Right to Die

looseleaf binders and a couple of photos in frames. One photo showed a house with beige stone walls and an orange tile roof, the walls bordered by small trees, kinds I was pretty sure I’d never seen before. In another photo, an adolescent Cuervo was standing near a man who resembled a dark-haired Cesar Romero, both wearing hunting gear. An elaborate telephone and a fax machine took up most of the desk.
    Cuervo hadn’t asked me for any identification, so I hadn’t yet brought up why I was there.
    “This your first time at the co-op, John?”
    “It is.”
    “We’ve got a great operation here. Only the second true growers’ co-op in this part of the country. We patterned ourselves after Penn Quality out past Albany . Veau Blanc?”
    I nodded as though I knew what he meant.
    “Toughest part was coming up with the financing. The growers around here, like everywhere else, would just sell their calves to the packing house, never had much idea about the business side of running a plant themselves. But once we got them to see the advantages of fair price and fair grading for their product, they came up with their share of the front money, and we’re in business. Doing eight hundred calves a week most weeks now, and that’s not bad. Penn’s a shade ahead of us, but they started before we did, and they’ve got this all-star named Azzone selling for them. It’ll take us a while, but we’ll catch them.”
    To keep him going, I said, “Where are you concentrating?”
    He set down the cup. “ Boston , for now. With veal, you know, you’re pretty much selling to the supermarket chains and the restaurant distributors. And you pretty much have to hit the ethnics, your Italians, your Jews. I was lucky to get into the business, since it’s mostly a family trade. But I’m from Spain originally, and a lot of the Hispanics in the New York/Boston corridor like their veal.”
    “You ever visit the restaurants on Newbury Street ?”
    “Newbury? You mean, like in Boston ?”
    “Yes.”
    I seemed to put him off track. “Once in a while. Couple of small accounts there. That where you are?”
    “A few blocks away.”
    Cuervo came back on track. “So, what do you think of our operation?”
    “Impressive.”
    “Damned right. State-of-the-art equipment and sanitary standards. You saw the schochet down there?”
    “The what?” »
    “The rabbi, like.”
    “Oh, yes, I did.”
    “You don’t run a clean plant, you don’t have to worry about the government inspectors. The rabbis, they’ll close you down first. Only use the front quarter of the animal, but you got to have them.”
    “Even so, it didn’t look like you waste anything.”
    “Right again, John. The heads we send to Mexico —they go for the brains and the cheek meat down there. The hearts, the Italians, they stuff them. Kidneys to the fancy French bistros. The rest of the dropped meat we send off to Europe . The hides to Japan for tanning, then to Italy for gloves and shoes.”
    “You get a lot of heat from the animal protection people?”
    “Pickets once in a while. They’d have us all living on bean sprouts and Velveeta, they had their way. But, hey, there wouldn’t be any veal calves if it weren’t for the dairy herds, right?”
    “Right.”
    “I mean, what’s a dairy farmer supposed to do? He needs the bull to knock up the cows so they’ll give milk. But when he gets a boy calf instead of a girl that can grow up to give more milk, he doesn’t have too many choices. One, he can let the calf roam with the mother and suckle, which cuts down on her milk production. Two, the farmer can let the calf loose in the fields to feed on grass and become a beefer. Three, he can sell the calf to a Bob-packer who whacks the animal at all of one or two weeks of life and maybe eighty pounds of weight. Four is us. The dairy farmer, if he’s smart, can auction the calf to a fancy veal grower like the ones who own this plant. The grower’s going to raise that calf for sixteen weeks and have it come in here at four hundred pounds, giving us maybe two hundred sixty pounds of meat. Now, those are the choices, right? You want milk, you’re going to have male calves and you got to do something with them.” He picked up the cup again. “And it seems to me that our way is the best way.”
    I didn’t say anything as he sipped.
    Cuervo blinked a few times and then said, “What outfit are you with, anyway?”
    “I’m not in the veal business.”
    He rotated the