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Cows spend their lives being constantly impregnated in order to produce milk. Bulls can be difficult, so the majority of dairy cows are now artificially inseminated. Sex is a thing of the past.
-Modern Farmer, “Inside the Milk Machine: How Modern Dairy Works” (17 Mar 2014)
The windows of Les Vraies Affaires cast bands of apple-green light across the deep blue plain of the parking lot. Inside the bar are discrete figures: women with fried hair, men with fried beards; the barkeep with tired eyes. Everyone sits within a cage of solitude. Even the ones who came together: there’s enough space in the countryside that you can go your whole life without ever rubbing elbows with another human being. Tom thinks of Edward Hopper—Hopper in the country, he thinks, Hopper à la campagne—then is surprised that he can think of anything at all.
When the bus comes, Francis makes a show of unlocking the doors. Just the passenger side. Tom yanks at his handle anyway. Francis’s eyes meet his eyes and glitter in the rearview mirror.
“You’re sick,” Sarah Thibault says in parting. “The two of you, you’re sick, you’re fucked up. Worse than that, you’re pathetic.”
“It was kind of you to visit Agathe,” Francis says calmly. “Your visit made her very happy.”
He holds out the plastic bag. The shirt. The etched silk velvet.
“As a thank you,” he says, smiling.
A glance. A sneer. “What the fuck?” Sarah says. She leaves with Guillaume’s letters in her purse.
*
The bus departs: ponderously, despite its limited cargo. Tom watches until its lights disappear. Then he looks back. Francis sits stiffly, staring ahead, the shirt in its plastic envelope hovering in his hand. Soft, springy, frictionless, it’s beginning to spill from the bag. Blood and roses.
“I’ll wear it,” Tom says. Francis ignores him. “Hey. Francis.”
He climbs into the passenger seat. It’s cooled already, clammy under his fingers. As if Sarah had never sat there. As if she had never come.
“Hey,” he says, gentle. “I said—”
His palm brushes the velvet. Francis slaps him. He sits back, trembling, ears ringing.
“You want this?” Francis says. His voice is inside Tom’s head and very far away at the same time. “You want her things?” He holds Tom by the hair and shakes him as he talks to him. “You want her lipstick too?” He smears the bottle Sarah was drinking from against Tom’s lips. “You think it’s going to be a nice color on you?”
“Fran—”
The bottle is in his mouth: thwacking against his front teeth and then past them, smooth and cold and heavy on his tongue. Francis keeps pushing. The slim neck begins to flare and Tom’s lips stretch around the body. “You want to be Sarah?” Francis says.
Tom stares at Francis with his eyes stinging and his mouth distended and tries to breathe through his nose. He tells himself it will end soon. He tells himself it will go on forever. Francis tightens his fist in his hair and he moans.
“Christ,” Francis says thickly. He makes Tom blow the bottle, pushing and pulling him. Spit dribbles onto Guillaume’s shirt. Tom goes cross-eyed watching the light from the bar gleaming on the glass. “That’s right,” Francis tells him. “Get it sloppy.”
The bottle hits the back of Tom’s throat. He gags and grabs Francis’s wrist with both hands. Francis screws the bottle into him, then tugs it out. A stream of saliva follows: and bile. Tom claps his hands over his mouth. “Gonna puke.” His voice is a thin whistle of air.
“Puke in my car, I’ll kill you,” Francis promises.
Tom heaves a moment longer. When he’s sure he can control himself, he straightens. Francis splashes him. The last lukewarm gulp in Sarah’s bottle, more backwash than beer. It trickles down Tom’s cheek, his chin.
“I came on your face, Sarah,” Francis says. He laughs wildly.
“Tom,” Tom says.
“Eh? What?”
“My name is Tom. Call me Tom. ‘I came on your face, Tom.’ ”
Francis drives them back to the farm. It’s 1:14 in the morning, the moon like a sou overhead. He thinks Francis is finished for the night, but when they arrive Francis walks around the truck and bends him over the passenger seat. Guillaume’s jeans are too big for him and come down easy. Oh God, Tom whispers, hoarse, God, Francis, yes; but Francis picks up the bottle.
“Tom’s hungry cunt,” he says, “wants a cock in it.”
The bottle, crusted with beer and saliva, burns like fuck as it plows inside.
*
The next day is Sunday. Tom, Francis, and Agathe go to Mass, where the priest talks about the healing presence of God. God is in our wounds, he says. Tom rocks from hip to hip. Agathe weeps and Francis yawns.
*
Lunch is trout with butter from the farm. Agathe serves Tom first. “Francis has caught so many trout, I’m certain the river is empty.” She says it reproachfully, her eyes on her utensils.
“Sarah called,” Tom says. Agathe looks up. Francis glares at him. “This morning,” Tom continues dreamily, “on my cellphone.” His cell has been dead for days. “To let me know she arrived safely.”
“Considerate of her,” Agathe says. She drops the next big fleshy slab onto her son’s plate. “It was kind of you to coax her to come, Tom,” she says. “She’s pretty. Very sexy. I can see why Guillaume fell in love with her. But girls like that must be a dime a dozen in the city.”
“There were other girls,” Tom says. “He was popular, Guillaume was.”
“Enough already,” Francis says, but Agathe slaps the table: let me hear them, she says, body of Christ, let me hear the stories.
“There was Veronica,” Tom says. “Véronique. She was an exhibitionist. Guillaume said she tried to get him to have sex on a playground. At the time he lived over a park. There was Tania: a virgin. She would look at Guillaume and turn red from head to toe. Red everywhere, from her throat to her pussy. She was Nordic, a real blonde—not like me—and her skin was normally so white you could see through it to the blue veins underneath. There was Katie, from New York.” An American, Agathe murmurs proudly, and beams. “Her favorite position was on top. She could ride for hours, Guillaume said.”
Francis stands.
“Aren’t you hungry?” Agathe asks him. “By Christ, don’t take so many fish from the river if you’re not going to eat them.”
“Madame Longchamp,” Tom says, “I’m not very hungry either.” It was the sermon, he says. “It reminded me of the service. The funeral.”
“Of course,” Agathe says softly.
“It reminded me of Guillaume,” Tom says, “and that’s why I had to tell you more, you and Francis, about his life in the city and all those girls.”
Francis has gone upstairs. Tom finds him lounging in bed in his track pants, a big fleshy slab of a man, his nipples shining brown in the sun. He looks at Tom, then looks away.
Tom closes the door. His ass tingles. The bottle was so hard inside him last night, he thinks, the pew so hard beneath him today. “Francis,” he whispers. He climbs on top of Francis, straddles him. She could ride for hours. “Did you see? I made Agathe smile.”
Francis moves like a snake and his hands like a set of jaws close around Tom’s windpipe. A squeak leaves Tom’s mouth, a noise that dies the moment it hits the stale, humid air. Tears fill his eyes.
“So what,” Francis says, squeezing. “The old bitch is crazy.”
Tom can feel the blood pumping in his neck, his temples. Francis’s grip is as tight as a belt. He wheezes, but nothing comes in. His lungs hang inside him, deflated. The strength is already leaving his limbs. He’s so hard—he’s so hard—he’s dying. He grinds himself against Francis, crying, until he faints.
*
Autumn comes. On a cool, cloudy afternoon, while Agathe lies down with a headache, Francis takes Tom fishing. They drive out in the truck until they reach a single dirt lane, Tom watching the unhurried dance of clouds across the sky. Francis unlocks the doors. He drops his tackle into Tom’s lap with enough force to make Tom grunt. Carry that, he says.
Francis carries the cooler and the rods. They’re mismatched, one much longer than the other. “This one was my father’s.”
“What happened to him, your father?” Tom asks.
Francis grins at him. “You thick? Your mind going? You know what happened. Agathe told you what happened. He died.”
“No, I know,” Tom says, “but how? Was it sudden? Was it…”
“Like my brother?” Francis says. His face changes. Tom shrinks into himself. They’re all alone on this dirt road. The tackle box is heavy. There are hooks inside it, he knows, long dirty hooks and maybe a knife. Never mind, he says. Francis points with his chin. “We’re here.”
*
The water is brown and sluggish. The far shore is a dull yellow wall of leaves. “The St. Lawrence?” Tom asks. Francis sniggers. “Sorry,” Tom says, flushing, “I’m not familiar, I don’t know…”
“The Richelieu,” Francis says. He drops the cooler so he can put his hand on Tom’s shoulder. Tom can feel him all the way through Guillaume’s flannel and sweatshirt and undershirt. He shivers. “But you’re not exactly wrong,” Francis concedes. “It will become the St. Lawrence eventually: it flows into it.”
“There’s no escape,” Tom murmurs.
Francis slips his Ziploc bag of worms into a pocket, hoists both rods, and wades in to his thighs. “Come in,” he calls, “come here, stand by me.”
Francis is wearing waders. Tom only has galoshes. Agathe’s: his feet were too small for Guillaume’s. He shakes his head.
“Come here,” Francis repeats.
“No,” Tom says. “It’s cold. I’ll get wet and cold.”
“Come here, esti de criss,” Francis says, low. “I’ll count from ten, shithead.”
Tom is shaking. The tackle box is open beside him, and he can see its contents. The rusty lures, all smaller and blunter than he had pictured. The bundled fishing line like a skein of silk. Two sandwiches.
Ten is generous. Ten is so much more than three.
“Tom!”
On zero, Francis leaves the water like a zombie, ungainly in his waders, a fishing rod clamped in each outstretched hand. He hurls one rod at the bank and swings. Tom dodges. The heel of Agathe’s galosh snags against a tree root. Tom’s foot goes one way, the rest of his body the other. The fall knocks the breath out of him, but once he gets it back, he screams; Francis is whipping him with his father’s fishing rod. Guillaume’s clothes are thick, cushioning him, but the rod splits his cheek open.
*
“You clumsy little fucker,” Francis says as he carries Tom back to the truck. Bridal-style, Tom’s feet bouncing in the air as Francis walks. Perfume is for weddings, he thinks: he smells like piss and blood, Francis like the water, fish and sewage and decay. They left their gear on the riverbank. The tackle box, the fishing rods. Your dad’s rod, Tom said, as Francis jerked him up into his arms. Who gives a fuck, Francis said.
Francis loads him into the passenger seat and buckles him in, handling him like he would a newborn calf. (Francis is rough with his calves, shockingly so. You’d think new life, stumbling around bewilderedly in the farmyard, would invite tenderness.) Tom closes his eyes. He feels sick with pain. His ankle is a swollen knot scraping against rubber; he’s sure they’re going to have to cut Agathe’s galosh off. At least it wasn’t Guillaume’s, he breathes. What, coliss, Francis demands, what are you mumbling about now. If it was Guillaume’s and we had to cut it up it would make her sad, Tom says, and if I make Agathe sad you’ll beat the shit out of me. You’ve caught on, Francis says. He pulls the worms out of his pocket and dumps them onto Tom’s lap: hold these. He slams Tom’s door, climbs into his own seat, and starts the truck.
If I eat one will you be nice to me? Tom asks. His cheek is swollen too, finally scabbing over. He touches it tentatively, wincing. If I kiss one, he says, if I pretend to suck it off or put it inside me, will you…
“Shut up,” Francis says flatly, flicking on the radio.
The sounds of the world beyond flood the truck; Tom starts to hyperventilate. Francis glances at him and toggles between stations. A DJ talks about her weekend plans. A grocery chain advertises a sale. Aerosmith yowl Walk this way. C’était l’année de l’amour, sing Beau Dommage. J’avais des fleurs dans’cheveux.
Francis, Tom gasps.
“Shut up,” Francis says again, turning the volume up louder and louder, until Tom’s sure his ears are bleeding, not just his ears but his eyes, his pores.
Open the windows, Tom begs him, just mine, just crack it, please, please, I can’t breathe. Beau Dommage fills the truck, his ears and eyes and nose and mouth and lungs, a cement slurry, crowding out the air. He drops his head against the window and gasps. The vibrations of road and music rattle his teeth. On est dix mille su’a rue Saint-Paul. He can’t remember what Saint-Paul looks like anymore.
*
“Put him in my room,” Agathe says. Her bedroom is on the ground floor.
“Downstairs is better,” Francis says with authority. “There’s the refrigerator. There’s water. I’ll put a mattress downstairs for him. I’ll bring him his meals until his ankle is better. It won’t take more than a few weeks.”
Agathe frowns. “A few weeks? Did you already take him to the doctor?”
Yes, Tom says, as Francis says no.
*
Downstairs, Tom hobbles around on one leg like a flamingo. Sometimes he crawls. He feels soothed by the creaky whir of the old refrigerator. He misses the cows and the feeling of natural light on his irises. His back hurts. His ankle is black and blue, then purple, then yellow.
Francis makes him eat on all fours. “I always wanted a dog,” he says. “A Rottweiler—not a bitch like you.” When the plate is clean, Francis makes him lick the floor. When the floor is clean, he lifts his face, and Francis wipes his lips and runs his fingers through his hair, scratching behind his ears.
The cycle of day and night loses its meaning. By the time Tom is able to limp upstairs, hobbling with Francis behind him, Francis’s arm around his waist, the fields are covered in snow.
*
Agathe’s sister invites her to La Prairie. Just Agathe: no mention of her eldest son. It will be good for me, Agathe says uncertainly; she’s parroting the voicemail her sister left her on the phone. A change of pace, of scene. She packs a case in quiet contemplation and asks Francis to drive her to the station. Tom wants to see you off too, Francis says, his hand heavy on the back of Tom’s neck.
The bus from Les Vraies Affaires will take her first to the depot in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu. After that, she’ll have to transfer to another bus, and then another: her sister doesn’t have a car. It’s why she didn’t come to the funeral, Agathe says, but Tom knows better.
“It’s too bad your car broke down, Tom,” Agathe says. “I would have asked to borrow it.”
Tom smiles and shrugs.
“I’ll be back soon. On the 27th.”
“Take your time,” Tom says. “Stay longer if you want to. You have some catching up to do. So many things to talk about.” He adds, don’t worry, Francis and I will be fine. But from the blank look on Agathe’s face, he sees that she doesn’t really care.
From La Prairie, Agathe says vaguely, you can see the city across the water.
*
The bus is still idling in the lot when Francis peels out, roaring back to the farm at fifty kilometers over the speed limit. Tom wonders if they’re going to do a line and tango. If they’re going to do a line and fuck. His heart thunders and his mouth dries and he puts his fingernails—black with dirt—to his lips and bites. Francis goes to the cows instead.
“We’ll go into town for our suppers,” Francis says when he returns. He smells like dung and sweat. There are stains around his armpits.
Let’s stay in, Tom says, swallowing: I can cook. Can you? Francis says doubtfully. I can, Tom insists. He looks at Agathe’s knives.
“She pulled one on me,” Francis says. “That bitch Sarah.” He leers. “Bet you wish she’d gone ahead and fucking stabbed me.”
Tom closes his hand around the handle. He thinks about what it would feel like: the flesh giving way. Plunging in to the hilt. Plunging in until you’re skin to skin, until your knuckles are flush against the wound. While he’s thinking, Francis looms up behind him. He clamps his hand around Tom’s wrist and squeezes until Tom moans and lets go.
*
At Christmas, Agathe gifts Tom a dark green sweater. It reminds me of the shirt you were wearing when you first came here, she says; when I found you sleeping at our table like Goldilocks. Five months, she says, they’ve gone by just like that.
Your turn, Agathe, Francis says. He picks a present out from under the tree. “This one’s from Tom.”
It’s a teapot from a store in Sabrevois. She’ll like this, Francis told Tom at the beginning of December. I’ll wrap it. Make sure you write her something nice on the card.
What should I give you? Tom had asked. Beneath the Christmas tree—which he took Tom to choose—Francis tears open an envelope of cash.
“Five hundred dollars,” Agathe cries. “Tom, it’s too much.”
It’s all the money Tom had left in his checking account. He had given Francis his debit card and pin. The pin he had relinquished with his face on the barn floor and Francis's boot on his cheek: Eight—zero—fuck—four—three.
It’s the least he can do, he tells Agathe. His tongue is numb and he talks through the buzzing in his ears. “I want to buy Francis his laser milking machine.”
“The model I want is only four-twenty-nine.” Francis peels a twenty off the stack. “Beer money,” he says, grinning. “Thank you, Tom.”
Tom gulps. “You’re welcome, Francis.”
Agathe looks sour. She hates her son’s drinking habits. He’s already had a few this morning, Tom knows; he can taste it on Francis’s breath whenever Francis comes near.
Whenever Francis comes near, he breathes in deeply. Nose and mouth, taking Francis in.
Agathe, Francis says, it’s Christmas, let’s not make a scene.
Agathe pulls herself together. “Let’s take a photo,” she says. “Put on your sweater, Tom, put on your sweater.”
Francis sets up the tripod, the timer. The photo is like this: Agathe in the middle, Tom and Francis on either side. Everyone’s smiling, even Agathe with her dark circles, even Tom with his new black eye. One day Agathe will have the film developed; one day Francis will nail Tom to the wall.
*
No one’s coming for you, Francis tells Tom later. No one’s looking for you, no one misses you, and all your money belongs to me.
Tom shoves his hand into Guillaume’s plaid flannel pajamas and closes his fingers around his cock. More than just my money, he says. Touch me, he begs. Touch me, baby: it’s Christmas and I’ve given you everything, it’s Christmas and I’ve been so good.
Francis is drunk. He looks at Tom and presses his thumb to the pulped edge of Tom’s eye socket. Tom winces. Francis smiles, soft and boozy, and digs in. Go ahead, he says. Oh fuck, Tom groans. He’s coming already. I love you, he says. Francis, Francis, I love you, Francis—
*
A male calf is born. Francis names it Guillaume. They’re all named Guillaume, he tells Tom. He tells Tom, it’s your turn to do the slaughtering. You’ve learned to bring them into the world; now you need to learn to take them out.
“Go on,” Francis says. “I’ll supervise.”
“No, no, no,” Tom says. His voice is weak; every no comes out like a hiccup. Francis takes him by the elbows and shakes him hard. Tom, he says sternly. No, Tom wails. “No—no—”
Tom is weeping. Francis starts to laugh. “You’d botch it anyway.”
Francis performs the killing clinically and methodically. He doesn’t torture the calf; he hoses everything down afterward. You could have sold him, Tom says. He’s cried so much his eyes have swollen shut and his sinuses are throbbing. Francis steers him back to the house, his hands on his shoulders. His skin smells like copper. You could have sold him, Tom says, you could have kept him, you could have given him to me to raise.
*
The seasons change. One morning, as the sky lightens, Francis rolls over and tells Tom that they’re going to visit Guillaume. It is not the anniversary of his death, of course, Francis explains, but the anniversary of his departure from the farm. April 5: the day Guillaume thought he was going away forever. But he came back in the end, didn’t he, Francis says with a smirk. Put on your jacket, he says.
“Where are you going?” Agathe asks.
“To fish,” Francis answers.
“But the river’s half-frozen.”
“We’ll cut a hole.”
You’ll fall in, Agathe says, and drown. Wait and see, Francis says.
*
The cemetery is marshy. The graves lie far apart, each one a lonely island. Beyond the trees, Tom sees the river, wider here, white with ice. Ice jams form up-river every year, Francis tells him, and every year the river floods under the pressure of torrential spring rain, though it never rises high enough to submerge the dead. But Tom thinks they are submerged already. The path to Guillaume’s grave has been engulfed by mud, which clumps under the soles of his boots and seeps in through the zippers as Francis marches him forward: as if to his execution.
Guillaume Longchamp, Guillaume’s tombstone says. December 3, 1987-August 21, 2013. Irreplaceable in our hearts.
“You know what I want you to do,” Francis says.
Tom looks at him—hesitates—spits on the stone. The glob of saliva glows in the feeble April sunlight as it slides down 2013.
He sees Francis’s punch coming. It throws him to his knees. His head slams into Guillaume’s tombstone. A tooth chips. The fragment rides a string of bloody spittle over his lip and into the mud. I’m sorry, Tom says, indistinct: his tongue is bleeding and his mouth is beginning to swell.
Francis hauls him to his feet. Reaches around him and pulls his cock from his jeans and places it, warm, in his hand.
No, Tom says. He sways against Francis’s chest. The word emerges lethargically, so nasal that it sounds like “Oh.” He thinks Francis might have broken his nose. Francis or Guillaume’s stone, Francis or Guillaume: the brothers between them are breaking him into pieces.
Yes, Francis says: in his ear. His cock twitches. Francis laughs.
*
He comes hard, striping the granite. Francis rubs his face in it, then pushes his head into the dirt.
*
That night, at supper, Tom tells Agathe about the time Sarah begged Guillaume to knock her up.
“She wanted him to use every hole in her body,” he says, “even her ears.” My God, Agathe says, wide-eyed. Francis, eating steadily a moment ago, slowly puts down his knife and fork. “But most of all she wanted him to fill her cunt to the brim. To make her swell. To show everyone that she belonged to him. She wanted to deliver twins.”
A boy and girl, he says. “She wanted to name the boy after him. And the girl—”
Francis: “Bitch-Ass—”
Don't interrupt, Agathe shouts, throwing her knife to the floor. Francis bends to retrieve it.
Barefoot and pregnant, Tom says. That's what she wanted to be.
Francis has taken his mother's knife to the sink. His back is to Tom. His broad, tense shoulders. The faucet streams and spatters. What an elaborate fantasy, Agathe says, in more modulated tones.
*
On Mother’s Day, Tom takes forty dollars from Francis’s wallet and limps to town to buy a bouquet of flowers. The journey is seventeen kilometers round trip and takes him about six hours. He puts the cold-shocked lilies in a vase in the kitchen, then grits his teeth and tries not to yell as Francis drags him from the house by his hair.
*
His hair is brown now: nearly the same color as Francis’s. On the second day of the new year, Francis had used his cow clippers to trim off the dead bleached ends. Fuck, he had said, teasing his fingers through the pile, it’s like fucking straw. The things you do to yourself, Tom.
Too bad Sarah took that lock of hair of my brother’s, eh, Francis had said, fingering the hair on Tom’s head. Otherwise we could compare. I’m darker than he was.
Bigger, too, Francis had added, grinning.
*
Brown: manure and the flaking paint on the farm’s iron holding pens. Francis tows him into the barn, into an empty pen, where he zip-ties Tom’s wrists to the bars. I did it for Agathe, Tom protests. I took the money for Agathe. It was my money to begin with anyway. Francis, listen to me. Francis, please.
Francis has taken his mother’s cloth-cutting scissors from the house. He shears through the middle of Guillaume’s jeans and underwear, pricking Tom’s tailbone in the process.
“Six hours,” Francis says. “Six hours to buy some fucking lilies that died on the way home. Six fucking hours, and a storm coming. I was driving around all morning looking for you.”
“I’m sorry,” Tom says. “I’m sorry—sorry—”
“But then I came home,” Francis said, “and I had time to think. I had time to think about what I was going to do to you when I found you.”
“I came back, esti,” Tom gasps.
“I thought about chopping off your legs with my axe,” Francis says. “I thought about running them over with my truck and crushing them.”
He thrashes against the bars until the skin under the zip-ties turns white. “No, no,” he gasps. He’s moaning and sniveling and Francis is behind him, cutting off his clothes, cutting his clothes into rags, and his cock is so hard: so fucking hard. “I’ll be useless to you without my legs—I need them to help on the farm—I want to help on the farm, Francis I want to help, Francis please—”
He’s alone. Guillaume’s clothes are in ribbons under his feet. His bare feet: before he left, Francis took off his shoes, bending each leg at the knee like a farrier with a horse.
*
It’s cold in the barn, cold in the country: the florist had told him that they could expect twenty centimeters of snow. The things that have only just begun to live and grow will die. And so will he, he thinks, if Francis leaves him here overnight. He starts to shiver uncontrollably. He screams in white clouds of breath: Francis, Francis. He sags against the zip-ties. He scrapes his cock against the bars.
His fingertips turn purple. The cows move in their own pens in uneasy eddies, lowing.
*
At last, footsteps. The agonized metallic squeal of the barn door. He contorts his body, straining to turn his head over his shoulder. In the corner of his eye, he sees Francis: holding a long thin steel tube.
“Know what this is?” Francis says. “I use it on the cows.”
“F-Francis,” he says. “F-F-Francis—”
“I warm it up for them,” Francis says, “in my shirt. But for you—”
It’s lubed, at least. It goes in smooth and fast and as icy as the bony finger of Death. You’re going to kill me, Tom screams. “You’re going to puncture—perforate—” Agathe, he screams, Agathe, Agathe.
Relax, Francis says. She’s not going to hear you, and I’m not going to impale you. “I’m giving you less than half of it. Six inches. It’s so thin you’ll barely feel it.”
Francis is right, though his asshole continues to twitch and clench around the intrusion. He’s shivering again, grinding his molars to smithereens in a desperate attempt to keep his knees from knocking, his body from spasming. He doesn’t want to jerk too hard and look down to see the shining silver tip of Francis’s insemination gun protruding from his belly. Beading at the edges with pearls of bull semen.
“You know how much I’m spending on you?” Francis says. His hand is a brand on Tom’s ass-cheek, burning hot. “You know how much a tank of this stuff costs?”
Nineteen hundred dollars, Francis says. “U.S.” He slaps Tom’s ass. Tom jolts, then screams. His leaking cock bounces against his stomach. Francis pushes the gun deeper. Tom feels the first wet rush. Nnahh, he says, banging his forehead against the bars. Nngh, guh, Fuh, Fran. He can’t feel his fingers. He can’t speak anymore, he can’t think.
Nineteen hundred American dollars, Francis repeats, and I’m going to use it all on you.
*
Tom leaves the farm.
*
It’s nighttime. It’s snowing. He follows the road.
*
Headlights flare behind him: huge yellow discs like the eyes of a giant owl. He turns and limps into the woods.
*
A twisted ankle, a sprain, means torn ligaments. Tom’s ligaments have mended but never truly healed. How could they, with no doctor, no splint, with Francis coming to him in the basement every night and digging his fingers in? I’m massaging you, Francis had told him, and while Francis had fucked up his ankle he had fucked his own fist, lying in the dark with his foot in Francis’s lap, thinking, he’s touching me gently, Francis is touching me with love.
Now his entire leg drags in the snow. He slips and he falls. He crawls out of sight, crouching behind the trunk of a tree.
Tom, Francis shouts.
*
When Francis cut the zip-ties, he had crashed to his knees. His hands were so numb they had disappeared from his brain. Unable to catch himself, he had fallen face-first into the dirt of the barn. Francis had kicked him twice in the ribs: the second time to gouge a real sound from him, a wet coughing cry. He had already removed the insemination gun, had taken it and left the barn to put it carefully away.
Feeling returned in stinging waves.
Liquid was trickling from him.
*
Did I go too far? Francis shouts. Did I frighten you? Did I frighten you, you fucking pussy?
Tom, he shouts, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, okay?
Just wait until I find you, he shouts. Fuck you! Fuck you!
His flashlight sweeps the snow. I should have brought a shovel, Tom thinks. I should have brought something I could use to bash his skull in.
*
The light draws nearer and nearer. It’s an old flashlight, flickering; the circle it casts is beautifully golden. Tom thinks of coins and peaches, the desserts that Agathe has fed him, the afternoons in August when the light stretched long and set fire to Francis’s eyes. His stomach aches. He wonders if Francis pierced something after all, if he’s dying; if he’ll die here in the snow.
The light trembles to a halt.
He looks up. He smiles.
*
Tom wakes up with vomit squishing under his cheek. The flashlight is beside him, filmed with blood and hair, shining into his half-closed eyes. Francis has his arms pinned behind his back and his jeans around his knees. Francis is fucking him. Francis’s cock is in his ass, stretching him open.
Hurts, he whispers. Francis.
I’m gonna cum in you, Francis hisses. I’m gonna fuck you inside out. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? Coliss! Isn’t it?
He drifts away. When he comes back, Francis is shouting at him. Concentrate, Francis shouts. Concentrate, you little pig slut. This is what you wanted, so you’d better enjoy it. Open your fucking eyes.
Francis, he whispers. The snow burns his skin. Francis. Francis. Francis.