Itch

by Polly Farquhar

  “Too babyish for sixth grade.”

  “Well, yeah, but you wore it in the fifth grade.”

  That made her laugh and that made me laugh. I was on a roll. “Maybe you just need to step it up. Be a zombie cookie.”

  We stood laughing in front of her bus.

  “You should come by later. After my dance class. We can do our math together. This is the year of fractions. Fraaaac-tions. Uncommon de-noooom-inators.” She said it in a vampire voice. “I know all about it from my brothers.”

  “So far it’s just review from last year,” I said. “I got it.”

  “Okay. If you’re sure. I’ll come get you to watch the game on Saturday. I’ve got dance class first, so I won’t be home until halftime. But I’ll watch the rest. Second Big Ten game of the season. Iowa.”

  “We’ll beat them, no problem.”

  “You know it.”

  After that, I had to wait for all the buses to leave. The football team, loaded up with pads and helmets, had already jogged out for practice. They lay in the field, stretching. I didn’t know Evan’s and Dylan’s numbers. I couldn’t tell who was who.

  Standing on the pedals, I rode my bike slowly through the grass and by the chain link fence around the athletic field. Nate, Daniel, and Tyler, hung up on the fence like bats (but not upside down), watching.

  “Hope they’re meditating, lying there,” Daniel said. “Hope they’re working on their mental game. They’re going to need it this Friday, playing those giants.” You might think Daniel was offering good advice, but he’s got a mean streak. He wasn’t really trying to come up with a way to help the football team out. He was saying they were puny chickens.

  Tyler said, “All the teams are bigger than us.”

  “We’ve got farm boys,” Nate said. “Farm boys are big.”

  Daniel said, “That’s old-school. All those other teams? They have fancy weight rooms.”

  We were quiet for a while. The players on the field scrambled up like a bunch of awkward, high-school-sized Frankensteins.

  “Hey,” Tyler said, “I saw you talking with Sydney.”

  “Yeah.” Sydney and I have been friends since I moved here. It doesn’t matter that she’s a girl. It’s been like that since the third grade. It isn’t any kind of boy-girl thing. We watched football and rode our bikes together and played cards and we cooked dairy-free and peanut-free desserts in her kitchen. Giant oatmeal cookies and chocolate chip pumpkin bread, but I wasn’t going to tell these guys that. Plus, they’d want to eat it all. “Halloween costume discussion.”

  “So important,” Tyler said.

  “Very important,” Daniel said.

  Last year we all went together. We did all the streets here and then Tyler’s dad drove us to one of the rich neighborhoods in the next town. Everybody goes to that neighborhood. I guess it’s a big deal and not everybody who lives there likes it—giving out hundreds of mini chocolate bars—and one lady said she didn’t think we lived around there because she could smell the farm on our shoes.

  It was Tyler. It was always Tyler. It was Tyler’s pig farm shoes, which always smelled even though they never looked dirty. Or his jacket. The lady still dropped a single candy bar into each of our bags. Tyler said, “Thank you,” but Daniel said, “I hope you enjoy your bacon,” and right then I liked his mean streak. Right then it wasn’t a mean streak, it was just backbone and he was using his power for good. When we got farther down the street, Tyler said what he said at school. “What’s that smell? Oh, that smell? It’s money-money-money-money.”

  Out on the field, the coaches blew whistles and the players ran drills. Tyler dropped down from the fence first and yelled, “Tire swing!”

  “Yes!”

  They started running toward the playground. “You coming?” Tyler asked.

  “Working,” I said.

  Nate pointed at Daniel. “You’re pushing.” They were going to play the game where one person sat in the tire swing and the guys whipped it in circles with all their strength until the one in the swing begged for mercy or some teacher finally came out of the building and said what we were doing wasn’t a very good idea.

  As they headed back toward the empty playground, Nate hollered, “Itch! You coming by later?”

  “Sure,” I hollered back, pushing my bike through the grass to the road.

  I spotted the circling turkey vultures before I even got close to Mr. Epple’s farm. The birds were big, hulking, and ugly, with red and wrinkled featherless heads. Coasting, they cruised for dead meat. The dead meat would be dead pheasants, the way the turkey vultures skimmed low over the pens. They wouldn’t get any, though. They wouldn’t get any pheasants. They couldn’t get into the pens. I knew that. But I also knew there were dead birds inside the pen and that it wouldn’t be like last time with only one sad bird pecked to death.

  I was right. I found three dead birds without heads. Three birds was a lot. The headless bodies lay around the edges of the pen, against the fence. One was a female. The hens aren’t as big as the males and they aren’t as colorful—just a kind of not-white with brown patterns on their feathers. If it weren’t for the male, everybody would think that the hens were pretty too.

  I didn’t find their heads until later. For the males, they were all torn off right at the white ring around the male neck, as if it meant Open Here.

  Had the birds done this to each other? In a massive bird brawl? I wondered about that until I found Brutus. I knew it was him because of his clipped beak. No pheasant rooster in the pen would rip off Brutus’s head, even if Brutus was debeaked. As far as I knew, pheasants didn’t rip off heads, anyway.

  It must have been something, whatever came after Brutus. I didn’t know what. The fencing was buried deep to stop critters from digging their way in.

  I went looking for Mr. Epple. He wasn’t anywhere. Not in the yard where I’d seen him before. There was nothing inside the brooder barn but warming lamps and chicks. I marked down the three birds from the dead check in the grubby notebook that hung by a string nailed in the wall next to the door. I knocked on the house’s back door. Knock knock knock. When he didn’t answer: pound pound pound.

  A big delivery truck rumbled as it turned into the long driveway, and I finally saw Mr. Epple at the mailbox. He stood at the edge of the road with his back to the truck, setting up a piece of plywood that folks on country roads use to keep the snowplows from knocking down their mailboxes. It seemed early for it, since it was only September, but you never knew about the weather. Even though he was practically standing in the road, I swear Mr. Epple never looked at the truck, never saw it, and the truck never stopped.

  “Hey! Hey! Stop! Mr. Epple!”

  I ran harder than I ever had in gym class, but trucks are fast and kids are slow. I was slow. I wasn’t fast enough. The truck turned hard. Mr. Epple didn’t look up and kept hammering the plywood to the post of his mailbox. He didn’t notice anything. Not me running and shouting and not the big truck aimed at him.

  I thought of me diving with my bike into the ditch to dodge the car. I thought about how the car didn’t come out of nowhere, not really, how I heard that screaming air, the buzz of engine, how my skin started to crawl a second before the real danger was there in the form of a big one-ton machine that could grind me up and turn me into watermelon pulp.

  When Mr. Epple finally looked up I was ready to tackle him like a Buckeye lineman with a silver-bullet helmet. I just ran and ran and knew what I had to do. If he wouldn’t move, I would move him. I ran right into him. He banged up off the road, against the mailbox and the plywood, and as I skidded, the mailbox got me in the gut. “Sorry, sorry.” Finally he saw the truck and the driver saw us and the brakes hissed.

  Mr. Epple opened his mouth but said nothing. I knew, though. I knew he was working hard on something to say that he didn’t want to give up. I waited and waited and
waited.

  The delivery truck driver threw open his door and yelled, “Sorry,” even though his face said, Stupid people. “Everybody okay?”

  Mr. Epple’s mouth was still open. He looked at the driver but didn’t speak, so I held up a hand. It was supposed to mean we were fine. Guess I didn’t feel like talking either.

  That’s when I figured it out. It hit me like that truck had just kept going. Boom. Mr. Epple couldn’t hear.

  After the truck driver dropped off a couple of boxes and left, Mr. Epple gave my shoulder a solid thump and nodded and didn’t say anything, so I didn’t say anything. We walked out to the fence line to bury the birds. I wanted to know what happened to them but didn’t ask.

  * * *

  —

  Nate’s grandmother’s storage units were between the farm and my house. That’s where Nate hung out. He played one-man dodgeball in whatever empty unit his grandmother would let him. It wasn’t always the same one, but it was always easy to find him. I just listened for banging metal.

  It was dark inside and the game was loud. The ball ricocheted off the half-open metal door and rebounded on the concrete and blasted off the walls. We didn’t say anything, just played until we were panting. It was wild.

  After a while, we stopped to catch our breath. “Anybody get sick on the tire swing?”

  “Nah,” Nate said. “How are the birds?”

  I told him about the dead pheasants. He thought it was cool. I couldn’t find the words to say anything about the rest of what happened.

  Bang. The ball shot off the metal door. “Owl,” Nate said. “Got to be an owl, right?” He swooped out one arm in slo-mo and turned his hand into a claw and made like he was grabbing a pheasant. “If one of the birds is sitting up high—are there bushes and stuff in the pens?”

  I nodded.

  “So,” Nate continued, “he can’t get it through the fence. The owl. And the pheasant can’t get out. Pop.” He turned his claw back into a hand and I could imagine just what had happened. Except for maybe why the owl dropped the heads.

  Nate said, “If a mink or weasel got in, they just kind of nibble on the back of the head and leave the bodies. You’d have found a stack of three birds with holes in their heads.”

  “Right.” Of course Nate knew this stuff.

  When he told me he had a chart about different animals and how they killed, I laughed and I forgot about knocking Mr. Epple over.

  “Skunks,” he announced, grinning, “just eat the entrails and leave everything else. I’ve never seen a skunk kill. Promise you’ll call me if a skunk gets into those pens.”

  “Won’t happen. I mean, I’d call you, but a skunk will never get in. Epple’s got fencing, like, buried three feet down and out.”

  “That owl. Three times. What’s that about? Stupid bird.” Nate dribbled the ball and changed his mind. “Maybe it was a smart bird.”

  “Wouldn’t the heads still be in the owl’s claws? Wouldn’t he want those?”

  Nate shrugged.

  I figured it out. “When the owl catches the pheasant its claws are inside the pen. The owl has to let go to get his feet back.”

  We slapped the ball around for a while. Then Nate said, “I want a chick. My grandma said she’ll give me one of the units. I was thinking chickens, but pheasants would be cool.”

  “You’d need heat lamps. A storage unit would be too cold for chicks.”

  “It’ll toughen them up.”

  “Yeah, toughen them up until they’re dead.”

  “Maybe you could get me a hen. You know, to sit on them.”

  “I don’t think Mr. Epple sells the birds, except to the preserves. You can order pheasants from some stores. They sell them at Tractor Supply.”

  “I know they do. But you can get me one for free, right? We’re friends.”

  “Come on, Nate.” I started to wish I hadn’t stopped by. I didn’t want to be part of one of his bad ideas. The only thing was you usually didn’t know the good ideas from the bad ones until you were in the middle of them. Aside from Sydney, I spent the most time with Nate. Sydney and I used to hang out, easy, after school, before school, all summer, but I got busy with the farm and her mom drives her to ballet lessons twice a week, an hour away, and then on the other days she’s got soccer. She hung out more with Abby and Maria now. One thing was for sure: Sydney would never ask me to steal her a pheasant.

  “I’ll come around and you can give me a bird and you just tell the farmer that the bird died or whatever you do.”

  “That’s stealing.”

  “That old farmer would never miss it.” Nate looked at me for a long time. I was stuck. I didn’t know what to say. I’d already said no. But then Nate said, “Never mind,” and dribbled the ball a couple of times and then hooked it under his arm. We stood like that for a couple of minutes, and then I left.

  I headed by Sydney’s but her dad told me she wasn’t home. He and Dylan and Evan were unloading the boys’ practice gear from the car. “She’s still at soccer,” Dylan said. His hair was sweaty and it stuck out all over the place.

  I said bye and looked up at the oak tree that had caught Sydney’s bike, because I always had to look, and biked home under the power lines that were back up on the poles where they belonged.

  Dad wasn’t home yet. I went downstairs. In the quiet of the basement I remembered what it had been like when the power had been out for five days. Weird. No background noise. No fridge running, no air conditioner, no computer humming. Peaceful. Eerie.

  Pressing my hands hard over my ears, I listened. The house still whirred. I still heard the blood in my brain, or in my hands, or somewhere on the inside.

  After a while, I turned on my computer.

  Hey, Mom,

  What are you doing?

  Have you looked at the stars yet?

  Have you seen the moon?

  Did you know that Mr. Epple can’t really hear anything?

  Do you think I should get Nate a bird?

  Get means steal.

  Why do my friends call me the thing I hate about myself?

  If I really sent this to you, what would you say?

  Then I pressed down on the backspace key until it ate up all the words.

  CHAPTER 9

  ITCH, HEY, WAIT up!” Nate huffed up behind me. It was morning. Cold and not quite foggy. Milky, the weather guy on TV called it. I walked my bike over to the rack in front of school and Nate followed me. “I’m serious about a bird,” he said, putting both hands on the rack’s top bar as he leaned over to watch me lock up my bike. “I’m thinking, though, I should get two birds. Makes more sense. Two birds.”

  “Two birds?”

  “You mad at me?”

  “Not really.” It was too stupid to be mad about, right? And why did he want a bird so much? Why did he want a bird from me?

  “Nah,” he said, “you’re mad. I know mad.”

  It didn’t matter if I was and if Nate knew it, because he hadn’t changed his mind. He still wanted to convince me to do it. “Look, you told me about the dead check. Just tell the old guy a couple of birds died and you already incinerated them—”

  “What? I don’t burn them.”

  “Oh.” He pulled on the straps of his backpack. “Well, what do you do?”

  “I bury them.” I clunked my bike lock shut.

  “Okay, so you tell the old guy you buried them and I’ll just come by to the fence and get them.”

  I didn’t say that Mr. Epple wasn’t really that old, or that I wasn’t going to steal.

  Instead I said, “It’s not a very good plan. I mean, I’m going to have two live birds and they aren’t going to want to get carried around like fancy puppies. And how am I supposed to get them through the fence?”

  “They’re birds. They’ll fly. And then I’ll get
them.”

  “Seriously? I know you’re a hunter and everything, but do you think it’ll be that easy?”

  “Okay. Well. Just hand them over to me. Do you think I can’t do it? I’ll bring a bag or something.”

  I shook my head. I thought about it. I wondered if maybe the birds would attack him. The birds never pecked at me, but then again I had the food. I might have thought about giving Nate the birds after all, if I thought they’d get all mean and territorial on him.

  Kids were still streaming in off the buses. I was usually the only bike rider. A couple of older kids walked by. I recognized them as friends of Sydney’s brothers. It was Friday, so they wore their football jerseys to show school spirit. Fridays, the junior high school team played first, and then, under the lights, the varsity. We’re too small to really have a junior varsity team. Once you’re in high school, everybody’s varsity.

  Nate stuck out his chin and said hi to the two guys in jerseys. I wasn’t surprised he knew them. Everybody was always waiting for Nate to get up to seventh grade so he could be on the football team.

  One of the guys said to Nate, “You got soup for lunch today?”

  “Yeah,” the second guy said, “heard you’re a soup fan, Emerling.” They both smiled like they’d said something real smart.

  Nate turned a hot and angry red, as scarlet as a Buckeye jersey. I didn’t really catch on that they were talking about that rumor about his father. And then when I did, I didn’t really mind. I know I should have. But at least Nate was done talking to me about filching some birds.

  “Did you hear the one about the guy who swims in soup? No? I can’t remember. Was it tomato soup?”

  “Nah, man,” the second kid said, “it was chicken soup, right? All those little noodles scared him right out of town.”

  Nate’s face was still red but he squared himself up and fixed his backpack straps again and got his jaw all tight and he didn’t say a word to anybody, not even me. I asked Daniel about it later after we were both out in a game of Horse at recess. The soup story about Nate’s dad. He was the one who told me about it the first time, but I thought it was a joke so I hadn’t paid much attention. Daniel said it was true. He whispered loudly, “Don’t let Nate hear you.”