bibfronts and rubber gauntlets.
The whitecoat female pointed at the heavy protective gear and said, “Put them on. Hurry up.”
“Just so you know,” Mildred said as she stepped into the bibfronts, “we don’t do toilets.”
“I think you’ll do whatever you’re told,” the woman said. She waved at the pair of swing doors on the left with her clipboard. “Through there...”
As they approached, Mildred could hear music coming from the other side. She used her shoulder to push the door open and nearly choked on her next breath. The reek of animal blood and rotting fish was that thick. Wall speakers pumped out the saxophone stylings of Kenny G, which mingled with the clatter of cutlery and rhythmic rasp of handsaws. The gray concrete room was lined with rows of stainless-steel tables and rolling steel carts. The latter were piled high with what looked like heaps of raw liver except for the red knobs of bone sticking out. About two dozen people in bibfront slickers labored with saws and knives and cleavers, either at the tables or on the gigantic carcasses hanging from meat hooks set in heavy rails on the ceiling.
At first glance Mildred thought they were sides of beef. Or enormous hogs. Then she looked closer and saw the stubby wings, taloned web feet and feather coats.
“By the Three Kennedys,” Doc said, his eyes wide with amazement, “those immense creatures are avian.”
Two men in black overalls strode up to them. From the truncheons they carried, Mildred assumed their job was to keep the butcher shop running smoothly. They were joined by a third man in bibfronts and dark blue coveralls.
“Some newbies for you to train, Oscar,” the female whitecoat said to the latecomer. His ruddy face, and his chest and arms were splattered with an impasto of blood, pinfeathers and fish scales. “When you’re done, turn them over to the fertilizer crew.”
The whitecoats unlocked and removed the handcuffs, then turned and left the room.
“Over here,” their instructor said, waving for them to follow him.
They stepped up to one of the hanging carcasses.
“What kind of bird is that?” Mildred asked, practically shouting to be heard over the Muzak and the clatter.
“Clonie pengie.”
At least she now had a clue where they had jumped to. “‘Pengie’? You mean penguin?”
Oscar scowled and looked at her as if she was crazy. “No more questions,” he said. “I’m going to show you the ropes, then you’re on your own, so watch carefully. You screw something up or work too slowly, and those men in black will pound the living hell out of you.”
Oscar selected a nine-inch boning knife from the array of razor-sharp blades on the tabletop. Raising his hand above his head, he plunged the point into the middle of the penguin’s torso, then slashed downward, smoothly unzipping the wet, gray feather coat from breastbone to pelvis, revealing an inches-thick layer of grainy brown fat beneath.
A horrible stench gusted from the incision, making Mildred take a step back. Doc coughed and covered his nose with his hand.
“You want to cut just deep enough to open the cavity,” Oscar said. “Be careful not to puncture the stomach.” He aimed the knifepoint at a bulging reddish sack the size of a basketball. “You don’t want to release the sour bile from the glands, these ones here, here and here.” He indicated compact, twisted, cordlike globs of gray tissue. “Prick them by accident and the meat is ruined.”
“Yeah, we’re walking a fine line there,” Mildred said.
Doc grinned at her joke; Oscar didn’t catch the sarcasm.
The butcher widened the cut by gripping the skin with gloved hands and pulling the edges apart. Coils of greasy guts slid out the bottom and into a strategically placed ten-gallon bucket on the floor. There was such a volume of intestine that the bucket was instantly filled to the brim. Oscar slopped the overflow into a second white plastic bucket.
“Cut here at the gullet and airway,” he said as he made the incisions with his knifepoint, “then pull out the heart, stomach and lungs. The rest will follow—like this.”
The remaining organs flopped into the backup bucket.
“Make your last cut just above the poop chute, right here. And that’s that. Gutting is the easy part.”
A female worker in navy blue hurried over to hoist the heavy buckets onto the metal table. Taking up a knife, she quickly excised the bulging stomach from the rest of the innards, then sliced it open over an empty bucket. Using both hands, she squeezed forth a slimy mess of half-digested herring, anchovy and other unidentifiable small fish and crustaceans. What skin remained on the little fish had a dull, yellowish cast from the animal’s stomach acid. The stench was like being downwind of a gray whale’s blowhole.
“Are you saving that to make fertilizer?” Mildred asked through the fingers clamped over her nose.
The worker laughed. She grabbed a gloved handful of the putrid slurry, then squeezed it in her fist, making it squirt into her open mouth. As she chewed, she gave them a thumbs-up.
A man in black swooped in from behind and whacked her sharply on the back of the skull. “You know better than that,” he said, raising the truncheon again. “Now get back to work.”
A second reminder wasn’t necessary.
“Go on, you open up one,” Oscar told Mildred. He handed her the knife and pointed at the next carcass in line. Unlike the others, its head was intact. It had a long black beak, large vacantly staring eyes. Only in overall body shape did it resemble the emperor penguins she’d seen in zoos and in National Geographic. There was a cluster of tightly spaced bullet holes high in the middle of its chest.
She had to stand on her tiptoes and reach as far as she could to correctly position the knifepoint. Making the first cut was difficult because the breastbone was deceptively massive, evolved to support the powerful wings. Once she got under the bone, the tip slid easily through the skin. She sliced downward as she’d seen Oscar do. Halfway through the cut, dark blood began to pour from the incision, splattering into the waiting bucket. It was the internal bleed from the chest wounds. Mildred held her breath as she yarded out double handfuls of guts.
Once both carcasses were cleaned of entrails and organs, and the cavities hosed down, Oscar showed them the next step.
“Can’t pluck off the feathers,” he said. “Too densely packed. Takes forever to do the job with pliers. So we just skin them out. Make sure your blade is hair-splitting sharp. If it isn’t, touch it up on the stone on the table. The idea is to leave the fat on the meat instead of removing it with the cape.”
He then proceeded to demonstrate the process, starting at the angry stub of neck. The feathered cape peeled away quite easily from the shoulders, riding as it did on a thick layer of brown blubber. He cut around the base of the wings, then throwing his full body weight into the task, ripped the skin of the torso down until it draped in gory folds on the floor. He used a pair of long-handled shears to snip off the webbed, taloned feet at the ankles and dropped them into a bucket of similar clippings. He finished by pulling the skin down over the stumps of wrinkly skinned legs.
As Oscar rolled up the cape, Mildred felt a nudge
