by Ivy Pochoda
“Well, if that’s the bad luck you were talking about, it’s not half bad.” Blake gathered his bony knees to his chest and fell asleep.
“YOU READY?” SAM REMOVED THE SODDEN BLANKET AND WRUNG IT OUT. The sky was still dark, but the rain had stopped.
“Let’s hope those shoes have done their worst.” Sam opened a can of beans. When he was finished, he handed the rest to Blake.
Blake didn’t point out that it wasn’t his shoes but Sam’s unchecked violence that had landed them in the sodden desert.
On their way back to the highway, they sank to their ankles in the softened sand. Blake’s eyes were heavy and his joints were stiff. He didn’t want to come fully awake, hoping that the miles would pass while he was half dreaming.
They walked down the center of the highway. Debris from the storm was scattered in the road. The sun came slow, struggling with the lingering cloud cover, revealing the muddy desert. Water pooled in depressions in the sand. The sky was marbled.
Sam rolled them each a cigarette from his damp tobacco, which hissed when touched by a match. “Maybe someone’ll pick us up today.”
“Maybe,” Blake said.
It started as a roar in the distance like the sound of a truck rumbling down a dirt road. But there were no headlights. The highway curved and straightened and the noise grew louder.
In an instant, the blacktop became a river. Water rushed toward the men, rolling over their feet, rising to their ankles. The desert around them was mud. Then it was roaring mud. The land was surging, a flash flood that brought them to their knees.
Sam tried to stand but stumbled back.
“Just stay put,” Blake said.
The big man tried to struggle out of the flood path. “I’m not planning on getting swept away.”
“There’s nowhere to get swept away to. Just wait it out.”
But if there was one thing Sam didn’t do, it was wait. He gripped the straps of his pack and stumbled forward. It was hard to tell the borders of the highway, where the solid asphalt gave way to the softer ground. Sam lurched, trying to high-step over the swirling water. He brought his foot down hard.
Blake could hear the crack of the bone that pushed through Sam’s ankle, letting in the dirty desert water. The big man staggered and sank into the mud. He dropped his pack, which opened, sending his few belongings into the flood.
Blake waded to the Samoan’s side. The water was easing up. He looped his arms underneath Sam’s shoulders and dragged him out of the flood path.
Sam gritted his teeth. A crown of sweat ringed his brow. Blake pulled up the big man’s pant leg and saw his anklebone poking through the skin.
“Collect my shit,” Sam said, pointing at his open pack.
Blake grabbed the backpack. He found the chessboard and poked around in the wet sand for the chessmen.
“Count ’em,” Sam said. “You know how many there’s supposed to be?”
“Sure,” Blake said.
“Thirty-two.”
“Looks like you’ve got twenty-eight,” Blake said. He found the wet blanket from the night before and placed it under Sam’s head. Then he put the chessboard in the big man’s lap. “We’ll play,” he said.
“You don’t know how.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
They lay on the muddy sand and watched the water roar past. The sun came up full and the clouds blew back. They were too close to the road for Blake’s liking, but there was no moving Sam. So he fashioned a shelter out of their blankets and used both their packs to cushion the big man’s leg. Using his dirty jeans as a pillow, he lay down and watched for lightning in the distance.
Sam fell asleep. He moaned and thrashed, keeping Blake up. Eventually Blake slid out from their shelter and bedded down far enough away that he couldn’t hear the Samoan. The desert rubbed his bare legs. The sand and God knows what else crawled along his skin.
The big man’s leg looked bad and would only get worse. But Blake was counting on an upside—a break in the tide of violence that followed in their wake.
4
JAMES, TWENTYNINE PALMS, 2006
The night before the chicken slaughter James hadn’t been able to sleep. Something had been hunting in the desert. It started with a lone howl then a staccato chorus followed by a chase through the cacti and arrowwood shrubs. Even after four years on the ranch the whip of the wind through the brush kept James up at night. He felt watched by the eyes he swore were glowing in the dark that stretched from the front door to the base of the Pinto Mountains. He was unsettled by the sound of dogs howling over the desolate acres between the homesteads and the way the wolves sometimes returned those calls. Then there were the deep reverberations of bomb tests from the marine base several miles away that summoned a different sort of fear.
His parents’ chickens were another barometer of nighttime danger. When the birds were calm, their large enclosure radiated a steady thrum, a comforting, low-grade buzz. But if there was a predator outside—a coyote or a bobcat circling the pen—the coop was seized with a helpless frenzy that jarred James from his sleep and disturbed whatever dreams might follow.
He glanced at Owen in the other bed, sleeping curled toward the window. The moon hung low, filling their room with a puddle of white light, highlighting the mark just below Owen’s shoulder in the shape of a child’s crude drawing of a flying bird. James stared at the soft V, the spot where he imagined he ended and Owen began, the one aberration to their otherwise identical bodies, until he fell back asleep.
When James next woke, the moon was gone, the sun had started its unforgiving climb, and Owen was gone. He pulled on his shorts and went to look for his twin. The air around the ranch already felt like death. Crows were perched in the palms near the chicken barn like they knew what was coming. They’d arrived early, able to anticipate the bloodlust of the farm. A hawk—the only fleck in an immaculate sky—was circling, the V of its wings tracing the path of its hunt as its shadow slid from sand to bush to tree to scrub.
James watched his father test his ax on a stump, swinging the blade into the hard wood and wresting it back out. His mother was lugging coolers of ice from the main house so the birds could be stored until they could be transferred to the freezer. The interns were up early, looking busy for once, grabbing buckets for blood, guts, and feathers. Owen was nowhere in sight.
He wasn’t in the pond or the garage or in any of the unoccupied cabins—all the places the boys hid to avoid the chicken slaughter. James finally found his twin on the backside of the house where a junkyard of fenders, tires, oil drums, old printers, and rebar had bloomed. Owen was sitting on a collapsed bed frame smoking one of the small brown cigarettes the interns preferred.
“Where’d you get that?” James kept away from the interns’ cabins. He had no interest in seeing their stuff, let alone stealing it. It was enough to listen to the nightly “sharing” his father conducted with the interns every evening—hearing them berate and attack one another around the campfire as they worked to excavate their most perfect selves.
“Where do you think?” Owen said, blowing a narrow stream of smoke at James.
“Gimme one.”
“Since when do you smoke?”
“Just gimme one.” James scrambled over the rusted refuse and grabbed for the pink package in Owen’s hand.
“Fine,” Owen said.
James lit the bidi and tried not to cough as the bittersweet smoke filled his lungs. “You hang out with the interns now?”
Owen tossed his cigarette. “That’s my business.”
James stared at the tiny ember at the tip of his bidi. He hadn’t known that his twin had business of his own.
James didn’t like the interns—and he’d thought Owen didn’t either—the way they walked as if they were moving through liquid, their wandering speech, how they were always touching each other, rubbing one another’s shoulders or braiding each other’s hair. Even worse was when they touched him or Owen or let their hands lin
ger on one of his parents. “Your aura matches your bike,” the one named Cassidy had told him the previous morning as she drank stinky tea from a large mason jar. “You know that, right?” She’d skipped back to her cabin and returned with a feather on an orange lariat necklace, the same color as James’s BMX. She put the lariat around his neck. “It’s a hawk feather,” she said. “May it guide your day.”
James had chucked the necklace behind a creosote bush where the feather would resume being what it was, another piece of desert garbage. He was tired of everyone finding power and meaning in all the objects littered across the sand—squeezing smooth rocks in their palms to release their hidden energies, burning bouquets of unremarkable herbs to heal themselves, making tokens and totems out of teeth, feathers, or bone to ward off evil spirits or to honor animal guides. If he dragged a stick through the sand, someone asked him if he was drawing a mystical sign. If he sat on the deck after dark, an intern praised him for tapping into the lunar power source.
When James was little, the world didn’t run on energy currents. People didn’t give off vibes or have auras. They didn’t require realigning and cleansing. There weren’t powers that needed to be coaxed out of everyday stones and plants. The sky was the sky, the wind the wind, the stars the stars—all interesting in their own way, but no more than zoo animals or trains. He wore cream to protect himself against the sun instead of being forced to salute it palms open, inviting it to fill him with its beauty and light.
James finished his bidi and ground it out on a hubcap.
“We better go,” he said.
Soon their mother would be calling them, summoning them to the chicken pen.
“Have fun,” Owen said.
“They’ll make you.”
“No they won’t.”
But at that moment their mother appeared. She was already wearing the heavy rubber apron that protected her from the slime and gore. “Your father’s waiting,” she said.
Owen slid off the bed frame and followed her.
“See,” James said.
JAMES HAD LOST COUNT OF HOW MANY SLAUGHTER DAYS THEY’D HAD ON Howling Tree Ranch. The first couple had been messy and haphazard. A chicken with a half-severed neck had broken free from Grace’s grip and run in bloody circles around the coop until Patrick finished it off. Now James’s parents operated with grisly efficiency. The procedure was simple: tie the bird by the legs, swing it overhead to dizzy it, place it on a wide tree stump with an ax handle to its neck, then bring a sledgehammer down on the ax. Once the head fell free, the body would be plunged into a bucket of hot water to loosen the feathers. Then someone would reach into the cavity and scrape out the chicken’s steamy insides. Finally the bird was hung upside down, so its feathers could be plucked.
In the winter, the harvest wasn’t so bad. But in the spring, summer, and fall, the smell lingered for days. It hung on the wind and sank into the sand—a hot, rusty odor that slicked James and dried in the back of his throat.
The twins’ job was to pluck the feathers—one of the less gruesome tasks, but it still made James queasy. Even though the birds had been dunked into hot water to open their pores so the feathers would slide out, the quills resisted. Plucking the feathers—touching the bird all over, its skin still warm and almost human—was too intimate. James would rather swing the ax, a quick, remote action that was over in a flash. But that was Patrick’s job.
As usual, his parents began the slaughter early, hoping to finish before the sun reached full strength. The day was still—the desert holding its breath. Sound carried from the highway, bringing the roar of trucks heading toward Las Vegas or Los Angeles. The crows circled overhead then settled in the palms to watch. A hawk swooped down on the action.
Before they started, Patrick gathered everyone together. He was shirtless, his graying beard and wild frizzy hair still damp from an early morning swim in the pond. He told the group that they were going to kill two hundred birds that morning.
The interns had tied their hair back in scarves and bandannas and had removed their lariats, necklaces, and rope bracelets. James always expected one of them to vomit or cry as he and Owen had during their first slaughter. But it never happened.
The woman who had arrived the night before stood outside the group. She was dressed differently from the rest of them, in short lime-green shorts and a pristine white T-shirt. Her red hair was brushed back into a neat ponytail. She’d brought her duffel bag to the chicken barn, as if she’d just stopped for a moment on her way back down to the highway.
“Who are you?” Patrick said.
The woman didn’t realize he was speaking to her. The other interns coughed and shuffled as Patrick’s question went unanswered.
“The clean one in the back,” Patrick said.
“Me? I’m Britt.”
“It’s a beautiful thing to honor the cycle of life.” Patrick swung the ax, driving it hard into the stump.
“If you say so.” Britt kicked the sand around her duffel.
A whisper slipped from one intern to the next. Cassidy and Anushna, a blond woman who’d told James her name meant Blue Lotus, bowed their heads together, their braids tangled over their foreheads.
“The world will always sit in judgment,” Patrick said. “It is your soul’s struggle to remain unjudged. But now there’s work to do.” He looked around the circle. “Who wants to hold the ax?”
James wasn’t surprised when Cassidy stepped forward. Because she was everywhere, a shadow that stretched from his father’s feet. When his father sat on the porch, drinking cans of cheap beer, she drifted by, hovering in the driveway, waiting for an invitation to sit. She was next to Patrick at the sharing sessions, her round face turned toward his, even as he and her peers berated her for her vanity and self-deception. And she was there, following Patrick out to the desert for one of his vision quests, returning hollow-eyed and looking more lost than when she’d left.
“I’ll do it.” Britt had raised her hand. “I’ll hold that ax.”
She stepped forward, parting the interns, and took the ax from Patrick.
“You have to have a steady hand,” Patrick said.
“I do,” Britt said.
The first bird was always the worst. Cassidy brought it out of the coop, swung it, and placed it on the stump, waiting for Britt to position the ax. She lingered for a second, waiting to back away until Patrick raised the sledgehammer over his shoulder. James held his breath. His father swung the hammer. The clank of metal striking metal echoed through the coop. The head fell into the empty bucket. Cassidy grabbed the body, struggling to control its flapping wings. Patrick glared at her and she plunged the bird in the pot of hot water, stilling its final wingbeats.
After a few birds, the horror started to fade. The noise of everyone working together distracted James from the clank of the hammer hitting the ax. The bucket began to fill with heads, which muffled the sound of each new one as it fell. And soon he and Owen had too much plucking to pay attention to the killing taking place a few feet away.
The clucking from the pen quieted as the day heated up. Owen was working more slowly than usual and leaving the more unpleasant parts of the bird for James to pluck.
Britt’s white T-shirt was speckled with blood. A streak of gore was smeared on her shorts. Blood spatter covered Patrick’s bare chest. All around the coop, the other interns, even Cassidy, were talking or singing as they worked. Grace was keeping up a cheerful patter as she moved from station to station ensuring that the birds were perfectly cleaned and quickly stored. Only Britt and Patrick were silent, working in gruesome lockstep.
James’s fingers were sore from the quills. The ground was sticky with blood. If you kept working, you didn’t notice the smell, but when you walked away it hit you, so Patrick and Grace didn’t allow anyone to stop until they were finished and the buckets of innards could be hauled off.
The sun had risen and the land glinted and winked. When they first got to the ranch, James discovered his pa
rents had lied. The desert wasn’t really made of sand, not like at the beach anyway. He couldn’t walk through it barefoot, bury himself, or build sandcastles. Instead it was rock—rough like gravel, jagged and sharp with pebbles and twigs. Still, his parents had promised that he would grow to love it like he loved the soft, golden beaches that stretched from Malibu to San Diego where he had begged to stay out until evening after the setting sun had stolen the warmth from the air and the water had turned the color of blue ink.
THERE WAS A DISRUPTION TO THE RHYTHM OF THE KILL. JAMES GLANCED at his father and saw that Patrick had frozen with the sledgehammer high above his head, a dazed chicken below him on the stump. “Owen,” he said, “you take a turn.”
Everyone stopped working and looked at Owen. Britt steadied the bird beneath the ax.
“I don’t want to,” Owen said, turning back to the bird hanging upside down in front of him. The boys were nearly done with a bird—all that remained was a Mohawk of feathers down its middle. The broiler on the stump twitched, coming out of its daze.
“Owen,” their father said. “I’m asking you to do something.”
Owen shook his head.
“I’ll do it,” James said. His hands were sticky with pinfeathers. He wiped them on his shorts.
“I’m talking to your brother,” Patrick said.
Owen looked down at the ground and James could feel the tears sting his eyes.
“It’ll be over in a second,” Britt said. “Do it now and the next time will be a breeze.” She beckoned to Owen, drawing him in with a blood-flecked hand.
Owen shuffled over to the stump. He took the sledgehammer. He raised it over his head. His arms trembled with the weight.
In another world, Owen would have been playing baseball. He would have been holding a Louisville Slugger over his shoulder, his eyes trained on the seam stitches as the ball zipped toward the plate. His arms wouldn’t shake. He’d put his strength into the swing, driving the ball as far as he could, thrilled by his power. As James watched his brother hold the ax, he imagined being in the stands clapping, urging Owen, or perhaps he’d have been in the game too.
