Cherry Pie

Cherry Pie’s mother was a hog farmer from Slovenia.  When Cherry Pie was three, and unfortunately named Marglotchka, her maternal swineherd made her way to the Western Lands of Los Angeles to try her hand in the bacon business.  There was a burgeoning market for butchers that raised their meat on the cheap, in abandoned warehouses, slaughtering unethically and selling low.  We are not talking about happy pigs here, wallowing in their shit in the open air.  No, I mean to say these hogs were pent in cages slopped with dog meat and MacDonald’s dumpster leftovers, pumped with human growth hormone, and generally pushed beyond all their natural porcine boundaries, in as short a time period as possible. 

Margo, Cherry Pie’s mother and obvious namesake was a hard taskmaster when it came to the rearing of her income.  She had an electric cord she would run out of the generator attached to her battered El Camino, the ends frazzled and sawed at by the bowie knife she always carried in her overalls.  She would rev her engine and stride purposefully towards the hog kennels, where there emitted such a cry of earsplitting ululation it was enough to wake the dead, and Margo always stopped and crossed herself, spitting three times to ward off any spirits of her enemies who might be lying in wait for such a moment.  Defecating in fear with an evil stench the result of their mutant diets, the pigs would break out in purple, swelling boils that rose at an alarming rate on their bristling backs the closer she came to them with the sparking, live wire cord they knew all too well.  At the first lick of the electric whip, the boils burst and the smell from them, combined with the burning hog hair, was enough to make the inhabitants of the sweatshop next door move out faster than any threat of the incumbent INS could have.

 Margo made her way through the rows of the darkened warehouse, slashing the pigs furiously, hardening their spirits for the cruel slaughter that was to come.  These pigs were her chattel, in her eyes, destined for the shelves of the black market among odd strains of tainted bush meat.  She had discovered the more she terrorized them in life, the cleaner their meat became in death.  It was as though by excreting all the misery of their doomed existence in that lonely cement warehouse they purged themselves of their toxicity before the final axe came down.  In death their meat was much sweeter, and the abundance of their bloated corpses never yielded less than a thousand dollars a pig.  This is roughly eighty-pounds per, of muscle and fat straining at pale, weak skin that had never seen the light of day, discolored by electrical burns and livid sores that converted as rigor mortis set in into an overall body bruising that made the pig meat appear oven roasted.  This was another selling point for the succulent merchandise of Margo.

  The very axe that would deal the deathblow, by the way, was wielded by Margo’s oftentimes lover, a lawnmower repairman by the name of Larry.  He couldn’t abide Margo’s philosophy of hog farming, but would gladly stop by and bludgeon the animals to death for a closer look at Cherry Pie, toddler though she still was.  She would generally be splashing about in a Barbie kiddie pool wearing spangled biking shorts and an American flag string bikini top, oblivious to the holocaust unfolding around her.  In fact it was because of Larry she was nicknamed Cherry Pie.  He was the only one to take the time to root through the dumpster pickings from MacDonald’s to save the half eaten cherry pies for her that she so loved.  He would gaze surreptitiously over his shoulder at her, between swings of the axe and the squealing of pigs as they bled out, watching her smeared and sticky face as she ate the remainders of the fruit pies.  He always had a soft spot in his heart for her.

As she grew older, Cherry Pie’s involvement in her mother’s business took on a stronger role.  At eleven, she could be found making the rounds of the Chinatown betting parlors, picking up stacks of cash in exchange for the shipments of pig meat, and bringing the money back to the warehouse in her school bag.  Ducking under the chain link fence that hung dilapidated almost to the ground, trying not to snag her hair in the rusted concertina barbed wire that trailed over the weed-claimed cement front lot, she would often pause to reflect on the slightly different life she seemed to lead from her schoolmates.  She was smart enough not to tell anyone of the chores that took up most of her after school hours, but of course, inevitably, her grades began to founder.

Margo was relentless in her acquisition of accounts, and soon fed whole pockets of immigrants, and supplied most of the fast food joints in town.  People could not get enough of the greasy meat that was available in such abundance, at such cutrate prices.  Because the pigs grew so large in their short, anomalous lives, the return on each was astronomical, but Margo still sold them piecemeal at affordable rates.  No one knew the amounts of money she was amassing.  She borrowed a jackhammer form Larry’s lawnmower repair shop one day.  Actually she crept in while Larry was sleeping in his Barca lounger, slatted light coming in through the dusty blinds and striping his fat hairy stomach as he dozed amid piles of discarded parts.  She was strong, that Slovenian, and managed to muscle out the jackhammer without waking him.  She carted it off in her El Camino and slipped Cherry Pie a sleeping pill with her hamburger helper dinner that night.  She brought it out into the middle of the lot and busted a large hole in the cement, no one the wiser in the desolate industrial district she had called home for more than a decade, all while Cherry pie slumbered innocently in her cot. 

Margo filled the hole with trash bag after trash bag of cash, stopped it up with dirt, and spent the remaining hours before dawn mixing dry cement in a wheelbarrow with water until she had a concoction to cover the evidence of her empire.  As the first roosters crowed, kept by the cockfighting Colombians the next block over, she patted down the last rut with a trowel, surveyed her handiwork with satisfaction, and went in side to make coffee.  She and Cherry Pie had lived in an area sectioned off by plywood, in the farthest corner from the hog kennels in the warehouse from the beginning, but Margo was thinking about change.  It was the security of her ferreted wealth that put her suspicious mind enough at ease to think about moving up. 

That morning Cherry Pie woke, groggy from the sleeping pill, and saw all their belongings piled into a wheelbarrow out front of the warehouse.  Margo was nodding off on her feet after her night of hard labor, but when prodded, muttered two words.  “Pink Beaver”.

The mystified Cherry Pie had no choice but to follow her determined mother through the early morning streets, and then shoulder the load herself when Margo said she would be “right back”.  Balancing the handles of the wheelbarrow, her school bag flapping round her hip, Cherry Pie looked up at the awning she stood under.  The faded, pink script spelled out Pink Beaver, sure enough.  When she looked back after her mother she was nowhere to be seen, only a few rain-swollen coupon booklets from CVS skittered through the gutters with a sinister hiss. 

The front door of the Pink Beaver banged open and revealed an old woman bent over a cheap metal cane with rubber-stopped tip.  She was watery-eyed and distinctly yellow, jaundiced looking in her faded floral mu-mu.  She waved at Cherry Pie, glaring when the girl hesitated.  What made Cherry Pie hesitate was the strange painting depicted on the inside of the door.  It was stenciled on in the same faded pink paint, and bore the image of a girl with large breasts hanging diagonally from a pole.  The oddest thing about the painting was that the naked girl had a beaver tail attached to her rump.  Cherry Pie had never seen anything like it, and it sent a cold wind of fear into her heart.  The old woman scowled at her, and stumped down the steps toward her faster than one would have thought, grabbing Cherry Pie’s school bag.  She unzipped it, lifted a handful of cash out of it Cherry Pie had not known was there, flipped through it with her gnarled fingers, and nodded.  She shouted something at Cherry Pie in a language she could not understand, and Cherry Pie picked up the wheelbarrow handles and followed her inside.  She did not know what else to do.  The old woman ushered her in impatiently and closed the door on the scant, smog-filled daylight that had been breaking over the run down rooftops.  The door closed behind her. Inside it was dark and cold.  Cherry Pie reached into the wheelbarrow of her belongings for her blanket and discovered it had been cemented to the rusting bottom, along with all other memorabilia of her childhood.