Don’t be afraid to make a mistake or two, the farmer says as the man relinquishes and makes way for Ungarte, when I was a boy my first dozen or so were failures, colossal failures. Killed off a dozen and a half of my father’s prime geese in between getting it right.
Ungarte spreads his legs wide as he straddles the wooden box that is still warm from the rump before his. It’s all about getting the right angle the first time in, the farmer tells him, there’s no undoing it once you’ve gone in at the wrong angle, and you just end up goring them anyway if you pull out and try again.
We’ve tried other ways, the farmer tells him as the man wheels the machine in front of Ungarte. For years we’ve tried to develop a bird through training or inbreeding or crossbreeding—whatever they call it—so all they do all day long is eat, but the damn birds forget everything else they need to know about survival, and the fuckers start laying eggs anywhere, the males won’t rut, or whatever it is they do, females won’t brood—they hardly even eat, none of them—and they lay all over the lawn, on the roof, everywhere.
By the time Ungarte reaches for the first bird, he realizes the farmer is no longer talking to him. Over the noise of the machines and the honking and quaking of birds, over the instructions of the man in Spanish, the farmer is just talking. And it is when the man shouts ¡Bueno! that the farmer looks down to see Ungarte grab and successfully feed his third bird. That’s it! That’s it! the farmer is yelling, he slaps the man on his shoulders, That’s it, he’s got it, to which the man says, Yes. That’s it—as Ungarte goes on to feed the fourth then the twelfth then the twentieth bird in a row—like you were born to do this, the farmer says. And he’s all teeth, the man who showed him says as he throws a hand in the air and walks away, and Ungarte is pleased, not because he is good at what he has been chosen to do, but because he’s hard, hard hard hard, so close—so close—hard.
That afternoon, at lunch, the farmer names Ungarte Head of Special Projects. At first none of the other boys can be bothered to lift their eyes from their plates to care, but when the farmer announces that Ungarte will be choosing four of them to work with him on the project, suddenly all but White Boy throw a hand up.
He picks Fulton and Andres because they are both strong and silent and push through heat and cold and sweat and ache like it’s nothing. Villarreal, because he’s smart and quick and never cuts corners and always gets the work out of the way. And, of course, he chooses White Boy, who he knows will whine and complain and cry and clutch his stomach and spit up his lunch and act like a bitch all day long.
There was no way he was going to do that, White Boy insists as the five of them—now named The Feeding Team by the farmer—go back to the barn. No way, no way in hell am I doing no fucking special project, White Boy mutters to himself, though he comes along anyway. Perhaps he realizes he would have spent the rest of the day wet and covered with mud or imagines there will be less work where they are headed.
The barn is warmer and damper than Ungarte remembered it earlier. A sheen rises on the faces of the other boys, and they shed hoodies and sweaters and stand in sweat-marked T-shirts, watching the man give the same instructions. And as Ungarte watches, something strangley lets go in him—even though he is unsure of what it is—he knows he knows what he needs to know before he needs to know, perhaps for the first time ever, before he needs to know it. So, when the man calls out—Fulton, then Andres and then Villarreal as trained and ready to go—and he asks about White Boy, who has begun wearing a trench as he paces four or five feet of dirt littering the air with what he can’t do—how he’ll be sick all over the place if they try to make him, how he had a condition—Ungarte tells the man to leave him be.
Just let him go, he tells them when the other boys complain that White Boy should at least be asked to rake up the shit and cart out the ducks that accidentally die in the middle of feeding. He puts White Boy on keeping the feeders filled to the top—not allowing any of them to go less than halfway full—which allows him to go on complaining. And by the next afternoon, White Boy believes that he has a fever, isn’t sure he can hold his lunch down. He needs to lie down every half hour or so, then every ten or fifteen minutes, and then he just spends the rest of the day arms curled around his belly, trudging between the bathroom at the far end of the barn and a hay pallet he has raked up for himself nearby.
It doesn’t seem to matter which of the supervisors comes through, each kicks the boy’s boots and screams for him to get his ass up and get back to work, but the moment they leave, White Boy starts to complain again and Ungarte chooses to ignore him. The other boys eventually begin to fill their own feeders when they go empty, they rake for themselves and carry the dead birds to the grinder, and at the end of the weekend—when they are all shaking and their muscles are knotted up with ache—as they are counted and scanned back onto the bus headed back to the city, the farmer comes out to say he has never seen workers like Ungarte and his team, never before has he had a group of workers—even the ones we pay—do as much in as little time.
And even though it doesn’t seem to do anything for the other boys—none of them even turn in the direction of the farmer’s voice—Ungarte notices that White Boy turns and waves back at the sound of his own name, his face is shiny and his chest is pushed out. The farmer is waving as their bus heads toward the road, and White Boy is the only one who looks, the only one who turns and waves back. And sitting directly behind him, Ungarte is hard—up and down in his pocket the entire way back.
They are the best group, the most efficient, the most on the job, the famer says over the next couple of weeks as he stops by the boys’ tables while they are eating, when he brings visitors to the farm. He hauls troops of men in suits out to the feeding barn, who tiptoe around bird droppings and puddles of White Boy puke, to take a look at a group the likes of which, the farmer says, he has never seen.
Open wide, Villarreal tells the goose he is feeding as he stops and throws on a grin so wide and forced Ungarte imagines it burns the inside of his ears when the farmer comes around with two photographers. They also take pictures of Fulton and Andres, and the other workers. They get shots of the rafters, the geese, the ducks, the cages, the feeders, the boxes the feeders sit on, the bleeds of gray daylight through the dirty windows high along the top of the barn. The muck, the slush drain, the gutter that runs the perimeter, and then they leave without taking a single picture of White Boy.
What the hell? White Boy yells out the door after them. What the hell? echoes across the field as the photographers head toward the main house without turning to hear where it came from. What the hell? as he looks to the other boys who keep working. He looks to the man who had shown them all how to feed, who simply responds, No que hablo, as he walks away from the boy.
Throughout the rest of the morning, White Boy complains of stomach problems, he asks the others if they can hear the ringing in his ears, see how blurry his vision is, but eventually reclaims his job filling the feeders with a cursing, slamming, angry vengeance. And for hours as he mutters fuck thems—fuck yous, fuck anyone who ever walked up in heres—into the air without any particular target in sight, he makes sure to top each feeder as soon as it is three or four inches down. The next morning, they can all kiss his ass—kiss his shiny pink ass—as he rakes piles of dirt and droppings into another pile of dirt and droppings only to do it and rake it all up again and again. They can kiss it—kiss it, kiss it—kiss my ass all of them until their lips get chapped, and Ungarte recognizes it is just the thought of him spending the rest of the assignment this way, just the thought of White Boy folding and refolding himself in a pile of droppings and dust for the next five weeks that makes him so hard and heady he drops the goose he has just fed and instead of reaching for the next bird he shoves his hand deep in his pocket.
He has wrapped his ankles around the base of the box, presses his thighs into its edges, and thinks he could watch White Boy sweep the same pile of dirt forever when suddenly White Boy stops, drops
the rake, and announces he is bored. Never been so bored in my entire life! he yells as he opens the door, and it is as if, caught up short by all the light and cold air he is letting in—he turns two full circles—he realizes he has nowhere to go and there is no one to hear him.
He wanders around a while until one of the supervisors walks through and he lies back down on the pallet, holds his stomach, and scrunches his eyes as he always has. Though, I’m bored! he pops up again when he hears the door slam behind the man. Show me how, he pulls at Villarreal’s shirtsleeve, I’m bored, show me how! But he is shaken off as Villarreal drops the duck he has finished feeding and goes for a goose in one of the cages. Show me, come on, man, show me, White Boy follows him. And just at the moment when Ungarte is certain Villarreal looks as though he is about to send White Boy through a wall, he grabs the bird he was after and pushes past the boy.
No que hablo, says the man who had shown Ungarte how; No que hablo, the man who had shown them all how says as White Boy goes to grab for him, pleading, Show me. Come on, man, show me! when Ungarte comes up and separates the two of them by shoving White Boy away. But it only causes White Boy to turn toward and follow Ungarte, Show me, come on, man, it ain’t going to hurt you to show me. And to his surprise, Ungarte finds White Boy backs up like a dog—You do what you always do! he yells at the boy—as he advances toward him. You do what you always do, he says in a lower tone—one that doesn’t part his teeth and comes out of the center of his chest—and even though the boy keeps talking, he takes a step back for each of Ungarte’s toward him until he falls backward onto his hay pallet in the corner.
Though it isn’t seconds after Ungarte is back to work—has inserted the feeder deep into a mallard throat—that White Boy is up pestering whoever is closest. I’m bored, show me how, I’m bored. And it is not until the duck goes limp in his hands—he feels it collapse; the bottom split out of it—and he feels the sloppy wet plop of innards and the rattling spill of feed on the tops of his boots that he realizes he has gone hard all over again.
Across the barn White Boy goes nearly faceless as an egg, and even though his mouth is open and moving—a red wet vibrating circle in the air in front of him—whatever the boy is saying it is the birds’ screeches, the roar of machines, and a numb thump that floods Ungarte’s ears. Not a sound, but a stream of feathers, bills, wide-open throats that seems to be coming from the top of White Boy’s head, out the back of his neck, that tells him he is actually headed toward the boy through the sea of birds, past the cages and machines.
He hears the squeal of the wire catch on the toilet and the door slam shut, he hears himself counting to ten the way his new social worker has told him he needs to, but it is only as he hears himself counting—one forty-seven, one forty-eight, one forty-nine—under his breath that he realizes he has passed it. And where he hears the wire catch and the door slam again, hears himself throwing the lock, if White Boy says, Don’t, You can’t come in here, I’m sick, My stomach, Leave me alone, he has no idea. He hears himself count seven fifty-two, seven eighty-nine, nine hundred as he lifts White Boy off the toilet, and flips him around. Through the forearm he has wrapped around the boy’s throat—his fist nearly fits in the boy’s mouth—he can feel the quickness of the boy’s pulse. Through the door he can make out the sounds of birds and machines, the occasional yelled instruction, he hears the rhythmic banging of the boy’s head against the back wall, he hears himself reach eleven hundred and fifteen, and his pace slacken before he recognizes he has been muttering, You’ll do what you always do, under his breath.
He doesn’t bother to shower or clean his boots over the rest of the weekend. As if posting a dare, he wears whatever has splashed on him while he waits.
And it is the shift in light that he first notices during the last few weeks of their assignment. Shorter shadows as the days grow longer open sudden golden jags quick as falling stars or lightning-bug flashes of opportunity in the otherwise muddy Hudson. He is awake, increasingly awake with each trip up. Each time the farmer sees him—Ungartey is the best of the best; Never seen anybody get a group to work like he does, that Ungartey!—sets something fiercely animal off in his chest, pricks his hearing to things like the low snore coming out of a boy three seats in front of him, things like the faint smell reminiscent of the undercoat on a goat that comes up in the air when there are twenty or so of them loaded on the bus in the mornings, perch him on the edge of his seat, clear his eyesight toward the slightest movement out of the ordinary. He is primed, readied, and hard.
I’ve never seen anything quite like it, his new social worker tells his Moms earlier in the week, he’s a new man, becoming a model student, dependable—getting stronger every day, taking advantage of everything that the program has to offer. Hold on, mijo, his Moms tells him after the woman leaves, hold on, with each day she takes off the calendar.
Last night in the laundry room, he had turned the stroller with the sleeping baby in it away and bent Kai over the dryer. As they eased into the warm vibration of the machine, deep deep inside her he had found he wanted to tell her there will be no miracles here as much as he wants to tell her a duck’s heart can reach up to a thousand beats per second in flight—he knows, he has looked it up—but to worry about either is a waste of imagination. But when he started to he accidentally slipped and called her María, which in a second caused her to push him off her, tell him she had to go. She collected her panties off the floor and dropped them into the machine she had going and rolled the baby onto the elevator. It’s a big place, he said, even though he knew she was probably at her front door by then, with the kind of logic that wastes a whole duck they’ve bred and tended just for its liver. He thinks she needs to know it is the kind of logic that makes it impossible for a boy to just be holding a gun. He thinks she should know things like that as well as the ways around it. He wants to tell her it is possible to make a white boy—now when he walks around him, looks at him, blows his breath onto his neck—go pink and very, very silent. But he would need to tell a woman who, because her mamá named her María, calls herself María.
Three Poems
Kevin Holden
SIMULIIDAE
that would
ever on the surface
ever expanding / of the world—
black fly horse fly
star black & prismatic
eye, that would
be a code
ever inturning move to
the animal moving
unthought, on the surface—
fly out in exponential hum
rattle out
the brain cup
green metal
sheen at the splitting
discus, for cold
skeletal drink at the warm
body, & buzz in the rotating
hollow of the instant
& see ultraviolet
wings tesseracting the spectra
beyond
to unfollow
green variations, buffalo
gnat lying fallow to unfold
the brain
or hover—
in some air
MIRROR
that would be
humans moving
& what, to be human?
& what, to see that or care
the difference spreading
that is, dot variations pixels
in zirconia
no one would say to watch that
other humans moving on a screen
they
interest us
or, bodies / language
that would be, a memory
of that place
nonhuman row through the trees
following the
other animals
to hold a green object
moving through the north
& up & up
towns & ice
the poor, the railroad, the wood, the lakes
dark animals
& move under glass pieces
how much, say down shaft blond
the jay curving in, meanly
phoning
string code farther for a green window
& hold the wire
a talking bird
URSUS ARCTOS
& black glass
reflection
in snow’s bank, hedged in—
to think
the animal’s thought
unthought—bear in the blizzard
tracks immediately
covered by snow, endlessly thickening—
not-you to say
or feeling, outside the
horizon of time &
the colored lights aurora
mind to unravel the cave of winds
shadow the city in the bear’s mind
glyph pattern 2-D hunter
fall falling fall
sinking in 20 names
to touch
the lens of the
boundary inside the boundaries
& stagger unaware
under hexagons
The C—————s1,2
Monica Datta
25 JANUARY 2013
THESE WERE NEITHER the velvety spaces of his childhood Januaries with nineteen hours of malamute sky, nor the crepuscular glows of the Parisian winter, cloaking tree skeletons in rosy-golden inky sheets through April. Winter daylight in New York should have been crass and efficient, nine to five, but this year a hurricane blew out the greenish autumn, and now it was always dark.
This morning half asleep—again, with the lights on—Neal saw a set of unblinking, beady yellow marbles nestled in Saul-scaly chromium-oxide lids, pebbled and dappled and mean.
A zoological society in Michigan had contacted his temp agency in search of an illustrator. The assignment was overdue. Neal left a raw, creamy paper wound at the bottom of the brochure’s front cover to accommodate the beast. The fee was the three months’ rent owed to the landlord. Neal asked if he could draw a snake instead. Not that there was ever any good news about c—————s; they weren’t tiger kittens. He turned on the radio.3
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