Seethed

 Seethed

1.

After the conversation about kids seethed in their mother’s milk, Montgomery exclaimed: “Really?  You’ve got to be kidding!”

The Agent replied: “You shouldn’t mock someone for their beliefs.”

“Maybe that’s the only thing you should mock anyone for,” Montgomery said.

The abandoned factory was all around them.  Bare sheds and long metal pole barns pressed around the little grease-stained parking lot.  A storm-damaged semi-trailer stood in the sharp-edged shadow cast by one of the sheds.  Although the sun was now bright overhead, the factory buildings appeared dull, gloomy and impenetrable.  No window panes reflected the light.  The sheds and barns were scuffed and corroding at their edges and bare windowless walls concealed the secrets within.

Montgomery said that he had several other appointments and an airplane to catch.  He told the Agent that he would talk to the Investor and send him an email.  

“The owner would like to do business with you,” the Agent said.

Montgomery got into his rental car and drove along the gravel lane between the silent metal structure.  The road to the factory was unpaved and the place had no railway siding.  Access was another problem.  In the Spring, the gravel roads would be weight-restricted.  Dusty, grey fields of corn and soybeans lined the road and it was more than a mile to the two-lane blacktop that led to the freeway.  

2.

At this latitude, nights were long and days short, at least in late September.  Montgomery had several appointments before his flight back to the Coast.  So he had arranged to meet the Real Estate Agent early, just before dawn.  The drive to the Factory required a dozen turns at country intersections and would take, the Agent warned, at least 45 minutes.  Furthermore, for some reason, GPS coordinates for the compound were inaccurate and the various map applications sometimes led visitors astray. Thus, the plan was for Montgomery to come from his motel to the Agent’s home and, then, follow behind his guide’s pickup to the factory site. 

The sky was dark with a faint red stain in the clouds to the east.  Montgomery saw a light in an upper window at the Agent’s address.  He got out of his rental car and stood on the sidewalk.  Across the street, a man in a sweat suit was walking a small dog.  A haggard-looking house next to the Realtor’s place pushed it unkempt lawn up against the sidewalk.  Some dark bushes drooped over tall grass moist with dew and the air smelled of hay.  Icy blue light suffused an upper window in the derelict home.  Montgomery looked up and saw that a strand of indigo lights was suspended at the place where the wall intersected with the ceiling in the room behind the lit upper window.  What would be the purpose for that?  From Montgomery’s vantage, he couldn’t see anything in the room but the top of the wall and the pale ceiling saturated with dark blue by the string of lights.  For some reason, the gaunt white house above the shaggy lawn with swollen bushes and the ray of blue light coming from the upper window filled him with disquiet.  He looked away from leprous facade, scaly with peeling white paint, to the dignified nearby home where the Realtor apparently lived.  No ray of light fell from the Real Estate Agent’s place and Montgomery took his cell-phone from his breast pocket to check on the time.  Headlights flared and a pick-up pulled to the curb behind Montgomery’s car.  The side-window came down:  “I had to get gas,” the Agent said.  The smell of hot coffee oozed from the pickup’s cab.

“Shall we go?” Montgomery said.

“Follow me,” the Agent replied.

Before putting his car in gear, Montgomery glanced up again at the decrepit white house.  The blue glow in the upper room was unchanged and sent a chill down his spine.

The pick-up crossed a freeway and, then, sped along a two-lane black-top highway that curved between spiky shelter belts.  Farm yard-lights far off in the distance twinkled like stars.  

Light spread across the fields.  The red tail-lights of the pickup in front of him faded from bright points to a smear of red in the dust kicked up from the gravel road.

3.

The Real Estate Agent led him through the factory buildings.  The power was turned off and the windowless structures were dark inside.  The Agent carried a flashlight to probe the corners of the buildings and cast shadows of the equipment against the corrugated metal walls.

It was simple enough: in the first building, things were cut; assembly took place in the second shed; product was stored in other structures.  In the cutting room, machines of various kinds were scattered across the concrete floor: there were upright band saws, table saws, overhead rotary saws, flat tables slotted for blades, planing and milling machines, angular drill- and punch-presses with cylindrical snouts poised over metal plates.  

“We’ve removed the blades,” the Agent said.

“Why?”

The Agent shrugged: “Kids would get in here and just go to town.  Cutting up all sorts of stuff.”

Montgomery asked: “Why?”

“Just for fun.  But we have the blades.  Under lock and key.  This is a turn-key operation, ready for production on the first day.”

The building where the cut material was stitched together was empty except for several long stainless steel tables with vises bolted to their edges.  There was a stench in the big dark room.

“Smells like something died in here,” Montgomery said.

“Bats I think,” the Agent said.

Two of the three warehouse buildings were empty except for a couple of gas-powered fork lifts gathering dust against the walls.  A stack of pallets clad in filmy spider webs stood next to a fork lift.  In the third warehouse, the Agent’s flashlight picked out a small artificial Christmas tree with flocked plastic needles, two golf-carts and a motorcycle next to a snowmobile with a broken ski.  Furniture was arranged with chairs and desks back to back.  

“You see,” the Agent said.  “It’s a turn-key operation.”

“This comes with it?”

“You bet,” the Agent said.      

They walked across the big yard to the business office, a bungalow with brick planters for flowers next to the entrance.  Spidery twigs extruded from the dry soil in the planters.  From this vantage, Montgomery saw that a big painted sign was bolted to the cutting building: CELEBRATE THE CHRIST! the sign proclaimed.  

The office smelled of wet carpet and mildew.  Some ceiling tiles had fallen onto the reception desk where the skeleton of another house-plant was visible in the gloom.  Montgomery stumbled over the electrical cord to an unplugged copy machine.  In the conference room, there was a round table with a veined marble veneer.  

“You see it’s completely turn-key,” the Agent said.  

Knick-knacks and some personal photographs were abandoned in the small offices in the back of the building.  Computer monitors turned their blind faces to the visitors.

The rot in the air made Montgomery sneeze.

“I’m allergic to mildew,” he said.  “Let’s talk outside.”

4.

Some animal with long jagged claws had walked across the patio behind the office when the cement was still wet.  Talon impressions marked the concrete.

A plastic card table was set up in the middle of the patio with two metal folding chairs flanking it.  A small kitten with green eyes sat with paws crossed in the shade cast by the table.  The Realtor beckoned that Montgomery should sit down.  The kitten ignored them.  

“You can see it’s turn-key,” the Agent told Montgomery.  He said: “Even the name is available.

“What is the name?”

“BWP,” the Agent said.  

Montgomery asked what this meant.

“Originally, it was the initials of partners.  But the business was sold to my client, different name needless to say.  He kept the acronym for its good will but incorporated under ‘Bridges Walls Panels’.  Then, there was the first receivership.  My client reincorporated when the business came out from under the receiver – then, it was ‘Built with Pride,’ then or, maybe, ‘Built with Precision.’  I don’t recall which.  Then, there was the second receivership.”

“Bankruptcy?”

“Reorganization.  But that went awry.”

“I heard.”

“Who would think you could go to prison for something like that?”

Montgomery shrugged: “Who would have thunk it?”

“It’s all got an explanation,” the Agent said.

“I suppose.  How do you know about these things?”

“In-laws are shirt-tail cousins to the Boss.  In this part of the county, we’re all kin.  And I was a salesman here.  Not a very good one, I’m afraid.”

The Agent paused.  “Do you know what a shawarma is?”

Montgomery said he’s heard the word: “Some kind of stringed instrument?”

“No,” the Agent replied.  “It’s a middle eastern food.  Arabs eat it.  That’s what went wrong here.”

“How so?” 

“I suppose you’re a fan of the Bible,” the Agent said.

“No more than the next guy.”

“Out here, everybody reads the Good Book.  Except for some that don’t, of course, but there’s loads of bible study.  You can attend a bible study circle every day of the week if you’re so inclined.”

“Okay?” 

The Agent asked: “Do you know what God commands more than anything else?”

Montgomery replied: “Lots of things, I suppose.”

“But more than anything else?  Not once or twice, but three times.  And there’s a mystic significance to commanding something three times: twice in the book of Exodus and once in Deuteronomy.  Three is the holy number, the number of the trinity.  You get three wishes.  A triangle has three sides.”

“So what is the commandment?”

“You shall not seethe a kid in its mother’s milk.”

Montgomery looked away from the Agent’s earnest, clean-shaven face and the glint in his glasses or, maybe, the glint, not in the lenses of his glasses, but, in his eyes.  The dead buildings cast square, angular shadows. 

“I don’t understand,” Montgomery said.

“It’s the word ‘seethe’,” the Agent said. “That’s how it’s phrased in the KJV.”

“KJV?”

“The King James Version.  Scholars say that the KJV is closer to the way God speaks and writes than even the Hebrew and Greek.  Do you know that?”

“Nope,” Montgomery said.

“Well, it’s a proven fact and the word ‘seethe,’ which is how God puts it in his Holy Word, means ‘to boil’.”

“So it’s a cooking term?”

“Go to Yellowstone, out to the Biscuit Basin, and you’ll see hot springs that are seething.  The water is agitated and bubbles up from deep underground where the hell-fires are burning.  That’s what it means to ‘seethe’.”  He paused.  The kitten under the table made a soft sound.

“Three times,” the Agent said, “the Lord our God says that thou shalt not ‘seethe’ a kid in its mother’s milk.”

“A kid?  Like a baby goat?”

“Yes, that’s the meaning.”

“So why is that a problem?”

“It’s not a problem.  It’s a sin.  There’s a mighty big distinction between problems and sins.”

“I suppose,” Montgomery said.

“That’s what this all means,” the Agent said.  He raised his hand as if in benediction, blessing the vacant buildings and the concrete that the weeds were slowly splitting.  

He continued: “You see the owner had a contract to supply materials to Saudi Arabia or, maybe, it was the Emirates.”

“I thought they were the same.”

“Oh no,” the Agent replied, “completely different regimes.  An educated big city person like yourself – you should know the difference.”

“Okay,” Montgomery said.

“You see the Boss had business with the Saudis and so he went to the kingdom and met them there and, at a banquet, one of the princes served him suckling camel cooked in its mother’s milk.  They said it was shawarma.  But this was all unbeknownst to the Boss and so he tasted, he ate, he swallowed, my friend, and the morsel of suckling camel boiled in its mother’s milk went right down his gullet and into his belly.  And, then, the damage was done.”

“But he didn’t know.  It was unintentional.  And why does a commandment like that exist?  What is its purpose?”

“To make us mindful.  To require that we study closely the Holy Scriptures and follow their wisdom.  To test our obedience.  But it’s a sin to even raise a question like that.”

“Why?”

“Because the Bible says what the Bible says and that should be enough for us.  You don’t stand before the Great White Throne and pester God with impertinence and cavils.”

Montgomery nodded.

“The Boss went to the Holy Lands and prayed in Jerusalem and prayed in Bethlehem and he walked the way of the Passion and inserted his head in the holy sepulcher itself.  He asked for forgiveness and said that he had not wished to offend.  And, so, you know what happened?”

“He was forgiven?”

The Agent gestured at the buildings and the still places between them and the encroaching weeds.

“Does this look like forgiveness to you?” the Agent said.

“It’s a factory.”

“Yes, it’s a turn-key factory, true enough,” the Agent said.  “But God reached down into his basket of trials and tribulations and he smote the Boss with fraud and he smote him with embezzlement and he smote him with class actions and product liability lawsuits and he smote him with sexual harassment claims and he smote him with rising costs and tariffs and accounts receivable that could not be collected.”

“So the factory is cursed?”

“Not in the least: God punishes people not places, not loading docks and rotary saws or computer monitors and office furniture.  God executed his mighty judgment on the Boss but let me ask you this –“

“What?”

“Has your buyer ever eaten a lamb or a goat or a baby camel seethed in its mother’s milk?”

“Not to my knowledge,” Montgomery said.

“Then, there’s no problem at all.”  

“So what’s the price here?  Knowing everything you know.”

The Agent took a pen from his pocket and pulled out a little notepad.  He wrote a number on a page in the pad and, then, tore it out.  He handed the scrap of paper to Montgomery.

“Negotiable?” Montgomery asked.

“Everything on God’s green earth is negotiable,” the Agent replied.

4.

By the time Montgomery reached the airport, thunderstorms were boiling up over the humid flat prairie.  The storms were shaped like the twisted columns in Solomon’s temple, spiral pillars of sculpted jade-colored cloud.  

Before the air plane could taxi to the runway, a storm blocked the way.  It became very dark to the extent that the blue lights along the edge of the taxi-way were illumined.  The blue lights, like a Christmas tree string, reminded Montgomery of something, but he couldn’t recall what it was.

The storm was furious, chattering with white dice-colored hail and all traffic was grounded for an hour.  Montgomery missed his connection in Atlanta.  The next flight was after midnight. He was very tired and the events of the day seemed like a dream to him.  

At the terminal food court, all the restaurants were closed except for a place called Rumi’s Felafel and Hummus.  Although he was hungry, Montgomery didn’t eat there.  He found a vending machine and used a credit card to buy a five-dollar candy bar.