Jerry worked the goathead loose and started running toward me again. “Goddammit, Gracie, move!” he yelled. We had a plan for this contingency, and yes, we'd run a few drills. We'd built a chicken coop bunker out of pallets we stole from the feed store. We lined them with scraps of plywood and stuffed them with straw until we had real solid walls. We had ammo and jerky and bottled water and K-Y Jelly stored in there. We could hold off a raid for a good long time. I'm realistic, so I knew that if we drew guns on Extension, it probably wouldn't end well. Of course, I didn't really believe it would come to that.
The dust cloud was moving closer. Jerry was still yelling. I grabbed Montana and three or four other chickens by their legs, flipping them upside down. This is supposed to calm the birds, or at least trick them into holding still. My hens are a bunch of ingrates, so they flapped around, screeching, trying to get a piece of my hand, or a fingernail, with their beaks. Jerry caught the other hens and we got them into the barn coop. I ran for my .22 while Jerry chased after Hitchcock. A .22 is not much of a gun. It's embarrassing to bring a .22 to a standoff with the government, but I had to live with the insult to my vanity. I climbed into the coop with the hens and looked out the peephole.
“Goddammit, bird,” Jerry said. He was half bent over, real ape-like, trying to grab Hitchcock. “This is for your own damn good. This is for the good of humanity.”
My dad would have known better than me and Jerry what to do. He was trained so well for combat he started to live for it, to seek it everywhere, create it when he couldn't find it. I was real mad at him when I was a girl, for re-enlisting all the time, for leaving me and Mom to grow the crops, manage the harvest, keep the woodpile stocked all winter. Now that I've had some time to think it through, I know he probably did it for our own good, because he knew deep down we weren't the enemy even though he treated us like we were most times. Still, I was real hateful to him the last time I saw him, just after my eighteenth birthday, when he flew home for Mom's funeral. He told me he had to go back, that he'd used up all his leave. I told him if I wanted to see him I'd just join the fucking jihad. I got the visit a few months later, the folded flag. It's up in barn storage, covered in a bunch of no-crow collars.
Jerry worked up a sweat chasing Hitchcock around. His forehead dripped and glistened, and the moisture set random chunks of his eyebrows against the grain. Hitchcock and Jerry were in a standoff, Hitchcock in full choked little crow, when Smith came through the barn door. I had a good view and a clear shot into that scene. I chewed some jerky and settled in for whatever was going to happen next.
Smith was dressed up fancy, and he had one hand behind his back. His brown wingtips were huge, like real-life fancy clown shoes. He had overstarched his button-down shirt, but it was blue and it made his green eyes look good, and his blazer was only a little worn in the elbows. He looked real handsome even though his mouth was gaping open all weird at Jerry. Smith couldn't see me. He wouldn't have expected to find me in the chicken coop, wouldn't have recognized the bunker as a coop. I don't know if Smith saw Hitchcock because the rooster went frozen and still, but Smith and Hitchcock looked a lot alike in that moment. They both looked worried and their feet were planted in odd directions. The rooster's eye was moving, vigilant, watching the two men. Smith was keeping one eye on Jerry, taking the measure of things with the other.
“Grace around?” Smith asked.
Jerry pivoted his body between Smith and Hitchcock and pointed the shotgun at Smith. “I want to see your piece,” Jerry said, real calm. “I want to know what you're holding.”
Smith took a step back and put a hand up, but it was a one-handed surrender, like promising something with your fingers crossed. “Let's just calm down. I only came out to talk to Grace. I catch you at a bad time, Jerry?”
“Who else you got out there?” Jerry said, lunging the shotgun toward the door. Jerry's voice was like one of those old-timey crank sirens, getting louder, more shrill, by degrees. “You got the guard out there?”
Smith seemed genuinely confused. “Wha?” he said. “The guard? What guard?”
“The National fucking Guard!” Jerry hit full wail, hopping from one foot to the other. He looked like he was on drugs. It's possible he was on drugs. “I know you're too chickenshit to come alone!”
Hitchcock made his move from behind then, launching with a staccato, helicopter whoosh. His talons, the scaly genetic gift from his dinosaur ancestors, landed on Jerry's shoulder and he beat Jerry about the head with his wings, the triumphant battle crow reduced to a few pathetic squeaks by his no-crow collar. Jerry let out some real high-pitched whoops and shrieks. He twisted around trying to lose the rooster, finally leaping onto a stack of two hay bales. In the chaos, his gun went off and I saw the spray of blood when the bullet hit Smith, who after a little staggering collected himself enough to pull a gun of his own out of a concealed holster and fire two really impressive shots. He took out Hitchcock and Jerry both before he hit the ground, and then they were all three silent, motionless. Next to Smith, the loose dirt from the barn floor was swirling, floating paisley patterns on top of a seeping puddle of blood, and in the middle of that spread was a single white rose. I couldn't see Jerry.
I retched up my jerky. Montana and the other hens started right away to eat it, fighting each other for position around my gut's steamy offering. All except Betty, who stayed watchful on her nest, protecting the shell-encased embryos of an entire possible future. People think chickens are stupid, use “birdbrain” like it's some kind of insult, but my girls have an instinct for self-preservation. They come home to roost at night. They scatter when shadows appear in the sky, search for cover from chicken hawks and bald eagles. They go broody when they need to and sometimes when they don't, like they're getting in some maternity practice. Soon, there in the coop bunker, the vomit was gone and Montana sat in my lap, preening her feathers, while I breathed deep and regular, trying to calm down.
I was thinking I should make a call, but the only government-type person I'd halfway trust was lying dead on my barn floor. I assumed a massacre, of course. It's natural I thought that, seeing that I lost both my parents at a pretty tender age. I imagine that every age you lose a parent is tender, probably, no matter how old you are. It's a raw sort of feeling. It didn't occur to me that any of those boys were still alive until I heard the moaning.
“Grace?”
It was a thin whisper, was all. I could barely hear it. I checked to be sure my .22 was ready, and crawled out of the coop.
I went to check on Jerry first. I knelt next to him, not realizing right away that the cool, thick wet I felt wicking its way into my pant legs, spreading in all directions around my knees, was Jerry's blood. His breathing was ragged and shallow. I took the shotgun out of his hands, kissed his bald spot, and whispered, “I'm sorry, Jerry.”
“My leg, Gracie.”
Jerry was bleeding bad from a wound in his thigh, near his groin but, luckily, not into his delicates. I grabbed at a pile of oil-soaked rags near the old Farmall, and Jerry winced when I pushed down, trying to put some pressure on the wound. The oil wasn't perfect, probably, but those rags were all I had to stanch the bleeding.
“You all right, Jerry?”
“That bastard shot me.”
“You shot first.”
“Accident,” Jerry said, and then he shuddered, and then he passed out. I made a tourniquet then, tight as I could. The blood slowed, but still it seeped and puddled into the folds of the oil rag, staining it further. I must have gotten a little lost in the image, because when I heard Smith call my name, I felt a chunk of time I could not quantify had fallen away from me.
“Grace,” Smith whispered. I looked his way. One of his hands raised up off the floor and held still for a minute, like he was giving me a real casual wave hello. It confused me, that wave, like maybe he wasn't as hurt as he seemed, but when I got closer I could tell he was. His gun was s
till in his hand. He wasn't pointing it at me on purpose, but the angle made me nervous, so I gently reached over and took it from him.
“Smith?” I said. “What the hell are you doing here?”
Smith managed a weak smile. “Dying, I think.”
“No.”
“Maybe. I brought you a rose, Grace.”
The rose was now fully immersed in a puddle of blood. When Smith picked it up and handed it to me, blood dripped off the tips and ran in warm, viscous rivulets down his hand and under the cuff of his fancy blazer.
“That's real nice of you, Smith.”
“You want to have dinner sometime?”
“Sure, Smith, but first I'm going to get you and Jerry over to Fran's. She can help you.”
“Fran was my piano teacher when I was a boy.”
“Yes.”
“I killed all her chickens. I didn't want to, Gracie. I know what you mean, that thing you said about sheds and people and fear. But I did it anyway. It was my job, and I did it.”
“You sure did.”
“Fran hates me now.”
“Maybe.” I hesitated for a minute. Smith wasn't wrong to worry that Fran might be holding a grudge, and I wondered if I should take him to the hospital instead. Jerry, too. Smith seemed sweet, repentant. He sounded like he was on my side, at least about the chickens. But what if he was just trying to soften me up so I'd show my hand? What if the rose was Smith's way of making sure I didn't best him on this chicken thing, a way to get me in bed before he took me to prison? Being caught with chickens was bad enough, but what would keep the police and Extension and God and everybody from thinking I was the one who shot them both? I'd just touched every gun in that barn. My fingerprints were everywhere.
I thought of all the questions, the police investigation, the ramped-up Extension enforcement, and I looked at my own girls, who had swarmed around Hitchcock and were working together to make a meal of him. Montana had torn open his back vent, and the girls were working on a full disembowelment, pulling on his intestines like gray-blue membrane-shiny maypole ribbons.
I was very fond of Smith, but I was not going to take any chances with the authorities. I took off my sweater, all the fabric I had, and piled it onto the bullet wound.
“Come on,” I said. “Fran will know what to do.”
“Fran was my piano teacher.”
“Yes.”
“Fran hates me.”
“Probably.”
I tried propping Smith up, having him lean on me but walk on his own power toward the truck, but it didn't work and he took me down with him. We landed all jumbled up together, my arm pinned under his ass, his left leg overtop of my right. It felt nice to be close to Smith, except it was alarming how light he felt, how loose and floppy his limbs were, the way the blood had started to soak into his wingtips. I am on the small side of average for a woman, but farm life has made it so that I can lift improbable things. I picked Smith up over my shoulders and carried him. He had parked me in, so I headed for his truck instead of mine. Letting him down turned out to be lots harder than picking him up. I tried to be gentle, but I stumbled when I opened the door and dropped him pretty hard into the passenger seat. He moaned some then. His keys were in his pocket, so I had to grope him some to get at them. He kept on moaning, his eyes turned up into his head like he was trying to read the fine print on his own brain.
I tried to move Jerry, too, but I had used myself all up. My arms and shoulders burned and shook. I just couldn't manage it. I propped him against a hay bale, kissed his cheek. He was still breathing.
“I'll be back, Jerry,” I whispered, letting my lips move against the softness of Jerry's ear. “I'll send Fran.”
Tears prickled the back of my eyes as I walked away from Jerry. I know I'm not the person I wish I was because even though me and Jerry had been together for a couple years, and even though he was always real nice to me and I cared about him a lot, I was happy it was Smith already in the truck.
FRAN CAME OUT TO meet us in her driveway. She had her white hair up in a bun held together by two lead pencils and was wearing a house apron that covered almost all of her, like a painting smock. Smith wasn't talking anymore, but he was bleeding a little slower than in the barn.
“Take him into the kitchen,” Fran said, glancing over each shoulder at the road. “Keep him over the linoleum. I don't want him bleeding all over my rugs.” Fran wasn't smiling but neither did she look particularly grim. It was hard to tell what she was thinking.
I laid Smith down, gentler this time, on Fran's floor. “You going to help him?” I asked.
“I'll look him over,” she said, handing me an old towel, frayed at the edges, with holes where bleach had eaten through the terry cloth.
“Okay.”
“Where's Jerry?”
“He's shot too. In the barn. Can you go?”
Fran nodded. “After I look to this one, I'll go.” She pointed at Smith's truck. “You best go hose out that truck. Try and get the blood as close to the stock tanks as you can, in the tall grass behind the barn where we slaughter the beef cows. Then you get that truck inside that empty grain silo in the back pasture.”
“Okay,” I said. Fran's hair was impossibly neat, not a strand out of place. I wondered how she managed it with those pencils, thought I'd ask her sometime about her technique.
“Grace,” she said. Her voice was sharp, like a slap. “You get that truck out of sight quick now. Quick, girl.”
“Okay.”
The earth swallowed Smith's blood, the grass covering everything. The silo smelled sweet, fermented, like cider. I walked back to the house. Fran came out with a bundle of linens. She threw her bundle and the towel I'd used in her burn barrel, doused them with diesel, and lit the whole thing up. I stood there for a minute, mesmerized by the flames and the fumes, trying to get my head to focus, to formulate some sort of plan. The fire was not part of a holiday, not a summer celebration. This was not the end. There was still the coop, and Jerry, and whatever was left of Hitchcock.
“Jerry?” I asked.
“He's okay. Got him bandaged up and comfortable. Needs the hospital soon, but that's not your biggest problem, girl.”
“Smith is going to die?”
“Ha!” Fran laughed. It was musical, like someone hit the middle C. “Dead men tell no tales. Darling, your problem is that this one is going to live.”
“Is he awake? Like is he talking right now?”
“No.” Fran was holding her hands over the fire, even though it was plenty warm outside. “Does anyone know he was at your place?”
“Not sure. He brought me a rose, is all. Asked me to dinner.”
Fran gave me a long stare, right in my eyes. “Did he see your birds?”
“Yes.”
“Jerry shot first?”
“Yes.”
Fran shook her head. “Gracie,” she said, “you have to make some decisions.”
“What should I do?” I asked. Fran, all sweet and white-haired on the outside, with her piano lessons and her knitting needles, just stared at me.
“You do what you want,” she said, “but listen. I'm going to burn my slash pile tonight. You got anything needs burning, I can throw it on.”
Fran was like Montana. Beautiful. Nurturing. Ruthless.
I shook my head and went inside. It wasn't the first time I'd thought of killing a man. I'd thought about it a lot the times my dad was home from war, whiskey-clumsy, talking down my mom and me. It didn't seem likely that I'd pull it off, though, especially not with Smith. Then again, Smith had stolen my water, come for my chickens. This shit now was just the after-that of both those things, an ending that was starting to feel heavy, inevitable. My dad told me once that no matter how much he believed in spreading democracy and just wars and retribution for terrorists, it still took everything h
e had to look at another human through the sight of his gun, a body with a beating heart, with people who loved and were loved by them, a life in progress, and pull the trigger.
“In the end, Gracie,” he'd said, “you do it because you're scared shitless that they'll shoot you first.”
Fran's kitchen smelled mostly like applesauce but also metallic, like Smith's blood. Smith's head was shaved, his clothes were rumpled, and a thin line of drool ran out of the corner of his mouth. On his blazer, stuck to the lapel, was a piece of chicken down. I didn't know if it came from Hitchcock or Montana, but the wispy tendrils were shivering as Smith's chest rose and fell. Next to him, on the floor, lay a wooden-handled kitchen cleaver.
I wanted to feed him. I wanted to bite him. I wanted to smash my boot in his nose.
I couldn't stop thinking of the day they came to take the water, years ago, when Smith just stood there, head shaved, gun drawn, pretending not to know me as the director of Extension locked my water away. I closed my eyes, trying to picture Smith the way I had loved him best, back when we were both just high school kids and everything was still real simple. At our senior prom, his rented tux fit him perfectly. He wore his hair long and his curls caught my fingers as I straddled him in the backseat of his mother's car. I can still picture the way the full moon gave a sheen to the vinyl upholstery, the oily flavor of Smith's Altoids coating my own tongue.
Back in Fran's kitchen, I needed my rage, but somehow I couldn't muster it. I closed all the windows. It helped to feel confined, penned in, to want for fresh air. I knelt next to Smith, the linoleum cool on my shins. I wrapped my left fingers around the knife handle, ran my right knuckles along the side of his cheek. He smiled a little in his sleep. I leaned in close, ran my tongue along the curved edge of his ear.
“What,” I whispered, my lips moving against the soft fuzz on his skin, “did you mean with that rose?”
Smith shifted a little, laid his entire forearm along the length of my thigh. He didn't open his eyes, and he didn't answer my question. I thought of Jerry, the way he used to put my braids between his thumb and his forefinger, run his fingers up and down them, declare his love for them, for me. He did the same thing with loose chicken feathers when he listened to the radio. Jerry said repetitive actions helped him get in touch with himself. I felt the steady beat of Smith's life where his skin warmed mine, and I breathed again, deep and regular, trying to match my pulse to his, trying to get in touch with myself. I was not afraid to act in my own best interest, but I could no longer discern the correct action. My instincts had lost clarity, cut to static. I imagined murderer's prison, chicken-keeper's prison. I saw my fields parched, my coop empty, my nation as confused and chaotic as my own silly girl heart—aching for freedom that seeps ever away, watching liberty puddle outside itself. Like tears. Like blood.
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