Knocker

From GJAK: Tales in Blood by Dimosthenis Papamarkos

‘Knocker’ is a sensitive and unapologetic character study of Argyris, a Greek-Arvanite living alone in America in the 1950s. The narrator, a younger man, also a Greek-Arvanite, meets Argyris when he moves to Chicago. Despite Argyris’s initial hostility, the two men eventually form a friendship. In this extract, we join the narrator, who has just lost his job.

One Sunday, I was talking to Argyris about it all. Mainly to get it off my chest, since I never knew if he was listening. He hardly ever answered me. So there I am, talking and talking, and I find myself asking if they needed anyone at his work. I didn’t even know where he worked. I mean, I’d asked him once but got no answer, so I never brought it up again. Like I say, I’ve no idea what possessed me to ask, but ask I did, and to tell you the truth I was expecting a quit-asking-questions, with him downing his cognac as he always did, killing the conversation there and then. You couldn’t do my job. Do you even know what I do? he said abruptly. He really caught me off guard. I’m telling you, I was convinced he paid me no mind at all. Well, do you? he asked again. No, I said, you’ve never told me, have you? I’m a knocker at Union. I looked at him dumbly. Have you ever slaughtered a pig? he asked. I clicked my tongue, no. But I’ve seen it done, I said, why, what of it? Well, you’ll know then, before you slaughter it, you’ve got to hit it on the head. With a sledgehammer, or whatever. The main thing is to knock it out before you slit its throat, otherwise there’s no getting a handle on it, it could even kill you. That’s what I do, but with cattle. The Americans don’t do it like we do in Greece, we stick a skewer in the gap between the head and the backbone to paralyse it. They kill cows like we kill pigs, with a sledgehammer square in the forehead. He paused for a second. D’ you get it? he said. I clicked my tongue again. That’s my job. Someone takes the cattle from their pen outside, and leads them into the slaughterhouse, shoving them into these cages where they barely fit. They can’t move an inch, let alone run away. They’re wedged in tight. Well, on top of the cage there’s a sort of ledge I stand on, watching carefully, and when I get the chance, just when the calf stops moving its head, I whack it with the sledgehammer right between the eyes. He leaned across the table and placed two fingers on my forehead, barely touching me, like a priest christening a baby. That’s where I hit it and it goes down. That’s what a knocker does.

I’d never heard of it, I’ll be honest. A whole job just doing that. I told him so. That’s what it’s like here. A factory. Everyone has their role. Wait, I said, is that all you do? Yes. Then another guy opens the side door and the calf falls onto a conveyor belt going round the back, where someone else ties it up by its hind leg, then the machine lifts it over to the guy who’ll slit its throat to drain the blood and what have you. I stared at him, stunned. Wait, so how many calves do you kill in a day to get full wage for a job like that? Two or three a minute. Depends. Are you the only one with that job in the whole factory? Serious as ever, without batting an eyelid, he says, there’s about twenty of us. I couldn’t get my head round it. That’s a nasty job, I said, going in and killing a thousand animals in a shift. And what does he say? I’ll never forget it as long as I live, that’s how much it gave me the shivers: killing has its own beauty. But it’s only beautiful when it’s useful. You’ve got to do it without spite, without hate. A killer doesn’t have to be a brute. That’s why I said you’re not cut out for my job. It takes more than muscle. You have to understand what I just said, too.

I was stumped. He was right, but I wasn’t thinking about that. I was thinking, what kind of person wakes up, drinks his coffee, puts his clothes on, and then goes somewhere where they put a sledgehammer in his hands and he starts hitting and killing till dark. And later, when he gets home, he’ll sit and eat, read his paper, do whatever he has to do, all without being bothered by the stink of blood and shit on his body, still able to sit quiet the same day he’d heard all those bellows, all those cries of the creatures he’d killed.

How long have you had this job? was all I could ask. Since I got here, he said, thirty years give or take. I tried to speak, but my voice caught in my throat. Do you get it? Thirty years. Thirty years was longer than I’d been alive. He guessed at what I was thinking and said, I was already ‘soiled’— he used the English word—at least now I was choosing what would dirty me. Before you go getting mixed up with something, just mind you reckon with yourself how it is you want to get soiled. Doing anything at all gets you dirty. That might be the best bit of advice I ever got, because that’s when I decided I wasn’t going to stay. Being in America, away from home, that’s what soiled me, and it wasn’t what I wanted. And Argyris was right. That’s why I was always griping, but he was the only one who could see it.