by Rick Moody
I’m getting away from the story, though. I really meant to talk about ostrich eggs. After ten years of trying to get the Rancho Double Zero to perform fiscally, my parents had to sell the whole thing and declare bankruptcy. That’s the sad truth. But it was no shame. Everybody they knew was bankrupt. Everybody in Bidwell, practically, had a lien on their bank account. When we were done with the Double Zero, we had nothing left but a bunch of ostrich eggs, the kind that my parents used to sell out in front of the farm, under a canopy, for people who came out driving. There were three signs, a quarter mile apart, See the Ostriches! Two Miles! And then another half-mile. Ostrich eggs! Five dollars each! Then another. Feed the ostriches! If you dare!
I remember giving the feeding lecture myself to a couple from back East. They were the only people who’d volunteered to feed the ostriches in weeks. I handed them the Cleveland Indians cups. They were dressed up fine. You can either put some of this corn in your hand and hold it out for the ostriches, but I sure wouldn’t do that myself because I’ve seen them pick up a little kid and whirl him around like he was a handkerchief and throw him over a fence, bust his neck clean through. Or you can hold out the cup and the ostriches will try to trample each other to death to get right in front of you, and then one of those pinheads will descend with incredible force, steal the entire cup away. Or else you can just scatter some corn at the base of the electrified fence there and get the heck out of the way, which is certainly what I’d do if I were you. Who would come to Bidwell from anywhere, I was asking myself, unless they were trying to avoid a massive interstate manhunt? Probably this couple, right here, laughing at the poor dumb birds, probably they were the kind of people who would sodomize an entire preschool of kids, rob a rich lady on Park Avenue, hide her body, grind up some teenagers, and then disappear to manage their investments.
Anyhow, that ranch came and went and soon we were in a used El Dorado with 120,000 miles on it. I was in the backseat, with five dozen unrefrigerated ostrich eggs. Dad was forty-eight, or thereabouts, and he was bald, and he was paunchy, and, because of the failure of all the gold-rush schemes, he was discouraged and mean. If he spoke at all it was just to gripe at politicians. He was an independent, in terms of gripes. Just so you know. Non-partisan. And the only hair left on his ugly head, after all the worrying, was around those two patches just above his ears, just like if he were an ostrich chick himself. Because you know when they came out of the shell, these ostrich chicks looked like human fetuses. In fact, I’ve heard it said that a human being and an ostrich actually share forty-eight percent of their DNA, which is pretty much when you think about it. So Dad looked like an ostrich. Or maybe he looked like one of those cancer survivors from Golden Meadow Estates who were always saying they felt like a million bucks even though it was obvious that they felt like about a buck fifty. Mom, on the other hand, despite her bad business decisions, only seemed to get prettier and prettier. She still spent a couple of hours each morning making up her face with pencils and brushes in a color called deadly nightshade,
In terms of volume, one ostrich egg is the equivalent of two dozen of your regular eggs. It’s got two liters of liquefied muck in it. That means, if you’re a short order cook, that one of these ostrich eggs can last you a long time. A whole day, maybe. The ostrich shell is about the size of a regulation football, but it’s shaped just like the traditional chicken eggshell. Which is something I was told to say to tourists, Note your traditional eggshell styling. The ostrich egg is so perfect that it looks fake. The ostrich egg looks like it’s made out of plastic. In fact, maybe the guys who came up with plastics got the idea from looking at the perfection of the ostrich egg. Myself, I could barely eat one of those ostrich eggs without worrying about seeing a little ostrich fledgling in it, because it looked so much like a human fetus, or what I imagined a human fetus looked like based on some pictures I’d seen in the Golden Books Encyclopedia. What if you accidentally ate one of the fledglings! Look out! They make pretty good French toast, though.
Over the years, my dad had assembled an ostrich freak exhibition. There were lots of genetic things that could go wrong with an ostrich flock, like say an ostrich had four legs, or an ostrich had two heads, or the ostrich didn’t have any head at all, just a gigantic midsection. Maybe the number of genetic abnormalities in our stock had to do with how close the farm was to a dioxin-exuding paper plant, or maybe it was the chromium or the PCBs, whatever else. It was always something. The important part here is that the abnormalities made Dad sort of happy and enabled him to have a collection to take away from the Rancho Double Zero, and what’s the harm in that. Not a lot of room for me in the backseat, though, what with the eggs and the freaks.
The restaurant we started wasn’t in Bidwell, because we had bad memories of Bidwell, after the foreclosure and all. There wasn’t much choice but to move farther out where things were cheaper. We landed in Pickleville, where it was real cheap, all right, and where there wasn’t anything to do. People used to kill feral cats in Pickleville. There was a bounty on them. Kids learned to obliterate any and all wildlife. Pickleville also had a train station where the out-of-state train stopped once a day. Mom figured what with the train station nearby there was a good chance that people would want to stop at a family-style restaurant. So it was a diner, Dizzy’s, which was the nickname we had given our ostrich chick with two heads. The design of our restaurant was like the traditional style of older diners, you know, shaped like a suppository, aluminum and chrome, jukeboxes at every booth. We lived out back. I was lucky. I got to go to a better school district and fraternize with a better class of kids who called me hayseed and accused me of intimate relations with brutes.
My parents bought a neon sign, and they made a shelf where Dad put his ostrich experiments, and then they got busy cooking up open-faced turkey sandwiches and breaded fish cutlets and turkey hash and lots of things with chipped beef in them. As far as I could tell, just about everything in the restaurant had chipped beef in it. Mom decided that the restaurant should stay open nights (she never had to see my dad that way, since he worked a different shift), for the freight trains that emptied out their passengers in Pickleville occasionally. Freight hoboes would come in wearing that hunted expression you get from never having owned a thing and having no fixed address. Sometimes these guys would order an egg over easy, and Dad would attempt to convince them that they should have an ostrich egg. He would haul one of the eggs out of the fridge, and the hoboes would get a load of the ostrich egg and there would be a terrified flourishing of change money, and then these hoboes would be gone.
My guess is that Dad had concluded that most midwestern people were friendly, outgoing folks, and that, in spite of his failure in any enterprise that ever had his name on it, in spite of his galloping melancholy, he should make a real attempt to put on a warm, entertaining manner with the people who came into the diner. It was a jolly innkeeper strategy. It was a last-chance thing. He tried smiling at customers, and even at me, and he tried smiling at my mother, and it caught on. I tried smiling at the alley cat who lived in the trailer with us. I even tried smiling at the kids at school who called me hayseed. Then an ostrich egg ruined everything.
One rainy night I was up late avoiding homework when I heard a really scary shriek come from the restaurant. An emergency wail that couldn’t be mistaken for anything but a real emergency. Made goosebumps break out on me. My pop burst into the trailer, weeping horribly smashing plates. What I remember best was the fact that my mother, who never touched the old man at all, caressed the bald part of the top of his head, as if she could smooth out the canals of his worry lines.
It was like this. Joe Kane, a strip-club merchant in Bid-well, was waiting for his own dad, Republican district attorney of Bidwell, to come through on the train that night. There’d been a big case up at the state capital. The train was late and Joe was loafing in the restaurant, drinking coffees, playing through all the Merle Haggard songs on the jukebox. After an hour or two of igno
ring my dad, Joe felt like he ought to try to say something. He went ahead and blurted out a pleasantry,
—Waiting for the old man. On the train. Train’s running late.
Probably, Dad had thought so much about this body that was right there in front of him, this body who happened to be the son of the district attorney, that he started getting really nervous. A white foam began to accumulate at the corners of his mouth. Like in your chess games that kind of pile outward from the opening, maybe dad was attempting to figure out every possible future conversation with Joe Kane, ahead of time, so he would have something witty to say, becoming, in the process, a complete retard.
He said, for example, the immortal words, —How-de-do.
—How-de-do? said Joe Kane. Did anyone still say stuff like this? Did kiddy television greetings still exist in the modern world of schoolyard massacres and religious cults? Next thing you know my father’d be saying poopy diapers, weenie roast, tra la la, making nookie. Just so he could conduct his business. He’d locate in his imaginary playbook the conversational gambit entitled withering contempt dawns in the face of your auditor, and, according to this playbook, wasn’t anything else for him to do but go on being friendly, and he would.
—Uh, well, have you heard the one about how Christopher Columbus, discoverer of this land of ours, was a cheat? Sure was. Said he could make an egg stand on its end, which obviously you can only do when the calendar’s on the equinoxes. And when he couldn’t make the egg stand, why he had to crush the end of the egg. Maybe it was a hard-boiled egg, I don’t know. Obviously, he can’t have been that great a man if he had to crush the end of the egg in order to make it stand. I wonder, you know, whether we ought to be having all these annual celebrations in honor of him, since he was a liar about the egg incident. Probably about other things too. He claimed he hadn’t crushed the end of the egg when he had. That’s not dealing fair.
To make his point, my father took an ostrich egg from a shelf where two or three were all piled up for use that night at the diner. The counter was grimy with a shellac of old bacon and corn syrup and butterfat and honey and molasses and salmonella. He set the egg down here.
—Helluva egg, Joe Kane remarked. —What is that, some kind of nuclear egg? You make that in a reactor?
—I know more about eggs than any man living, my father said.
—Don’t doubt that for a second, Joe Kane said.
—This egg will bend to my will. It will succumb to my powers of magic.
—If you say so.
My dad attempted to balance the ostrich egg on its end without success. He tried a number of times. Personally, I don’t get where people thought up this idea about balancing eggs. You don’t see people trying to balance gourds or footballs. But people seem like they have been trying to balance eggs since there were eggs to balance. Maybe it’s because we all come from some kind of ovum, even if it doesn’t look exactly like the kind that my father kept tipping up onto its end in front of Joe Kane, but since we come from some kind of ovum and since that is the closest we can get to any kind of real point of origin, maybe we’re all kind of dumb on the subject of ova, although on the other hand, I guess these ova probably had to come from some chicken, or vice versa. Don’t get me confused. Joe had to relocate his cup of coffee out of the wobbly trajectory of the shell. A couple of times. My father couldn’t get anything going in terms of balancing the ostrich egg and so why did he keep trying?
Next, Dad got down the formaldehyde jars from up on the shelf, and started displaying for Joe Kane some deformed ostriches. In his recitation about the abnormalities he had names for a lot of the birds. He showed Joe the fetus with two heads, Dizzy; she was the sweetest little chick, and then showed Joe one with four legs. He showed Joe two or three sets of Siamese twin ostriches, including the set called Jack ’n Jill. This pair could run like a bat out of hell. My dad’s voice swelled. He was proud. He gazed deeply into yellowed formaldehyde.
Joe Kane tried to figure an escape. He looked like an ostrich himself, right then, a mouth-breather, a shill waiting for the sideshow, where the real freaks, the circus owners themselves, would go to any lengths, glue a piece of bone on the forehead of a Shetland pony and call it a unicorn, for the thrill of separating crowds from wallets. Wasn’t there any other place for Joe to take shelter from the buckets of rain falling from the sky? Must have been a lean-to or something. On the good side of the tracks.
—This bird here has two male appendages, and I know a number of fellows would really like it if they had two of those. Imagine all the trouble you could get into with the ladies.
Ever notice how in the Midwest no one ever kisses anyone? That little peck on the cheek people are always giving one another back East? Nice to see you! Much less in evidence here in the Midwest. Probably it accounts for the ostrich farmhands and their romantic pursuits, turned down by wives, just looking for some glancing physical contact someplace, with a mouth-breather, if necessary. They came home, these working men, to wives reciting lists of incomplete chores, because of which they’d just get right back into their pickups and head for the drive-thru. They’d sing their lamenting songs into drive-thru microphones. My father had seen a man once slap another man good-naturedly on the shoulder after a friendly exchange about a baseball. This was at a fast-food joint. He was sick with envy right then. And that’s why, since he’d just shown Joe Kane an ostrich fetus with two penises, he decided to chuck Joe under the chin, as a sign of neighborly good wishes. My father came out from around the counter —he was a big man, I think I already said, 250 pounds, and over six feet —and as Joe Kane attempted to get up from his stool, my father chucked him under the chin.
—Take a weight off for a second, friend; I’m going to show you how to get an ostrich egg into a Coke bottle. And when my magic’s done you can carry this Coke bottle around with you as a souvenir. I’ll give it to you as a special gift. Here’s how I do it. I heat this egg in regular old vinegar, kind you get anyplace, and that loosens up the surface of the egg, and then I just slip it into this liter bottle of Coke, which I bought at the mini-mart up the road, and then when it’s inside the Coke bottle, it goes back to its normal hardness. When people ask you how you did it, you just don’t let on. Okay? It’s our secret. Is that a deal?
What could Joe say? Dad already had the vinegar going on one of the burners. When the egg had been heated in this solution, my dad began attempting to cram the thing into the Coke bottle, with disappointing results. Of course, the Coke bottle kept toppling end over end. Falling behind the counter. Dad would have to go pick it up again. Meantime, the train was about to come in. Hours had passed. The train was wailing through a crossing. My father jammed the ostrich egg, which didn’t look like it had loosened up at all, against the tiny Coke bottle opening, without success. Maybe if he had a wide-mouth bottle instead.
—Last time it worked fine.
—Look, I gotta go. Train’s pulling in. My dad’s —
—Sit down on that stool. Damned if you’re going to sit in here for two hours on a bunch of coffees, eighty-five cent cups of coffee, and that’s going to be all the business I’m gonna have all week, you son of a bitch. I know one place I can get this egg to fit. Goddamn you.
And this is where the ostrich egg broke, of course, like a geyser, like an explosion at the refinery of my pop’s self-respect. Its unfertilized gunk, pints of it, splattered all over the place, on the counter, the stools, the toaster, the display case of stale donuts. Then Joe Kane, who was already at the door, having managed to get himself safely out of the way, laughed bitterly. My father, his face pendulous with tusks of egg white, reached himself down an additional ostrich egg and attempted to hurl it at Joe Kane. But, come on, that was like trying to be a shot-put champion. He managed to get it about as far as the first booth, where it shattered on the top of a jukebox, obscuring in yolk an entire run of titles by the Judds.
Next thing that happened, of course, was the bloodcurdling shriek I already told you
about. Sorry for it turning up in the story twice, but that’s just how it is this time. My father, alone in the restaurant, like the bear in the trap, screamed his emergency scream, frightened residents of Pickleville for miles around, especially little kids. People who are happy when they’re speculating about other people’s business, they might want to make a few guesses about that scream, like that my dad was ashamed of himself because the trick with the ostrich egg didn’t work, or my dad was experiencing a crisis of remorse because he couldn’t ever catch a break. And these people would be right, but they’d be missing a crucial piece of information that I have and which I’m going to pass along. My father screamed, also, because he was experiencing a shameful gastrointestinal problem. That’s right. It’s not really, you know, a major part of the story, but there was this certain large food company marketing some cheese snacks with a non-nutritive fat substitute in them, and that large company was test-marketing its cheese snacks guess where? Buckeye State, of course. Where these companies test-marketed lots of products for people they figured were uninformed. These snack foods were cheap, all right, a real bargain compared to leading brands, and they had cheddar flavoring. Only problem was, since your intestine couldn’t absorb the non-nutritive simulated fatty acid, it was deposited right out of you, in amounts up to two or three tablespoons. The food company was trying to find out how much of this we’d tolerate in Ohio, this oily residue that didn’t come out in the wash. If you ate a whole bag, it could be bad. So, truth is, on top of having egg on his face, my dad, right then, was having a rough day, and he wasn’t tolerating it too well.
You’ll be wanting to know how I know all this stuff, all these things that happened to my father in the restaurant, especially since I wasn’t there and since Dad would never talk about any of it. Especially not anal leakage. Wouldn’t talk about much at all, after that, unless he was complaining about Ohio State during football season. You’ll want to now how I know so much about the soul of Ohio, since I was a teenager when all this happened and was supposed to be sullen and hard to reach. Hey, what’s left in this breadbasket nation, but the mystery of imagination? My mother lay in bed, hatched a plan, how to get herself out of this place, how to give me a library of books. One night she dreamed of escaping from the Rust Belt, from a sequence of shotgun shacks and railroad apartments. A dream of a boy in the shape of a bird in the shape of a story, a boy who has a boy who has a boy: each generations dream cheaper than the last, like for example all these dreams now feature Chuck E. Cheese (A special birthday show performed by Chuck E. Cheese and his musical friends!) or Cracker Barrel or Wendy’s or Arby’s or Red Lobster or the Outback Steak-house or Boston Market or Taco Bell or Burger King or TCBY or Pizza Hut or Baskin Robbins or Friendly’s or Hard Rock Cafe or KFC or IHOP or Frisch’s Big Boy. Take a right down by Sam’s Discount Warehouse, Midas Muffler, Target, Barnes and Noble, Home Depot, Wal-Mart, Super Kmart, Ninety-Nine Cent Store. My stands at the end of the line. Fresh poultry and eggs. Eggs in this county they’re the biggest darned eggs you’ve ever seen in your whole life.