Barn 8

by Deb Olin Unferth

  “WHY’D YOU TAKE THOSE?”

  The hens were clucking inside the car but Cleveland didn’t flinch.

  Psychopath, thought Janey.

  “I’m doing my job, Janey. This is the difference between an employee who will advance and an employee who will fail.”

  So crazy she was probably dangerous.

  “Go ahead and call the regional director. I’ll give you his number.”

  “No thanks.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “No, I don’t want to.”

  The fans roared.

  “Fine.”

  “Fine.”

  The psychopath opened her car door.

  “Hey,” Janey said.

  Cleveland turned back.

  “How many times did my mother babysit you?”

  “Hundreds.” She got in the car. “And I wasn’t a baby.” She drove off. Janey followed.

  SHE AND CLEVELAND began removing animals. They turned up long before dawn, hours before the first farmhands arrived and hours after the last ones had left, when the barns were sheer machine and coo and fume, when the security lamps’ glow was the only light on the land. Invisible horizon, straight roads cutting through the dark, Janey and Cleveland pulling up alongside a barn, climbing out of the car in their auditor uniforms, which they wore at Cleveland’s insistence. They walked through the barns, Cleveland recording in a wrath “noncompliances”—jammed belts, crowded cages, a cat stepping along the aisles. If they got caught, Cleveland said, let her do the talking. “By all means,” said Janey. Oh, she’d love to see that one. Worth the jail time. They hustled out a dozen at a time, six thin hens per burlap sack, took turns driving, tore away from the farms at three in the morning, hens huddled on towels in the backseat.

  Did they talk about Janey’s mother? Barely. Once, it began to snow while they were in a barn. They stepped out into a blizzard so thick, it was like peering through white mud. They couldn’t see a thing. Not a road, not a building, not a car. Their flashlights lit nothing but snow. They went weaving off in one hopeful direction, then another, the sacks getting wetter and heavier (hens could stay in the sacks for only a little while or they’d die: it had happened), slush eddying under their feet, Janey cursing and shivering. Cleveland stopped, shined her flashlight on her. “Janey Flores, for the last time, stand up straight. Your mother used to say that even the most humble job should be done as if for the president of the United States. Would you slouch like that before the president?”

  Janey gasped. Her mother did used to say that. Janey threw back her shoulders. They marched a long way. They found the car and got in.

  Cleveland: “There are not two sets of numbers, Janey, one for mathematicians and one for auditors of layer hen farms. Check your calculations.”

  Her mother: “There aren’t two sets of manners, young lady, one for the queen of England and one for little Brooklyn girls. Use a Kleenex!”

  Cleveland: “Roll up that window. How do you think these chickens like being blown around like lotto balls?”

  Her mother: “Shut that window. We are not lotto balls at seniors bingo!”

  Janey never got used to the sound of the barns. The clanking machinery, the squeaking belts. Even the lights made a sound in these places. She’d start her long walk toward the center of the row and the fans would give way to the sound of tens of thousands of hens, a sort of roiling moaning or droning. It reached the ears in what could only be described as layers, the shallowest layer coming from the hens clucking and ululating nearby, and the deepest layer a low cooing that rose from all corners of the maze. She’d look up and glimpse through the metal a second story identical to this one. She’d crouch and see the lowest tier of birds at her feet, she herself encased between two loud walls of hens, honeycombed in, hundreds of heads poking out at all heights, ahead and behind. She couldn’t see the row’s end through the haze of dander. The unimaginable scale, the tiny beside the huge, the existential power of size.

  Some farms had barbed wire, some had key codes. Some had a security truck coasting the horizon. Others had nothing but a dented sign to keep them out. Cleveland found ways onto them all. Virtuoso at it, really. If a barn was locked (most weren’t), she knew where the keys were. If she didn’t, she’d look in their audit forms and in minutes have a key or a code. A glance at their audits and she knew when the night crews would be out. “My life’s work,” Cleveland said to Janey’s impressed grin.

  (“Our life’s work”: her mother, head in a kerchief, leaning on a mop, joking about their Sunday cleaning.)

  Janey couldn’t believe the eccentric people who had made up her mother’s early life, first her father, and now this. And yet …

  She could hear the echo of her mother’s voice.

  “The barn is the whole world as far as the hens are concerned, Janey. The earth, the sun, sustenance, rain.”

  (Her mother, one of her final voice mails: “You’re my whole world, Janey. My sun, my sustenance. How many ways can I say I’m sorry?”)

  Janey didn’t know when the old Janey would have occasion to say “Cleveland.” Perhaps at a party in Red Hook. The old Janey would be leaning against a stove, making eyes at the closest face, a guy with a band look on, hair suitable for the latest rock and roll. He’d say he was from Ohio, and she’d say, feigning flirtation or boredom (is there a difference?), “Cleveland?” because it was the only city in that state she’d be able to think of. Meanwhile, at the same moment, a perfect thousand miles away, the new Janey held a single saved hen clucking against her chest, and was saying, “Cleveland?” because the woman was recording some “noncompliance” (what a loon!) and Janey wanted her to cut it out and come over here and open the neck of the sack so she could nestle this hen inside.

  For the first time she felt like she’d rather be doing what this Janey was doing than what that Janey, the old one, would be doing, whatever law-abiding inanity the East Coast Janey had taken up as a way to waste the day. Surely the old Janey would be an intern someplace, complimenting some asshole or writing company tweets. Meanwhile, the new Janey was a pirate, a Robin Hood, an outlaw of the best kind, smuggling a few citizen hens to safety.

  What a relief. She’d thought she’d never feel alive again. She’d thought she’d been crushed for good, become just another one of the flattened personalities you encounter every day, constructed out of cardboard and cemented down in place.

  So say you have been trying to dim your own lights, take it down a notch. Lessen longing. Lessen rage. Lessen. Say that has been going on for years and then this happens—you find this and you ride along. You revive a bit, that’s all. You lessen the lessening.

  JANEY CAME YAWNING out of her bedroom. Box of doughnuts on the coffee table, TV on mute, father in his spot.

  “What’s this about?” Janey picked a giant rubber band off the table.

  “Gimme that,” he said. “It’s the style these days. Everybody exercises hours all the time.”

  Janey tossed it to him and reached into the doughnut box.

  “You have a reason to look happy like that?”

  “What?” Janey said. “I don’t look happy.”

  “You don’t?”

  “No, I’m not happy.”

  “My mistake.” He stretched the band out over his head.

  “Why don’t you look out with that thing?” Janey said. “You’ll break a window.”

  “What are you so happy about? Does it have something to do with you getting home in the middle of the night every night?”

  “Not every night.”

  “Often enough that I’m thinking, Why is she getting home so late every night? Three a.m.? How’s that for your job in the morning?”

  “I’m not happy, okay? Don’t worry about it.”

  “Why should I worry if you’re happy? I should worry if you’re unhappy.”

  “Well, go ahead and worry then.”

  Why didn’t she just say she was out with Cleveland? She didn’t have to admit
to breaking into barns to say she was spending time with the woman. It’d be so easy. He’d be pleased.

  “You meet this guy at your job?”

  “What guy?”

  “You going to come home one day and tell me I’m going to be a grandfather? Let me walk you down an aisle before it comes to that.”

  “I’d sooner have an abortion.”

  Janey ate her doughnut and watched him pulling the band, grunting. She had a pang of guilt but she didn’t want to tell him. She felt protective and private.

  “What’s there to be unhappy about? That’s a good job.”

  “Torturing small animals, sure.”

  Afraid she might break the spell of her and Cleveland.

  “You see they have college reimbursement? Not bad.”

  “I don’t give a shit about college. Would you watch it with that thing? You’re going to crack the TV.”

  THEY DIDN’T CALL IT “stealing” since that made it sound like notepads from the supply room and Cleveland kept insisting this was part of their job. She forbade them to call it “freeing,” or worse, “liberating.” Where could they take these birds where they’d be “free”? The chickens were so overbred, they no longer had a natural habitat. “You have to have a place to go where you can be free in order to be freed,” Cleveland said. But Janey wasn’t so sure. These chickens, these animals with wings, who could fly short distances, these birds, as in the phrase free as a bird, were ineligible for freedom? But Cleveland was unmoved. Likewise the hyperbolic “rescue” was out.

  So what to call it?

  “Releasing” sounded like a dirty massage.

  “Delivering” had the religious connotation.

  “Evacuating” sounded like a bowel movement.

  “Exodus.” Now Janey was just being silly.

  Cleveland decided on the apolitical, unsentimental “removal.”

  They were removing the birds from the audit area.

  Hen. Not quite bird, not quite not bird. Tremendous wings, body slimmer than a duck, but the thing could barely fly. A few flopping feet off the ground and an awkward landing. Not what you first picture when you think “bird.” And bird itself, in the between space of mammal and reptile, a freakish mix of the two—warm-blooded and chatty, yet egg-laying, descended from dinosaurs.

  They pecked at her shoelaces, hopped up on a stool, poked at her buttons, looked into her face. Gallus gallus domesticus. Its mammal side tame, its face still containing the reptilian wilds.

  What to do with them was a problem. Janey and Cleveland brought them down two-lane roads in the dark to the closest sanctuary: off the highway, set into a patchwork of farmland. They hefted a crate of birds out onto the road by the mailbox. But that was inconvenient and took an extra two hours and on the cold nights in February, then March, the hens’ fragile combs could get frostbit before they were found. So they went back to the small animal rights office in town and left them there instead. The person who ran the place wrote them swearing revenge. Cleveland was certain it was a woman related to one of the farms, but the only one ever in there was a man—Dill, they discovered, was his name. Then one night they showed up and the sign was down, a for-rent poster in the window. Janey cupped her gloved hands against the glass. Place was empty, cardboard boxes turned on their sides. They tracked Dill down to a hulk of an old farmhouse ten miles down the road. They left the birds in boxes in the yard.

  The next time he caught them. Janey was carrying a box up onto the farmhouse porch, out of the chilly wind, when the screen door swung open and a lanky redheaded guy stepped out. He was enraged. Janey froze. Cleveland had the car running at the bottom of the porch. He stepped over, wrestled the box from Janey’s arms. “Keep your fucking voices down,” he said. “You’ll wake the whole house.” He slammed back inside. Janey burst out laughing.

  SOMETHING SEEMED TO BE MISSING, some piece of herself receding. The old Janey: she was retreating. The life she should have lived, the one where she grew up and became all she’d ever wanted (and what had that been?), was beginning to feel faded now, and blurry.

  To get the auditor job, that had been the first plan, or the first fake plan, since she had no interest in getting the job, only in meeting Cleveland. To do the auditor job, that was the second plan, or the second fake plan, since the job was stupid and she had no intention of doing it well. Then she had begun “night auditing” with Cleveland—third plan, also fake, even if she found it sort of fun.

  But in truth none of those fake plans were the first or second or third. There were hundreds of fake plans, there were thousands. She had been constructing fake plans for years because any plan that involved this life in the midlands was fake. Even the plan to come out here in the first place was fake, in that it was nothing but a bedtime story, a girl’s dream about coming to meet her father. The only plan she could recall concocting that wasn’t fake was the day she’d decided to call her mother and go home. Since that day, it had been layers of not taking anything seriously, of seriously working at that, at seriously fucking off. Even in her imagination, even in her fantasies of the other person she’d be, far off on the East Coast, she saw herself there being too cool for it, whatever it was, because no matter where she was or what happened, that was her essential feature: herself, making a joke.

  But now that plan was receding. That plan—to have only fake plans—was giving way, was beginning to seem like a fake plan covering the real plan. There were many layers of plans to push through to reach it, but it was happening: a plan was emerging as the real plan—fast, faster than she (the one watching all this as if outside it, the over-Janey) could keep up. Is that what one calls “growing up”? And is this—rescuing hens in the middle of the night—Janey’s version of it?

  Heart-beating creatures, crushed, carried away in Janey’s small hands.

  She wondered about this one night as Cleveland opened the door to yet another barn and waved Janey inside.

  But the original plan, to have no plan, was still there, hanging behind her, tapping on her shoulder, demanding she stop. Do not pay attention to this new “real” plan. It’s disloyal, the old plan reminded her, to her mother, who was the only one who could rightly claim her true attention.

  But she was paying attention. She couldn’t help it. All the fake plans were being brushed aside like branches, as if she were walking through a forest, pushing through the foliage. That’s what it felt like that night, as she walked behind Cleveland, along the mad machinery, mad belts burbling and eggs drifting by like a stream, fake plans crunching under her feet like twigs. She was restless. A month had gone by since she had caught Cleveland hen-handed in the night. What now? Had they reached the dead-end concrete wall of Cleveland’s dream? What was on the other side?

  “Look at this. This whole barn is in violation. Are you seeing this, Janey? Every hen in this place.”

  Janey entered a row and stopped, like pausing in the woods to hear the birds, the tiers of cages rising like tremendous trees from her feet to far overhead, the birds humming and cooing and calling.

  She saw it. The Real Plan, a vision of it: the cages falling away, the hens flinging out of them, flicking off the steel like eggshells, birds shucking off their cages, jumping out of the wire as from nests. She saw the roof open up and stars filling the sky over the canopy of swaying cages and branches. She saw the hens, hundreds of thousands of them, with a power unheard of in a chicken, fly up out of the barn and into the night.

  “Cleveland,” she whispered, though Cleveland couldn’t hear her, “let’s take them all,” because the new Janey had arrived.

  “I’M SERIOUS, A WHOLE BARN,” Janey was saying. “A mass transportation of hens. A removal on a tremendous scale.”

  “I mean, what is the point in these random removals?” she said. “No one even knows we’re taking these.”

  “Fifty people, a hundred and fifty thousand hens,” Janey said. “We could do it.”

  “An entire barn. Imagine the rows of empty cage
s. Imagine the farmer’s face.”

  Janey Flores, once on the debate team, in chess club, who had written half a sophomore thesis on the early speeches of Malcolm X, whose grandfather had led strikes for workers’ rights, this woman had skills. Rhetoric, reasoning, civil rebellion. None of those lights had burnt out. She knew she had to think like her opponent. What was in her opponent’s mind? What was their idiom? What line of logic would sway?

  “I mean, who’s in charge here?” Janey said. “Who’s the head of audits? You or them?”

  “You said it yourself,” she said. “Every hen is in violation.”

  But she didn’t quite have it. It wasn’t going down.

  “You’re the person to do it, Cleveland. If anyone could, it’s you.”

  “Don’t laugh. I’m serious.”

  She tried a line from those goddamn UEP guidelines she’d had to read again and again. “Farms that fail the audit are supposed to face repercussions, right? Who decides the repercussions?”

  But that wasn’t it either. What angle was she missing?

  THE GIRL WAS RAVING.

  “We are not a guerrilla organization,” Cleveland was saying. “These are not hostages. We are not making demands.”

  “Janey, there is a name for removal on that scale. It’s called industry farming.”

  “Us and who?” Cleveland said. “One does not take out an ad online for dissidents.”

  “If I wanted to think of a farmer’s face I would have married one, Janey.”

  Cleveland had her own set of skills. Her skills were in rule adherence, dictatorial single-mindedness. “No, Janey, you don’t get to decide to change the guidelines any time you like.”