Menagerie

by Bradford Morrow

  Twenty-Eight! the supervisor calls out as he scans Ungarte’s pass and pushes him to line up with the others on the grass.

  Not like the military, his new social worker had told his Moms, just something to teach him we live in a world that has rules and a certain order. Hands at his sides, spine straight, eyes forward, despite the wind, the razory specks of sleet that take bites out of his face, nearly twelve heads in front of him, he can see the only one not shivering in the cold is the white boy. He noticed when it was still hot out the white boy didn’t sweat as much as the rest of them, the white boy carried less, took more breaks, required more water, he needed more breaks to go to the bathroom, ate less, took up less space, and now, apparently, handled the cold better. It’s how they do, Ungarte thinks.

  Welcome! Gentlemen! the farmer shouts as he walks across the field toward them in a pair of black rubber boots that come up to his knees. It is the first time Ungarte has actually seen the farmer, or the owner of any of the places they’ve worked. He is a white guy, of course, bald and bright as an egg with a great heft of belly underneath a brand-new Carhartt. His hands are as big and pink as raw catcher’s mitts and he throws them into the air, tells them he is happy they’ve come to work with him the next two months, that he wants them to feel comfortable. And then he stops and says as comfortable as they can within the rules and regulations set up by their supervisors. Nearly a hundred and twenty-five years ago, he tells them, Hudson River Farms had been an impossible dream his Dublin-born great-grandfather had of a tiny place he could raise enough food to keep his family of ten alive on, and now with a hundred and eighty acres, over fifty products in a world market, a tiny wish has returned a thousand-fold.

  Boys, the farmer starts, and he begins to tell them about what a simple dream can do—how far it can take you; where it can lead—and Ungarte can see that White Boy is the only one who seems to be listening. His blind-looking eyes are on the farmer; he nods his head up and down as though it were tied by a string to one of the man’s big pink fingers. Neither of them—unlike everyone else, even the supervisors—is pounding his feet against the ground and clapping his hands against the cold. And maybe it is because he can—despite the bitterness of the wind, the rush of gooseflesh that runs from his calves up to his neck—just by pushing his hips forward, Ungarte thinks his dick hard again, pushes it forward and up toward the tag on his zipper until it aches to poke out over his waistband, tents the front of his pants so that anyone who looked could see, and he finds himself unable to give a fuck.

  Instead of going to work straightaway, they are taken into a white building smaller than the main house that the farmer calls the little barn, though it looks more like a church to Ungarte. The echo from their boots against the concrete floor rises toward the exposed ceiling beams of the vast, mostly empty room. There are rows of white folding chairs set up in front of a screen, and even though the room is heated by a woodstove in a far corner, after standing in the cold, the blast of heat that meets them as they file in is enough to force most of them to take their jackets off while they line up against the wall and wait for their next instruction. No, no, no, the farmer says, no, I want you all to take seats, feel comfortable.

  The front remains empty. Ungarte sees most have seats in between the screen and the back, and a hulking figure at the far end of the row to his right slouches and immediately begins to snore once the lights are lowered. And as the screen begins to flicker with hundreds of ducks—white feathered, white billed, streaked with black—he slips his hand in his pocket and his cock instantly bucks and stretches as though it will never stop blooming, turn his breath inside out, force his lungs to work backward.

  He sucks his lips into a tight circle as the farmer says, We hatch over five thousand ducklings per year, the farm processes eleven thousand pounds—that’s five thousand kilos—of foie gras. Fa-Wah Gra-ah, he pronounces it for them over and over again and he then begins waving his hands in rhythm for Ungarte and the other boys to repeat. Some catch on, but most continue to look at the screen. The farmer tells them it is the best foie gras outside of France. Some, he says, grinning all toothy and wide as if he is taking them all into his confidence, consider it better, and he raises his hands, Fa-Wah Grah!, to conduct them again. And the fact that Ungarte can hear the white boy’s voice—clearly, over the muttering of all the boys around him—believes he can smell his rotten breath, see his crusty, uneven teeth, causes him to lose it, so as the lights come up he pulls his hand out of his pants without busting a nut.

  Even then, instead of going to work, they are lined up and sent crunching across an icy field and into another dining hall. Before the farmer can announce that, here on Hudson River Farms, the help, the management, and the owners all eat together, Ungarte finds himself wishing for a time just months ago when lunch meant a box with a sandwich with orange cheese and wilted lettuce; he wants the two bottles of warm apple juice, the dried-out orange or the over-ripened apple they are used to eating on the side of the road or in the middle of a field. Bright and noisy with the clattering of plastic trays and the low growl of men’s voices, the dining-room smells make him suddenly hungry, a deep-to-the-middle-of-his-stomach hungry that makes him want to knock people in the aisles over, stomp them down, kick them out of the way to get to the hairnetted women passing out trays.

  Foie gras, the farmer announces when the trays are placed in front of them, but says they shouldn’t expect it at every meal; this is a one-time special occasion. And the smile he throws is so wide and grinny, proud and self-satisfied, it is only that Ungarte is so hungry he can taste the bottom of his stomach and that he hasn’t asked them to pray that keeps him from getting up and kicking all the man’s teeth down his throat.

  He is caught off guard. All he can recall of the film they were shown, all he remembers, is the ducklings, trampling all over each other, and the feathers and the drone of the farmer’s voice. In front of him there is a green salad, some peach slices swimming in a clear-ish juice, and what looks to him like torrejas or buñelos—sweet, like the kind his tía Rachel makes—and it smells like lechón, like Christmas, like waking cold mornings warm, safe and sound alone in his bed with nowhere to go and nothing to do. And it is what promised to be warm on his tongue, go down savory, fill his belly in ways that will make him feel all-over sexy and sleepy, that suddenly turns to shit in his teeth. Exactly what he would think shit would taste like—gritty and warm, as if it was coming directly from the source—with the consistency of clay.

  And it is precisely as he realizes he has no idea where to spit, Ungarte turns his head and sees the white boy, grinning like a fool—shit all stuck to his teeth like he’s been lapping at the farmer’s ass—and it makes Ungarte wonder what the boy would look like with his head split open, brains spilling out like a cracked egg, dangled out a window by his heels, submerged underwater, eyes all bulging.

  By the clock, they’ll get to work in less than twenty minutes. The supervisors will dole out, show how to do their tasks, and like always, right before the hard work starts, the white boy will complain about his stomach and need to spend the first half hour—when everyone else is breaking his back—locked away in the toilet. He’ll come back, grabbing his belly, complaining. He might get to lie down for a half hour halfway through the day, while everyone else is aching, stinking—ready to pack it in, readied, primed to shove his fist into the first person that says anything—because there were enough supervisors out there who never seemed to see the bullshit in the white boy’s batting lashes, or know enough to know when he was telling a white-boy lie.

  Lining up in the hallway, a shoulder against the wall, they wait. Permission, they are supposed to say, and one of the supervisors will tap him ahead to form another line in front of the men’s room. And it is possible that Ungarte is hard just because he manages to call out Permission before the white boy, hard—Permission, he hears the white boy’s voice behind him—because he can hear the white boy’s feet shuffling on the floor the w
ay he does when he’s trying to tell them all his stomach is giving him trouble. Permission, Permission, Ungarte hears behind him, and where it may be any number of the other boys, it only sounds like the white boy begging—Permission, Permission—like the white boy whimpering as if he were being wrung for the last drop of blood. Hard, so deliciously, pearly, shiny hard, with the white boy the next to go in behind him, Ungarte nearly kicks the door open, before ripping at his zipper and blowing his load all over the seat—the back—the rim of the toilet, and the wall directly above it.

  He is the best, he is the strongest, the fastest, the smartest, Ungarte tells himself, and between the fifth and sixth weeks of going out to the farm, his new social worker tells his Moms that the reports from his supervisors are all glowing. Always on time, Always takes the initiative, Never complains, Never swears, Never gets in fights, she says, and as she checks each one of his praises off he notices her creamy tetas bounce.

  Though when the social worker leaves, his Moms tells him that she didn’t need that immodest woman to tell her that she needs to be proud. She was always proud of him, what she needed was to know that he was safe.

  Cuídate hijo, she says each time he’s off to play with the ducks.

  Their first day in, the farmer had shown them the difference between ducks and geese, which soon became crystalline to Ungarte when a lone duck dove through the air to catch a goose behind the back of the head. The bird turned its head and within seconds had the duck’s leg in its beak. Within seconds, there had been a skirmish of feathers and squawking when, as if from nowhere, one goose turned into fifty or more, and the farmhands ran toward them, crying out with rakes and hoes in hand, and when it was all cleared, had it not been for the blood, what was left would have been indistinguishable from the feathers, grit, and bird shit in the dirty snow.

  This hardly ever happens, the farmer told them, nearly never, he said. Watching the man who had talked about owning everything they could see, standing on land that had belonged to his family forever—that was his to give to his sons—with his mouth wide open, had made Ungarte hard all over again. Never, the farmer had said like he might cry, which made Ungarte all the harder. Never, the farmer said, he couldn’t figure how this had happened. Though the only one of them who asked why was the white boy.

  Then again, White Boy was the only one who later asked why they had to muck out the stalls and clean cages when the ducks would only come and shit all over them later. He wanted to know why they needed to use gloves when they were raking up hay if what they were doing was safe, if they weren’t going to get anything from touching duck shit all day long.

  White Boy throws long sighs into the air anytime he’s asked to do anything; outside, in the cold, his hate for nearly anything said—any distance they are asked to walk, any new chore they are asked to do, anytime they are told to stand, sit, haul, or shovel—is spit up as icy vapor. Even though the foie gras they had had the first day made him sick—sent him retching into the corners of the barn until he was sweaty with the dry heaves—so sick, he was unable to work—he complains about the orange cheese and bologna sandwiches they get—he’s barely able to stomach an apple—he calls out to the farmer every time they see him, when are they going to get some more of that stuff they had when they first got here. That brown stuff! White Boy screams after the farmer as if the man would somehow not know what he meant.

  Hey, Mueller, the farmer will call out, raising a hand in the air as he passes. He knows White Boy’s name. It’s just how they do, someone will mutter around him, but Ungarte lets it slide off him, lets nearly everything the other boys say while they are working slide off him. Like grease on a duck’s ass, he would say if anyone was to ask, but they don’t and he’s pretty sure he’s the only one who would think it was funny, laugh so hard at shit like that his dick goes hard and he can taste blood in his mouth.

  He keeps his nose pretty clean, his new social worker tries to translate from the report his supervisors submit for his Moms. But the young woman quickly gives up, and just tells her that he does everything that he is told and more. He wonders how much more is more.

  Ungarty! the farmer will call out to him the same way he calls Mueller when he wants to get White Boy’s attention; however, Ungarte is the only boy that he will go up and talk to. Through the supervisors he gives Ungarte what he calls special assignments—Give it to Ungarty, he tells them, he’ll get it done—and when White Boy howls, why is it always Ungarty, the farmer just calls over his shoulder as he walks away, Be more like Ungarty. He’s the most trusted member on his crew, his new social worker tells his Moms, he sets an example for all the other boys, the farmer is placing Mateo in charge of the most important chore that they have, he’ll be the leader for all the boys.

  Cuídate hijo, his Moms says before she goes out. When he overhears her talking on the phone to his tía—and to the man she flirts with who runs the bodega at the corner—she now says things like, Teo works weekends, and, While Teo is off at his job. His new social worker now says things like, It has had an overall good effect on him, There is marked improvement in his schoolwork, He has no problems getting on with his teachers or his classmates. Although, as if yanked upright by the flowered housedress his Moms wears before she goes out to clean other people’s floors and feed their babies, it is as if she suddenly remembers there is no paycheck attached to what he is doing. It’s just payment of a debt that will eventually claim more debt. And she loses her smile as she says it again—Cuídate hijo—before she heads out.

  Both hands shoved deep into his pockets—each of them bottomless: Full of himself—as he follows the farmer, he counts each crunch of his boots—two to one—against those of the farmer as they cross the icy field. I want to tell you something, the farmer says without turning to see if Ungarte is there or not, you’re going to be in charge of, well more or less semi-in-charge-of, one of the most important functions on this farm. Without this we’re nothing, the farmer yells as he slides the door on a barn none of them has ever worked in before.

  This is what we call the twenty-day barn, the farmer says.

  It’s the sound that hits him first—the screeching, piercing HelpHelpHelpHelpHelp! of birds and the growl of machine engines—that deafens him, and then it’s the smell. For weeks he and the other boys have been around thousands of birds. They had spent time learning to count the days from lay to hatch; they learned to turn the birds and the bins that separated males from females; they threw seed and filled feeders; they had dug up, buried, and hosed away mountains and mountains of shit, though suddenly there is something in the air in the barn that knots his stomach over onto itself and forces it toward his throat, and it’s the sudden shock of the farmer’s voice—Come on, Ungratey, let’s get started—that makes the boy swallow hard and keeps him from shaming himself.

  This is where we bring them at six months, the farmer yells over the din. Unlike in France where they’re kept twisted up in pens, he says, pulling the boy closer to him to yell in his ear, we let them walk around, well, as long as they’re able.

  Like beetles scurrying in the light, the four women and one man working in the barn are dark and small and quick between what at first to Ungarte looks like a chaos of Mulards, but he soon can see each woman is seated on a slotted wooden box between two corrals. From one corral, they grab a duck by the neck, turn it upside down, and scan the tag on its foot before shoving it into the box.

  Show the boy, the farmer tells the man.

  Although the man is not all that old—not as old as Ungarte’s Moms—his face is drawn up like an apple that has sat around too long. His two front teeth are brown and look as though they have been cut in half, and even over the bird stink, he gives off a steamy, stale mixture of tobacco and BO. Ungarte can feel the man’s eyes look him up and down before he spits out ¿Hablas niño?

  And Ungarte imagines that it is because Spanish to the farmer is a stream of sounds like the screeching of the birds or the grind of the machines he con
tinues to yell at him while the instructions are given. Don’t worry if you don’t get this right the first time, the farmer tells him, it took me a while, it takes everyone a while.

  When the birds get so heavy they can no longer stand in the corrals they need to be put here, the man tells Ungarte as he points to the wall; while at the same time the farmer says, They really don’t feel anything, it’s not as if they have the same kind of gag reflexes we have. They hardly feel it, they don’t know what’s happening, the farmer yells over the man’s instructions of how to shove a duck or goose into the wooden box—feet first, hold the neck tight, push the middle down hard—and the farmer tells him there is no need to be nervous, none at all.

  Don’t worry, the farmer cautions as the man shows Ungarte how to stroke the bird’s neck—tells him to hum, so it feels comfortable, but be firm so it knows to be a little bit afraid of you—as he inserts the feeder into its throat. Don’t let the bird pull away from you, the man says, the bird—it’s a bird—it don’t know when it’s full. You’re waiting for the machine to kick off like a rifle, then you pull it out.