September Fair (15 page)

I made a note
to ask Christine about the hair weirdness later. She was scheduled for a long session in the booth, and I had to catch a bus to Bovine Productivity Management. Heading out of the Dairy building, I was surprised to run into a crowd on the outside larger than the one on the inside, and they were all holding signs.
Meat is Murder. Free the Cows. Have you Had your Glass of Chemicals Today?

They looked like the same bunch I had literally run into the day Ashley had been murdered. I tried to circumvent them, but it was impossible to leave the Dairy building without wading through the protestors. As I pushed forward, head down, a brochure was shoved in my hand. On the front was a brown-eyed, sad-looking calf over the words, “Can I have some of that milk?” I looked up and recognized the sign holder as the same guy I’d collided with when leaving the Cattle Barn the other day. “Hello,” I said to him.

He ignored my greeting. “The average glass of nonorganic milk contains eight drops of pus.”

“Um, gross.”

“Factory-farmed cows spend their lives in cramped quarters with barely enough room to turn around. They’re force-fed antibiotics and growth hormone that end up in our food and our water supply, creating the perfect environment for a superbug strong enough to wipe out the human race, and causing both girls and boys to reach puberty prematurely.”

He was tall, probably 6’5”, and wiry. His clothes hung off of him, but he was clean, and his eyes were bright but sane. Still. “You see those cows over there?” I asked, pointing at the Cattle Barn behind him. “They look pretty happy to me.”

“Some small farmers still respect the land and their animals and grow sustainably,” he said grudgingly. “We’re not here protesting them. We’re speaking out against the corporate dairy industry, as exemplified by Bovine Productivity Management.”

Now we were getting somewhere. “BPM? The sponsors of the Milkfed Mary, Queen of the Dairy pageant?”

“Yeah. That’s why we’re here.” He indicated the Dairy building.

“They’re pretty corporate, hunh?”

“The worst.” He started warming up to his subject. “They’ve created some of the most toxic antibiotics in the industry, and their milk enhancer has some dangerous side effects.”

“Like what?”

He ran his fingers through his hair. “We can’t be sure. They guard their secrets well, but we’ve got it on good authority that they’re doing terrible things to cattle. They conduct a lot of their experiments right here in St. Paul, at their local lab. Cows go in, but they don’t come out.”

We were talking about the lab I would just so happen to be at in about an hour. Interesting. “Thanks for your time.”

“Wait, let me show you some pictures.” He pulled out photos of scrawny-looking cows packed together in mud up to their knobby knees. If cows had knees. “They basically don’t have room to turn around. In the U.S., corporate cows don’t get to eat their natural diet of grass. They’re fed grain, antibiotics, and noxious protein made from ground-up dead animals, including other cows. When they calve, their babies are taken away from them and fed an artificial diet of formula so humans can have that milk, which our bodies are not designed to digest. You know how your throat gets gummy when you drink milk? That’s your body telling you it wasn’t made for you.”

I swallowed. As a point of fact, I hadn’t drunk a glass of milk in years. The faint animal smell always turned me off. I loved my cheese and ice cream, though, and I didn’t want to hear any more rank details about my diet. “Well, thanks for your time. I didn’t catch your name?”

“Aeon. Aeon Hopkins. There are alternatives to dairy that are good for your health, good for the environment, good for cows. One glass of rice milk contains more calcium than your average glass of cow’s milk, and it’s easily digestible as well as delicious.”

“All right, Aeon. Thanks.” His little speech had me feeling queasy and unsettled. I pushed my way through the protestors, finally reaching some breathing space when I was about a hundred feet from the Dairy building. The weather had bounced back from yesterday’s storm to the sultry climate that had opened the State Fair, and as I made my way to the south gates, I was thankful that I’d worn a sundress instead of the one pair of pants I’d packed. Already, the deep purple cotton was clinging to my back, and the humidity curled the baby hairs escaping from my ponytail. I passed an ice cream booth and looked longingly at someone licking a cone of toasted almond fudge, but all I could think of was salty pus. Damn. If that man had ruined my taste for ice cream, there was going to be some payback.

I hopped the next bus, letting a breeze from the cracked window wash over my moist neck. Choosing the right bus—actually, buses, since I needed to transfer three times—to reach the headquarters of BPM had been no small task, and when, an hour later, I was dropped off near a deserted-looking industrial area, I wondered if I had wasted my time. I had no concrete course of action other than to size up Lars Gunder as Ashley’s possible lover and find out more about BPM and its products, but I hardly expected him to spill romantic or company secrets. Heck, I couldn’t even coax the Scotch egg guy into divulging his recipe. I was here, though, and so I might as well see this through.

I recognized the front of the Bovine Productivity Corporation from their web page, though their official image had Photoshopped out the barbed wire-topped, ten-foot wall surrounding the gigantic facility. I pressed the speaker button next to the front gate, peeking through the iron bars at the scrubby brush surrounding the building. On BPM’s website, the bushes had been grand oak trees. I wondered what other false fronts the business had.

When I identified myself, I was buzzed in and strode up the front sidewalk and into the main building, which was as sprawling as an urban high school. The interior of the business was straight out of
Brave New World
, all cold white walls and pristine floors. An immaculate receptionist, looking like she may have been a Milkfed Mary herself in the not too-distant past, smiled up at me as I entered. Her teeth were artificially white, and her eyes stayed flat, not reflecting her smile. “Welcome. Can I help you?”

“I have an appointment with Lars Gunder.” I shifted from one foot to the other, feeling like bacterium in a Petri dish in my sweaty, sleeveless sundress and flip-flops. My hands were clenched as I waited for some sanitation system to detect and eject me. Red lights would flare, sirens would wail, and long metal pincers would emerge from behind a secret panel, snag me by the back of my dress, and lift me off the ground while a leather boot on a stick appeared to kick me out.

“Of course.” No sirens. She spoke softly into a phone and then suggested I have a seat, holding her brittle smile all the while.

Two white leather chairs flanked a glass table in the waiting room. I sunk silently into one, or at least tried to, but my wet thighs bleated loudly against the surface. It was in everyone’s best interest to pretend my body hadn’t just made that noise, and so I didn’t bother glancing apologetically at the receptionist. Instead, I leaned forward, rifling through both of my magazine options:
Farm Journal
and
Dairy Farming Now
. Fortunately, Lars’ arrival saved me from learning more about teat salve and the hoof-split crisis. I shook the hand he held out to me, glancing quickly back to make sure I hadn’t left a stain on the chair.

“Thank you for coming, Mira. I wasn’t sure if you would.”

“Wouldn’t miss it,” I said. “Quite an operation you have here.”

“Thank you. This main building is where we do some of our testing as well as house our corporate employees. Wait until you see the lab.”

I followed as he slid a card into an electronic lock, opening two automatic metal doors that led off the foyer. A whoosh of air greeted us, and it smelled like rubbing alcohol, dry dog food, and something that caused an instinctual fear reaction in me. At first I thought it was the smell of the doctor’s office when you’re about to get a shot, or that weird tang someone who has intense stage fright gives off, but neither was it exactly. I couldn’t put my finger on it, so I ignored it. I found that by the time we had taken four different turns and were in the bowels of the faceless, white-halled building, it was hardly noticeable, and my heartbeat was back to normal.

“Ever get lost in this place?”

He chuckled, but like the receptionist there was something robotic about his attempt at good humor. “You get used to it. You see those guys in white coats?” He stopped, pointing at the glassed-in lab to our right, the first windowed room we’d passed. Inside, three men worked over a series of massive microscopes arranged on a stainless steel table. They wore protective goggles and face masks and thick rubber gloves. They were surrounded by whirring machines, delicate-looking computer equipment, and stacks of testing materials. In one particularly intricate operation, a blue liquid bubbled from one end of a glass piping unit to another, trying to escape the flames poised below. “They’re about to make history.”

“What’re they doing?”

“Updating ME. That’s Milk Enhancer, our best-selling product. In its current form, it doubles milk output on an average cow. These scientists are days away from changing the formula to quadruple output.”

I unconsciously adjusted my boobs under my still-damp sundress. “Doesn’t that hurt the cows?”

“Not at all. And think of all the hungry people in the world who could be fed if your average cow produced four times as much milk. This project is my baby. I’m currently negotiating to get the newest version of ME sent overseas.”

“Do you test it on real cows first?”

In the reflection of the glass, I saw him raise an eyebrow. “Of course. We have a full testing lab on our facilities.”

“This isn’t it?”

“Different kind of testing. You are the curious one, aren’t you? I like an intelligent woman.” He rested his hand on my shoulder and massaged lightly. When I glanced over, uncomfortable at the physical contact, he smiled flirtatiously, giving me the full charm treatment. The tightness at the corners of his lips indicated another emotion all together, but only because I was watching for it. I could see how another person, like an eighteen-year-old, attention-hungry farm girl, would only hear the flattering words. “This lab isn’t set up to accommodate animals, but we have a building on the grounds that is. By running the product on high-quality dairy cows before releasing it to the public, we ensure farmers the best results, no worries.”

I thought of Aeon and his claims that the products weren’t safe. “Run into any hitches testing ME?”

“None.” He abruptly dropped his hand from my shoulder. “Let’s go look at the manufacturing facility and the packing warehouse.”

He led me through a maze of corridors to the rear of the main building, where we stepped outdoors and through another security gate before entering the blue collar area of the plant. The BPM operation was much larger than I had first thought. In the rear, out of sight from the street, were several warehouses, a behemoth of a manufacturing plant, and a distribution center. Lars stopped at a small building to grab us bright yellow hard hats before showing me around the other buildings, smiling and waving at the hundreds of workers busily producing, boxing, and transporting cow products. As we went in and out of buildings, I realized that from the air, the BPM operation would look like a giant “T,” with the main offices the base of the letter and the ancillary buildings above and then to the right and left, forming the crossbar of the “T.”

All the rear buildings we had entered had sturdy, reinforced doors but were not walled-in like the main structure, the white-halled corporate offices. The only exception was a small building, completely surrounded with razor wire, that was at the far left corner of the “T.” “What’s in there?”

He smiled his oily smile, but it was beginning to wear at the seams. “That’s our product testing lab I spoke about earlier. Can’t go in there. We’d interrupt important stuff.”

“Why does a testing lab need a bulldozer?”

“They’ve got to park them somewhere.” Before I could point out that there were much more sensible places to rest it other than inside the razor wire fence—say, in the giant warehouse marked “Garage” across from us—he grabbed me by the elbow and steered me into the next warehouse, the fourth one we had entered on our tour. It was packed floor-to-ceiling with boxes, male workers in blue shirts swarming around like busy bugs, driving forklifts and moving product. They treated us as if we were invisible, and I wondered how many visitors they got.