a farm.
One day during a training mission they spent hours idling in a tank waiting for the grunts to “take the objective,” whatever that was. Gene had told him about the first time he’d seen pigs castrated. He and Miller had been kids and were excited to help the men castrate the male piglets. Their father and his brother had held the squirming pig upright, locking down its hind legs so it couldn’t kick with its sharp hooves, while their neighbor and cousin, Ralph Edson, who owned the farm, made two cuts on the pig’s small mound of a scrotum, yanked the testicles out, cut the long strands attaching them, then tossed the wad into the pig pen.
“Rocky Mountain Oysters!” Ralph called to the boys. “Your grampa used to bread ’em and fry ’em up for breakfast.”
Back in the pen the other piglets and the sow swarmed around the testicles and gobbled them up, squealing and sucking down their own flesh and blood and ductus deferens. It was horrific. Mothers gobbled up the testicles of their own squalling brood, brothers and sisters gobbled up brothers’ testicles, and Miller claimed he even saw one pig, released back into the pen, gobble up his own ruined and bloody gonads. The two boys climbed into the back of the truck and felt sick. Miller never went again. After his first time though, it was a mixture of pride and fascination that brought Gene back for more. He spent most every summer through high school working with pigs and soon learned how to castrate them himself, single-handedly.
“Why do they cut their nuts off, dude?” Jimmy Tosti asked.
“So they grow bigger. Also, you don’t want a bunch of bulls running around. You only want one good bull for breeding.”
Often when they were bored, playing the military’s favorite game, Hurry Up and Wait, Tosti would say, “Tell me more about them pigs, dude.”
“What do you wanna know?” Gene asked. He didn’t mind humoring Jimmy Tosti, who was pretty much his only friend, but didn’t know what else to tell him.
“What else do they eat besides their own nuts?”
“Anything. Everything. Even their own young. There was this one guy, Nolan Johnson, my grandma’s neighbor. He was a farmer, but he was into the stock market and all kinds of cockamamie schemes. The Feds busted him for sending stolen tractor engines by train. They caught him at the loading station in a sting operation. The whole thing was a set up. Anyway, when he came back a year later from prison, his life wasn’t so good. His wife was teaching grade school and had left him, his daughter was off to college, and he had to sell most of his farm. All he had left were a bunch of rusted lawn mowers and a few hogs, and one day a neighbor came to check on him and he was gone. Nowhere to be found. The neighbor walked through the house, walked down the hill to the back forty, went over to the barn—nothing. No Nolan. He gave up and was walking back to his car when he passed the pig pen and saw Nolan’s Rolex gleaming in the mud. He only had three or four pigs, but they ate him, bones, clothes, and all. All that was left were his half-chewed shoes and his watch. Nobody knows if he got drunk and careless or slipped and it was an accident or if it was suicide or revenge for ratting everybody else out or what.”
“Damn, boy, you got some fucked-up stories.”
Four years later, Jimmy Tosti sent Gene an email saying he had a business proposition and wanted to talk in person. They met at a Hardee’s on I-64 and Route 1, the Carmi exit, the next afternoon.
The Hardee’s sat across from a Phillips 66 in a small valley built up by the highway ramps and overpass. It was the only hill for miles, and the brown stubble of cornstalks stretched around them until it reached the scrawl of trees that shadowed the Little Wabash. Every few years the Wabash would flood into the Little Wabash and the huge flat stretch of land between the two rivers looked like a vast lake, with waves lapping the tops of oil wells and water tanks. But this meeting happened in September. Flood season over, the corn stubbled up dry and brittle. The fields were a cheerless, leached brown, and the sky was overcast with a film the color of spoiled milk.
Jimmy Tosti’s bright new yellow Dodge Viper stood out in this colorless landscape. He sat behind the wheel talking on his cell, when Gene pulled into the parking lot. Jimmy’s belly had bulged a bit since Operation Desert Storm and now sloped at the same angle as his fine sloped nose, which looked to Gene like it had maybe also grown a bit. He was always short and stocky with muscular arms, but he had grown a bit softer in the past few years. Jimmy’s two biggest loves were firstly smoking dope and secondly eating sweets, which he usually did ravenously after the first, especially Entenmann’s doughnuts, the dozen-sized box that came with four chocolates, four powdered, and four plain. Operation Dessert Storm, Jimmy liked to call it. Despite the extra pounds, he looked the same and at least still had a thick full head of hair, unlike Gene, who believed most of his hair had wilted and fallen out after so many years in a hot helmet before and during the war.
“Farmer Brown!” said Jimmy Tosti, sticking out his hand. Gene had always either been Farmer Brown or “dude,” and he wondered if Tosti ever called anybody by their real name. He figured Tosti was usually too stoned to remember or too uninterested in learning it in the first place.
“How’s life in exciting Carmi?” he asked, mispronouncing the town “Carmee.” It always irked Gene when people mispronounced Carmi as much as when people pronounced the s in Illinois.
“It’s Carmi, with an I, as in I like it here just fine, thanks.”
They ordered their food and stood there facing the counter while they waited. Neither man broke the silence. Gene couldn’t tell if Jimmy Tosti was contemplating the chocolate chip cookie and hot apple turnover on the dessert menu or organizing his thoughts for whatever proposition he had for Gene.
“Looks like you’re doing well enough,” Gene told him when they sat down at a booth with their plastic trays. No one else was in the restaurant. He patted his own belly and gestured to the parking lot. “Full tummy, nice ride.”
“Business has been good,” Jimmy said and stuck a wad of French fries in his mouth. “I travel a lot, work mostly in St. Louis and Chicago, but I travel the whole country.”
Gene decided not to ask Jimmy what business he conducted all over the country, and after unwrapping his sandwich, his former communications operator wasted no time getting to business.
“They used to put ’em in a tree chipper and shred ’em into the river,” Jimmy said with a mouth full of Frisco Burger. He gulped red fruit punch through a straw to wash it down, then swirled a couple fries in a large puddle of ketchup he’d squirted onto his sandwich wrapper. “But I’ve watched enough crime shows to know they can trace all the blood now.” He gestured with a couple of ketchup-tipped fries. “We don’t want nothing left behind, so I thought of you and them pigs.”
Gene considered his financial situation. The house had been paid off long before he’d moved in, but he owed several years worth of back taxes and was behind in his truck payments. The price of corn and soybeans last year was so low he’d barely covered his costs. He told Tosti he’d have to think about it and get back with him. Three nights later, Tosti appeared on his back porch.
“You still thinking about it, Farmer Brown?”
“Nice to see you too. I’ve been busy, but I haven’t forgotten.”
“I got three G’s in my pocket and a corpse in the trunk. You can have them both.”
Gene looked out over the dark fields. Pretty Girl was still barking at the uninvited guest. Gene’s eyes had started to adjust to the night, and by the light of the full sky of stars and almost a full moon he could just make out the line of trees by the river at the end of these forty stubbly acres. The truck foreclosure notice lay on the table—this was for his GMC, his “dress truck,” as opposed to his “work truck.” He was already two months behind on the tax payment the IRS had handed him in January. A week before he had made up his mind to mortgage the farmland but not the house, but it was the farmland that worried him the most. It had been in his family for five generations, and his mother had entrusted it to him back when she was still lucid.
“Follow me,” he sighed.
They stopped at the trunk of the yellow Viper, and Tosti pulled out a dead man about their age wearing boxers and a T-shirt and hoisted him over his shoulder. Gene wondered if his flesh might even still be warm.
“Friend of yours?”
“You don’t ever want to ask, Farmer Brown. But since you didn’t know, he was an associate.” Tosti put down the body and looked out, contemplating the trees in the distance along the Wabash, then looked Gene in the eyes. “Never ask again.”
Gene never did. He never asked where the bodies came from. He never asked if Jimmy killed these people himself or if he just arranged for the disposal. He never asked who they both worked for. He figured the less he knew, the better. He never even asked him if he still smoked as much pot as he did during the war. This transaction was business, an ugly but necessary business, and the less personal, the better.
Tosti picked the body back up and after another fifty yards, he puffed, changed shoulders, and asked, “Is it far?”
“Follow your nose. Not far.”
Gene helped Tosti toss the body over the rail close to the pile of dozing hogs and started to leave, but Tosti stood at the gate.
“You coming?”
“I have to see this.”
Gene couldn’t tell if Tosti meant, “I have to see this” out of professional thoroughness or personal satisfaction, but he didn’t stay to watch with him. He walked back to the house and sat on his paint-blistered porch and sucked a cigarette, which he still did at the time, and thought about what he’d gotten himself into. The mostly full moon had moved a bit further west, cheered on by a chorus of crickets in the fields around him, fields that in two months would lie quiet and cold. He wondered if he’d get caught by the police, if these people would come back and get rid of him for knowing too much, feeding him to his own pigs, and if there was a psychic price he’d have to pay—or if he’d become a calloused son of a bitch like some of the marine sergeants, contractors, and foremen he’d worked under. He didn’t want to be a son of a bitch except to people he wanted to keep their distance. Jimmy Tosti had become one of those people.
“They left some of the big bones,” Tosti said coming up through the darkness.
“They probably weren’t hungry enough to work at it. I won’t feed them tomorrow and they’ll be gone.”
“You sure?”
“Yep.”
“Here,” said Tosti, handing Gene a thick $3,000 in fifty-and hundred-dollar bills. “Count it.”
The money was a mixture of old and new bills, but perfectly stacked, fresh out of a machine.
“Three thousand.”
“We’re good for our word.”
“OK.”
“It’s been a pleasure doing business with you, Farmer Brown. I’ll be in touch.”
Gene set the money on the step beside him and said nothing as his stocky ex-friend and now business partner walked to his Viper and drove off. In the several years since that night, Jimmy Tosti had sent him a body every three or four months. Usually he’d a get a phone call on his cell from an unrecognized number. If Gene didn’t answer, there’d be no message, but the phone would ring again in ten minutes.
It was Tosti, polite but short and business-like: “Hey, Farmer Brown. Can you pick up some bags of concrete?” Every time Jimmy would change what needed picking up—lumber, rebar, bricks, paint buckets, copper pipes, tile, drywall.
“Sure. When?”
“Tomorrow. Usual time.”
“OK.”
Gene had arranged the meeting place himself since he didn’t want the deliveries at his home. Jimmy Tosti had stopped making the deliveries himself a year and a half ago and now had other people doing it. Each delivery was made by someone different, though Gene thought he’d seen Romeo at least one other time.
Gene told no one about this relationship—not his sometime semi-girlfriend Danise, not the group he accompanied on motorbike trips who were more like regular acquaintances than actual friends. He had one friend, Keith, who he’d gone to high school with and who, like Gene, had never married and lived with his parents until an embarrassingly late age and then moved back in with them again when they got sick. Keith was a kind, shy person with an endless appetite for death metal, and Gene certainly couldn’t tell him about his side job. Gene wasn’t squeamish, but he wasn’t proud of these transactions either, and he was scrupulously careful. As he put it to himself, and he often did put things to himself since he spent most of his time alone, “The extra money doesn’t help me live high on the hog, but it does keep me from having to sell the family dirt.”