She got out of the car.
She walked in, a customer bell dinging the door. “Look who’s come to call,” she said. She shaded her jitters with a smirk.
Manny turned his chair thirty degrees on its axis and stopped. Smiled. “Now where’d you come from?”
“Nice place you’ve got here.”
“How are you, girl?”
“Never better.”
“What can I do for you?”
“Ask what I can do for you.” She strode up. “I’ve got an opportunity for you.”
He squinted, grinned. “Nah, I’m good.”
“Want to be involved in something bigger than yourself?”
“I am involved in something bigger than myself,” he said. “I’m the smallest thing I know.”
“Manny, come on. I know you’re the type that wants to change the world.”
“The world is changing every minute, with or without me.” Stretching back in his chair, arms behind his head, enjoying himself.
“Well, I’ve got a plan to make the world a better place.”
“Bad idea. Each time someone tries that we have another disaster.”
Damn this guy. She barreled on, told him what she came for.
He laughed. “What am I supposed to believe you could conceivably need that many battery trucks for?”
“This is a legitimate transaction, Manny. We pay you.”
“Not a chance,” he said. “I can’t get my hands on that many trucks at one time.”
“For twenty-four hours? Yes, you can. I know how this works.”
“No thanks. I’ll pass.”
Fucking Manny. An image flashed in her brain of her going back to the group empty-handed. Sorry. You gave me one assignment and I gave up in a hundred seconds.
There was the racket of a truck banging onto the premises. There was shouting in the distance, the war cries of premodern man.
She remembered the city of hens. A whole generation. She remembered the vision, hundreds of thousands of hens rising out of their cages and taking off into the night.
Her mind, six feet away from his, spun through all the calculations and permutations of how this could go. (Malcolm X calling out to his Muslim brothers, raising a fist. The queen strutting forward on the chessboard. Her mother, eyes lifted, leaning in.) Janey tilted her head, pursed her lips. Had one card left to play. She stepped forward. Her face must have already changed because he leaned back. “You thought you’d get off so easy as the price of a couple of motel rooms? What would Carol think?” She folded her arms.
He paled.
She almost faltered. “It’s for a good cause,” she allowed. “I promise.”
He rubbed his forehead. “Who’s going to drive these trucks? Permitted drivers?”
“Of course.” (She’d have to remember to ask Dill about that.)
“You got the money? It’ll cost to get forty-eight battery trucks. Those run one-fifty a day each. You know how it’s done. No shortcuts.”
“That’s, let’s see …”
“About seven grand. Plus tax and gas. And insurance.” He shook his head. “What do you need all these trucks for?”
“It’s legit.”
He counted on his fingers. “I guess I can give them to you at cost. That’ll bring it down to one-oh-five apiece, plus insurance. Meet me halfway. You get me six grand and promise me you’ll bring only licensed drivers. I’ll see what I can do.”
“Okay.”
“And bring them back with gas.”
“Of course.”
“I don’t want to hear about this on the news.”
“You won’t, Manny.”
“And you’re not blackmailing me. Is that clear?”
“Of course, Manny.”
He sighed. “Christ, Janey.”
She went out to her car and called Dill. “We’re going to need some cash.”
“Fine,” said Dill. “My husband is a longtime contributor.”
“We need six thousand dollars.”
“I’m on the emergency account,” he said. “Not after this, of course.”
THE FACT THAT they never did settle on what would happen to the hens, not each and every one, wasn’t their fault. There were simply too many. Only nine hundred thousand, since two of the barns would be empty, but still. You had to get places willing to commit to this. You’d have sixty trucks filled with fifteen thousand hens apiece, though you’d have to assume 5 percent wouldn’t make it, so say fourteen K with casualties, give or take. This was all ballpark.
They had contacts. Annabelle knew people at every sanctuary and shelter in the country but still it was an awful lot of hens. She and Dill pulled together a list. Most of the places didn’t specialize in birds, were more educational facility than refugee camp. They kept representative samples: you had your pigs, your cows, your turkeys. Always a nice fat barnyard for the chickens, sure. A good hundred hens running around.
“You said fourteen, right? Bring ’em. We’ll make room.”
“Well, fourteen thousand.”
“Thousand?”
“Some might die on the way.”
“You want to bring them here?”
There were the horse havens, the circus-animal rest homes, the wildlife sanctuaries for the lost coyote or the bird that hits the glass. The only way these places would take a hen was by force: If, say, an investigator showed up in a truck and refused to leave, which Annabelle and Dill were not above doing. Or if, say, someone simply released them into the sanctuary at night. Also not above doing. Desperate times and all that.
“Holy shit. Fourteen grand? What a story. Whose exclusive is this? CBS, am I right?”
“No story.”
“Excuse me?”
“No publicity.”
There was one place, way off in the high hills of California, a long valley full of flowers, a refuge solely for spent hens. The group had thousands of these ladies. True, the most they’d ever had was four thousand, but surely they’d take a full truck if it could get that far.
Once a lady in Woodstock flew eleven hundred hens in a cargo plane.
A farm sanctuary in Michigan had a brand-new barn, could hold a hundred hens, maybe a hundred and twenty-five.
One place, you could pay fifty bucks and get a photo of a saved hen or a goat or a turkey. If you paid two hundred you got to name one. Five hundred and you got your name scratched onto a wall for all the animals to see.
“You want to ‘drop them off.’”
“We’ve got people to unload them.”
“Someone brought fifty here once. Someone brought ten. No one ever brought a hundred. Much less … how many did you say? Can I ask where you are getting twenty-eight thousand chickens?”
If two shelters were fairly near each other, they could split a truck, was Annabelle’s thinking. One shelter could take the fourteen thousand—the empty truck making its escape through the night—and then the two shelters could transfer half the hens bit by bit over the next week.
“In what? An ice cream truck? A wheelbarrow? How are we supposed to move seven thousand hens?”
Some said no and hung up shaking their heads. Some thought about it a little more on the toilet and called back an hour later. Some said no and determined to have nothing to do with Annabelle or Dill ever, ever, again. Yeah, they meant it this time. What kind of irresponsible assholes did you have to be to take that insane quantity of chickens—seventy-five hundred? Twelve grand of chickens?
But surprisingly many agreed.
“Listen,” said Annabelle. “We’ve got to get serious. We have reached the apex of employment-based investigations. It’s all falling apart. The farmers are onto us. They’re a slow bunch, but they’re catching on. They share databases now. They have facial recognition software, fingerprint scanning. They’ve got the government in their pocket more than ever. Ag-gag is old news, only the beginning. The walls are closing in, the corridors shrinking like a cartoon. It’s time for extreme measures.�
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“We’ll figure it out, bring them,” they said. This generosity may have been due to the fact that an assortment of gritty animal rights activists ran the sanctuaries, from young aspiring investigators to the former underground subversives of the ’80s and ’90s.
“Right on,” said the old-timers. They’d been around for the era of farm sabotage, they’d smashed equipment, slashed tires. “We’ve become tame. We’re herd animals now.”
“Bring them,” said the young ones. “This is what we signed on for. Not leading Saturday tours through the turkeys.” They’d fought hard, gone door to door for months. Won, celebrated, only to see the watery compromises. The meaningless increments. The lack of oversight. Egg-free doughnuts, four more inches of cage space, progress implemented on a fifteen-year time line, hens represented by people in suits.
These days animal activism was less revolution, more capitalism with a conscience.
“What is the matter with us, letting the enemy bulldoze us while we stammer and politely disagree?”
They had been there for the fast-food battles, had cheered when McDonald’s agreed to go cage free. Now they found themselves in the preposterous position of having to approve of eating eggs at McDonald’s.
“Fourteen K? Now that’s what I’m talking about.” (They didn’t yet know about the other eight hundred and eighty-six thousand, since these folks could keep a secret.)
“We came from radical roots and must return to them,” said Annabelle. “This is a call to arms, a revolt, a long-awaited swing away from the rich man’s middle and back over to the rebel left where we belong.”
“Bring them! Bring them!”
It was time to set aside childish things, they agreed. Time to wrest the power away from the oppressors. Western civilization was dead from conception if this was the end result. America may have created the first modern democracy but it also invented six out of the twelve greatest evils this earth has ever seen.
“It’s time to reject the so-called Renaissance and go Dada on these assholes,” they cried.
It was already too late. They all knew it. The enemy has clearly won. Soon all that will be left of the miracle of our planet will be the monocrops of damaged cows, pigs, dogs, hens, a few other practical species—and humans, horrible, unbeatable, disgusting humans.
But the sanctuaries were still run by warriors, and they would have their moment of no.
“I’m sending you a gift,” she said. “I wanted to give you advance warning.”
“This must be absolutely confidential,” she said. “I know I can trust you.”
“Yes, yes, you can trust us,” they said. “Bring them.”
In one case it was a new high school intern who answered the phone, agreed with little comprehension to take the hens, and left a note on the desk of the director, who read it, muttering in confusion (“who are these interns?”) and became distracted by another problem. The note was lost under a pile of papers.
And when she and Dill had finished going through the list, had called every contact (eighty-three total), and assigned trucks to those who agreed (and to those who said maybe, and to a few who said no), they settled down to review.
Dill ran his finger down the sheet and stopped. “Oh no, wait.”
What words to introduce now! No? Wait?
“That’s only fifty-eight trucks,” he said. “Who’s taking these two?”
Annabelle looked over his shoulder. “Yeah, I’m taking care of them.”
Dill lowered the sheet. “What do you mean, ‘taking care of them’?”
So this whole end of the wagon was rickety before they even got started.
THINK HIGH-RISES, gated communities, all the places that give you a twitch of existential dread. The Amazon shipping facilities, the dying superstores, the prisons and detention centers, the pig farms, all the boxes that hold products and people and animals, the LeCorbusian landscape one skirts over or through, avoids. Think of the smaller boxes that we press our faces to, think of all the tiny digital boxes we touch with our fingers to signal alliance, passion, smarts, nostalgia, enmity, the whole of our minds.
Think of a guy, a lone man, sitting far below in a box of tin and wheels, a stretch of plain earth around him. Deep dawn, barren concrete, bluing sky (though the footage was black and white so the sky would look gray). The guy, Matt (but some of them don’t use their real names), grabbed his plastic lunch bag and got out of the car. He walked toward the steel barn (the mic recording his breath and the sound of his steps). Inside, he pulled his time card out of the slot. His phone buzzed.
Another one, Chris, two states away, was already walking through the barn, saying hello to everyone he passed (his “character” was “friendly, helpful”) over the hens’ tremendous coo. (His camera was off. He flipped it on only when necessary. Early in his “career” he’d felt like he was making a zombie movie: horror with four million hens, and he’d let the camera run on and on. But these days he thought of his films—well, footage—as mumblecore: too boring for anyone to bother watching.) In his pocket his phone rang. He pulled off a glove and silenced it, didn’t look to see who it was. He was supposed to leave his phone in his locker. The first rule of being an investigator: follow farm rules.
The investigators. She was summoning them.
There was Joey, an ultraprofessional—calculating, quiet, efficient, earnest, not a drop of the smartass in him—but so short that the camera, disguised as his top button, hit the farm managers at their bellies so that it was nearly impossible to catch their faces. He wore heels for professional purposes, cowboy boots (not leather, of course, but some quasi-recycled substance). The boots helped maybe a little but made his feet hot. His call came while he was still sipping coffee at the motel. It was an hour earlier there. He saw the number. What, was she back?
The investigators. Their squeaky shoes in the not-quite dawn. Their humble lunches of fake meat in a grocery sack. The time zones turning up and down across the country like a dial. Their video flickering on at 6:45 a.m., the first shot of the day the local paper (proof of place and date). They’d trained in covert operations, physical and psychological warfare. There were only a couple dozen active in the country at any time, spread out among the various organizations. A few dozen more who’d quit after a few years’ run. She knew every one of them and had all their numbers.
There was Penelope. Max. Shawn. Frank.
There was the Canadian investigator, a woman with a voice like Mary Poppins. No one could remember her name. She was just “that Canadian,” as in, “That Canadian can flirt the farmers into anything.”
Jim, the philosopher-investigator, who, when the call came, was walking the long rows of hens. Hens and hens and hens. It was an exercise in repetition, a mathematical situation, Zenoean, Steinian, Sisyphean. The cages, the eggs, the beaks, the long journeys down the aisles. The hours of depop, vac, debeaking, the sound of the birds, the amazing amount of excrement, the same jokes over and over, the dead birds he ripped from the floor of the cages (“mummies,” they called them), an infinite series of infinite series. His phone was in his locker. She left a message.
There was Uriel. He could tell stories of shit, all right. The shit pit, walking around in it, shoveling paths through it, shit mounds eight feet high, a forest of them, stray hens running around and living in it (which would be better, he pondered, to live in a cage or in shit?), the shit being dumped in the fields and wafting into the air, turning everything white—the trees, the grass, himself, white with shit.
Ben’s charisma, Mariam’s charm, Tame’s sense of humor, but also their deep sorrows, their solitary natures, their disturbances. They were all covering disappointments in one way or another, throwing another blanket on top.
There was JT, six foot four, former quarterback. First glance at his footage and you’d think he did nothing but bitch, a running monologue of complaints through his workday. The hours, the filth, the heat, the cold. What an asshole. But in this way he was ab
le to talk to the farmhands all day, get verbal confirmations from managers, and be above suspicion (all farmers know an investigator never complains—it’s the hardest workers you have to look out for). You’d have to admit JT was a damn professional and on top of that a great comedian.
JT got the call on his boat because he’d quit (the bitching wasn’t only a technique), had taken his cash, bought this little used skipper, was sailing away to Gilligan’s Island, never coming back. Fuck them all.
When she called, he was starboard, coiling ropes. He saw it was her and (he couldn’t help it) answered—his first (or next) mistake.
Simon, who never went anywhere without a weapon.
Tinker, who recorded every phone conversation he had and listened to them later when he was alone. He recorded his conversations with his mother.
Pooky, who’d had it with investigating. They’d risked his safety over and over. He’d tell anyone who asked. He had proof of it all.
Mostly men, mostly white, the investigators, though a handful were women, and some were Latino. A few more than you’d think from across oceans.
They walked, the investigators, each day from their cars to the barns. Today it was Ian, Guillermo, James, Pat. Midwest flatness in the distance. Desolate earth that they saw at its most desolate hour—in the ice-dark. Or at the loveliest hour: in California, the soft dawn, leafy light, the lucky bastard investigators who got assigned there. Jonny, AJ, Joel the Jew.
Dylan, who’d captured some classic footage before he quit. A details man, skilled at showing abundance. He’d filmed whole dumpsters of dead hens dropping through the air into trucks. He filmed flies that were like walking on popcorn, flies that looked like piles of dirt. Dead flies all over the counters, the plywood, the eggs. And live flies in the air, swirling in front of the camera.
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