Addled

by JoeAnn Hart

  Vita stood guard over her feathered friends and watched them finish the main course; then she pulled out a black garbage bag from the skiff filled with all the kitchen leftovers from the night before and tossed them on the ground as a dessert. The birds were vegans, so Vita did not save meat or dairy or eggs, but there were vegetable parings, outer leaves of lettuce from the salad station, and all the rolls that had been left untouched on the bread plates, the sacrificial lamb of many a diet. Onion skins and carrot ends she kept for her stockpots, which she needed more than ever now that she was cooking special dishes for Dr. Nicastro, making exquisite fatless, low-salt stock to use as a base for sauces instead of cream. She still wanted to tantalize his taste buds, even though she must no longer contribute to his flesh.

  As the sun began to glimmer on the horizon, she threw the empty bag into the plastic skiff and launched it back into the water for the short row back to the mainland. She fixed the oars in the locks, leaned forward, and pulled back in a stroke, propelling the boat across the surface. Some mornings she took the skiff for a quick spin around the lake before heading back to the Club just because she enjoyed it, not to mention the need to control that subcutaneous layer of fat. But she had lingered too long and had to hurry now in order to miss the sprinklers.

  “Damnation,” she whispered to herself just as she was getting ashore. She saw the silhouettes of four men in the distance, across the water. Was it the rat exterminators, who conducted their nefarious business in the off hours? Or impatient golfers? She wondered if one of them might not be that nice Mr. Amory, who’d been so cute all summer, always first at tee, so eager to start chasing his little white ball around the course. But no. This was a rowdy bunch, crouching and stumbling over by Trough with their clubs raised, playacting. She would have to start locking the service gate behind her.

  “Just like little boys,” she muttered as she got out and pulled the boat up to its regular spot. She turned and peered again, trying to identify them at this distance and in the dim light, but couldn’t. Two geese were flying toward her, soaring flashes against a colorless sky.

  “Too late,” she called to them. “Go find your own breakfast.”

  A storm of blasts broke the morning air, shaking thousands of feathered beasts out of the branches and up off the ground in a single roar of wings. Snipers? Hunters? The blasts came again and she screamed. An airborne goose seemed to pause to reconsider its flight path, then dropped, hurtling toward the earth. The bird splashed, half in, half out of the water. If it had landed on her it could have killed her, and she hunkered down. Just then the sprinkler system came on, forming a series of watery V’s on the course. Some spray hit her in the face, and so she screamed again but stopped when she heard the men curse and yelp, quickly gathering themselves up and scooting away in the cart.

  When all was quiet, Vita stood and stared at the rolling fairways spouting water in the pink glow of dawn. The mainland geese were scattered and distressed. She hoped her own flock was not too upset, for anxiety at this stage might cause weight loss, or a flush of enzymes that would taint the meat. She bent to attend to the fallen goose. Its head hung limply at the end of its neck, and blood oozed from the cavity of shot that had entered its chest. The goose had landed in such a way as to snap a wing back violently, almost severing it from its body. How odd to have poachers, she thought; it was practically feudal.

  She looked around. Homeowners would report the blasts, if they hadn’t done so already. She stared at the bird. The police would want it for evidence. But she had just prayed for a bird to practice on, and look, one had fallen from the sky. It was a goose from God. She stuffed the still-limber carcass under the skiff seat, casually arranging the garbage and feed bags over it. She’d send Merle to get it later. He owed her for letting him have access to the kitchen and its ice machine even after Gerard forbade the caddies such freedom. Merle could sneak the bird back to the kitchen later, in a golf bag.

  She rinsed her hands of blood in the lake water, then stood, facing the long rise to the club-house. If the police wanted to know what all the noise had been, she would tell them, within limits, what she knew. As she ducked and darted through the forest of sprinklers, nine crows circled above in the fresh morning air.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Greens Committee

  PHOEBE STOPPED at the bottom of her lawn to adjust her rubber sandals, really wishing she’d worn the soft leather ones instead. But she’d sworn off wearing the skin of other species, and this time she meant it. Still, it would be nice not to have to cope with stupid blisters right now. After all, she didn’t want to miss seeing the police bring Mr. Bellows and his merry band of killers to justice. She couldn’t wait! And it was all because of her. She was the one who dialed 911, standing naked at her third-floor window, her heart still pounding from being woken by blasts; she was the one who witnessed their overloaded golf cart retreating through the sprinklers like some crazy windup toy.

  “You’d better block the exits of the Club,” she told the police dispatcher, kicking the pile of clothes on the floor until her denim shorts rose to the surface. “I’ll meet you guys over there.”

  She hung up the phone, found her PETA T-shirt in the rubble, and, as she tied her dreads back, examined the course again from her bird’s-eye view. It was from that very spot, after her first violent jolt from her futon, that she’d seen the goose fall through the purple sky. But all was quiet now. Was it dead for sure? She hadn’t seen them retrieve a body, so maybe there was hope.

  She hurried, not even putting on her beads, and headed out of the house to the course she’d known her whole life, since before her family moved in after her grandfather died and her grandmother moved to Florida. It was a kids’ paradise, even if she did have to play by herself most of the time. She didn’t have sibs and not much going on in the way of chums either. There weren’t many other houses in the neighborhood back then, and even though her mom arranged all these playdates for her, it was harder to arrange for friends. She must have been born into some demographic black hole because there were hardly any kids her age at the Club either. And most of them were prissy things anyway, even the boys, none wanting to build elf-houses with her or help her construct stone-lined mazes. But it was just as well if they were all destined to grow up to be like Mr. Bellows in his silly helmet, playing British imperialist. Anyway, she always had Ben, half black Lab, half standard poodle, the result of some wild escape at the breeder’s but just the greatest dog. He died of old age and heartbreak during her first semester away at college. Home still seemed empty without him.

  She shushed the goats and clicked the back gate behind her quietly, not wanting to wake her parents, who would try to keep her from her mission, the way they were so tight with the other members. Or used to be. Something was going on with them now, though, something totally weird. Dad hammering away in the garage nights and weekends like some deranged gremlin, and Mom sitting on the screened porch with her wine watching the garage, no one saying boo.

  But when did the two of them ever say boo about anything? They were so dormant they’d barely commented on her new dreadlocks, which were sort of a pain, cool as they were, so people had better notice. But all Mom could say was “Oh.” And they wouldn’t even fight for their food. Where was the reward in converting them to vegan when there was no philosophical battle? She felt her whole education at Evergreen College was going to waste, all her books and papers and statistics on the fragility of the planet—how would her parents really understand if they never got to hear what she’d learned? Mom still brought home ice cream, like it was exempt. If only! Not a word about flavor either, the one argument she would have lost. She was only human, after all. Right? But not Eric. No-o-o. When he found a Dove Bar wrapper in the backseat of her VW he accused her of being more interested in her own desires than in stopping the suffering of animals.

  She had to pause for a minute on the course and wipe her eyes on her shirt. He’d told her. . .he’d told h
er she was just one of those rich white kids who joined movements so they could feel good about themselves.

  Well, when was it, exactly, that this good feeling was supposed to start? She sniffed and continued walking, keeping her distance from the sprinklers and thinking back to her rebuttal, which was maybe a bit more truthful than she’d intended. “A-and you are such a dry, sanctimonious stick sometimes,” she’d stammered. “It’s your fault I have to take my pleasure in ice cream because I’m certainly not getting it in bed.”

  He left that afternoon to join a raw-foods collective in the Willamette Valley. After a week of lonely nights, when it was clear that he was gone for good, she moved back east to lick her wounds and regroup.

  “Ahh!” Phoebe looked up and saw a shocking white heron with legs dangling, flapping overhead. It must have flown off when the guns sounded, and now, somehow, in that magical way that animals had, it figured it was safe to come back home again. As much as the Club tried, it could not kill all beauty. The grounds crew in their white hazmat suits were always tormenting the land with power equipment, spray-gunning poison, saturating the air and the earth until the birds began to teeter on shaky legs, then die. She’d seen the butterflies become still, then disappear; she’d listened to the peeping of the frogs grow weak, then silent. The Club’s chemicals seemed to kill everything except for the geese, somehow immune, so now Mr. Bellows was sent to finish the job. If only there were an emergency number to report the crime of total ecological annihilation.

  She walked beside a manicured hedge and ran her hand along its flat top. Like this place was some real environment! It was sort of crazy, the way she loved the course and wanted to help it, for all its artificiality. It wasn’t exactly like saving the redwood forest. Most of the tree species weren’t even native, and even those that were were kept at some ideal, unchanging size with saws. There was a Norway spruce up by the club-house that was pruned so unnaturally it looked like a cell phone tree. The gullies were fake, the creek beds phony, and the falling off at the end of the course beyond Hole #2, where once it had seemed to her that the earth’s crust had truly ended, was as much a Victorian folly as the little stone bridges that spanned nothing at all. And the lake. . .oh God, the lake!. . . it was lined with clay and as tidy as a kidney-shaped bathtub, kept sterile and blue with Aquashade. She couldn’t imagine what the geese even saw in it, except that maybe they had nowhere else to go.

  And that was really it, wasn’t it? Where were they all to go now that their old habitat surrounding the course had been stripped away? What that rat-bastard Eric would have called a “Northeastern mixed-woods ecosystem,” and what she simply called her old woods, full of birch and maples and scrub, had been totally replaced by mansions built so close together they cast one another in shadow. They had lifeless lawns, and on these sterile green carpets sprouted not trees, not even gnomes, but warning signs of ARMED RESPONSE. Armed response. She came back from college one day and she felt like she was surrounded by the military.

  Because of this, the golf course had become the last refuge for the little creatures. Not just the birds, but fox, deer, raccoons, fishers, squirrels, chipmunks, all feeding on the tainted turf, messing up their DNA for the next generation of wildlife, the next generation of us. Didn’t they get it? Poison a single amoeba with herbicides and the next thing you know, wham, another case of breast cancer in the world, and the researchers still shaking their heads about where it all starts as they play another round of golf.

  A few geese had returned to the scene of the crime, tentatively plucking at the turf. One hissed at her as she passed, carefully making her way down the slope, where she found golf cart marks but no dead or dying goose. A squirrel chattered at her from a tree branch, and she looked up. Hmmm. If the Club balked at going organic on the basis of reason, well then, maybe she would just chain herself to this handsome oak until they saw the light. Of course, she’d have to work out the logistics of food and facilities, and she wasn’t real sure about using a bucket, but there were some things that had to be endured for a greater good, and that might be one of them.

  She widened her circle, hoping against hope to find the goose still alive, but nothing. It must have fallen in the lake. But. . .What was that?

  A gun. One of those dodoes must have dropped it. The barrel was cold, so it hadn’t been fired. She knew she shouldn’t, but she picked it up, ran her hand along the polished wood, and, after checking to make sure it wasn’t loaded, rested the butt against her right shoulder. Her grandfather had brought her out to the range once and showed her how to shoot skeets. It was her best memory of the old guy. She looked down the length of the barrel, aimed it in the direction of the club-house, and laughed at herself.

  She lowered the gun. She and her buddies at ALF, the Animal Liberation Frontier, had been kicking around the idea of freeing some turkeys from what Eric used to call a CAFO—a Confined Animal Feeding Operation—and what she still called a farm. Bentham’s Farm over on Route 2, where her mom used to bring her to see the turkeys, some of them Bronze Beauties, with their bright feathers and purple wattles, just like out of her picture books. The birds scratched and mingled in the fields together. But those fields were gone now, sucked up by development, the poor turkeys imprisoned in long corrugated buildings with no room to lift their wings. Didn’t anyone understand that the suffering of animals was the suffering of us all?

  But how was she going to end this suffering if she was too afraid to go on missions? When she helped liberate the goats a few weeks ago she’d almost got them all caught because she froze. But what if she had the gun with her, to give her confidence? Not even to point, just to have hanging around, like she meant business. She couldn’t really get in trouble if it wasn’t loaded, could she? After all, unlike some ALF members, she prided herself on drawing the line at sabotage and arson. Keeping an unloaded gun seemed pretty tame compared to that.

  She heard a siren out on Eden Road. She had to hurry. Clutching the gun, practically scrambling up the slope on all fours, she ran back to her yard. When the goats saw her they propped their hooves on the top of the wire fence and cocked their heads, thinking of breakfast. Instead, Phoebe entered their pen and hid the gun in the eaves of their shed.

  “I’ll be right back,” she whispered, and kissed the black one on his musky forehead. “I’ve got to go save the Earth from idiots.” The white one baaed, and so she kissed him too. “If only idiots knew they were idiots,” she whispered into his silky ear. Then she headed back to the Club to tell the police, within limits, what she knew. She thought maybe she’d better not say she’d seen Mr. Bellows and his friends shooting, because now that she’d taken the gun, she didn’t want to get in trouble herself. The police would catch the offenders without her testimony. She hoped. As she tromped through the course, her feet rubbed raw from the stupid rubber sandals, a band of crows swept through the air in formation above her, flying to the lake.

  Chapter Fifteen

  A Few Practice Swings

  GERARD WAS FEELING very smug as he stood in the early morning air near the sheltering presence of his club-house. The world seemed green, luxuriantly green. And to think it had been so recently bleak. When he’d arrived at the Club, the adrenaline froze in his marrow at the sight of Phoebe Lambert talking to the police. Then an asphyxiating constriction seized his throat when he saw a photographer from the Boston Globe, who told Gerard—when Gerard informed him he would have to leave the premises—that he had picked up the news of gunshots at the Club over the police radio.

  Bellows. Gerard had almost said the name out loud, and looked around in a panic. If it was Bellows, he’d better have gone far and fast. If he was caught, Gerard was sure to be implicated. He was the one, after all, who had, in a moment of desperation, brought up the subject of goose hunting. And yet, in spite of the legal and professional circles of hell that were opening before him, he could not help wondering if Bellows had made any dent in the goose population.

  Gerard had tak
en immediate control of the situation, successfully insinuating himself in between Phoebe and the police, talking over her. He jabbered his name, his occupation, and his deep regret that the police had been called out on what could only be a false, incredibly false, alarm. He jostled Phoebe, trying to push her away from the authorities, and as he did he could feel, through the fine mesh of his pink ERCC polo shirt at his shoulder blades, her nipples. She was not wearing a bra. This realization stunned him, so that it took a second before he understood that she was telling the police she wasn’t sure if she’d heard guns or backfire.

  Gerard moved out of her orbit to give her space, carrying with him a whiff of incense, and he looked at her. Her skin, smooth as milk, still showed the imprints of rumpled sheets, and as his eyes slid down to her toes, he caught the sight of a tattoo on her calf: a teeny Earth, splitting open like an egg. “You know those SUVs,” she continued. “Anything they do, even backfiring, impacts the environment in a negative way. Some noise woke me up, and when I saw those dudes out on the course, I freaked and assumed it was them. But they might have just been playing golf or something. You’d better track them down and ask them yourself.”

  Vita, who’d been standing outside this circle waiting to be pulled in, stared at Phoebe too, wondering. There was no reason on earth why she’d want to protect goose hunters. Unless, of course, she knew one of them. Vita had heard rumors that Mr. Lambert had been losing it ever since he killed that goose. Maybe he was one of those poor souls who was compelled to repeat a trauma over and over again.

  Her old snack bar help, Scott, arrived, stripped down to his black swimming trunks and Birkenstocks for working at the pool, but she still felt a proprietary right to his time. “Scotty, go fetch some coffee,” said Vita, pointing toward the police officers. “And take last night’s ladyfingers out of the walk-in.”