“Publicly,” put in Dill.
“What other kind is there? The definition of speech is that it’s public.”
“They talk plenty when no one’s looking.”
“I don’t want to abandon you like everyone else.”
“I think you’re specifically supposed to not abandon me like everyone else. Isn’t that the vow?”
“It’s too destructive. People coming at all hours. I don’t know if they’re bringing drugs or animals or what. And where are all these stupid chickens coming from now? We talked about this. We had an agreement. I can’t take it anymore.”
“How do you think I feel?”
“Have you thought about looking for another place?”
“Apparently you thought of it for me.”
“I hate it, I do.”
“That fucking helps.”
“Well.”
And then he’d gone back up to the main house and switched off the lights, no wave, no call goodnight, and Dill lay there and thought, Fuck, fuck, fuck.
So hours later, when he jolted awake at the phone’s buzz and knew the number, he was so weary, felt like such an emotional ruin, he didn’t think he could talk without weeping.
“Not you two again,” was what he said.
“Aw, be nice! You said call first. Here’s your call. We’re coming.”
“Thanks for calling. Don’t come.”
“We’re in a jam.” It was the younger one, Janey.
“I don’t care about your jams.”
“He doesn’t care about our jams,” she was saying to the other.
“Tell him about the birds,” he heard the other say. Cleveland and Janey. What kind of foolish names.
“You should see these birds. There must be twenty of them.”
“I wish you two would get another sideline.”
“You girls thirsty? I think they’re thirsty.”
“I’m hanging up.”
“See you in an hour.”
“An hour? Where are you? It’s after one already.”
“Yeah, and we have jobs to get up for.”
Of course there had to be people like these two. People do all kinds of strange things.
“You are not doing this to me again,” he said.
He hung up when he heard her laugh.
By the time they bumped up the driveway, it was three in the morning. They must have gotten turned around on those thin lightless roads, nothing but prisons and animal farms out there in the dark, NO TRESPASSING signs tacked up and shot.
They rolled to the shed, the dogs loping over, a couple of them letting out a weak bark, didn’t even give the pretense of protection, these dogs. Dill put his face against the back window. “You couldn’t let them out? They’ve been stuck in cages all night?”
“Their whole lives actually,” said Cleveland.
They carried the cages into the barn.
“So listen,” he said. “This has to be the last time.” He couldn’t look at the auditors, couldn’t face them, or he might just crack into pieces right there.
This is what it feels like to be at the very bottom, he thought. Now I know. But even as he thought it, he knew that was wrong. Crouching on the cement in filthy clothes and broken shoes, taking out the hens one by one, he could see in his mind how much further down this could go, tossed off this land, homeless, alone.
He wasn’t going to be there much longer, he explained. Unless he figured out some things fast, which wasn’t a strength of his. Never had been. He was more the kind who couldn’t take a hint. Stubborn. Sometimes this is called “persevering,” though not in his case. Any day now the banker was going to come out that door over there and tell Dill to get off his property. The banker wasn’t going to have a rifle in his hand when he said it, but the guy could get a tone in his voice worse than a gun to the head. So future hens had to go elsewhere.
He said all this while he gently lifted the hens away from one another because they were starting to clump together in the corner of the barn. He didn’t know where to advise them to take the hens, he said. He’d been shuttling most of them over to the sanctuary, though they’d told him under no circumstances was he to come back. That’s pretty much the line everyone was taking with him these days. And you know what? He was tired, just exhausted. Just fuck it. And now look at this, the fucking hens were clumping again. Did the auditors see this? The hens were all huddled up. They always did that when they got here. They were so used to being in those tiny cages that they were terrified of the space, all that air, the roof high overhead, and above it sky, terrible freedom, terrified, and they gathered themselves together into a clump and each tried to get into the middle. And they suffocated to death. Every time some of them died. Did the auditors know that? It wasn’t that they were stupid, like the banker said. In fact there are things about birds that would shock the layperson. There are intelligences in a hen that would amaze you. You think we can breed out in a couple hundred years what took a couple hundred million to put in? No, you just had to be patient. If you made it through the first night and day with them, they were okay, they started to get it, clumped a little less each day. You got past the danger zone. Sometimes you have to just stay there with them, keep them from killing themselves. Did the auditors know that each time they brought hens here, he stayed with them all night and most of the next day, just like Annabelle used to do, lifting them off of each other one by one—and they were so light, little balls of feathers the layers were (not like their gentle fat sisters, the “broilers,” what kind of disgusting appellation to give an animal)—and that within days they knew his hands and voice so well that they followed him around the barn as he filled their water and poured more feed? That by the time they were ready to go to the sanctuary he’d named every one? They laid eggs all over the barn. They were bred not to sit on their eggs but one sometimes did and last time she wouldn’t get up. Dill had brought food over to her because she’d never been able to sit on her eggs before and she wasn’t going to get up for anything. Dill had burst into tears when he finally picked her up off her egg to bring her to the sanctuary, burst into tears because she was such an intelligent, unintelligent little birdie, thinking her job was to sit there, stay no matter what.
The way Annabelle used to hang around and talk to them. Annabelle always had a lot to say.
When he looked over at the auditors at last, he wasn’t sure how much of all that he’d said. Not most of it, he didn’t think. He was a bit dizzy. The auditors were gleaming. They spoke as if they hadn’t heard a word he’d said so maybe he hadn’t said any of it.
“What makes you think this guy is going to be any help? He’s high on something.”
“Fuck, I am not,” Dill insisted. “For the last time, I’m not.”
“Listen, we’ve got more than chickens this time.”
He sat back on his heels. “Well, I don’t have room for a fucking donkey.”
“IS HE DYING or just sick? I can’t tell.”
“No, he’s coming off some Iowa drug made in a lab by ninth graders.”
“Help me get him up.”
The bird mind. This is an animal whose brain has been evolving for two hundred million years.
Someone had Dill by the elbow and was leading him into the shed, though he needed to stay in the barn.
Got to unclump the hens.
“They’ll be okay for fifteen minutes. Come on.”
While the mammal mind evolved on one track, the bird mind evolved on another. A dynamic rolling forward, not a lizard stagnancy. Bird thought dove deep into the cortex, didn’t skirt on the surface in large lumpy folds like humans. How was a bird supposed to fly with a big fat head? The bird brain is compact, has more neurons in a small space than any other animal.
He let them guide him to a chair and sit him down (because why not be a melodramatic asshole?), but when one of them came in with a bag of fast food he shot up from the table. “What is that?” he yelled. “You come in here with you
r hens in one hand and your bag of beef in the other? Don’t you dare put that on my table.”
She put napkins down in a pile. “Hey, when was the last time you ate?”
“You people make me sick,” Dill said hoarsely, backing away. “Get out of here.”
“You look like a junkie. You are so strung out. Sit down.”
Birds. Their ingenuity and cunning, their language and tool-craft, their local cultures, their long memories, their astounding charisma, their individual personalities. Some species routinely pass intelligence tests that apes and dogs and human children fail.
“You think we don’t know who you are?” said one. “It’s black beans and tomatoes. A side of guacamole. No meat. No cheese.”
“Hold the sour cream,” said the other.
He dropped his hands. “Taco Bell? This tasteless shit? I’ve got a jar of peanut butter if you wanted dinner.”
What a handful this guy, the younger said with her chin.
And they fly.
He sat down and ate.
He’d had three gooey burritos and a fistful of chips. He didn’t feel like he was going to pass out anymore. The women—Janey and Cleveland, he recalled now—looked a bit overcome by the transformation. “Wow, you look like you just stepped out of a Calvin Klein ad.”
He knew it. He’d always been like that, his whole demeanor could say, I’m in charge. Hair pushed back, I-don’t-care shoulders, bad-boy stubble.
“You were starving, you idiot.”
He sat back. His hair fell over an eye in a jaunty lock. “All right. I’m listening. What’s the bright idea? Lay it.”
They were a peculiar match, these two. The older one, Cleveland, cleared her throat. “We think we can do better than two by two like Noah’s ark.”
“Sorry, I don’t speak Bible. What are you talking about?”
“The thing about 9/11 …”
The younger one looked skeptical.
“I don’t see where you’re going with this,” Dill said.
“That was a grand gesture,” Cleveland went on. “Troy. Pearl Harbor. No one misunderstood.”
“This is sounding pretty radical.”
“We think you might be interested in a grand gesture. And we might be interested in pulling one off.”
He gave a dismissive wave. “Kill thousands of people? Sure, it’s a grand gesture. But come on. Not doable. Where are you going to get thousands of people? Besides, what’s the point in that? Everybody does that. That comes from uncreative minds. The same minds that build parking lots. The minds that shop the mall.”
The other one, Janey, held up her hands. “I’m sorry. Who are you two? What are you talking about?”
“How should I know? You tell me.”
“Pearl Harbor …” she said, disgusted. She leaned forward. “Okay, see this. Mysteriously from a farm one night all the chickens disappear, every single one.”
“That’s millions.”
“A small farm. Say a million.”
“You ‘incidentally remove’ a million birds. What are you going to do with a million birds?”
“Put a little fear in the hearts of Americans.”
“They won’t be afraid. They’ll be confused.”
“They’ll imagine it,” said Janey. “All those birds. Missing. It’s wild, it’s disorienting, it’s beautiful. People will find something in it.”
“Like what?”
“A message.”
“The birds are gone?”
“The birds are free,” said Cleveland.
“Free the birds,” Janey corrected. “Jesus Christ. One phrase to remember.”
“Free the birds,” said Cleveland. “It’s poetic.”
“It’s dumb,” said Dill. “What do you do with the chickens?”
“That’s part of it, the mystery,” said Janey. “Where did the chickens go? Suddenly the chickens have agency.”
“Where do they go?”
“‘Free the birds.’ Think of it. It’s a public service announcement.”
“You can’t bring a million birds here.”
“We come up with a plan for that.”
“A plan for a million birds.”
“We figure it out. You help.”
“I will not help,” said Dill. “Free the birds. Fuck’s sake.”
“We thought it was pretty catchy.”
“Since when are you into sending a message? I thought you weren’t into that.”
“We’re not doing it to send a message. You’re doing it to send a message.”
“I’m not doing it. But why are you doing it?”
Janey looked at Cleveland, who coughed a little and said, “They failed the audit.”
Dill sat back.
“Farms that fail the audit ought to be stripped of their UEP status,” said Cleveland stiffly, “or be subject to other measures.”
Stripped of their …
“The audit bit isn’t necessary,” said Janey.
“Of course it’s necessary,” said Cleveland.
What in the goddamn fuck …
“We have a farm in mind,” Cleveland went on. “A place where we know someone on the inside.”
“A place where you know someone on the inside,” said Janey.
Oh.
Got it. Goddamnit. Of course.
“Except one problem,” he said at last. “She’s not inside anymore, obviously.”
“You could ask her.”
“We don’t even have any idea where she is.” He always used first person plural when he lied. “Besides, no one would ever do that with you. Especially her.” He could feel his voice getting louder. “Because it’s impossible. Impossible to organize, impossible to get them out, impossible to find places to put them. And because it’s meaningless. They’ll just order more hens. They’ll fill up the farm the next week. And anyway I’m through having crazy people in my life. I’ve had enough crazy.”
“I can see that. Told you he couldn’t do it. Did I tell you that, Janey?”
“I don’t have to prove anything to you,” he said.
“Don’t worry, you aren’t.”
“You know what? I don’t want to hear another word. We’re done. Quit bringing your goddamn chickens here, and your fucking corporate tacos, and fuck you, by the way.”
“Fine,” said Cleveland, gathering herself up. “Come on, Janey.”
Janey rose, looked uncertain.
But Dill jumped to his feet. “Get the fuck out of here so I can spend ten hours unclumping the chickens you brought here.”
“Maybe we should help him unclump,” said Janey.
Cleveland was out the door. “You call us when you’re ready.”
“Never happen.” He followed them out.
“Yes, it will,” Cleveland called back. “You need us.”
He picked up some gravel and threw it at their car as they got in. “Forget I live here!”
“Jesus, what next?” was the last thing he yelled as they drove off.
And in the morning, after many hours of unclumping, he went out into the sunshine. He was exhausted and hungry again but he’d eaten all the burritos. His back hurt. Some of the hens from the last time the auditors had come were out in the run, taking their morning constitutional. They spotted Dill and came toward him.
Moving in a line along the fence, they looked like emissaries from another planet with their thin heads and round eyes, their inexpressive faces, yet clearly on a mission of friendship. Neither side had quite figured out how to communicate beyond pleasantries, but here they all were, together. When they finally caught up to Dill, he said, “Well, what do you want?” They gathered around him and looked out over the fields.
THE BANKER WAS AT WORK. Dill snuck back into the main house through the basement, like he did every day, helped himself to a few handfuls of cereal, noted that the banker had cows’ milk in the refrigerator—the poser was no longer even posing. He sat down at the computer and began scrolling through his usu
al sites. He used a ghost browser so that none of the world’s many assholes could see what he was looking at. It was Dill’s job to know what certain assholes were up to and their job to know what he was up to back.
Or, rather, used to be Dill’s job.
While he was letting his mind skirt over the pages, thoughts relax into off mode, the door opened and the banker walked in. He saw Dill. Sighed.
Dill sighed back. Removed his hands from the keyboard. “I’ll go.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“All right.”
“I was going to come find you.”
Uh oh.
“I have some news.” The banker sat down at the edge of the sofa. “I’ve been assigned to open a branch in Egypt.”
It took Dill a while to remember bank, branch of the bank.
“I’ll be gone six weeks.”
“Okay.”
“That should give you enough time to find a place.”
Ah, and there it was. At last.
He’d been expecting it for so long, he was shocked at the sharp pain, his brittle chest tightening and cracking, limbs breaking.
“I’d like you to be out when I get back.”
The banker, his small body, his eyelashes, his mouth. The banker, who’d let Dill stay all this time. God, Dill loved him for that.
“Okay,” said Dill.
“You and the animals.”
Well, at least one of the animals was the banker’s—that fucking fatass cat. Once Dill was gone he bet the banker would let the thing outside and that’d be the end of the songbirds around here. Oh, just think what this place would be like in a few years. A pool, a rose garden. Lawn. Dill didn’t doubt the limit of the banker’s bad ideas.
“I’m sorry,” the banker was saying. “You must have known. We both did. Things haven’t been right between us for years and …”
His voice, his moans, the way he hummed while he cooked, his brown skin. His suits, yes, even his suits. His hands. Dill loved the banker’s hands. His forgiveness, Jesus, the number of times he had forgiven Dill. Dill had had no idea how much he’d needed that. His sense of humor—not that it had been in evidence much lately, but the banker could be very funny, the smarty-pants.
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