I thumped back down on the bench. My bike fell against me. “Homer. It’s not cool.” Of all the weird things Homer had ever said, this was the weirdest. “I’m a thief.”
“You saved the bird.”
Sydney snorted. “Only if the bus ride doesn’t kill it.” The bird had hardly moved since it had landed on the cooler. “Or if it’s not dead already.”
It hit me then. I was trying to do what Nate wanted. I was trying to fix everything. But I was also doing the most horrible thing I had ever done on purpose in my whole life. It was against the law. I was a thief and a liar, and I’d been a thief and a liar to Mr. Epple. And now Homer thought I was doing something good?
“Great,” Homer said, but he sounded sad and he didn’t really mean great, not in the heavy, flat way he said it. “This is even better than my party. You’re saving this bird’s life and you got it for Nate. Right, Syd?”
“Homer, your party was amazing and you know it.”
“I didn’t exactly plan this. I didn’t ask for a ride. And just so you know, I was trying to help you out with Nate. Okay? When you spilled your tomato soup and Nate was about to explode, that’s when I started trading sandwiches. Okay? I was helping both of you out.”
Sydney gasped. I think it was Sydney. I still couldn’t see her face.
“And it’s not just for Nate. The bird. I mean, sure, he’s the one who started it, but it’s for all of you. You guys voted. It was unanimous.”
“You abstained. It wasn’t unanimous.”
“It’s to show you all that I’m not a bad guy. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone. Sydney.” I looked over at her. She stared at her feet. “You, Sydney. It was just a new sandwich. The roll. And we all started swapping, and then—” I stopped there because we all knew what had happened next.
Out of breath as though I’d been biking and yelling at the same time, I slumped back onto the bench. “Okay?”
Homer didn’t answer, just moved his arms and legs around like he was thinking about folding everything up but didn’t know how to do it. After a while he said, “Nate was the one who technically traded with her.”
“I shouldn’t have traded,” Sydney said. “I know better.”
Homer said, “Don’t blame yourself.”
Sydney said, “I need to protect myself. I can’t eat anything if I don’t for sure know the ingredients.”
“It stinks,” I said, and Homer said, “Get better, not bitter.”
We were quiet for a little while. A bag of charcoal in the back rattled.
Sydney asked, “What are you going to do with it? The pheasant.”
“Drop it off at Nate’s storage unit.” She looked like maybe that wasn’t such a great idea so I said, “He’s got it all set up. He’s got a box for it and some sawdust and stuff and some food bowls.” I couldn’t remember if he had food in the bowls. Probably not. I wondered if pheasants could eat soup, since it looked like Nate could get a lot.
“Will it be okay there?” That was from Homer.
“Sure,” I said. “It lives just fine outside.”
Sydney said, “My cousins turned an old shed into a chicken coop. Isn’t this about the same thing?”
“It’ll be dark,” I said.
“Maybe you should stay with it,” Homer said, “just for the night.”
Before I could tell Homer no way, Sydney said it instead. “Nobody’s going to sleep at the storage unit, Homer. Not even you.”
Homer sighed. Maybe he’d really been thinking about it. Probably. If he thought that me stealing a pheasant was awesome, I could only imagine what he’d think about camping out with it in Nate’s storage unit.
“Here’s what we could do,” I said. “We’ll grab some twigs and stuff to make it better for her.”
“And we’ve got water,” Sydney said. “We’ll fill her water bowl from one of the bottles.”
“Okay.” Homer still didn’t seem convinced. “I’ll call Nate. He should know tonight, don’t you think?” He looked at me when he said it. As if he was worried about stealing my glory.
Because I knew there wasn’t any glory to steal, I told him, “Good idea.”
He smiled then. “Great.”
“Good.”
Homer said, “This is a good thing you’re doing, Itch.”
When I went to itch my neck, both Homer and Sydney shouted at me. “Stop! Don’t!”
“What?”
“Don’t itch it,” Sydney said. “It looks like a hive.”
Homer peered at my neck. “Confirmed. It’s a hive.”
“So what if I itch it? I’m Itch.”
Homer said, “You can’t finish this if you’re red and puffy and stuff.”
“Sure I can.”
“Didn’t you take your medicine?” That was Doctor Homer.
“This morning.”
“Does it help if you don’t itch? Or is it impossible not to itch?”
“Itching makes it worse? Right?” Sydney asked.
“Yes.”
“Yes to which one?”
“All of them.” I took my second pill out of my zipped pocket and opened up its sealed blister pack and chewed it. It tasted awful, the same as always.
We were closer to town now and there were more lights, hazy haloes in the fog. Lights over garages. Lit-up houses still filled with Buckeye parties. If it wasn’t for the fog, I bet we’d be able to see the big-screen TVs shining out at us. The bus chugged and hissed as it slowed down.
Sydney said, “You better put that bird away.”
I laughed at that. She made it sound like it was a normal thing to do. Put away a pheasant.
Now that the bus had stopped moving, the bird decided to start. It stood up and flapped out its wings and made that drum-drum-drum sound. Sydney bolted over to our side of the bus. “Seriously! Do something. And do it before Homer’s dad finds it.”
We’d come to a full stop in the drive of the Storage-U. Homer’s dad stuck his head back. He looked like Homer, only older and inflated. “This isn’t a house. It’s the storage place.”
“It’s where he’s going, Dad! Wait a sec. I’ll help him with his bike.”
“I dropped every kid off at their house and watched them go in the front door. I’m not leaving anyone at a storage unit in the dark.”
“He’s got a thing to do.” It was the most regular thing I’d ever heard Homer say. His dad must have felt the same way too.
“ ‘A thing to do’? I don’t even know what that means.”
Sydney and I looked at each other. She tilted her head at the bird. I shrugged and reached into my backpack for the towel.
Homer told his dad, “Itch has to make a delivery.”
Homer’s dad shook his head and took a deep breath and then looked at Sydney and me and then back at Homer. “I’d like you to start making sense right now.”
Homer pointed at me. “Itch is making a delivery to a storage unit here.”
“What’s itch?”
“He’s Itch!” Since Homer was already pointing at me, he stuck his finger into my shoulder. “This is Itch!”
“Excuse me?”
“That’s his name.”
“That’s no one’s name.”
“That’s what we call him.”
Homer’s dad looked at me. “What’s your name, son?” Then he held up his hand. “Hold on. Don’t answer.” He looked at Homer. “You tell me his name.”
There was a long pause. I started to smile. I don’t know why. Because it was funny? Because there was a pheasant on the bus and maybe Homer’s dad hadn’t even noticed it yet? Because Homer was getting in trouble? Because Homer was going to have to use my real name?
Finally Homer said, “It’s Isaac.”
“Isaac what?”
“Isaac Fitch.”
“Thank you. Now. Isaac. I’m not just going to leave you here. You can call your parents if you like, and Sydney should call hers, since we’re running late.”
Homer said, “His parents are in China.”
Homer’s dad looked at me again. “Right. Fitch, I know your mom.” What he said next iced up my gut. “I know how she’d want this done right.”
Just then the bird shot up again, its wings flapping. I didn’t remember it being so big. It was loud and had nowhere to go.
I yelled I got it, I got it, though I didn’t. Homer’s dad swore. Homer yelled out something about hollow bones, and Sydney said we should get off the bus. They all ducked. I held the towel. The bird thwacked around. Its wings brushed the windows, the ceiling.
“Just hold still.”
I meant every living thing on the bus. I wasn’t just wishing for the bird to hold still. When it did, I wrapped it in the towel and tucked it up under my arm as gentle as I could. Slid my hands around the legs at the hocks. Turned it upside down. Kept it tucked in like a ball on its way to the end zone. Don’t crush it, don’t crush it.
Open the door, open the door, open the door. I forgot to talk out loud.
Homer yelled, “Open the door, Dad!” Then he told me one more wrong thing. “Wow, Itch, you’re really good at that,” he said. “You look like you know exactly what you’re doing.”
CHAPTER 22
DO YOU EVER think sleep is kind of like amnesia?
After the bus dropped me off I showered and then didn’t feel like going down two flights of stairs to the basement futon. So I slept upstairs in my real bed. Regular old twin mattress. Regular old comforter. Regular old walls and windows.
Waking up after sleeping hard, it was just morning in my old bedroom. All that was in my mind was a big sleepy blankness: white bedroom walls, white snow outside. Amnesia. Maybe there’s a good kind. You don’t remember the wrong things you’ve done. It’s an eraser. You can start all over again.
Looking at my four plain walls instead of the basement walls, it was as though the tornado had never roared through town. Like maybe all of it had never happened. Sydney eating my sandwich. The pheasant that got loose and the pheasant I stole. The fog and the Buckeye Bus. Homer. Keeping the bird cornered in the storage unit while Homer and Sydney searched the snow for branches to make the place more bird-friendly. Homer’s dad grumbling at us until Homer told him it was for a school project. Maybe Mom’s been here all along. Yesterday, we went to the mall. Maybe I ate a triangular slice of mall pizza and a giant waffle ice cream cone, and the food court was so empty it echoed.
Thinking like that worked until I moved. My whole body was sore. My arms ached. It hurt to move my legs. And I saw the cuts on my hands from the pheasants. When I got home last night I’d scrubbed them and then loaded up with antiseptic cream. Would they get infected? A bird probably carried all sorts of germs. Then again, I’d been working with the birds since August without any problem. Mr. Epple never seemed sick or anything. The scratch on my leg wasn’t bad at all. A red spot. The pheasant had made a hole clear through my jeans and long johns.
Then Mr. Epple showed up and knocked on the front door early Sunday morning while I was still in bed and Dad was drinking coffee and checking Mom’s flights online. She was coming home Monday night. Tomorrow night. Her flights were booked. Shanghai to Toronto to Detroit, which was about two hours away.
Dad was glad to see him and shook his hand. It was a good thing he wasn’t home last night when the Buckeye Bus dropped me off. Dad must have thought Mr. Epple had picked me up yesterday too, because I hadn’t heard anything about me and my bike and bad roads and fog and watermelon brains.
“Trouble,” Mr. Epple said, loud enough for me to hear up from my bedroom.
Dad said, “Sure. I’ll get Isaac.”
I threw on yesterday’s dirty long johns and shirts and jeans and covered my hands with work gloves. Dad made me gulp down some OJ and my pill and sent me with a granola bar in my coat pocket.
The drive out in Mr. Epple’s truck was short. Yesterday, on my bike, the ride had felt like a triumph. Me and the snow and the fog and the pheasants and finally getting the pheasant hen safely shuttered in Nate’s storage unit. But not now. Whatever reason Mr. Epple needed me on Sunday morning wasn’t good and it was because of what I’d done yesterday after the game.
He didn’t speak to me until we got to the farm. I sat quietly in the truck and sweated, listening to the engine and the whir of blasting heat.
The landscape looked new again in the snow. Like it had when I’d first driven out with Mom all the way from New York and it was all unfamiliar. Once we’d dropped south by Erie, Pennsylvania, our drive had been west, west, west. We’d gone past cities and factories and the big lake and then it was country, farmland, green earth, and endless, open land and sky.
We drove by the pheasant farm too, that first time. We didn’t know what it was. I’d pressed my face to the window, looking to see what it was inside the pens, but I hadn’t been able to see much then. It had only been June, so now I know that any pheasants Mr. Epple might have had would be young and hard to spot in the brush.
Mr. Epple parked his truck off the side of the road before the farm. “Quiet,” he said, and when he got out he didn’t even close the truck’s door. I left mine partially open too.
“There’s eleven missing,” he said, as we slogged through the wet and muddy grass at the side of the road. At the farm, he gave me a bucket of feed and pointed me in one direction and he grabbed another bucket and headed in another. There was already a trail of feed in the leftover snow leading to the first door of the pen. That’s where I found my first missing pheasant. A bright rooster, pecking his way back. He was easy. I just opened the doors, secured them behind me, and left out some more feed.
Then I checked the pen and the two doors again. Because that was why I was here. Because I hadn’t secured the pen last night and eleven birds had escaped.
No. Nine. Nine birds had escaped. I’d stolen two.
Then I thought about the pheasant that had shot up in the bright security lights and how beautiful it was. Was it free? Was it out there? Was it some other animal’s prey? Would we find ten birds? Maybe we’d find ten pheasants—the nine who had escaped the pen, and the one who had escaped me—and Mr. Epple would shrug the last one away, and then he’d never know, I’d never have to tell.
I’d done things all wrong. I could have paid Mr. Epple for the birds. I could have asked and maybe he would have said yes, or I could have sent Nate to him. There were a lot of things I could have tried, and this one was just a thousand ways stupid. Nate had started talking about stealing the birds and I’d spent so much time thinking about eggs that it all got jammed in my brain and I never tried to come up with any other, better way.
Mr. Epple was different than the other grown-ups I knew. He let me be. And though it was hard to see it at first, he was nice. He’d made me microwave noodles and we’d watched the game. I liked being out here, alone and not alone. I liked the pheasants too, and I’d ruined it all.
I found two hens tucked into the wet and muddy grass just a few feet away from where they had escaped. I made a trail of food for them and waited. Mr. Epple carried in a bird. It was easy for him. He knew what he was doing.
When I took off my coat, a gust of flying wind took away the air in front of me so that just for a second when I inhaled there was nothing there to take in. Holding my coat open, I crept quietly up on the sitting bird. Just as I started to close my coat carefully around her, Mr. Epple was there and he scooped her up with his crooked-fingered hands, tucked her in, smiled big at me, and headed to the pen.
What struck me then as he carried the bird so carefully and gently was how he used to be a boxer. It wasn’t just his face and his hands, but the way he stood. He always looked like he was ready for something. Stance. I think that
’s what it’s called.
I waded through an icy mud puddle and got the second pheasant. I held her loosely in my coat and she flapped out of it somewhere close enough to the pen. Mr. Epple and I steered her in.
And then we had nine.
My gut was sick and my mouth all acid.
Mr. Epple laid out more feed and headed back toward the brush, and that’s when I chased after him. “Mr. Epple! Mr. Epple! They’re not there.” I touched his elbow and he turned to face me. “They’re not there.”
“Don’t give up yet,” he shouted.
“It’s my fault.”
He nodded, because it was the most obvious thing in the world and it was obvious that he already knew it. But he thought I was talking about the unsecured pen and the escaped birds. He didn’t know what I’d done.
Whipping off my gloves, I showed him the scratches on my wrist. “Last night after the game I came back out here and took two birds.”
He looked at my hands and then he nodded and shook his head all at once and then he looked at me.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry and it was wrong. I thought—I thought—I thought it was the right thing to do.”
He shook his head at that.
Dylan said I should write Mr. Epple a note if I had a lot to explain. I don’t know what I would have written if I’d had paper and a pencil. I didn’t have a clue. “I’ll pay you back. I’ll pay you for the birds. I’m sorry. It was stupid and I thought it was going to help me. I thought it would solve something.” A gift. An egg. A bird. It made me think about my mom and how she sees the big stuff in the small stuff. How small things can get big. How after the tornado when I couldn’t believe the school’s missing cafeteria hadn’t made the news and how she said the small stuff still matters.
How little things add up to big things and multiply. Like saying hi to Homer. Sticking up for him.
Or like knocking on Sydney’s door. After.
Or how I hadn’t done either.
Mr. Epple waved his arm again and turned and walked away. He wasn’t even going to look at me.
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