Fresh Eggs (25 page)

“I'm not selling,” Calvin says.

Bartholomew Gumboro tempts him. “It would make a lot of your problems go away.”

“Suppose you go away?”

At four o'clock Norman Marek calls. “Cal—you got cable TV, right?”

“Assuming Donna found the money to pay the bill, sure.”

“Well, if it's still working be sure to watch
In The Crosshairs
at seven. You'll see exactly what those bunny huggers are up against.”

Twenty-nine

Echo-booming drums. Simmering bassoons. Boiling trumpets. A voice from heaven: “
Tonight on
In the Crosshairs:
Rhea the Feather Girl. Liberal flight of fancy? Or a fight for animal dignity? Now here's your moderator, Carlotta Aqouti Brown
.

Carlotta Aqouti Brown: “Good evening. On this side of the barbed wire we have Scott Snitzen, national president of Animals Are People, Too. And on this side, Robert P. Gallinipper, chairman and chief operating officer of Gallinipper Foods, one of the nation's largest egg and poultry wholesalers.”

Scott Snitzen frowns at the host. Bob Gallinipper smiles at the camera.

Carlotta Aqouti Brown: “Let's start with you, Mr. Snitzen. By now the entire world has heard of Rhea Cassowary, the Ohio farm girl with feathers. Now, as the family faces allegations of child abuse, your group is demonstrating in front of their farm, claiming Rhea as some sort of messiah for the animal rights movement. Aren't you just taking advantage of a sad situation?”

Scott Snitzen: “The sad situation is how animals are being treated. Rhea Cassowary has grown up seeing first hand how chickens are treated. Squashed into cages like so many sardines. Forced to breath putrid air. Forced to lay an obscene number of eggs. Murdered when their uteruses wear out.”

Bob Gallinipper: “Murdered? Animals are just that, Mr. Snitzen—animals. God put them here for us to use.”

Scott Snitzen: “Use is not the same as abuse.”

Carlotta Aqouti Brown: “He has a point there, doesn't he, Mr. Gallinipper? Today's factory farms show no respect to animals whatsoever.”

Bob Gallinipper: “Carlotta! Please! Farms are farms, whether you have six chickens or a million chickens. That factory farm stuff is nothing but liberal mumbo jumbo.”

Carlotta Aqouti Brown: “We'll be back after these important messages.”

Thirty

The lilac bush calls out, “Joon.”

That startles Joon Faldstool, until he realizes it's not the lilac calling out his name, but Rhea. For some reason she's sitting inside the tree's ring of spindly limbs. He jumps from the snow cone wagon, where he's been working all evening scraping the dried egg off the floor, and sneaks low across the lawn, keeping, he hopes, out of sight from the house.

“Come on in,” Rhea says.

So Joon squeezes between the spindly limbs and sits next to Rhea. Their arms and hips are touching. She tells him how she used to hide inside the lilac when she was little, pretending she was wearing a magic cloak that made her invisible, watching Phil Bunyip's crew load the crates of Leghorns.

“It's a lot like a cage in here,” says Joon. A limb is digging in his back.

From the lilac they can see the sheriff's cars and the demonstrators. See the gawkers and the television crews. They talk about their few short days on the county fair circuit. They agree it seems like a long time ago. Agree it wasn't all that bad. “I was prepared for all that,” Rhea says. “It was like being in the movies, you know? And there was a reason to do it. But all this. I don't think I can take this.”

Joon puts his arm around her. She rests her feathered head on his cheek. “Most people really liked me,” she says. “I know Jelly Bean and Robert Charles did.”

It is only a bit after seven and the sun is just now beginning to tilt toward the horizon. “I'm driving down to see my grandfather on Thursday,” Joon says.

“The one you got the big ears from?”

“Yup. Grampa Hap.”

“The one who lives in the trailer by the swamp?”

“It's a cool place.”

Rhea bends back his thumb, playfully, until he winces. “Cooler than my lilac?”

“Way cooler.”

It is now that they decide to kiss for the first time. Neither has been kissed before, not a girl-boy on-the-mouth kiss. But they have been watching people kiss on television all their lives and they have practiced it on the back of their hands. So now, when they kiss, it is a good kiss.

In the Crosshairs
isn't over two minutes when Norman Marek calls. “Great job, wasn't it?”

“It's just going to add to the hoopla,” Calvin Cassowary says.

“It's also going to endear you to Bob Gallinipper. When Bob goes to war he doesn't leave his wounded on the field. Your copaceticness runneth over.”

Calvin has the phone cord stretched as far as it will go, so he can lean his forehead against the screen door and let whatever breeze there is outside work on his headache. “Lucky me.”

“Now there's one thing I want you to do, Cal. First thing tomorrow call Bob and tell him what a great job he did. Tell him how proud you were.”

“To tell you the truth, I'm not so sure that—”

“And invite him to the farm for dinner. He eats that kind of thing up. But don't—whatever you do—try to tie him down to a specific date. Just make it general. Just say, ‘You know Mr. Gallinipper, Donna, Rhea and I would like you and Bunny over for dinner sometime.'”

Calvin watches Joon Faldstool jump from the snow cone wagon and sneak across the lawn, heading toward the lilac by the garage. “Just sometime?”

“That way he won't feel guilty when he can't come.”

Joon's sneaking worries Calvin. “Talk to you soon, Norm,” he says and hangs the phone cord over the brass hat hooks on the wall. He slides out the screen door, making sure it doesn't slam. He trots to the garage and slips around the back, sneaking low across the grass to the lilac, where inside Joon and his daughter are locked at the lips.

Calvin reaches through the limbs, clamps onto Joon's ear, and jerks, and screams, “I should fire your ass on the spot!”

Calvin Cassowary does not fire Joon on the spot. Doesn't fire him at all. So for the next two days Joon comes to work as scheduled and shovels as much chicken manure as he can. On Thursday, even though it's his day off, he comes to work anyway, at 5:30 in the morning, and shovels until noon. Then he washes up and changes into a clean pair of jeans and a denim shirt and takes off in his Gremlin for Acorn County. He is thirty miles down Route 83 when Rhea pops up in the back seat, throwing back her cowl and kissing him first on the left ear and then on the right.

Joon pulls into a driveway and starts to turn around. “Don't you dare,” Rhea says.

Joon needs no more of a threat than that. He's glad Rhea is in his back seat. Glad that they can spend an afternoon together. Even if it means that later tonight his ass will be fired for real.

Acorn County is real country. No developments. No strip malls. They pass through the townlets of Pym Center and Amber-jack, Kellicott and McKelvey. They cross the bridge over Chippewa Creek and take a left on Bear Swamp Road. NO OUTLET the sign says. The dust flies.

Bear Swamp Road is straight and flat for maybe a half mile. The thick scrub woods on both sides muffles the sound of the Gremlin's tires on the gravel. Suddenly the road gets curvy. The scrub woods gives way to weedy fields. The sun gets hot. There is a corrugated metal culvert to bump over and then a final steep descent to the swamp and Grampa Hap's small silver house trailer.

They find Joon's grandfather behind the trailer, sitting in an aluminum lawn chair. He is just a few feet from a rotting dog house and a circle of bare ground littered with sun-baked logs of beagle manure. The beagle is sleeping on top of the dog house. A rusted lawnmower is submerged in the knee-high grass, right where it ran out of gas, maybe a summer or two ago.

Hap Aspergres is clearly in his seventies or eighties. He is clearly a thinner man than he used to be. His extra skin hangs in folds. His ears, even bigger than Joon's, are flower pots for thickets of bristly white hair.

“Joonbug!” he growls when they appear around the end of the trailer. “I've been waiting forever.” When his eyes adjust to the distance, and he sees Rhea, he unfolds from the chair. He stares and shakes his head slowly. “I didn't know she was coming, too.”

Joon skirts the beagle manure and hugs his grandfather. “I didn't either.”

“You look a lot more normal than I figured,” Hap Aspergres tells Rhea. He is studying her without embarrassment or apology. “What a wonderful world we live in.”

He brings them tall glasses of orange juice and a new bag of Oreo cookies, and they sit on broken lawn chairs in the high grass and listen while he tells them the history of Bear Swamp: There are no bears. It really isn't a swamp. More of a marsh that spends all summer trying to dry out, succeeding just a week or two before the first snow. It runs east as far as the Bailey farm and west as far as the Wunkerschmidt farm and north as far as the new county landfill. “I own all but a corner of it,” he says. “But nobody really owns anything, do they? Everybody's a renter in God's eyes.”

Joon and Rhea tell him about their days on the county fair circuit. About her father's current trouble with Children Services, the Maple Creek Homeowner's Association, the AAPT and the PAAT, and the television crews.

“I've only had one television set in my life,” Hap tells them. “When it fizzled out I saw no reason to buy another. But I've got several radios.” He tells them that both radio and television are broadcast on radio waves. He tells them what radio waves are. Explains the electromagnetic spectrum to them, and Planck's constant, the theory by nineteenth-century German physicist Max Planck, that established the mathematical relationship between the frequency of an electromagnetic wave and the amount of energy in that wave.

It is now that Rhea remembers Joon telling her about her grandfather's gift for retaining information that has no direct bearing on his own life.

“You got time for a witching lesson?” Hap asks his grandson.

Joon loves to go water witching with his grandfather. Loves gripping that Y of springy willow, barely able to breathe while he walks, waiting for the end to tug downward, waiting for that pat on the head and the praise, “You're a natural, Joonbug!”

“Sorry. We've got to get back,” Joon says.

Hap understands. Walks them to the Gremlin. The beagle comes along, his upright tail skimming the top of the tall grass like the periscope of a submarine. By the time they reach the car, Hap has explained the history of Daylight Savings Time to them.

Joon will have to push the Gremlin hard to get Rhea home in time for supper. He grips the steering wheel with both hands and leans into it. “Too bad we couldn't stay longer,” he says.

Rhea leans against his shoulder. “It was worth it.”

Joon knows exactly what she means. He feels that way, too. A few hours of freedom. A few hours of respect. “Hap's really something, isn't he?”

Answers Rhea, “He reminds me of the Hoopoe.”

They hurry north, through McKelvey, Kellicott, Amberjack and Pym Center. They hurry through a dozen plans to get Rhea into the house without Donna or her father ever realizing she was gone. They realize it will be next to impossible. But necessary that they try. If they're caught, Joon will lose his job. There'll be screaming and swearing and the smashing of coffee mugs and the sheriff's deputies guarding the driveway will hear it all and report it to April Poulard of Children Services. Rhea will find herself in a foster home. Maybe living with her Toledo grandmother. They will never see each other again. “You can't let yourself get caught,” Joon says.

“I won't,” says Rhea, tightening her grip on his arm.

A half mile from the farm they pull over and Rhea crawls over the seat. She puts on her cloak and melts against the floor. Joon drives on. The sheriff's deputy recognizes the Gremlin and motions him in. They crackle up the drive. Park alongside the garage. Joon half opens the door for Rhea. She slides out. He leans back and closes his eyes, waiting for the screaming and swearing and the smashing of mugs.

Rhea slips along the back of the garage and then ducks under the willow, its drooping yellow-green branches concealing her all the way to the corner of the house. She crawls to the rusted iron coal chute behind the snowball bush. She lifts the heavy lid and slides into the coal bin. The Cassowarys haven't heated with coal since 1965, when Rhea's grandfather got sick of the dirt and the lugging and had an oil furnace installed. Now the bin's cement block walls are painted white and instead of coal, it's filled with junk not good enough for the attic. She climbs down the metal shelving. The door to the basement is latched. She knew it would be. But she knows where the emergency coat hanger is. Her great-grandmother Dorothy got a coat hanger and stretched it out like the neck of a goose and hung it on a nail just to the right of the door in 1944, after getting locked inside herself. She'd been inside setting mousetraps when her husband Alfred came by and saw that the door was open a crack. He shut it and latched it and went outside to milk his cows and Dorothy was trapped inside there for two hours and the Swiss steak in the oven baked as hard as boot heels.

Rhea gets the emergency coat hanger and lifts the latch and after leaning against the washing machine for ten minutes or so, trying to hear what's going on upstairs, she climbs confidently to the kitchen.

“There you are,” her father says. There is a frown on his face but his eyes are happy.

“I was looking at the junk in the coal bin.”

Donna is draining spaghetti noodles in the sink. “That must have made for a fun afternoon.”

“I was looking for that drawing of my mother feeding the chickens.”