Site Fidelity

by Claire Boyles

  Chris has an impeccable instinct for businesspeople, but a blind spot, or maybe a soft spot, for half-family. He didn't tell me, he said, because the price of the new family was insignificant,

  but he couldn't accurately calculate the costs of my disapproval.

  Chris came out of the mine with new conviction about ownership of circuses and monkeys, apples and trees. He calculated the relative strength of wind from the south and from the west, the breathy through-line of generations. He will not return to LA without the boys, and they won't leave the mine without Brandy.

  Did you find Del down there? I asked.

  It's just a big pile of rocks, he said. Obstructing everything.

  Colton is right. My eyes are unmistakably from Del, brown, unremarkable, focused best on the periphery. I don't want to believe my heart is from Del too, suspicious, wandering, beating so much for the search that it forgets to love what it has already found. I want a heart that loves easily and well, a heart so welcoming and resilient and good that it doesn't have to fear breaking. A heart like Chris's. A heart like yours.

  Love, Charley

  To: Mom

  From: Charley

  Subject: Project Gold Rush

  August 23, 2016

  Dear Mom,

  We promised to retrieve the gun safe and the guns in the near future. We promised to stop in Las Vegas so Brandy could visit her sister. We took rooms at Circus Circus, more amusement park than casino. Our new brothers are children, after all, and Chris loves trapeze artists and tumblers. I felt we were gambling enough.

  When Thomas Edison was fifteen, he traveled around the country filling in as a telegraph operator for men gone to fight the Civil War. Those were electric years for young Edison, years of transmission, of formation, of meaning-making. Our half-brothers spent hundreds of Chris's dollars on the midway at Circus Circus, throwing basketballs at a tilted hoop until they won a life-sized stuffed bear for their mother.

  The plan was to meet at the Prius at 7 a.m., get an early start. The sun was firmly up when Chris and I walked out, blinding where it reflected off the metal and glass of the Strip. Later, we watched security footage of Brandy and the boys, with a stolen set of keys, driving away at 3 a.m. Colton was behind the wheel, Brandy in the front seat, Michael in the back with the giant bear.

  It's nothing we can't afford, Chris said, shrugging.

  We had taken the boys to watch the free circus acts, watched a woman in a polar bear leotard lie down on her back and juggle clear plastic ice cubes with all four limbs. Chris tried to explain that hydraulic engineering sought to amplify the power of human muscle, that someday he would find a way to make the jerky, stop-and-go hydraulic effect as elegant as the motion of the polar bear woman, of the tumblers. The world could use more grace, he said.

  Later, Michael did flips into the outdoor pool. Colton teased him. Graceful amplification! Elegant hydraulics!

  Chris cheered, refused to correct their Science.

  Upon discovery of the empty parking space, Chris's face revealed something close to recognition. I wanted to call the police, but he smiled and pulled Del's will from his pocket: The feds don't need to know nothing about this.

  We tabled our disagreement for discussion at a less emotional time and rented a car for the drive back to LA. The desert glowed pink, the soil reflecting the fading burn of a sky. Chris and Chris's phone were both silent, and then Chris said, We did what we could. I wish them well.

  I don't know exactly what to wish, Mom, but I thought about the way the wind sometimes blows the clouds lenticular over the mountains. Those clouds are the shape of lenses, named for lenses, but those clouds, like so many other things, are always opaque.

  Love, Charley

  Chickens

  JUST BEFORE SMITH, THAT turncoat of an Agricultural Extension agent, showed up on my farm with the rest of them, me and Jerry stuffed my chickens into wax-covered produce boxes and threw them in the back of the truck. I had just shy of a dozen hens, plus Hitchcock, the rooster. We covered them with insulated blankets to keep the noise down, and we played it real cool while Smith and the other agents searched the place. Extension used to be all advice and suggestion, but they're armed now, the agents, so now it's more like monitoring and enforcement.

  “I know you still have those birds, Gracie,” Smith said, the toe of his boot kicking open a fresh piece of chicken shit. “I've never known you without chickens. Why not just cooperate?” Smith looked awful smug for a guy who had soaked through the armpits of his shirt. I swear I couldn't believe, right then, that I'd ever shared his bed.

  Last month Congress banned outdoor poultry flocks on account of the bird flu, made keeping chickens a Class A felony worth ten years, minimum. An hour ago, my neighbor Fran called to warn us when Extension showed up at her house. Fran is a sweet white-haired lady who made a deathbed promise to my mother that she'd look after me, but mostly she just knits me a hat every Christmas. Fran's birds didn't have bird flu and neither did mine, but Extension was going house to house slaughtering any chicken that even maybe could have touched a wild bird. They didn't test them or anything. Raising chickens is regulated now. You need to lock them inside giant barns, install special ventilation and filters, pay for licenses and inspectors. Only millionaires can have chickens now.

  I'm real attached to my chickens, the hens anyway. They're barred rocks, and they have the loveliest black-and-white patterns, not quite speckled but not quite striped either, with bright red heads and combs. Each one has its own shades and markings, which is something you couldn't tell unless you'd spent a lot of time with barred rocks the way I have. It's like what they say about snowflakes and fingerprints. Each one of my girls is only ever just like herself.

  I named my top hen Montana because her markings are just like the section of Rocky Mountain range that I can see, on clear days, from all the way out here. That range looks just like a woman lying on her back, knees bent, ready to take a lover, the peaks of her face raised to the sky, joyful and laughing, her hair all swept behind her into a shallow valley. Montana has those same peaks and valleys etched right on her back, like God held her up and traced the pattern to get it exactly right. Sometimes I wonder whether God repeated beauty like that everywhere on purpose, like maybe he hoped humans would learn to see and reflect it, to find a way to copy it in the things we make ourselves. God is probably so disappointed.

  “Hey buddy,” Jerry said, looking at one of the agents. “Smith here, your big boss man, is having visions, thinks he's got some kind of psychic chicken second sight. You ought to make some kind of report about that.”

  Jerry was shirtless and the bottom of his pockets were hanging out under the frayed edges of his jean cutoffs, flapping against his legs. I hate those cutoffs. I tell him all the time those cutoffs are too short, but Jerry says he needs ventilation to keep his balls from getting swampy in the summertime, and I hate swampy balls, so there's that. He's six foot something, skeleton thin. He's got a bald spot on top but the rest of his hair is almost as long as his beard, which touches his chest even when he's staring straight ahead. Not a looker, but he sticks close by, so he'll do.

  “Watch it, Jerry,” Smith said. “I stay here long enough, I'll find those birds. This is an illegal chicken facility you're running. New rules say you build them a special shed or you don't raise them up anymore. It's for their own good. For the good of everybody. Can't be too careful with this bird flu thing.”

  “Jesus, Smith,” I said. “Next you'll come tell me that you have to lock all the people up inside sheds. For their own good. To keep safe. Is that what you want?” I know my history; I believe the government is capable of that, maybe even eager. The worst part of it, I think, would be the vicious establishment of the human pecking order inside the shed itself.

  Smith stared at me for a long time then, but he only shrugged, and he didn't find the birds.


  “You better get these weeds taken care of, Grace,” Smith said as he got in his truck, waving at my corral. That corral is a mess of puncture vine and Russian thistle since they took the water, with purple loosestrife blooms infesting the edges of my old irrigation ditch. “You know I have to report them.”

  “Spray them yourself if you want,” I said. “The government is the only invasive weed I worry about these days.”

  I worried for a while after Smith drove off, a plume of red dirt rising off the road behind him, about calling the government an invasive weed. They say we still have free speech, but it's hard to tell for real anymore.

  ME AND SMITH WERE sweethearts in high school and for a couple years after, but he ended up on the government side of the water grab a couple years ago, and that was the end of that. He's good-looking though. A lot better-looking than Jerry. Smith's looks are the only thing I know for sure about him anymore.

  The water grab was hard to swallow because I was raised patriotic. My dad fought in Afghanistan and other places he wouldn't name. Growing up, I spent Memorial Day at cemeteries, not barbecues, thinking about how freedom ain't free. I touch my heart when I sing the national anthem. I remember at least half the 4-H pledge, too, and I take it serious, something about using my head and hands for the good of my country. I believed so much in democracy and liberty and such that the first time I heard someone say that the government was going to eminent-domain our water rights, I thought it was a dangerous rumor and I said so.

  My acreage had so much water attached I could never use it up, on account of my great-great-grandfather was one of the first with enough imagination to replace the eastern Colorado scrub plains with sugar beets and feed corn. I could have turned my property into a private lake, learned to jet ski. I didn't, because corn was easy to grow and a whole lot quieter than a pissy little two-stroke engine, but I could have. Then drought, panic. Public opinion was firmly in favor of stealing my water rights. Everyone who didn't own water thought that folks who did, like me, were greedy, hoarding bastards.

  Smith was in charge of the grunt crew installing locks on the irrigation headgates that day. Fran's farm and mine shared a junction box, and I took my cues from her—chin up, back straight, eyes on everything, unblinking. The director of Extension, supervising Smith's crew, seemed unsettled by our presence. We could see his eyes looking our way even though he didn't turn his head.

  Fran turned to me, shielding her eyes from the sun with one hand. “You know this was coming? He tell you?” The men could all hear her. She meant Smith, and I could tell he knew it because he went as red as he had the first time he saw me shirtless back when we were both just sixteen.

  “Seems like he should have,” I said. Smith and I had woken up together that morning, swearing at Hitchcock's incessant crowing, but out in the field he wouldn't meet my eyes. It was like I was holding the scales of justice. On one side, I put the corsage he'd gotten me for our senior prom, the earrings I knew weren't real diamonds but sparkled like they were, the promises he'd whispered, as I sobbed in his arms at my mother's funeral, that he'd take care of me. At the time, I'd taken his stone-faced solemnity for strength, but there, as he helped the government steal my water, I put it on the other side of the scale—stone face, stone heart—and I knew he and I had lost any sense of balance.

  Fran frowned. “It does seem that way. Unless, of course, this is his way of telling you something else, Gracie.”

  The director of Extension gave Smith a hard look. Smith stared into the junction box, and I was glad to realize he was seeing a warped reflection of himself down there, the water disturbed by the action of the lock installation.

  Most farmers out here put up more of a fight than me and Fran, of course, but Extension, with the National Guard on their side, made short work of the standoff. In related news, nobody cares that I can't put crops in the ground without water, that my savings are near used up and my taxes are near due. Bacon grows in petri dishes now, corn comes husked and wrapped in clear plastic. People don't care about farmers unless it's Halloween and they're looking to visit a pumpkin patch.

  Hiding these chickens is real founding fathers shit. Straight justified civil disobedience. Anyone paying attention knows that birds belong outside. Seagulls follow the plows. Eagles glide on the high winds. Geese in V-formation still migrate with the seasons. Besides, you have to be exposed to develop immunity. That virus might soar for miles on the prairie wind like seeds of milkweed, of blue flax, but so does the dust that scours our noses and ears, the sunshine that bleaches us clean. My girls and their line will outlive those shed birds by a thousand years. They won't have to be afraid of wind and sunshine, of seagulls and seeds.

  I'm ashamed it took me two weeks after the headgate incident to kick Smith off my farm, because every time he touched me it felt like he was stealing something else, but I have appetites, if you know what I mean. One reason Jerry's here is that I can't abide having a cold spot in bed. For a long time, I've been hoping I'll start to love Jerry the same way I loved Smith. Jerry is a better man, softhearted, which is new for me and I like it. Jerry's kindness opens me all up inside, blows the stink right out of me. Jerry puts a bouquet on the breakfast table every morning, even when all he can find is milkweed or ditch sunflowers. He has strong opinions about the consumption of green leafy vegetables, makes us smoothies every morning and skillet greens for dinner. I never have to wonder whether Jerry's on my team, but I don't always know if I'm all the way on his.

  THREE OF THE HENS smothered during that first Extension raid, but Hitchcock and Montana and the rest came out of it okay. I've been taking Fran eggs every day to thank her. That must be all she eats because every day I see her she's shrunk a little more. I still have my garden, but she won't take any vegetables. She says they give her the slipperies.

  My girl Montana is the top of the pecking order and she keeps the other hens in line. We keep them hidden behind the barn now, one wing clipped, the wire fence hidden from sight by the pigweed and lamb's-quarters, the Indian cabbage and ditch sunflowers I've let grow. They're all twined together, those weeds, their branches linked up like kids playing Red Rover, a wall solid enough to keep the hens hidden in place. I like to watch the flock scratch around and gossip. Those girls have opinions about everything. For example, they don't much care for their new covert lifestyle. They prefer things free-range. They think Hitchcock, the rooster, is a real jackass. I happen to agree.

  Hitchcock is always strutting around like he owns the place, jumping those poor girls whenever he feels like it, which is all the time. He's insatiable. He tore the feathers right off poor Betty's back when he mounted her, which I think is why she's gone all broody and refuses to leave the clutch she's nesting on in the barn. The crowing isn't as much a problem as you'd think because Jerry made his living selling no-crow rooster collars to the backyard chicken crowd. It's real humane, the collar, just wire and Velcro around the rooster's neck. I wouldn't say this to Jerry but it's not really no-crow either. Hitchcock crows all day and all night. The collar keeps him just quiet enough that the neighbors don't hear, and at night I put a bushel basket overtop of him. We've got boxes and boxes of no-crow rooster collars in my hayloft because there's nobody to sell them to now. We're using Hitchcock to start our breeding program, and then eventually we'll need those collars for the little baby roosters our girls are going to hatch. We've already got a waiting list of people who want their own secret flock. Mostly they're last-minute preppers. They might be militia. Jerry's worried some of them might be government spies, but the truth about Jerry is that he's always been real paranoid.

  One time we were driving through Nebraska, me and Jerry, and a cop pulled behind us in the lane. His lights weren't on or anything. Jerry got all worked up about a dime bag he'd stuffed in the ashtray before we left. He was mumbling some nonsense about redneck cops and the war on drugs. I wasn't speeding and I knew my taillights and blinkers and all
the stupid stuff cops pull poor people over for were working. The only thing was my Colorado plates. Nebraska cops were still super pissed off about legal weed in Colorado back then. You had to be a little careful.

  “We've got to get rid of this shit,” Jerry said.

  “Be cool,” I told him. “We're fine.”

  I heard some rustling, and next thing I knew, Jerry had a mouthful of weed. He ate everything in the bag. I had to give him my Pepsi to keep him from choking on how dry it was. The cop got off the freeway two exits later.

  Jerry's real sweet, but he's a lot to handle.

  “THEY'RE COMIN' FOR THE damn chickens!” Jerry's eyes were all crazy, and he kept looking over his shoulder and waving his shotgun around. I have sometimes moaned about the plains, about no trees, no hills, no nothing but fields and ditches and short-grass prairie between me and the Rockies, the summer noon so hot I might melt, spread invisible-thin across the land, become tiny and helpless in the vast, big-sky world, but anyway the good part of it is the view is unobstructed. You can see deer rustling in a field five miles away. Behind Jerry, past the dry ditch, past the oil rigs, past Fran's house, I could see a line of red dirt plume rising, traffic on the road moving quick toward my farm.

  I had the same feeling I got right before the first raid, like when I used to jump into the snowmelt rush of the South Platte in June. I couldn't fill my lungs. My arms were thrashing around but not doing anything specific. My blood felt thick and gummy, slowed way down while panic sped the rest of me up. The air, like the water, held me down, constrained me.

  “Grace, this isn't a drill! Not a drill! Get to the bunker!” Jerry was shirtless again and barefoot, running across the corral all frantic, and then he must have stepped on a goathead or something because he started swearing and jumping up and down, staying in one spot but turning in a circle, holding the shotgun with one hand and grabbing at his foot with the other.