The Woefield Poultry Collective (10 page)

“Excuse me!” I yelled. “Wait! I need some help here!”

She stopped.

“Just wait!” I found myself panting as I pushed my empty orange cart up the aisle as fast as I could.

“Mesh. Where is it?” I asked, as I pulled alongside.

“Aisle six,” she said, edging away and glancing from side to side.

“Wait! Nails. Where are the nails?”

“Aisle four. Or five. I don’t know. I don’t work in Fasteners.”

She was picking up speed in reverse. She was getting away!

“Tar paper?” I shouted. But she was gone, saying something about being busy with another customer.

I trudged back to aisle six, where I picked up a roll of wire mesh big enough to build a supermax chicken penitentiary. Then I headed over to aisle four, which turned out to be nail-free. On aisle five I hit the jackpot, nail-wise. There were hundreds in every shape and size.

A heavyset sales associate with a face like a bulldog walked by, deep in conversation with a couple, who clung to his shirtsleeve.

“Excuse me!” I said. “I’m looking for—”

“Back off,” said the woman, moving protectively in front of her sales clerk. “We just found him.”

I realized I’d just have to guess. I pulled a couple of large plastic tubs of nails off the shelf. Some about an inch long, some maybe two inches. They looked about right for building a chicken coop.

Then I walked each aisle in turn until I finally located tar paper, which was sold in rolls large enough to side an entire third world shantytown. I was just heading to the only checkout with an actual cashier when I heard the announcements.

“Manager to Lighting and Design. Manager to Lighting and Design.”

“Security to Lighting and Design. Security to Lighting and Design.”

A premonition came to me and I wheeled the cart around in a tight circle and rushed down the aisle, my shoes slapping against the concrete floors. I’d seen the sign for Lighting and Design when I came in. It was at the back of the store in the far left corner, near the Garden Center. I rounded aisle two, flushing out a couple of sales associates who’d been hiding in a blind spot just off Toilets. When I got to Lighting
and Design I found Seth on his knees in front of a frightened-looking young girl who wore a cowboy shirt under her orange apron. His arms were stretched wide and he was making a high-pitched keening noise.

“Seth?” I asked.

“Dude, I thought we had a connection!” Seth said to the girl, who had backed up against a rack displaying fake Tiffany lamps.

She tried to smile but it came off as a sort of facial rictus.

“We talked about compact fluorescents,” he said.

I moved closer to him, hoping to distract him before the security people arrived. If the length of time it had taken to summon a clerk from Building Supplies was any indication, I estimated that I had at least forty minutes.

“I wasn’t aware that you were so passionate about compact fluorescents,” I said in what I hoped was a calm, conversational tone.

He turned to me. His face was stricken. He’d somehow managed to break one of the arms of his wraparound sunglasses so they hung crookedly across one of his eyes and extended down his cheek.

“Truth is, I don’t give a fuck about compact fluorescents. Don’t even know what they are. I’m just trying to
meet
someone,” he wailed. “Make a
connection
out here. I been home alone a long time, man. You have no idea.”

The girl looked from me to Seth, her eyes wide.

“I don’t think he’s dangerous,” I whispered.

I could tell she didn’t believe me.

“Seth, Home Depot isn’t the place to make a connection. At least not the kind you mean. But it’s great that you realize that compact fluorescents are key to reducing our emissions,” I said. “If we all switched to them the savings would be amazing.”

“That’s true. They might be mandatory in a few years,” added the girl, in spite of herself. Her shiny brown hair was held off her face with a tortoiseshell headband. She really was very cute.

I put my arms out to pull Seth to his feet, but at the same instant he fell forward, flat onto his face. The girl leapt sideways, tipping over a
fake Tiffany lamp, which toppled into a series of fake Craftsman-style lamps, which fell to the floor and shattered, Frey-like, into a million little pieces. At that moment the security detail swept in. They spoke rapidly into their radios, possibly to each other.

“Situation in aisle one,” said the middle-aged man.

“Roger that,” said the middle-aged woman.

The salesgirl stood among the wreckage of the lamps and gaped, horrified, at Seth, who had made it back to his knees. He’d cut open his chin and a trickle of blood ran down his neck and into his shirt, blending with the red wine stain on his chest to create a particularly gory effect. For some reason his hair appeared wet.

“Sorry,” said Seth, to no one in particular.

I faced the security associates.

“That’s right. He’s really sorry. This was just a misunderstanding. He just wanted some information about compact fluorescents.”

The security associates, a dim-looking man and matching woman, stared doubtfully at the mess on the floor.

“What’s going on here?” the woman asked. “Was he bothering you?”

The girl looked from me to Seth. I could see she didn’t know how much trouble to get him in.

“He keeps talking about his drama teacher,” she said finally. “I tried to tell him I don’t know her.”

“I’m more than happy to pay for this,” I said, gesturing at the mess of glass and wiring behind me. “Just let me get my employee to the car. He’s not feeling well. He may be on medication.”

Seth was crying silently, huge tears running down his face, joining the little trickle of blood from his chin.

The security people had been joined by a small crowd of shoppers.

I felt I had to keep explaining. “He’s sensitive. In addition to working for me on the farm, he’s in the entertainment business,” I said, thinking of his blogs.

“Like Mel Gibson,” said Seth, still crying, but now trying to focus on a woman in the crowd. She’d packed her chest into a very tight leather vest. “Hey, sugar tits!” he said, through his tears.

“I’ll just get him outside and then I’ll come back and pay for these things,” I said, trying to ignore the thrilled look on the face of the woman who’d just been called sugar tits.

“Get him out of here or we’ll call the cops?” said the woman security officer, who seemed to speak only in the interrogative.

“Absolutely,” I said. I put my arm around Seth’s shoulders and pushed him in front of me. The crowd parted for us, and the woman he’d called sugar tits winked at him. The security people followed at a safe distance.

“It wasn’t my fault,” muttered Seth.

“He’s been under a lot of stress lately,” I said to the crowd.

The security team nodded uncertainly, trying to look as though they dealt with weeping, bleeding drunk guys falling around the aisles every day.

“Me, too, actually. Just inherited this farm and I’m trying to get a chicken shed built.”

People exchanged looks.

We made the long march out of the building and through the vast, bustling parking lot to the truck.

“Can I ask one of you to watch him while I go in and pay for the things he broke?” I asked, after I’d pushed and shoved and prodded the nearly comatose Seth into the truck.

Before they could answer, a flicker of movement in another corner of the parking lot caught their attention. A teenager, maybe thirteen or fourteen years old, was pushing two other teenagers in one of the carts. The kids were racing the cart toward an exit.

“Hey!” shouted the security man.

“Stop?” added the security woman.

They took off running after the kids.

I waited until they were halfway across the parking lot before leaping into the truck, turning the ignition and driving off, all in one violent motion.

“We’ll get them next time,” I said as much to myself as Seth, who’d passed out. His head lolled over and smacked against the passenger window with a satisfying thud as I made a sharp left onto the street.

There’s this girl at Poultry Club, Bethany Blaine. She’s kind of slow but not exactly retarded. It makes it hard because you don’t know whether to encourage her to try to be smarter or be nice to her for trying, the way you would if she was definitely retarded. Earl, the man who works at Woefield, seems a little bit like Bethany.

He might not be handicapped but he doesn’t seem totally normal either. My mom says you should always be extra nice to people with challenges, like mental or physical ones. She didn’t say why. So I tried to be nice to Earl. Just in case.

When I saw what a bad job he was doing building the coop, I didn’t let him know how disappointed I was or say anything mean. I just showed him what was wrong. Which I think is okay to do, even if a person has challenges. I mean, how else is he going to learn? I showed him that the coop didn’t have any ventilation, except where the boards didn’t fit together. I also told him he had to build a foundation and I reminded him about insulation. When he gets all that fixed, I’ll show him where to put the nest boxes and the perches.

Bethany, the girl at Poultry Club, talks a lot. All the time, practically. That’s part of how you know she’s not quite right. But Earl is really old and hardly talks at all except to swear. That may be what happens to slow people when they get old. I’m not sure. Slow old people are kind of rare, I think. Him swearing in front of me made Prudence nervous at first. Every time he said a swear, she’d whisper “Earl!” and look at
me. But my dad swears all the time so I’m used to it. It’s probably not very good for me though.

Last Sunday I went to church with Bethany and her family. Bethany doesn’t have many friends, and she and her mom have asked me about twenty times whether I wanted to go with them, especially after my dad lost his job and his name was in the paper. I feel kind of sorry for Bethany, so I said yes. It turns out that church was really great. The preacher or minister had an excellent message. It was all about being organized and prepared for the end and how there is evil just about everywhere and you have to guard against it. He also said you have to try hard to get ahead in this world so you can get ahead in the next one, too, by which I think he meant heaven. In that way, church was like Poultry Club. There is a strong emphasis on leadership. I think my parents could benefit from the Lord’s message. I think they might suffer from apathy, which is another thing the minister warned us about.

Bethany’s mom lent me some church literature to read and also this book called
Left Behind
. I’m looking forward to reading it. I read quite a few books, but mostly they are about chickens.

I can’t decide whether going to church is making me more sensitive to swearing or less. Time will tell. Going to church with the Blaines is definitely making me more patient and kindhearted, although my stomach still hurts sometimes.

The truth is that if I didn’t supervise him, I think Earl might try and get away with doing a halfhearted job. As a senior citizen, you’d think he’d try harder. He’s only going to be around for so long and this chicken house may be one of the last chances he has to leave his mark on the world. I said that to him, but before he could thank me Prudence said it was probably time for me to go. She had been in a bad mood ever since she came home and had to put Seth to bed because she said he was feeling under the weather. She went across the street to tell Seth’s mother that he was sick but I guess his mom didn’t care. Prudence came back looking even grumpier.

The next day Seth was feeling better. He just sat on the porch and
didn’t move for almost two hours, except to smoke and check his watch a few times. He had on track pants and a shirt with no sleeves that looked American because it was made of a blue and red and white flag. His arms didn’t have many muscles. When Earl saw him, he swore even more than usual.

Seth looked extremely tired and was a bit yellow, like he might have a disease or something. I thought I should probably be careful around him. I didn’t want to end up getting abused. Guys who sit around and don’t have jobs are more likely to be pedophiles. I saw that on one of those TV shows that comes on after eleven.

But to tell the truth, I kind of liked him. I think it was because when I talked he paid attention really hard, like he thought I might be interesting or worth listening to. Not many people listen to people who are eleven. I liked it when he sat outside and typed on his computer, which is quite big considering it’s a laptop, or even when he just sat outside doing nothing.

My birds were moving to Woefield in two days and I could hardly wait. If Bethany didn’t talk so much I’d have invited her, but I didn’t want her bothering my birds.

I have this theory about hangovers. The theory is this: We are all born with a single hangover. It’s located in our gut and when we drink, it wakes up. I had the bad luck to be born with an incredibly powerful hangover rather than any number of other attributes, such as an enormous cock or a fine head of blond, Bret Michaels–ish hair. The colon-shredding ferociousness of my hangover is one of the few things I can count on in my life.

I’ve even named my hangover. I call him Phil. Phil the Fucker. I think about him this way. Phil the Fucker lives deep inside me in the basement suite owned by Fear and Anxiety, whose ‘70s-style stucco home is located directly across the street from Shame and Resentment’s rundown rancher. It’s not a big neighborhood, but it has character. Then again, I may have gotten all this from an interview I read once with one of the guys in Van Halen.

A few times I thought Phil might kill me. The key to coping when Phil’s awake is to do everything real slow. He seems to settle down if I feed him Chinese takeout. The greasier the better. I just thought I’d mention this. It seems relevant somehow.

Anyway, about the incident at the Home Depot. That was a shit show, I admit. When Prudence stopped by my room the next day I told her to go away and leave me to die in peace. That’s what I used to say to my mother and she always listened. She was trained from living with my father. But Prudence didn’t know any better and she walked right in.