Shy (19 page)

“Oh good,” I said. “Let’s feed them and go then, shall we?”

Frank gave me a gentle pat on the ass as we trudged along through the weeds. “Don’t worry. You’ll be fine. We have to gather the eggs too. Won’t take long. Maybe an hour.”

An
hour
?
I blinked three times, trying to avert the Aunt Pittypat swoon I felt coming on. Be butch, be butch, be butch. I kept repeating that mantra silently in my head as Frank pulled open the chicken house door and the sound of nine hundred screaming chickens intensified to about the same decibel level as a Boeing 747 hurling itself into the sky.

Boy, those chickens were loud. And friendly. They came running at us from every direction. Treading on our toes. Brushing up against our legs. Flapping their wings and bobbing their heads and squirting poop all over the place in their excitement. The air was dense with dust and feathers and probably parasitic chicken mites. I clapped my mouth shut, trying to keep them out of my lungs.

Frank laughed again. “You have to breathe some time. Just relax, Tom. Look how happy they are to see you.”

And I had to admit, they were. Of course, they didn’t fool me. Pedro has played that ruse for years. He always acts like he’s happy to see me too. Until he gets his treat, that is. Then it’s toodles, see you later, ta-ta. The only difference here was that these damn chickens wanted chicken feed while Pedro wanted a biscuit, or a belly rub, or half my sandwich. Same principle, different species. It was all a big scam. Of course, Pedro had a personality to back him up. Not much personality on a chicken. Not that I can see, anyway.

The chicken house was one long room, with roosts and tiers of nests built into the walls on both sides and skylights stuck in the ceiling for light. The skylights were propped open for fresh air, which the place was desperately in need of. I supposed they were closed during the winter months so the chickens wouldn’t freeze to death. Not that I would care.

Halfway down the length of the long, skinny room, the building was separated by a wall of chicken wire. There was a chicken wire door stuck in the middle of it. On the other side of the wire, there were no nests, just poles arranged along the walls for roosts. And even more chickens than there were on this side.

“Are these chickens being punished?” I asked. “Is this side of the wire like the cooler in stalag movies? They’ve got no beds. No reading materials. No Coke machine.”

Frank ruffled my hair. Thank God, he still seemed to find my stupidity charming. I wondered how long that would last.

“These chickens are sold for food. The chickens on the
other
side of the wire, the ones with the nests, we keep for their eggs. That’s why they need the nests. To lay the eggs in. Every spring Pop gets in a truckload of baby chicks, eight or nine hundred, and we grow them right here. In the fall, we sell them. The next year we do it all over again. But the egg chickens, we keep.”

I was beginning to understand the basics of chicken farming. It seemed a little light on the financial end, though.

“You mean your dad makes a living doing this?”

Frank sighed. “Well, no. You have to put everything together. He rents out a couple hundred acres of farmland for crops. He sells the eggs and chickens and milk and butter and hogs, and sometimes a calf now and then, and maybe some things out of the garden, and if you add it all together, and throw in a few farm subsidies from the government, he makes about enough to survive and pay the taxes. People like my dad don’t farm for the money, Tom. They farm for the way of life it offers. And it’s a good one. Just not moneywise. On the bright side, nobody eats better than we do. And everything is fresh. Plus, you’re your own boss.”

A feather wafted down from the ceiling and landed on top of Frank’s head. I fondly plucked it away.

He rested his hand on the back of my neck and gave me an affectionate squeeze. “I wish you’d learn to like it here, Tom. It would mean a lot to me.”

I smiled at him and took a deep breath. “Then I will, by God. So let’s feed these bastards and gather the eggs. Show me what to do. Mold me. Make a farmer out of me.”

Frank looked startled for a moment, then he laughed so hard he had to bend over and hold onto his knees to prop himself up. A little rope of snot even dribbled out of his nose. After what seemed like about three hours, he finally pulled himself together and looking a little shamefaced, wiped the tears from his eyes and proceeded to show me what to do, still chuckling now and then in a stunned sort of way. I guess he didn’t see me as farmer material. Well, I’d show him. I’d work really hard. I would, by God.

Because it suddenly dawned on me—what a wonderful sort of life this might be for a couple of guys with terminal shyness and social anxiety disorder. No people. No bosses. No asshole brothers or exes lurking around to ruin your day and invite you to parties. If it wasn’t for the goddamn animals and the poop and the mud and the bees and the poverty and all the back-breaking work, it might even be
fun
.
Sort of. At least we would be together, Frank and I. And Lord, we wouldn’t even have to pay any apartment rent.

Hmm. That last thought really grabbed me. No rent. I’d have to give this some serious thought.

But first, I had to extract this chicken’s beak from my forearm. It seems they don’t like having their eggs scooped out from under them by erstwhile bankers. Who knew? I danced around in pain and terror for a minute while the chicken and I screamed and flapped at each other, then I got hold of my senses and got that damned egg. Of course, it shattered twelve ways from Sunday before I could get it out from under the chicken’s fat ass, but still the effort was noteworthy. Dripping egg yolk and shell fragments and a considerable amount of blood, mine, I turned to see what Frank thought of my noble effort. He was in the process of digging around for a handkerchief because he was laughing all bent over with snot hanging out of his nose again.

I wondered if he was getting a cold.

Altogether, we gathered sixty-four eggs. There would have been seventy-eight, but some of the chickens didn’t like me. We held the eggs up to candles in a darkened back room to make sure they were sound (Frank seemed to know what to look for, I sure didn’t), and once they were checked and wiped free of chicken poop we stashed them in gigantic egg crates that held about a bazillion eggs each.

I lost less than a pint of blood and I still had full use of my fingers, or most of them, so I guess the mission was a success. I was pretty pleased with myself until Frank told me we had to do the same thing twice a day, every single day until either us or the chickens were dead of old age, and it was about that time that I had an uncontrollable urge to sit down and blubber like a baby but I held it in. I figured if I was going to be a farmer I would have to learn to be stoic, and trust me, so far in my life, stoicism wasn’t exactly one of my calling cards, if you know what I mean.

As Frank and I were leaving the chicken house, he gave me a kiss and told me I did just fine. I spit out a feather and said thank you.

I was exhausted already, and the day was just beginning.

Chapter 11

W
E
DUCKED
into the house long enough to tiptoe into the back bedroom and check on Frank’s dad. He was asleep, but it didn’t look like a restful sleep. There was a sheen of perspiration on his face, and his hair was lank and damp and stuck to his forehead. His breathing was heavy and rasping, just short of a snore. Pedro was snoozing on his back between Joe’s legs, all sprawled out like he had just fallen out of a tree. He lifted his head when we peeked in the door, but he didn’t rise. Maybe I read more into it than there really was, but I got the distinct impression that Pedro didn’t want to disturb Joe by moving. He also seemed to resent our intrusion. He gave a soft growl, and we took the hint and quietly closed the door on our way out.

In the kitchen, we each guzzled half a crock of ice-cold unpasteurized milk to wash down the chicken mites. I was still waiting for the
E. coli
to strike me down, or maybe bird flu would be the culprit now after our little interlude in the chicken house. Frank rummaged through a first aid kit to find alcohol and bandages for my injured forearm thanks to my altercation with the deranged chicken.

“Next time a chicken acts like that, I’ll shoot it for you,” Frank promised. “Chickens shouldn’t be so cranky.”

No wonder I was in love with the guy. While he wiped my arm down with alcohol and wrapped the bandage around my wound, I stuck my tongue in his ear and nudged his crotch with my knee. The bandage I finally ended up with looked more like a three-year-old’s version of First Aid 101. It was so big you could have used it for a hammock. Frank and I laughed until we almost peed our pants, but at least my wounds were sterilized and dressed. If flesh-eating bacteria didn’t set in, I would probably survive.

Back outside, Frank led me to the summer garden. It covered perhaps half an acre at the north side of the house and was neatly laid out in perfectly straight rows with labels tied to sticks at the end of each row to show what was planted there. It looked to me like a
dozen
families could have survived on the amount of food Joe was growing in that garden. Rows of sweet corn stood tall at one end, their crisp long leaves rustling in the hot breeze. Next to the corn were russet potato plants in full flower, tomatoes fat on the vine, then sweet potatoes, carrots, peas, green beans, lettuce, broccoli, beets, cucumbers, hot peppers, thick clumps of rhubarb, plus, at one end of the garden, a carpet of vines with bright red strawberries peeping through. And it all looked neglected. Even a city boy like me could see that the weeds were taking over. That would have to be remedied.

Frank introduced me to a hoe, told me which end was the business end, as if I couldn’t figure it out for myself, and told me to use it between the plants to chop out the weeds. I guess he didn’t trust me with the monstrous rototiller he chose for himself. I daintily pecked away at a few weeds, scared to death I would mow down an innocent vegetable, while Frank cranked up the rototiller and in a cloud of exhaust fumes and enough racket to deafen a stone wall, dug his way between the rows, churning up dirt and weeds and obliterating everything in a horrendous cloud of dust. Trillions of bugs ran or flew or crawled for their lives.

It was during the mass exodus of those trillions of bugs that a big fat bumblebee, who must have been having a bad day to begin with, he was so short-tempered, took it into his head to have a go at my ear. He stung me before I knew what was happening, and when a bumblebee stings you, you know it. Pain? Oh, no, not much. I yelped and took off running and when I stopped running I was two fields away. I could see Frank way off in the distance behind me, standing in the middle of the garden behind his rototiller, looking in my direction and scratching his head, wondering what the hell I was up to.

Too mad and in way too much pain to be embarrassed, I traipsed back to Frank, then spent twenty minutes looking for the hoe. In my panic I had flung it into a tree.

By the time I was back in the swing of things and we were an hour into the work, Frank and I were both sweating bullets, so we shed our shirts. It was a hot day, and the sun blasted down on us like a forced-air furnace. While I chipped away at the weeds with my trusty hoe (which I already hated with every fiber of my being), my dirty arm bandage flapped around like a war-battered flag, and my poor ear wailed an off-key aria from
Aida
. Trying to take my mind off my woes and tribulations, I concentrated on watching Frank’s back muscles slide around beneath his gorgeous sweat-soaked skin. With his blue jeans barely hanging onto the curve of his scrumptious pale ass, he manhandled that rototiller up and down the rows of vegetables like a cowboy steering a bucking bronco through the shoot. God, he was something. Even with all my miseries, after watching him for three minutes, my dick was as hard as the hoe handle. I finally had to tear my eyes away from Frank before I chopped my foot off.

By the time we finished slaughtering weeds and the garden was looking halfway respectable, the sun was almost straight up in the sky, and my ear felt like someone had spliced an electric wire to it and turned on the juice.

“You hungry?” Frank asked, looking at me with considerable sympathy. I must have been a sight.

“No,” I grouched, wiping the sweat from my eyes. “I’m too tired to be hungry. And too much in pain. Horny, though.”

Frank grinned. “I’ll fix that little problem later, babe. But first let’s pick some of these vegetables before the birds get them.”

Let’s don’t, I thought. But we did. We shucked sweet corn, gathered up enough lettuce to stuff a mattress, picked all the tomatoes that were ripe, which was about a ton and a half, not counting the ones we gobbled up while we worked. They were the best-tasting tomatoes I had ever eaten, even if they were covered with dirt and bug poop and possibly fertilizer made from some sort of fecal matter, as fertilizer so often is. Now I had hepatitis and dysentery and maybe dengue fever to add to my list of things to worry about, but I was too hot and tired and grumpy and horny to care. We pulled a few hundred carrots, plucked a thousand or so cucumbers off the vines, and filled two buckets with strawberries. By the time we were finished, my back muscles were screaming in outrage, and I never wanted to eat another fucking vegetable as long as I lived.