by Jeff Parker
There is no question I owe him. I go to the chest for my camo shirt/pants set and we drive with the sheet flapping behind the Civvie like a cape.
“Did you hear what they’re calling you?” Minnow says.
I turn my mouth into an “o” and pinch my eyebrows together.
“The dogs,” he says. “You’re Feh-feh.”
“Veh-veh?” I say.
“You should be flattered. Technically, that’s not a predator name. They understand, you and me are with them.”
He flips on the radio news and it gives us the whole story. Inexplicable tornados. Took out a chicken farm on the edge of the state. Sixty-four laying-hen buildings, each 600 feet long and 50 feet wide, 85,000 chickens per. Inoperable watering, feeding, and heating systems. They say they can’t be saved. It’s too dangerous. So, more than one million chickens will be killed to prevent them from dying. An interview with some Department of Agriculture poser: “Under state law, they need to be buried or burned or rendered. And the process has to be done humanely too. These chickens are not going to die of cold.”
“God damn right-on about that,” Minnow says. He begins shaking. “When we get there my people will have certain—how should we say?—oh fuck it. If someone tells you to do something, do it. And don’t follow me. I hate that.”
I look away when we pass road kill. And there is nothing else but that big wide sky and then a city of warehouse-like things appear in the distance and the traffic bottlenecks. The laying houses are arranged in six perfectly symmetrical rows. The tornadoes have lifted the roofs off several and the smell of bird shit is heavy in the air. We slow to a crawl. Finally, cars pull over and we do too and walk toward the chicken farm. I recognize the heat of the breath of many small, nervous creatures.
We walk the line of stickered cars. There’s tree, bird, and Operation Ivy stickers, X’s, little fig leaves, a bumper that reads ANABAPTIST AND PROUD OF IT. And then there’s all the government issue, the emergency vehicles, a snorkel truck. I misdetect at first, but folks peel out of the way for us. Pretty soon the street is packed with punks and hippies and funny hats all whipping around, then making way. It looks more like the run-up to a Lollapalooza than a chicken protest, and Minnow is the Perry Farrel. He swaggers, an “I’m in charge here” on the tip of his tongue, more and more buds on mine.
When we hit the perimeter, the Agriculture Spokesman, surrounded by firemen, is giving a speech: “There’s nothing to be done for them. We’ve saved all we can. The new plan is to gas the laying houses, then render. We’ll need you folks to disband.”
“We’ll all carry out one,” Minnow says. “One man, one bird!”
The crowd chants, “One man, one bird. One bird, one man.” Someone in back shouts, “One woman.”
“The buildings are a tangle of cages and chickens and manure pits below. This is going to be a Herculean task,” the spokesman says.
“You don’t need a Hercules to carry one chicken,” Minnow cries.
“Don’t need a Hercules to carry one chicken,” the crowd chants. “One man, one bird.”
“Woman,” the voice in back shouts again, drowned out in the second chorus of “Hercules.”
“The danger is too great to allow people inside the buildings to, as much as we’d like, rescue the birds,” the spokesman says.
Minnow backs into the crowd, chanting and punching fists into the air at the spokesman. I don’t follow him. I walk down the road a bit to the point where the crowd thins and sit on a snow-covered rock, wetting my camo pants. I stare at the dismantled laying houses. I can make out the off-white puffs that are the chickens, pacing in their cages. I hear the low rumble of a mass clucking.
I roll my eyes, checking for the long gone defector beauty mark, and touch my finger to the multiplying bumps on my tongue. Then I feel a shove on my shoulder and turn to see the pear-shaped bearded guy from the Buzzard Workshop. I stand up. “You’re the one run off with my knife,” he says. He towers over me.
“Canth theak,” I say.
He stares.
I point to my mouth.
“Where’s my knife?”
I pat my pockets, and hold out my empty palms.
“I’ve run into your type before,” he says. “Only just they never stole my knife. Every year hundreds of moose are killed by cars or trains. Hundreds. A road-killed moose is a unique opportunity. One hundred and twenty-five pounds of meat will stock a freezer for a year. That’s just over 25 percent of a moose. It’s not like deer. Deer you hang to sweeten the meat. You can taste the difference between a back strap and a brisquet. Moose is different altogether. It’s a community event. It’s environmentally sound. It’s a lot of fun.”
I nod and shrug, hoping he’ll understand, I didn’t run away to antagonize his cause. I didn’t mean to steal the knife. A body alone is not capable of communicating this.
“I don’t know about your type,” the bearded guy says. He turns and I watch him climb into his Gut Deer? truck.
From the opposite direction, gas trucks break the long horizon. The crowd has begun to peel out, to admit defeat. The drivers of the gas trucks receive some instructions from the Agriculture Spokesman, and they park in front of a laying house. They run hoses inside the buildings and pull massive plastic tarps over them one by one.
I’m getting cold. The orange sun is setting. Plus, I realize that I really don’t want to be here when all these chickens die.
Then I see what seems to me to be two skiers from the resort, in their ninja gear, something—maybe skis—between them. Then it crystallizes, it’s Minnow and someone else and the thing they’re wielding may be a giant can opener. I try and block the reflection of the sun off the snow with my hand.
“They’ve got the Jaws of Life,” someone screams. Two firemen bolt down the embankment. The clunky fire suits make their legs short, and they run stilted.
Minnow and his co-conspirator rake the Jaws of Life across the bottom edge of the cages along an exposed section of the laying house. The gas truck drivers drop their tarps and converge on them. One of the firemen trips and goes face first into the snow, his yellow fire helmet like something obscene but natural growing in the winter. Before I know it, I too am running down the embankment toward them.
Minnow and the other guy are prying up the cut edge of the cage, opening one whole side of the enclosure, releasing what might be thousands of them simultaneously.
“Go,” Minnow screams.
One of the firemen tackles him and the gas truck guys go for his friend, but they’re slowed stepping through all the bewildered chickens. The sound, that rumble of clucking, is off the charts when I reach them.
The chickens hop and flutter. White feathers hang in the air, but at first I think it’s snowing again. Everywhere you step is bird. The snow comes up to their bellies and they fumble, moving like popping corn across the field.
The fireman is holding Minnow’s hands behind his back. He’s face first in the snow. He looks up and I see that he is bawling. He is biting his upper lip, gazing out across the snow—between here and the horizon there is nothing but the remains of the laying house roofs and a spreading band of chickens clearing the perimeter into only deeper snow.
Minnow sees me and mouths, “Go.” I glance to my left and see the other fireman, up now and beelining for me. I run behind the birds shouting at them to go, go, go, go, go. I snatch one up and it’s warm in my hands. I tuck it under my arm like a football. I pick a point where the snow meets the big sky, and I aim to make it there.
The Taste of Penny
BROTHERMAN’S HAS A LITTLE PROBLEM WITH ITS local competitors, The Two Men And A Truck crew. The Two Men And A Truck crew are former cops.
Now Sam is standing on the side of the road with a current cop, and his finger, a part of himself which he loathes, pokes into the meaty ball in the corner of his eye. At first he’s shocked to see the thing there and thinks it’s someone else’s. But he recognizes the sad condition of his own digit in the bright glare of
the street light as it misses his nose completely.
This sad condition was a constant source of embarrassment. Just the other day two girls, strangers in some waiting area, suggested that he get a manicure.
“I don’t even know you,” he said to them.
“They’re really bad,” one of them said, “your nails.”
“But do you think it’s your place to tell someone something like that?”
“They’re disgusting,” said the other one.
Sam had always known they were disgusting fingers, spindly and crooked from breaking them as a kid. He couldn’t recall ever having a full nail. He bit them down to nothing—a habit he’d recently been trying to break, going around with hot sauce coating them, reeking of cayenne and vinegar.
The surprise of that one appearing where it isn’t supposed to and sticking him in the eye makes him lose track of the penny hidden under his tongue, and swallow it.
Immediately Sam begins—maybe this isn’t the right word—sensing the penny in his stomach. He experiences two distinct sensations: the pressure of his palm on the back of his eyelid, and the discomfort of the penny inside him, a presence. If he moves the hand, pain lights up in his eye.
Sam and the cop stand there a few silent minutes looking at each other on the side of the road. The cop looks at Sam, and Sam looks at the cop. Sam blinks his good eye. He keeps the other eye covered with his palm, pointing his fingers outward like lashes. He doesn’t even want to touch himself with them. Not in the eye, not on his dick. He wants to keep his fingers away from himself.
Sam doesn’t know what to do with his other arm so it hangs limp at his side. He does not have his swerve on.
“So it’s like that is it?” the cop says.
“Like how?”
There is no response.
“I think I really did something to my eye,” Sam says. “I can’t seem to take my hand away from it.”
“You know what I think, sir?” the cop says.
“I don’t know.”
“I’ll tell you. I think your eye’s not hurt. I think you’re trying to get out of something.” The cop believes Sam to be bullshitting. He believes him to be drunk as well.
“Oh it’s hurt. It’s definitely hurt.”
“And I don’t suppose you could pass any more tests then, huh?”
“It’d be difficult. I am happy to try. It’d not be easy. Not one bit. However I am cooperative. I will do what you ask. I am being cooperative.”
The cop walks Sam to the squad car. He jostles him some, testing his swerve for himself. Sam is steadfast. Never mind he missed his nose. Sam is the best drunk driver you’ll meet. He’d been pulled over not because of the seatbelt either. No one can see that you’re not wearing your seatbelt. Everyone knows that is some bullshit excuse law. He’d been pulled for his magnetic signs, and he should have known better.
He’d won them off a sign painter, in a drinking contest, and he could peel them off at any time. But they were fantastic white magnetic signs, and Sam was proud of them. They announced in the way the constant flyering at the grocery store didn’t that he ran a real business. In beveled yellow letters, a yellow so fantastic you could almost call it neon, “Brotherman’s Hauling.”
But this is only Sam’s perspective. Actually he is a pisspoor drunk driver. He has been for years.
“Remove your mitt from your facial area.” Sam does and brushes the cop’s cheek. “Jesus Christ,” the cop says. “Watch those things.”
“Apology,” Sam says.
“Now open it.”
Sam tries, but he can only manage a tight squint. Everything is blurred, and the effort it takes to open that one forces the other one closed.
“How many fingers am I holding?” the cop says.
“I have no idea.” Which he does not. He sees refracted light, lots of refracted light, and shapes.
“Well don’t lay down back there,” the cop says.
“Why would I lay down?”
“Some people lay down.” The cop shuts the door behind him then climbs in the front and radios for an ambulance. With the dispatcher, he refers to Sam as “some numb nuts who seems to have poked his own eye during the drunk test.”
Sam instinctively begins to gnaw on the thumbnail of his spare hand. He need not even, as he usually does, remind himself of the protein in fingernail.
When the cop opens the door again, he has a little gadget with a tube coming off it. “While we’re waiting, you don’t need neither one of your eyes to blow into this.”
There’d been no problem when the Two Men stuck to moving. But maybe the moving business wasn’t too hot or something. Just last week they stumbled across a flyer at the PriceChopper that read, “Two Men And A Truck: Moving, AND NOW HAULING TOO.” Technically, yes, movers and haulers both haul things. They also both move them. But to Sam’s mind the distinction was crystal: Things that people want or care about are moved. Things that people don’t want or care about are hauled.
In some towns the Two Men And A Truck company is a franchise, the kind of place that hires buff frat boys and deducts FICA. This Two Men And A Truck was just that, two men and a pickup, just like Sam and Jeremy, the F-150, and Brotherman’s Hauling. Sam and Jeremy might even have welcomed their expansion, a little competition, had those fuckers not tacked their flyers up directly over the Brotherman’s flyers.
Sam took one of the tear-off phone numbers from the Two Men flyer. He then called with a fake hauling job. “It’s a little drive out of town,” he said. “But the payoff is worth it.”
“We have a few moving gigs scheduled,” one of the Two Men said. “If it’s that big we can cancel them.”
Sam described the job to him. The job he pitched was a point-by-point description of the first hauling job Brotherman’s had ever done, transporting 500 80-gallon drums, the kind bums make fires in, to the barrel refurbishing plant. The plant’s drivers had gone on a strike. It had required precision stacking, four-inch truck cargo straps, and multiple trips to haul it all in the F-150. But it had paid extremely well. That one job funded the whole business. It bought Brotherman’s computer and the mobile. Sam described the job to the one man, who sounded very eager. Sam gave him a fake address of a drum processing facility on the Old Highway. He gave him a fake phone number too.
So when the mobile buzzed later that evening he didn’t think anything much of it. Sam’s plans have simple flaws. It was actually the two men of Two Men on at the same time.
“You cost us a day, pussboy,” said one of them, Sam thought the same one he talked to earlier.
“A day,” said the other one.
“That’s Brotherman to you,” Sam said. “You have conference call or something? How do you get that?”
“Yeah, we got conference call,” said the first one. “And you got a genuine problem.”
“What are they saying?” Jeremy said.
“They say we’ve got a problem,” Sam said.
“Talking to your pussy, dick?” one of the two men said. Sam couldn’t tell them apart anymore.
“They ask if I’m talking to my pussy,” Sam said.
“Tell them your pussy takes umbrage at their comment,” Jeremy said.
“Takes what?” Sam said.
“You guys need to watch your backs. This ain’t cool. We let you run your little show around here long enough. Now there may be some action.”
“An equal and opposite reaction?” Sam said in the voice of a black man imitating a white man.
“Um-bridge,” Jeremy said.
“Payback action,” the two men said.
“My pussy takes umbrage at your comment,” Sam said.
“Umbrage to your comment,” one of them said, and they hung up.
Sam regretted making the phony call.
“Well?” Jeremy said.
“They corrected you.”
“Corrected what?”
“They said it’s umbrage to your comment.”
“Bullshit
,” Jeremy said. “Bullfuckingshit.”
Sam is hyperaware of his shit as it moves through him. He searches the bowl. He probes with a wire coat hanger, but there’s no penny. He feels it still, somewhere within him, a point of pressure there above his stomach, a little insignificant weight.
He removes two bowls of hot sauce from the fridge and soaks his fingers for ten minutes like he’s seen women in manicure shops soaking their fingers. When time is up, he drip-dries over the bowls. The tips turn a crusty orange. They sting and tighten.
Today the hot sauce serves a double preventative purpose. Because the floors in Sam’s apartment are paper-thin, the Red-haired Girl downstairs can hear him masturbating at his computer. Yesterday, the Red-haired Girl had a little talk with him during which he pretty much got the picture. She knocked on his door while he had the news on. She told him the news was too loud.
“It’s the news,” he said. “How can the news be loud?”
“I can hear everything that goes on up here,” she said. “Everything.” This being her subtle hint that he might want to check the volume at which he engages Internet porn. He understood that she issued her complaint intentionally during an innocent moderate-volume news moment so as to get her point across when he was not in the middle of the activity she really wanted to put a stop to. She was smart, he figured. Of course he knew how troubling it was to be able to hear something like that. He could hear the guy above him jerking off to Internet porn too.
Some queerbaits might find the guy above you jerking off at the same time as you exciting. It really bugs Sam though. And because he can never hear the Red-haired Girl downstairs doing anything, he knows the guy upstairs can not hear him. Sound moves downward, he thinks.
So when he breaks for attempting to expel the penny again, he hears the guy upstairs watching The Price Is Right at a normal volume—normal in this building means, in the quiet of his apartment one floor removed, he hears the sound of Bob Barker’s voice over his own bathroom fan.
Sam goes upstairs and knocks on the door. He keeps his hands in his pockets.
