“But it’s okay,” Rhea assures her.
Jelly Bean’s head is slowly bobbing. “My daddy said we’d stay in show business just long enough to buy a little filling station. But we pin-headed ’til the day he died, and then carted mama around pin-headin’ until she died. Then we pin-headed on by ourselves. ‘Til the do-gooders started doing their good.”
“We’re just doing the county fairs until September,” Rhea says. “Then we’re going back to the farm.”
Jelly Bean goes on with her story, hiding whatever sympathy or suspicions she has. “Oh, there’s been lots of famous pinheads over the years: Rosi, Wild Girl of the Yucatans. The Mexican Wild Boy. Tik Tak. Henry Johnson simply went by the name of What Is it? They called us Aztecs because we looked like the slopey-headed Indians on the walls of those old temples down in Mexico. To the last drop we pinheads was all Negroes.”
Shouts Robert Charles, “Black is beautiful!”
“Me and Robert Charles never got as famous as some did,” Jelly Bean says. “For one thing our heads was bigger than most, and we came along at the ass-end of things when the do-gooders started making people feel sorry for freaks. Midwayin’ ain’t no life, if you’re going to do it all your life.”
“We’re just doing this until egg prices go up,” Rhea promises.
“That’s good,” Jelly Bean says softly. She gets Joon another root beer. “We worked with all sorts of freaks. Midgets and dwarfs and men who could drive railroad spikes up their noses. Giants and fat ladies. Three-legged men. They’d have a painting outside of a man with three perfectly fine legs, running along or tap dancing. But inside the tent you’d see his third leg was just a little shriveled up thing with only a couple toes. That’s why I’m so surprised by you! I saw that painting of you and …”
“My father painted it,” Rhea says.
“… and I figured either you was a complete fake or you just had some bad skin disease. But when you come by my stand, and I see all those thick pretty feathers, I didn’t know what to think. Did I Robert Charles?”
“You was perplexed, Mrs. Roosevelt!”
“No,” Jelly Bean says, “I’ve seen alligator boys and snake girls and womens with hair on their faces like grizzly bears, but I never heard of a girl with feathers. I wish I was smarter so I knew what made perfectly fine and normal parents give birth to such strange children.”
Twenty-five
At exactly eleven the last dandelion head of pyrotechnics explodes over the grandstand. The smoky sky slowly turns black. The Ferris wheel grinds to a stop. People head for their cars. The Burgoo County Fair is over for another year.
Joon and Rhea’s father immediately get to work, folding the canvases, rolling up the canopy, rolling up the lengths of chicken wire that protected Rhea from the assholes, packing it all away in the pickup. Rhea takes charge of the snow cone wagon, scrubbing the counters, securing the egg cases for the drive ahead. By the time they hook onto the housetrailer and bump across the empty field toward the highway, it’s three in the morning.
“Dinkum County here we come,” her father sings.
“Do-dah, do-dah,” Rhea sings back.
At six they pull off the highway and stop at a McDonald’s for breakfast. Rhea stays in the cab while her father and Joon go inside to order the Egg McMuffins. She watches the normal people eating their breakfast at the tables. She sees her father use the pay telephone. Sees Joon wave at her while he sucks on the straw of a large Coca-Cola.
Joon joins Rhea and her father in the cab. They unwrap and eat, shoulder to shoulder, Rhea in the middle.
“Was that Donna you called?” Rhea asks her father. He is chewing angrily. “Who else would I call at six in the morning?”
“Everything okay?”
He swallows angrily. “The homeowners’ association won’t accept our offer.”
“And that means what?”
“It means we’re going to trial. I don’t know what those bastards expect from me.”
Joon lets his straw slip free of his puckered lips. He offers a sip to Rhea.
She accepts. As she sucks on the straw she watches her father’s disapproving frown. That frown has been there all week, every time she and Joon got within ten feet of each other.
They reach the Dinkum County fairgrounds right at eight. The old man at the gate sphincters his eyes and reads their midway contract. “Weatherman says we’re going to have a fine week,” he tells them. “Maybe some rain Thursday. Always rains one day.”
Rhea spends the day inside their trailer. She tries to read. Tries to nap. Goes from one tiny window to another, trying to spot the blue camper and rusty red truck that belongs to Jelly Bean and Robert Charles. When she finally spots it swaying up the road, she runs to greet them, without her cape and cowl. “Sweetie girl, how you doin’ today?” Jelly Bean squeaks at her, as she rolls down her window. “Where’s the elephant boy?”
“Helping dad set up.”
“Set it up, break it down,” Robert Charles says.
The next morning Rhea does put on her cape and cowl, and walks with her father and Joon to the midway. The sky is the color of a nasty bruise and the canvases are flapping. “Looks like our one day of rain is about three days early,” Joon says.
“Hope not,” Rhea says. But she’s lying. She hopes it does rain. Tomorrow, too. All week. All summer. She hopes it rains forever.
“I’ve made some changes,” her father says as they enter the square of canvases that surrounds her stage. “To make it a little easier on you.”
Rhea is already untying her cape when she sees them. “Oh, daddy,” she says.
Her father is quite happy with his work. He’s extended the chicken wire all the way to the top of the canopy. And not only in front of the stage, but on the sides, too. “You’ll be safe now,” he says. Outside the canvases the rides start to churn. Tinkles of tape-recorded calliope music ride the rolling aromas of French fries and grilling onions. “Let’s get to work, pumpkin seed.”
And so they do. And despite the bruised sky and the noisy breeze, it does not rain at all. Dinkumites by the score plunk down their dollars. They gather around the chicken wire, gawking and giggling, asking Rhea The Feather Girl again and again if she lays eggs, crowing and clucking as if they were the ones covered with feathers.
The next day the sky is as blue as a Wedgwood vase. The day after that even bluer. In fact there is not a drop of rain all week, despite the gate keeper’s wise assertion that it “always rains one day.”
It takes all week for Sunday to come. For the pyrotechnic dandelions above the grandstand, for the rides to stop churning. Rhea is inside the snow cone wagon scrubbing when Jelly Bean stops by. They hug. “Where you folks going next, sweetie pie?”
“Abner County. I think.”
“Abner County? That shriveled up prune of a fair? Hooo! You should be going up to Wyssock County. Big fair. Make some good money up there.”
“We’re from Wyssock County.”
“I understand,” says Jelly Bean.
Jelly Bean makes six trips to the phone booth before getting up the nerve to place her call. She holds the phone book and inch from her Aztec-parrot nose and punches the numbers with her cocoa-colored pinky finger. After only half a ring someone answers: “Wyssock County Children Services.”
“Yes ma’am … I don’t mean to sound like a do-gooder—because I ain’t one—but there’s this sweet little girl.…”
Twenty-six
There is no easy way to get to Abner County. No interstate comes within seventy miles and the old U.S. routes in this part of the state run east and west, not north and south. So April Poulard, twenty-eight, interim director of the Wyssock County Children Services Board, has to drive the narrow, curvy, pot-holed state routes.
She reaches the Abner County courthouse three hours and seventeen minutes after leaving New Waterbury. She writes down her mileage. “Jeesh!” She hadn’t averaged over forty-five miles an hour the entire time. As soon as s
he’s inside the old red-bricked building, a voice echoes down the steep oak-banistered stairway: “That you, April?”
April Poulard’s voice echoes up. “Mrs. Pilchard?”
A stocky woman in her sixties is descending the steps. She stops to catch her breath and study her counterpart. “You call me Ruth or I’ll throw my shoe at you.”
They take Ruth Pilchard’s car, a midnight blue Mercury. They reach the fairgrounds in just five minutes. It hasn’t rained yet today, but it rained yesterday, and the day before, and the clouds are still low and dirty. “I could flash my ID and get us in free,” Ruth Pilchard says as they join the line of people winding toward the ticket booth, “but I don’t think it’s a good idea to broadcast our business, do you?”
Sam Guss learned about April Poulard’s secret trip to Abner County the usual way—late night coffee and donuts with Doris Ackley at Edee’s. Doris is always eager to pass on the courthouse gossip to Sam, though Sam knows she would rather it be pillow talk than donut shop talk. Sam has been stringing her along for years like this, hinting at a future romance, digging out juicy stories for the Wyssock County Gazette.
The Abner County thing is the most bizarre tip Doris ever gave him. Bizarre but believable. Sam first heard rumors about the girl with feathers three, maybe four years ago. But he hadn’t tried to dig it out. You don’t write stories about strange people unless they do strange things. A story needs a hook. A story needs justification. As Managing Editor Paul Grant likes to say in his best West Virginia French, a raison d’être.
Doris was right about one thing: April Poulard is on her way to Abner County. Sam stays as far behind her white Ford Escort as possible.
He slips into an empty parking place across from the courthouse and watches April go inside. He watches her come out with another woman. That must be Ruth Pilchard, the woman Doris said April was going to meet. He follows them to the fairgrounds. So far so good.
Sam Guss hangs back and watches the two women buy their tickets. He could try to get in free with his press pass but decides to go the incognito route, even though he knows he won’t be reimbursed. “Au contraire,” Mr. Grant will twang.
Sam hides behind the public toilets while April and Ruth Pilchard buy cotton candy. He follows them down the midway. Slips the 35mm Canon out of the side pocket of his sportsjacket. Puts his ballpoint pen between his teeth.
Sonofabitch! Doris was right on the button. There, stuffed between two of those three-balls-for-a-buck-win-a-stuffed-animal games, is a flapping canvas with fat circus letters that says:
RHEA THE FEATHER GIRL
And that’s Calvin Cassowary, out front in the Styrofoam straw hat beckoning April and Ruth to plunk down their dollars. He knows it’s Calvin Cassowary because the Gazette has put his photo on page one three times since the Maple Creek Homeowners’ Association filed its lawsuit against his chicken farm.
Twenty-seven
When the table in the breakfast nook wobbles beneath Calvin Cassowary’s elbows, he pounds it hard with the flat of his fist. There is still an inch of cold coffee in the mug First Sovereignty Savings Bank gave him when he took out that first quarter-million-dollar loan against the farm.
He heaves the mug against the wall anyway.
Donna finishes blowing her nose and goes back to buttering the toast. “That was real smart,” she says.
“We’ve got a dozen mugs just like it in the cupboard.”
“It’s not the mugs, Calvin. It’s the wallpaper. It’s my sanity.”
He watches yet another television crew pull up. There are five of them now. It’s only 7:30 in the morning. “Fuck the wallpaper.”
She sets the toast in front of him. “And fuck my sanity?”
There are more than the five television crews parked in front of the farm this morning. There are a dozen newspaper reporters and maybe three dozen gawkers. There are kids from Maple Creek Estates, weaving their bicycles in and out of the parked cars. There are deputy sheriffs. There are three empty egg-yolk yellow semis from Gallinipper Foods trying to pull in.
The commotion makes Calvin think about that day at Kent State when he was a sophomore—May 4, 1970—and the Ohio National Guard opened fire on protesting students. Those shootings, senseless as they were, at least were understandable, given the madness of those years. President Nixon had invaded Cambodia. Students had burned the ROTC building. The National Guard was sent in, guns loaded. Nine students were wounded and four shot dead.
But why all this commotion now? Why are those two deputies unrolling that yellow crime scene tape? No crime has been committed here. The only thing here is an art major doing everything he can to keep his farm in the family for one more generation. “How long do you think it will be before they send in the National Guard?” he asks Donna, finally taking a bite of toast. It’s already cold.
Donna is squatting in front of the stove, picking up the coffee mug shards. “Tomorrow some politician will get caught with his pants down around his ankles and the reporters will go away. Everyone will go away.”
“That knucklehead from Children Services won’t go away.”
The dustpan of shards rattles into the wastebasket. “Everything we did was on the up and up.”
“Was it?” Calvin asks as he watches the Maple Creek boys ride chest-high through the yellow crime tape, pretending, he supposes, that they’ve just won the Tour de France. The Gazette’s first story on Rhea appeared three days ago, when he and Rhea and Joon were still at the Abner County Fair. Jimmy Faldstool read the story to him over the phone:
“The big black headline across the top of the page says, ‘FEATHER GIRL PROBED’ and the little headline under that says, ‘Children Services fears abuse by desperate father.’ And there’s this big picture of Rhea staring out through a wall of chicken wire. Good gravy, Cal. She looks pitiful.”
And that’s how Calvin found out. He ran back to the trailer, where Rhea was watching Joon eat his Rice Krispies, and, not knowing what to say, said only, “We’ve got to go home right away.”
They left Joon at the fair, to keep an eye on the exhibit, to keep selling Ice Noggies, and drove home as fast as the narrow, curvy state routes would allow. When they pulled in, there was a white Ford Escort sitting in the driveway. Inside the house he found that knucklehead from Children Services, April Poulard, asking Donna one question after another. Donna was crying from the questions and sneezing from the young woman’s apricot-scented hairspray.
The following day the Akron Beacon Journal and the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Columbus Dispatch ran their stories. Then the television crews arrived. After the six o’clock news the gawkers started arriving. The deputies. The boys on their bicycles. And now this morning the yellow crime tape.
At 9:30 the lawyer Calvin hired to handle his squabble with the Maple Creek Homeowners’ Association arrives. Donna opens the door just wide enough to let him in.
“Morning all,” says Michael Rood III. Remembering Donna’s allergic reaction to nearly everything, he plucks the war club-sized briar pipe from his stained teeth and slips it, still billowing, into the side pocket of his seersucker sports coat. Instead of a briefcase, he carries his important papers in a replica Pony Express saddlebag. He slides into the chair across from Calvin. “Worry not, my friend. I think we can get this ‘ol bag of donuts behind us pretty quick.”
“You said that about the homeowners’ lawsuit,” Calvin reminds him.
Michael Rood III admits his earlier mistake with a long hard nod. “Right-e-o. I said it would never get to trial and I was wrong. But it won’t be a long trial. No jury in Wyssock County is going to find against the smell of a man’s manure.”
“Let’s hope,” Calvin says.
“Any-hoo, that ‘ol bag of donuts is down the road. Today we’ve got another problem, don’t we?”
Donna brings him a mug of coffee. “They’re threatening to put Rhea in a foster home.”
“They always threaten that. SBB. Standard bureaucratic bluff
. Where is our sweet little chickadee, anyway?”
“In her room,” says Donna.
Michael Rood III approves. “Keep her there until the hoopla dies down. You don’t want to do anything that smacks of abuse or exploitation. Whatever you do, don’t yell at her with the windows open.”
Michael Rood III, saddlebag over his shoulder, stands tall on the porch and lights his pipe. The smoke boils straight up then flattens across the ceiling. He pats Biscuit on the head and walks like Abe Lincoln toward the road. He makes sure the charming old farm house is squarely behind him, so the television cameras convey the proper Reaganesque message—farm family fighting for survival against the Big Brother liberal leviathan. As he walks he wishes the Cassowarys had an American flag flying.
He stops at the crime scene tape and waits until the microphones are in his face. Then he says:
“I am Michael Rood III. R-o-o-d. I’m the Cassowary’s attorney. Rhea and her parents are quite distraught, as well you can imagine. But we are confident that this misunderstanding can—and will be—resolved quickly. There is simply no evidence that Rhea has been victimized in any way. She has feathers, yes. But she is normal in every other way.”
A reporter shouts: “Is it true she doesn’t go to school?”
Michael Rood III’s head bobs up and down. “Rhea is home-schooled. Her father trained as a teacher before taking responsibility for the family farm. Her stepmother has an associate’s degree in accounting. Her work is monitored regularly by the local school board. The Cassowarys are loving, responsible parents.”
A reporter shouts: “They keep her in a cage!”
“They certainly do not. That chicken wire was there to protect Rhea from the occasional fairgoer who’d try to pluck one of her feathers. Concerned, loving father protecting his daughter. Any one of us would have done the same thing.”
A reporter shouts: “I hear they only feed her bugs and worms.”
Fresh Eggs Page 17