Itch

by Polly Farquhar

  We got to work. We each stood on a ladder and knocked off the snow covering the tops of the pens with brooms. It was hard work. My arms burned and my legs, already tired, shook from holding steady on the ladder. Inside the pens, the birds ran from one spot to another as daylight finally broke in.

  I wondered what it was like, at the game, at the Horseshoe. It would be a sea of scarlet and gray. That’s what people said when the stadium was packed (like it always was) and everyone was wearing their colors. And it would be loud. Loud all the time and then louder still during an exciting play.

  Or what it was like at Homer’s party. Would I have finally been able to say something to Sydney? Maybe we’d just sit next to each other and cheer together and that would be enough, just being together like the way it used to be. And if I were there, would I still be planning on stealing an egg for Nate? Or would everything be good?

  We found four dead pheasants under some snow. Suffocated, Mr. Epple told me. “Not bad,” he said.

  * * *

  —

  When we were done Mr. Epple waved me into the brooder barn. I stomped the snow off my boots and slipped through the crack of the open doorway and then closed the door behind me. Light came in under the door and through a couple of high windows, but the inside of the barn was nothing but darkness and the red and eerie glow of the heat lamps. Musical cheeps filled the space like strange background noise.

  It would be easy. Grab an egg, wrap it up, ride away. Except that wasn’t my plan anymore. The miracle of the snow. Nate’s storage unit. I wasn’t taking an egg.

  A TV played in the back of the barn. It was an old tube TV—a small black cube—with a blurry picture. Mr. Epple dragged over two solid white plastic chairs and pointed at them and I walked past all those easy eggs.

  We sat in the barn in our coats and watched the game. We ate microwave noodles and crackers. The picture was lousy and the players looked small and fuzzy, not bright and big the way they looked on a regular television. It smelled like sawdust and birds. A space heater blew at our feet.

  The sound was off. The Best Damn Band in the Land, Ohio State’s marching band, played, moving soundlessly across the thick, square screen. It sounded as though all those shiny brass instruments only played bird noises. At the start of the third quarter, Mr. Epple turned up the volume and laughed a rusty laugh and smacked my shoulder and shook his head.

  “So,” he said after such a long while that his gruff voice startled me, “who won?” He pointed at the faded bruise under my eye.

  I turned to look at him square. “Not me.”

  “That the end of it?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not.”

  “That so.” He pointed to his own face, his flattened nose and the unrolled scrolls of his ears. “Ugly mug,” he said. He cleared his throat but when he spoke again his voice sounded exactly the same. “Fair fight?”

  “No. But I deserved it.”

  He nodded. Then I told him I knew how to fix it. I said it out loud. But he’d looked away from me by then, so it was as though I’d only told myself.

  The Buckeyes scored and the screen was filled with red rolling waves of cheering fans and players leaping in celebration, followed by a flash of the band playing. Mr. Epple smiled and shot a fist in the air, and when he watched the replay he did the same thing all over again.

  The Buckeyes were driving toward the goal line. That’s what the announcers said. My heart pounded, as if I cared about the game. Every time it beat it felt like a fist inside my chest.

  By the time the game was over, the Buckeyes had won and the world was filled with fog.

  I waved goodbye to Mr. Epple and acted like I was expecting a ride and waited until he went into his house. I couldn’t even see him in the fog. I only knew he went inside because of the sound of his back door opening and closing.

  I pulled on my ski mask. I looked like a bad guy on the news.

  What time was it? Would I get itchy? How long would my medicine last? Would I need the extra pill? I went back to the pens. Those birds knew me, even if I was unsure of things, in the dark and in the fog. They were used to me. When I opened the gate a few walked over and crowded my feet, ready to follow me to the food and water. Most stayed put. They don’t know anything about danger. Most of the hens were tucked down tight in the snow.

  They didn’t know danger, and they didn’t know freedom either. I left the door open. I figured I wouldn’t be able to mess with the doors and the birds at the same time. But those birds, they didn’t go anywhere. The way out wasn’t obvious—two chain link doors covered with netting, with a turn between them—but the birds weren’t even curious.

  My pinky finger got hot and swollen, the way it sometimes did. Itch here, itch here, itch me.

  Those birds, they came right to me. They had a few weeks to go before they got their full color. They were some of the last birds of the season. Then there would be no work until maybe April, when it would probably be Dylan’s job again.

  I dropped the towel on the closest bird. Clutched the edges in my hands and ducked down to wrap it, held its wings in. Not too tight. Not too hard. Didn’t want to break anything.

  I forgot about the legs. I forgot to hold the legs. I forgot to hold the bird upside down. That’s what I’d read to do. Hold the bird upside down with a finger between the hocks. Hocks are like ankles. I’d looked it up.

  I had a rooster. His whole body beat. I don’t know if it was his heart with fear or the wings I held down. I hadn’t wrapped him all up, and he stuck my leg with a spur. Not too deep. I had on jeans and long johns. It hurt, though. Sharp and fast. He stabbed again. I tried to get the towel over his feet, to get him upside down, and those spurs stuck my work gloves and my exposed wrist. I yelled and it hurt so much my eyes smarted and there was that feeling when it hurts all through your body. It was too dark to see blood, but I could feel my wrist bleeding, the opening of my glove sliding against it. How much blood was there? Was there an artery there?

  “Come on, come on. Time to go, Not Brutus.”

  I held that bird upside down and all wrong. Wrapped up. My arms around it. Its feet covered but against my chest, not in my hands. The doors banged behind me.

  I should have tried a hen first so I could practice on a bird without spurs, and I should have brought my backpack in with me. Why hadn’t I brought it in with me?

  Hands full of angry bird, I kicked the backpack open. I tried to shove it in. Head down. Wrapped in a beach towel. I thought I’d be able do better than that, but right then all I wanted was to get it contained.

  Then click, flash.

  The motion-sensor light on the barn flicked on. One of those pure white and blinding lights that makes everything look like the moon. I dropped the bird.

  Except it didn’t go down. I let go of the bird and it shot straight up, wings flapping hard. A few tail feathers fell off. It flew up vertically. It was beautiful and unlike any bird I’d ever seen, glowing in the white light and the haze of the fog, its colorful feathers shimmering. And then it was gone. It probably hadn’t gone far but I didn’t know. In the light, I saw the thin trickle of dried blood on my wrist and you’d think it would have been a bigger relief, that I wouldn’t bleed to death.

  When the light went off, I went back in, smarter, and grabbed a hen.

  The fog made the whole world, everything—my icy bike and the bird, a quiet, warm slug of weight in my backpack—seem unreal. Lonely. It wasn’t like I could exactly call my dad. Maybe I could try later after the drop-off. Under my chin strap and inside my mask, I itched.

  I rode slow past the farm and past its wide driveway and wide gravel shoulder. Out to where the road was nothing but a white line to follow on my right and beyond it the big drainage ditch. And that’s where I was—soggy with the melting snow, but not as foul as last time—when the Buckeye Bus rolled up.

&nbs
p; CHAPTER 21

  FIRST, THERE WAS only light. Headlights. Hazy and mysterious in the fog. Like what you’d imagine a spaceship to be if it had landed right there in the road.

  I wanted it to be a spaceship. It seemed possible. Everything since the storm had been weird. Different. It would be so easy if that creepy light shining through the fog was an alien spaceship come to take me away.

  But it was the Buckeye Bus.

  An old-style short bus, it had a long nose and was painted a darker gray than the surrounding fog. Up over its grill and hood was a thick red stripe, edged with two thinner white stripes. Scarlet and gray. OHIO STATE was painted in block letters on the front between the headlights.

  Taking off my helmet and ski mask, I stood at the foggy side of the road, my hands on my cold handlebars, that cold cooking through me, bird strapped to my back, as the door creaked opened.

  “Hey, kid, need a ride?”

  Inside the bus was dark and quiet. A party bus without the party. A postgame show buzzed on the radio. I didn’t see any passengers. I didn’t hear anyone singing “Hang on, Sloopy,” which is something Ohio State football fans do. I didn’t see Homer or Sydney or Nate or anybody. The bus clanked and something inside it clunked in a way maybe it shouldn’t.

  “Kid? Kid, need a ride?”

  A ghost of a face appeared in the doorway. “Itch, it’s me.”

  “Homer.” Bus fumes filled my mouth.

  “Yeah.” He didn’t sound very happy. “You don’t live here,” he said, squinting out into the darkness. “It’s the bird farm.”

  “Pheasant.”

  “Pheasant farm.” He looked at my bike. “Come on, we’ll give you a ride.”

  I hauled my bike up the steps and into the bus, pushing it down the aisle until it ran into all the junk at the back. It wasn’t like a regular bus inside. Two long benches ran along each side, under the windows, and the bus was crammed with gear. A grill. Bags of charcoal. A propane tank. Folded-up red tents and lawn chairs. Homer. And Sydney.

  That fist feeling in my chest was back. Punch. Punch. Punch.

  “Hi,” Sydney said.

  Punch. “Hi.” Punch punch. Punch.

  She sat across from Homer, her arm over a barrel of a cooler parents fill with orange drink for soccer games.

  I was thinking about telling her I was sorry, just simple, just Sorry, like the note, because that might be all I could manage, when the bus jerked forward and the interior lights went off. The coolers on the floor slid forward and then, after the bus lurched, fell back. Everything smelled like propane and charcoal and bratwurst and barbecue and, at the same time, like the outdoors.

  Homer’s dad hollered. “Find a seat!”

  I sat next to Homer because it was the first open spot.

  “Where you headed?”

  I gave Homer’s dad the name of the roads that intersected by the Storage-U. “Okay,” he said. “We’re dropping kids off.”

  “Right,” Homer added. “Getting the full Buckeye Bus experience. We just dropped off Tyler and Abby. Sydney was last.” He paused. “But now there’s you.”

  Homer’s dad called back that Sydney was still the last stop.

  She said, “Cool.”

  I sat stiff and straight. I couldn’t lean back. I had to brace my feet on the floor and my elbows on my knees so I wouldn’t crush the pheasant. The bird was quiet. Please, bird, stay quiet. And don’t move. But be alive.

  Nobody had much to say to anybody. Sydney looked out toward the dark window. Homer looked at me. I looked at Homer’s dad’s feet. We stayed like that until the bus lurched again and I lost my hold and fell back and the bird got her feet into me, right through my backpack and coat. “Ow!”

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  The bird was still moving. I turned to face Homer so he couldn’t see my backpack but I didn’t have much hope I could keep things hidden for long. Homer wasn’t the type of person who wouldn’t notice that my backpack was alive. Trying to distract him, I said the first thing I could come up with. “How was the game?”

  “What?”

  “Um, the game? How was it?” He didn’t answer, so I said, “You know, the only game that counts?”

  Homer looked at Sydney. “How did he not watch the game? Who doesn’t watch the game?”

  “I meant,” I said, “how was the game because of the party and the big screen and all that.” I knew what it meant to him. “I saw the game.” Most of it.

  “Is that so? What was the score? What was the best play? Who was the MVP?”

  “It’s not like I rooted for Michigan, okay?”

  “Hey!” his dad called from the driver’s seat. “We don’t say that word on this bus!”

  “I was with the pheasants.” I looked at Sydney. She wasn’t ignoring me, exactly, but she was mostly looking out the window. “We had to knock the snow off the pens or the pens would collapse and kill the pheasants.”

  “Great,” Homer said. “Now everybody can make money by killing them later?”

  “I did it for Mr. Epple.” Which was part true and also part of the biggest lie I’d ever told.

  Sydney asked, “The birds would die under the snow?”

  She still wasn’t looking at me but out the window, and I could only see half her face.

  “Right.” And just like how everything else was all mixed up, when Sydney finally spoke to me after all this time, it was both wonderful and awful because she was only talking to me because we were stuck on the bus together. She thought I’d helped the birds and Mr. Epple. She didn’t know what I’d really done. She didn’t know what was in my backpack. “If the pens collapsed,” I explained, “the birds would suffocate.”

  The bus shook and chugged and bounced me and Homer up and down on the hard bench, and I believed Homer when he’d said something to Nate about it not being up for the trip to Columbus.

  Mostly, though, I was thinking about keeping the bird alive and keeping it hidden. Because how stupid would that be? To steal it for Nate, lose one while I was at it, and then have this one suffocate because I was just happy that it wasn’t making noise and was scared stiff?

  Homer’s dad braked hard for a stop sign. It’s a country stop sign at a four-way stop and it has a flashing red light so drivers can see it far away while they’re going fast on flat, straight roads, and so drivers can see it in the fog. When I jumped up so I wouldn’t crush the bird, Homer jumped up too.

  “Hey! Knock it off!” I twisted away, and the hen gave up being a scared lump. Even though the bird didn’t have room, she tried to fly. The noise she made was all wings.

  “Whoa,” Sydney said. “Your backpack is alive.”

  Homer lunged for the zipper.

  “Don’t open it, Homer,” I told him. “Don’t open it. Don’t open it.”

  “Homer! Don’t open it!”

  “My name’s not Homer!”

  “But—his backpack really is alive!”

  Homer ripped the zipper and the bird burst out and up, hit the ceiling, and then landed, stunned, on the cooler next to Sydney.

  Sydney yelped and ducked and then held out her hand. “It pooped on me!”

  Homer said, “That’s not a pheasant! It’s a big pigeon!”

  I yelled back. “It’s female!”

  Sydney shushed us. “You don’t want Homer’s dad to hear us.” She still held her hand cupped and away from her. “Are there any paper towels or anything back here?”

  Homer shoved some party napkins at her while he scowled at the bird. “My dad is going to kill us. And that may or may not be hyperbole.”

  “What?” Sydney made faces of disgust as she wiped her hand.

  “An exaggeration.” Homer stared at the bird. The bird stared back. I didn’t bother to tell Homer that any terrified bird will win any staring contest with
a human, a female pheasant in particular. Even on the rattling and clanking Buckeye Bus.

  “So gross.”

  Homer told her, “It’s supposed to be good luck. When a bird poops on you.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “I guess, maybe, because what are the odds? You know, of it actually landing on you.”

  “Maybe if you’re outside. Not closed up together on a bus. Because then I think the odds are very, very good that the bird poop will land on you.”

  We all looked at the bird and Homer asked, “Is it dangerous?”

  “It’s a hen.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said.

  Sydney asked, “Can’t you put it back in your backpack?”

  “I’m pretty sure Homer destroyed the zipper. So I could put it in but I don’t think it would stay there.”

  “She’s glad to be out,” Homer said.

  Sydney said to Homer, “Yeah, but are you glad she’s out?”

  “Look, guys. Even if the zipper works, I don’t think I could get it back in. It was hard enough the first time.” I didn’t tell them about the male pheasant, his feathers gleaming in the light before he disappeared into the fog and the dark.

  “I can’t believe you really did it,” Sydney said, looking at me straight-on for the first time in ages. “You stole a bird for Nate.”

  “How can you not believe it? You guys voted for it.”

  That’s when Homer said, “Stole, nothing, Sydney. He saved this bird’s life.”

  “Not if he’s going to give it to Nate,” said Sydney.

  I told them, “I think Nate will do right by it.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.” I thought about telling them about what I’d seen in Nate’s storage unit, but it seemed personal. Sydney asked, “What if it flies up to the front? And if you can’t get it into your backpack, how will you get it off the bus?”

  Before I could tell her I’d wrap it up in a towel, Homer said, “I can’t believe you’re saving this bird. That’s pretty cool.”