Bottom-Feeders
22 Minutes Read Time

It’s winter in the sturgeon-spearing capital of the world. Once again, there is justification for the expensive trucks parked in the driveways of crumbling lakeside houses, waiting to be turned over and driven out onto the ice. Standing on the lake, which you can barely see across, is like being on a planet people are futilely trying to settle with corrugated shacks. And there is something off about those fish, those million-year-old beasts, who you shared the lake with on summer swims. They lurked below as you cannonballed and sailor-dived. They are thorny, large, and old, crusted with dinosaur bumps. They look as if they could tear a person to bits, but your brother told you they are bottom-feeders. They eat muck and trash. Suck it from the lake floor like a vacuum. They swim to the surface only because they are curious about the dangling Bud Light can, the Bundt-cake mold, the musty old boot, the detached doorknobs that the fishermen place strategically in the light. Curious.
The department supervisor tells you to go out to the loading dock and organize the leftover Christmas items in the trailer. It’s a mess, frozen expired hams stacked too high to reach. You’re so tired you want to build a fortress around yourself and take a nap right on top of the free-range geese but decide to push through instead. You’ve worked every holiday for the last ten years, four a.m. to eleven. Holidays are what balance the books. You despise everything associated with Christmas: tinsel, lights in the park that you can tune your radio station to, the Salvation Army, frozen turkey giblets stuck to the insides of carcasses. You should be supervisor, but you passed up the promotion several times. To take your job seriously is to give up.
The back of the store is a maze: passageways lead from one department to the next, with stairways that lead to the second-floor observation deck, breakroom, bathrooms, etc. It’s a hive that people funnel in and out of, through automatic doors, to pick up cocktail weenies and brandy. As you pass by reception, you give the boys stacking pallets a dirty look and push a stray shopping cart in their direction. Everyone else dislikes you meat guys. They think you are a bunch of antisocial jerk-offs. You find this observation fairly accurate.
Your brother volunteers with the firefighters every sturgeon season. He used to teach college science, the basics, up the road. He looks like Richard Dreyfuss in Jaws. He looks like he belongs on the lake, hanging over the edge, chumming the waters. There is a road on the lake, with cracks and thin ice flagged with dead Christmas trees. Last year, like most, the markers were ignored, and a truck took the dive. This happens a lot. Drinking is half the culture. Except that time, there were two little kids in the back seat. A son and a daughter. Your brother was one of the divers they sent down. He tells stories about how he didn’t want to reach in and unbuckle them because they already looked buried down there at the bottom of the frozen lake. He told you how one of the prehistoric creatures swam past the windshield as if mocking the dead man floating in the driver’s seat, then disappeared into the brown murk. He acts as if you’re his private counselor.
Your first day on the job reminded you of walking out onto that lake, in the cooler or out front in the refrigerated open workspace, and you cursed the job and the water soaking through your shoes because your work boots hadn’t shown up yet. Back then, you were freezing, but now you are used to it, don’t notice it at all.
You turn to the meat guy standing next to you and say, “Toad, come look at this.”
“I’ve seen that before. Cut off a chunk and try to save it.” He sounds excited and entertained, like a destructive little boy. “Yuck, yuck, yuck,” he says, stamping his feet.
You bend the loin back into a horseshoe and watch the pus ooze out from where the bone touches the meat. It comes out in an almost-perfect cylinder, like a black-snake firework, the kind you used to ruin the driveway with as a kid. Toad comes over, sticks his finger into the hole, and corkscrews it, laughing.
“Filthy beasts,” he says.
You save what you can and throw the rest in the trash. You unplug the band saw and begin to spray off the bone dust that gobs onto the blade and falls to the bottom. You spray the floors, washing away the blood under Toad’s workstation, and the mixture runs into the sewer grates behind the display case. You spray the back of Toad’s work boots.
“Hey, watch it,” he grunts.
In another lifetime, Toad would be raping and pillaging, setting fire to thatched dwellings. He’s a compact bundle of rage. Under his whites he is tattooed across the arms and neck, iron crosses, spiderwebs. He’s a short man, a metal drummer who (like all drummers) has an uncommunicative energy, one he beats into his set in his sister’s basement every day when he gets home. He reminds your supervisor of Battletoads, with their bulging traps and steel-toed boots. He has a tattoo of a sturgeon in the middle of his chest, but he hasn’t seen one swim past his hole even once, though he knows plenty of people who have. You spray his feet again, and he chucks his knife into the sink, then heads into the cooler. Many of the employees who work at Westrow for short stints, summer jobs or part-time on their way to something better, find it best to keep their distance from Toad, but you find his cartoonish masculinity entertaining, a walking, talking Popeye.
In your brother’s home office is a large file cabinet with hundreds of microscope slides. A student from the community college comes over once a week and helps him catalog these online. Research was once his baby, before his students became his babies. He doesn’t want you going through the slides and mucking up his order, so you just watch. Since the accident, your brother is primarily concerned with microbial communities within Lake Sturgeon and has asked several fishermen for the soupy mud they’ll pull out of the fish this year. The last time you saw him, he said that the oldest fish caught in the lake was 125 years old and 240 pounds. “Think about it,” he said, “Benjamin Harrison was president.” As his private counselor, you advised him that this was becoming an unhealthy obsession, possibly a by-product of grief. When he didn’t return to teaching this year, you felt then, as you feel now, that you’re both sliding into the same hole, the one you assumed he’d crawled out of years ago, through education and better looks. You were under the impression that he maintained his taxonomy project because of nostalgia, science, or both. “Teaching kids how to use Bunsen burners isn’t all that thrilling,” he’d said. Now you are both back where you started.
“Take the shit out of your shoe.” Toad pushes you on the shoulder as you catch the clock with the corner of your eye. He gets closer and waves his hand in front of your face. He lets out a slow whistle. “Whew, what are you on?” he asks. A heat wave crawls underneath your sweater and up the back of your neck. If you looked at yourself, you would see your face turning flushed, red blotches breaking out across your chest. At first you thought this was how your body reacted to the freezer, that the blood must have been rushing back to your face again after spending so much time around your heart. Or it was bacteria. Your body adjusting to, or fighting, all the new microbes you’ve met in the last few months, all the times your blood crossed with a cow, pig, or chicken.
“Whew, listeria.” Toad laughs.
This is a joke you and the boys lifted from a safety video about foodborne illnesses: that you would go home and wake up dead from listeria. This joke was brought up whenever one of you would empty a drain trap clogged with all sorts of watery meat bits, purplish and white. There is a whole set of stimuli unique to your job that people wouldn’t believe if you told them. Things that any normal person would have considered quitting points. For instance, the best way to tell if meat is rotten is to smell it. Since everything kind of smells anyway, you need to get in real close and inhale. You can’t count how many raw sausages you’ve smelled, eyes watering and rancid, how many homophobic giggles that incited, how many sausages were pulled out of the trash and shoved deep into the toe of your shoe, how many times you had to jerk off the sausage stuffer, which is exactly what it looks like when you slide yards of pig intestines onto the nozzle by hand.
“Remember, fowl is the foulest,” Toad often chimes, pointing at something like a box of bird parts all crammed together in a plastic industrial bag that bleeds translucent pink, which always smells rotten even when fresh, and you’re just waiting for Toad to toss it at your feet with a splat and say, “Look at what I found behind Planned Parenthood.” Or the way chickens’ rib cages crack under your grip as you place them in the display case, or even the ease with which a pig leg rolls off the bone, neatly displaying all the muscle groups like a drawing in a physiology book. This one really blows your mind, how neatly we are all put together. Somehow you know this flushing isn’t listeria, that it must be connected to how you’ve been waking up four hours before work, lying wide awake with your mind running a million miles a minute. It must be related to how when you stare down the cereal aisle, all the boxes sway like a heat mirage burning off the asphalt on a summer day.
Once, your brother’s assistant turned to you and said, “I imagined this town to be different.” You know she means that when she imagined a lakeside town, she didn’t think of this one. She imagined a lake surrounded by upscale homes and relaxing beaches, quaint little candy shops. Not one with minimal public access, a beach with no sand. One that was often closed during the summer because of E. coli or swimmer’s itch. One where nobody liked to swim because the lake floor felt like you were standing in a pile of shit, which is precisely the way the sturgeon like it. A body of water where lake flies hatch so densely in the spring that a car or two may drive off the road. A sight that might make an out-of-towner recall the book of Exodus and wonder why the hell they pulled over here to get gas.
You look Toad in the face and grin, then lift the hose off the ground and begin to spray water into the trash cans. This way, when the night guys come in and throw away the trash, specifically Rich, the bags will rip open, and he’ll be covered in fluids that run down the arms of his stark white coat, that get in his skin. You don’t feel sorry because this is what happened to you when you first started; that’s how it works. The smart ones will learn to take out the trash early, before the bags get too heavy. Everyone has it in for Rich anyway. At first, you felt bad for the kid, who obviously didn’t have a clue. Who you caught crying back in the freezer next to the beef liver and chicken hearts. But after you coddled him at your own expense and he seemed not to catch on, your patience grew thin. It isn’t rocket science: to not get it, you have to give it. Never say you’re sorry, only “Fuck off.” It’s a large playground. After the umpteenth time Rich corrected someone’s grammar or divulged some truly geek trivia, you labeled him a lost cause. After everyone started calling him Tenderoni, after he forgot his work boots and you told him there were slip-ons in storage and he looked at you in his brand-new kicks and said sarcastically, “These will work great,” rolling his eyes, you thought Good luck and filled the trash can with a little extra gusto.
That night you see yourself staring through a sea of greenish brown. It looks like it’s snowing as little white flakes—larva and plankton—drift down from above. In the distance are two muted beams of light. You start toward them as your body snakes back and forth, cutting through the water. You are curious. It sounds as if you are walking through a highway tunnel at night, as if someone is cupping their hands over your ears. The water becomes clearer the closer you get to the lights. Above you hangs a shiny reflective object that distracts from the lights ahead. You find yourself moving toward the object despite wanting to pursue the two lights in the distance. There is no stopping this instinctual draw. You can’t help but feel cheated.
Toad is in a Plexiglas box and has thirty seconds to grab as many dollar bills out of the air as he possibly can. They are being blown around him by some sort of fan. He has won the halftime raffle and his chance in the box. People scream things like “Put them in your shirt, you idiot,” and “Look in the corner, left-hand corner.” All you think is that it must be harder than it looks. Toad emerges with seventy-five dollars and wastes it all on bar dice. “Well, it was free money anyway,” he says.
At work Rich is saying that it’s inhumane.
“Like, they’re extinct,” he says.
“You’re gonna be extinct,” says Toad.
You explain to him the subtleties of fishing caps and the capabilities of the DNR and how Lake Winnebago is the perfect environment for the fish to thrive, and it is because the fish are thriving that here, unlike anywhere else, you can chuck a spear at them.
“I’m just saying, I don’t think you should be able to hunt something that’s endangered everywhere else.”
“Not here. They’re thriving,” Toad says adamantly, then invites Rich to join him on the lake when the season begins.
You leave the meatcutters’ area to grab more cleaning solvent from the produce guys down the hall. When you return to the open workspace, you see Rich down on his knees next to the band saw. Your supervisor passes you in a hurry, making a beeline through the cooler door to the red emergency phone hanging in the hallway, leaving a trail of bloody footprints. Toad is on his knees holding a rag to Rich’s hand. Rich looks at you, completely silent, and you look at the band saw, which is covered not with its usual brown been-dead-a-long-time blood but with bright red blood thirsty for oxygen, shocked to see the world. Rich’s cut glove is dangling from the blade in between the table and the guidepost.
“Grab his hand,” Toad says. So you get on your knees next to him and grab his hand, which is pressed to the ground, and hold it like a father does a child’s.
“No, you idiot, his hand.”
You realize in this moment that the hand is still in the glove. You work the fabric and the flesh out of the band saw’s teeth and place it in a green plastic bag from the produce aisle and tie a neat little knot, like you’re shopping for human appendages. The bag is steaming as you hold it in the cooled workspace and wait for the EMTs, as Toad uses all his burly strength to apply pressure to Rich’s wrist, as Rich looks at you and goes on about how he thought only Native Americans had permission to spear sturgeon and Toad replies, “Do I look like a damn Indian.”
Toad finally notices that you’re just standing there watching them. “Keep that cold,” he shouts. You go into the cooler and rummage for a nice area for it to chill, but everything is covered in bacteria, so you slide out a box of frozen prewrapped turkey burgers and put the warm bag of hand into the box. Rich now has his head thrown back and is letting heavy breaths slip through his teeth. His body is finally registering the pain, but he’s shed not one tear. You watch his legs start to shuffle back and forth underneath him, like he’s trying to stand up on a sheet of ice. Toad pushes him down with his free hand while grasping the bloody rag with the other. Customers funnel in and out of the doors.
Sturgeon breed in the many tributaries that flow into Lake Winnebago. Your father took you and your brother to one such tributary, the Wolf River, to watch. The sturgeon bobbed in the shallow water next to the rocks as if dead. Then suddenly, in a moment of instinctual panic, they started flailing their bodies. Each one slapping against the rocks in the shallow water, causing it to spray and foam. No, there is nothing particularly sexy about sturgeon. Children slightly younger than you and your brother reached into the water to pet the backs of the fish they could reach from shore. People from places like Shiocton milled about at the river’s edge in bright orange hunting caps and dated Packers jackets dirtied with road salt. Germanic faces under ’80s perms and bad mullets. Your father, who had been standing next to you, pulled you back by the collar. He must have been in awe of the mere spectacle, the natural organization of the whole thing, the built-in navigation systems that brought the sturgeon here over and over again, their lack of scales—which he pointed out to you and your brother—because they are cartilaginous like sharks, like predators, except they’re not. If Rich had been there to witness it, he probably would’ve noted how sad the whole thing was, how helpless the sturgeon were as preservationists lifted them out of the water to be tagged and tracked. He would’ve noted the meaner children chucking rocks until an adult shouted in their direction and they scattered into the park. Toad would have probably laughed at the children, who had no idea what they were witnessing. Children whose parents would rather not have explained the process until much later or left it to the public school system. Children whose hands played in the water full of reproductive juices, which is the whole point of the thing.
Toad has cut holes into a piece of pigskin and is wearing it like a mask. On one side of his cheek is half a nipple and on the other a small blue tattoo. He lets out a mixture of loud grunts and distressing squeals, then tosses it in your direction. The red blotches have already started to break out across your chest this morning, and your hair seems to ache right at the base of your skull as you touch it.
“What an ignoramus,” Toad says.
Toad is talking about Rich and how he shouldn’t have been using the band saw with his cut glove on, because if it catches, which it did, it will drag you in, which it had.
“I think the kid’s a genius,” you say. You mean this. Toad takes it as sarcasm. Rich has earned not a superficial wound like the rest of your nicks and dings but a million-dollar ticket out of here, and you are filled with jealousy at the prospect that Rich will never work another day of his life. You have subconsciously been thinking about injuring yourself for years, for the workers’ comp, for white sand beaches and high-stakes blackjack at Potawatomi. You’ve been stacking heavy boxes on the top shelves hoping your back will give, swinging cleavers with abandon, and wearing no cut glove when brandishing knives the length of your arm, but you’re just not blessed. You giggle out loud at this thought. Because of Rich, the whole crew must stay late and retrain on safety, as well as pick up his slack until the big men upstairs find a replacement. It’s an industrial video with a lady wearing a bright yellow hard hat over a hairnet. She says the names of the saw parts out loud as the screen cuts to a diagram alone against a black backdrop. You rest your face on the keyboard and wake up forty-five minutes later to a still of her next to a pig carcass.
All sturgeon spears are custom-made by hobbyists. The other weekend, Toad drove down to Kaukauna to buy a new one for the season. He shows you it in the back of his truck in the Westrow’s parking lot. Fourteen pounds, six tines instead of the usual five, retractable barbs that deploy as the fish swims away. A detachable head so the spear doesn’t get pulled into the water while the fish tries to escape under the ice. A wooden handle, because Toad says the steel ones don’t throw straight. This is one of his odd preferences. If you’ve never caught a sturgeon, you think, you have probably never thrown a spear. He says he doesn’t want to miss the big one. You hold it in the parking lot and make a motion as if you were throwing a javelin, humoring him by trying it out. An asphalt Poseidon.
It’s the fourth and last day of the season. There are thousands of you out on the lake yet not a soul in sight. Outside the shack, you look across the lake and dream of a nuclear holocaust, of another great ice age that weeds us down to the chosen few, or an alternative life in which you were born into an Inuit village and became snow-blind at a young age after getting lost on a seal hunt, after which people would trudge across the tundra to have you lay your hands on them. Anything but this shack and the two men inside it, who are drunk and farting in an enclosed area. Who are playing the Thunder drinking game, which is comprised of listening to AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” and drinking until the next THUNDER sounds, at which point the next person drinks, until so on and so forth. Inside the shack, Rich’s hand is sitting in a red-and-white Playmate cooler in the corner. He says it’s still a part of him. They nuked his body with antibiotics. He got out of the hospital just in time to make the last day. You imagine your brother playing euchre in the firehouse, waiting to save someone who has walked into someone else’s fishing hole, to reclaim his life, moving beads across his savior’s abacus. Toad and Rich now have an odd camaraderie. You chalk this up to the fact that they no longer work together. They don’t have to tolerate each other anymore, or maybe Toad simply misses having someone to call pussy lips and Cinderella. Or it could be that for fifteen minutes while Toad applied pressure to Rich’s wound he had a true purpose in life. For a second, you think that maybe Toad should be putting things together rather than taking them apart but decide there really isn’t much of a difference. Once inside the shack, you are welcomed by the heat and sit on an overturned bucket next to the spears, which hang down into the water. Toad tells you to put the decoy somewhere else, because it must not be working, as if a Natty Ice can tied to a string has anything to do with luck. You start to pull it out of the water. The can slips through the string’s loop and vanishes.
“Great,” Rich says.
“Plenty more where that came from,” says Toad.
Rich has an idea. He brings over the cooler, removes his hand from the packed snow, and attaches it to the string. It looks a full size bigger than his regular hand, like it was never his to begin with. You realize at this moment that Rich didn’t lose his whole hand but that it got cut at an angle from the bottom of his pinkie and down across his palm. It floats in the brown-green light of the hole, like the aftermath of a bad motorized accident, a mob flick. Toad is overjoyed. He reaches over the hole and grabs Rich by the shoulders and places a big beer-breath smooch on his forehead. Between the two men’s bodies you see it come up for air and break the water with its flat gray snout, its body sinking down into the murk farther than you can see.
Read more from Issue 19.2.