Women & Other Animals Read Free Page B

eyes and clutched the cracked seat and door handle. Her brothers had promised to take her with them to the auto parts junk yard, but the way her mother drove, there was no guarantee she'd be alive to go. Loose gravel spit up as Tinny's mother jerked the truck back onto the pavement.
    "Looks like we're here," said her mother as she braked to turn into the compactor driveway.
    "Let's have a beer," said Tinny Marie.
    "Did you peer in the mirror?"
    "I'm a queer reindeer."
    They backed into the unloading zone, and Tinny helped her mother empty the blue plastic oil drums and galvanized metal cans. The more an object was unlike garbage, the better Tinny liked throwing it into the pit. Her favorites included pieces of busted furniture, appliances, and books. A handwritten sign on the side of the operator's shack said "No TVs!" Tinny Marie would've liked nothing better than to see a TV explode.
    After they had emptied the cans and barrels and swept out the rusting truck bed, Tinny climbed on top of the cab. The roof bowed and made a sound like thunder beneath her weight. From inside his shack below her, the compactor man turned on the hydraulics and a chunk of the world began to compress. Lengths of wood splintered and snapped like bones. Cans flattened and bottles popped. Tinny imagined a stray cat jumping into the hole. She closed her eyes and hunched her shoulders against a shiver.
    "Tinny Marie, what do you see?" asked her mother from the ground.
    Tinny opened her eyes. "I see a tree and it sees me."
    "What if I were you?" asked her mother. "And you were me?"
    "What if bumbles was a bee? What if there was a flea on that bee? On his knee?"
    Tinny's mother carried her empty cup into the shack with the compactor man and closed the door. Hands on her hips, Tinny Page 12
    surveyed the field beyond the mowed grounds. She could see all the way through to Indian Road from her perch, nearly all the way home across the yellow scratch of fall. The reds of the sumac trees are like scabs, she thought, on hills that are like knees. "These trees are bees' fleas' knees," she said aloud.
    From the top of the truck, she could see Jimmy Poke's red and white cows lounging in the sun beside the farm pond edged with frost. The cows didn't seem to care that winter was coming. They lay chewing as if seasons didn't change. Jimmy Poke was a friend of her mother's. He dragged one leg behind him as he walked and called all the women "Dahlin'." He always kissed her mother on the mouth. Tinny Marie said "Dahlin" twice out loud but couldn't find a rhyme.
    Late last winter, Jimmy Poke had called their house to say that one of his cows had walked out on the ice and fallen through. If there was a thaw, he said, the carcass would poison the water. Her mother could have the meat if they could get the cow out. Tinny had gone along but stayed on shore while her mom and two brothers went out with a rowboat. They took lengths of rope and a chain saw as well as a splitting maul to bust up the ice.
    The cow in the water was frozen solid, and that was why they had to cut her legs off. As the chain saw buzzed, Tinny had buried her face in the shoulder of a Guernsey heifer. Her brothers tossed the legs one at a time toward the shore. The legs clattered as they skipped across the ice. If those cold white legs were there now, she would kick them into the compactor and bravely watch them snap. Last winter they had carried the frozen cow home in the back of the truck, and her brothers had skinned her and hung her body in the garage. The weather broke, and over the next few days the boys cut the meat from the bones. Her mother finished the job on the kitchen table, wrapping ugly fivepound chunks in freezer paper and gray tape.
    The truckload of garbage was smashed into a tight package, and through the window of the little hut, Tinny Marie could see her mother laughing with the compactor man. Their mouths moved in speech she couldn't hear. When finally another truck pulled in and