Читать книгу 142 Ostriches - April Davila - Страница 10

THREE

When the funeral finally ended, I rode home from the church with Devon in his banged-up SUV. Halfway there, a fat drop of rain, carried ahead of the storm by the wind, burst against the windshield.

Watching in the rearview mirror, I could see the nine cars that followed us in a solemn procession from the church to the ranch. They were spaced evenly behind us on the highway, like a line of ants winding over the pale Mojave Desert.

Another drop exploded on the windshield, then another. I wished it had been raining the week before. If it had been raining, I could have believed that Grandma Helen’s death was an accident. The highway might have been slick, her vision obscured or perhaps confused by headlights on the wet roads. But the day of Grandma Helen’s death had been clear and sunny from dawn to dusk.

I considered the framed photo of her I held in my lap. I had snapped the shot myself, a few summers ago, after I graduated high school and Grandma Helen began paying me for my work on the ranch.

With my first paycheck, I bought myself a phone. The trip into town took most of the day, and when I returned home to the ranch, Grandma Helen sat reclined in one of the wicker chairs on the front porch, the green glass of her beer bottle wet with condensation, her head resting against the outside wall of the house. I joined her on the porch and pulled my new gadget from its box. I touched the unmarred glass of the screen and left a perfect fingerprint.

Grandma Helen had been skeptical of the utility of a cell phone way out there in the desert. Service was spotty at best, and carrying anything shiny into the corral with the ostriches was akin to filling your pockets with birdseed. They were quick and curious and drawn to any unfamiliar object.

Preoccupied with the device, I experimented with ringtones, sending unnatural trills and toots into the otherwise tranquil evening. To emphasize her opinion of my purchase, Grandma Helen made up her own names for the sounds as I tried them: chicken fart, sinkhole, dying dog. I ignored her, but she kept on, cracking herself up. I snapped a picture of her chuckling at her own jokes. The low light streamed in over the mountains in the west and it caught a glint in her pale blue eyes, the lines around them lifted in an easy smile. That moment, with her arm slung over the back of the chair, her hair loose around her face, that was how I wanted to remember her. It was nice that Aunt Christine had framed the photo for the funeral. It was just the kind of thing I never would have thought to do.

I cracked the car window and lifted my face to breathe in the scent of water in the air. Devon flicked the wipers to clear the drops that had begun falling in earnest. The sign for Wishbone Ranch came into view on our left like a miniature billboard, its tall lettering bold against the whitewashed wooden planks. Devon slowed.

His tires crunched against the gravel as we pulled off the paved road. The driveway marked the corral’s southern border, and I strained to see if there were any eggs, but the brown-quilled females were all sitting on their nests, blending into the desert landscape. Again, I questioned what I had seen that morning.

The darker male ostriches milled about the corral, necks stretched high, feathers rustling. Of the 142 ostriches on the ranch, most paid no mind to the comings and goings of cars, but one bird always made it his business to track visitors.

Grandma Helen had called him Theo; I didn’t know why. He was about eight feet tall. His black wings were tipped with white, same as his tail. Fine floss coated the ashen skin of his neck. He was a textbook example of a male ostrich and would have blended seamlessly with the flock except that he could not resist the urge to inspect any vehicle coming up our drive.

Within seconds of Devon’s car turning off the highway, Theo found his stride beside us, nothing but the thick wires of the corral fence separating us. Normally, he would have escorted us all the way to the walnut tree in front of the house, but his attention was drawn by the car that pulled in after us.

Breaking away, he looped back. I watched in the rearview mirror as he was distracted again and again by each car that exited the main road. Like a nanny in charge of too many children, he ran in circles, trying to be in nine places at once. The rest of the flock watched with blank stares.

By the time we parked, the rain was falling hard. Plump drops coated the windshields faster than the wiper blades could clear them, and at first I didn’t notice the Dodge Ram waiting outside the barn on supersize tires, floodlights and gun rack rigged to the cab. Its nose aimed down the driveway toward us. The license plate read OSTRICH. It was Joe Jared.

The rain found my arms and face like a thousand incessant questions as I jumped from Devon’s SUV, the photo of Grandma Helen tucked under my arm, and hurried over to Joe’s truck.

His giant boots squeaked against the metal rungs of the truck as he climbed down. I marveled at the crude size of him. Built like an ox with a glandular problem, he had broad shoulders that lifted his six-foot-four frame, and where most men either tapered or bulged in the middle, his body melted down into the two gigantic tree trunks that were his legs.

“Tallulah, I’m so sorry for your loss.” Joe Jared’s voice filled the yard the way an elephant would fill a teacup.

“It’s not a good time,” I said, crouching under the pelting rain and casting glances over my shoulder at the arriving guests, wishing for some way to hide Joe Jared from view. The timing was terrible. I hadn’t told anyone I planned to sell the ranch, and Grandma Helen’s funeral was not the time or the place.

The cars that had followed Devon’s SUV from the church parked one by one along the corral fence. The drivers set parking brakes and held the doors for one another. They flipped up their collars against the deluge and made their way across the uneven gravel of the driveway. An elderly couple I didn’t recognize emerged from the Mercedes I had seen in the church parking lot.

Uncle Scott emerged from the passenger side of Matt’s white sedan. But while his sponsor headed straight for the shelter of the house, Uncle Scott held up a hand to shield his eyes and looked around. It had been about a year and a half since he had visited, but the ranch, like the desert around it, existed on a geologic time scale, and changes, when they happened at all, were nearly imperceptible. His gaze swept over me and Joe. Our eyes met.

“I’ve been waiting twenty years for this,” Joe said, his voice so painfully loud. He held up a manila envelope, the paper quickly collecting caramel splotches in the rain.

“Stop,” I said in an admonishing whisper, waving at the envelope and willing it away. “Let’s go to the barn.” Behind me, I heard Aunt Christine welcoming everyone up onto the dry porch and hoped she would be too busy to search for me. I shoved open the barn door, and was greeted by Henley, the white fur of his snout against my knee. He wagged his tail as I urged him back. Joe Jared followed me in. I rested the photo of Grandma Helen on the workbench and tried to wipe the raindrops from the glass with my hand, but they just smeared.

Joe Jared took off his Stetson and flicked the water from it. He studied the space appraisingly. At roughly twelve hundred square feet, the wooden barn had more space than we needed. It had been built when my grandparents were in the meat and leather business, competing with Joe Jared for customers.

Wishbone Ranch was strictly an egg operation by the time I came to stay, but my grandmother had explained how the eggs used to be incubated until they hatched. The gangly chicks would spend their first year in the barn, living in the stalls that lined the south side of the structure until they reached their full height. At that point, they were moved out to the corral, where they waited to be transported to the slaughterhouse. That was in the eighties, before I was even born. It had been decades since an egg had hatched on our ranch, but Joe Jared would revive that business model: incubator, barn, corral, slaughterhouse.

“You got some damage to the joinery up there,” Joe said, gesturing with his hat to the northeast corner of the barn. At the boom of his voice, our two goats froze midchew and gazed over from the corner where they were tethered.

The barn needed work. I knew that. Owning anything out in the desert meant fighting a constant battle against the weather. Every year, the triple-digit heat of the summer months caused the wood of the barn to swell until the winter winds froze everything, contracting and cracking the posts where they came together. A tapping caught my ear as rain sneaked through a small hole in the roof, hitting the cement floor below.

Under the ruined timber of the roof rested two hulking egg incubators, each roughly the size of a bunk bed. Wide glass doors revealed the shelves inside, stacked with vacant trays that could hold hundreds of eggs. When they were in use, the entire interior of each incubator shifted every twenty minutes to simulate the attention the eggs would have gotten from the hens if they had been left in their nests. But they hadn’t been powered up in decades.

The way my grandma told it, sending the birds to their death always weighed on her. She would get attached, she said. Ostriches could live forty years, sometimes longer, and she hated to see them all butchered when they had so much life left to live.

For two decades, she ignored the nagging sense that she was responsible for so much death, but eventually, she told my grandfather it was time for a change. Eggs weren’t nearly as lucrative, but Grandma Helen had taken pride in the choice, and over the years, it rubbed off on me. It wasn’t that I had any great love for the birds, but it made sense to me that the meat and leather business would wear on a person after a while.

Joe Jared gave a whistle and pulled a Citori shotgun from its rack, paperwork suddenly forgotten. “I’ll give you a grand to leave this when you go,” he said, holding it up to admire the engravings on the side.

“It’s not for sale.” It had been my grandmother’s, a gift from her father when she moved out to the desert, and she’d given it to me on my eighteenth birthday. She treated target practice like meditation, even when we were just shooting at empty beer cans: focus at the top of an inhale, exhale just a little and hold it, steady the aim, pull the trigger. She even showed me how to take the gun apart and clean it. She had taught me so many things, and all she had wanted in return was for me to stay and carry on the enterprise she had spent her life building.

“Two grand,” Joe Jared said.

“Can we get this over with?” I snapped. I retrieved the envelope from where he’d dropped it and handed it to him.

Joe Jared reluctantly set down the shotgun and produced a slim stack of pages. Biting the cap from a pen, he laid the contract on the workbench so we could review it together.

“This outlines the basics,” he said around the cap in his mouth. “Market rate for each of the birds—” Before he could elaborate, an ostrich emerged from one of the stalls in the back of the barn. Her name was Abigail, and she could be a bit of a pest. She walked with a limp due to a badly injured ankle that had never healed right. Because of it, the other birds in the corral would peck at her, so Grandma Helen had allowed her to roam the property freely. She never went far. We treated her pretty much the same as we treated the dog and, like the dog, she followed us around the ranch as we did our chores, but she did have a way of interrogating strangers. Aunt Christine had worried that the inquisitive bird would frighten the funeral guests. At her request, I had spent half an hour the day before luring the limping bird into the barn so I could shut her in until the reception ended. I’d forgotten she was there.

She crossed to Joe Jared and pecked at his giant, silver belt buckle. He chuckled and shoved her away with an oversize hand.

“Sorry.” I wedged myself between Abigail and Joe Jared, trying to steer the bird into a nearby stall, but she skittered out of reach, her feet scratching against the cement floor. I scurried after her.

“Not at all,” Joe Jared said with a smirk.

I hated the amusement on his face. The birds were difficult to wrangle. He knew that, but he also had a hundred pounds on me, easy, not to mention the ten extra inches and a wingspan to match. I had to compensate for my smaller size by being quick. He had probably never chased a bird in his life.

I snatched Abigail’s beak and pulled her head low, forcing her to follow me into the enclosure. I latched the door and brushed my hands together as I returned to where Joe Jared waited with a condescending grin.

“As I was saying”—he chuckled again and adjusted his belt—“market rate for the flock comes in at two hundred ten, plus fair value on the land.” The pounding rain overhead grew to a thundering roar that syncopated with Joe’s voice until his words, loud as they were, became simply another noise.

I pictured the water flowing off the barn roof in sheets, overshooting the flooded rain gutters. It would glisten in the gray light and smooth the sand. The whole of the desert was one big basin, and though pockets of the ranch would catch runoff in pools, for the most part, the rain would rush down into the lowest part of the valley, miles to the east of us.

In my mind, I saw the path it cut to a creek bed that sat dry 363 days a year. Tomorrow, it would be a lake, and the next day, it would be dry again, the rain having soaked into the thirsty soil to replenish the underground reservoir that provided our small town with its modest supply of drinking water.

It would rain in Montana. Snow too, though I figured by the time winter came, I’d have a new assignment somewhere else. That was one of the things that appealed to me about the idea of working a handcrew. They would send me where I was needed. It didn’t pay much, but I wouldn’t have to pay rent and I’d have money in the bank from selling the ranch.

The thought brought me back to the barn, where Joe Jared tapped his pen on the pages before him and planted tiny check marks in the margins. When he came to the sale price, he tried to lowball me, offering a decent price for the land and the barn, but nothing for the house itself.

“It’s a four-bedroom,” I argued.

“I’ve got no use for it.” He sighed, reluctant to explain himself. “Here’s the thing. You can spend the next year transporting your birds to the slaughterhouse, setting up buyers, and dealing with accounts receivable while you try to sell the house, incurring all the costs that come with wrapping up a business like this. Or you can sell it all to me and be done with it.”

I had three weeks to get myself to Montana. I didn’t have time to sell off everything piecemeal. “Fine,” I said.

He wrote the total at the bottom of the page. All in, I would walk away from the sale with almost two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, an overwhelming amount of money, though I tried not to dwell on it. My plan was to put it all in savings and buy a place of my own someday when I found somewhere I wanted to settle down.

“You hang on to this,” he said, returning the pages to the envelope and handing it to me. “I’ll send my inspector out to do some diligence on the barn, the rest of the infrastructure,” he continued, scrutinizing the splitting wood of the joiner. “Do an official inspection. How’s Tuesday?”

“Fine. The sooner, the better. I’m leaving town at the end of the month,” I said, glad to have settled on a price before he knew I was in a hurry. “We’ll need to wrap things up before then.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem.” Joe Jared ducked to try to catch my eye. I avoided his gaze. I didn’t want to discuss my plans with him, and I knew he didn’t really care. We didn’t need to pretend otherwise. We were business associates, nothing more.

I held the dog’s collar as Joe Jared shoved the barn door open. The storm carried on and the crisp, cool air rushed in, the clean smell of it distinct for the absence of dust. From over near the house, I heard a squeal and saw my cousins through the deluge, dancing in the driveway, wiggling their hips and spinning in circles.

Joe Jared hesitated. “As a courtesy,” he said, “would you mind firing up the incubators and collecting the eggs while we finalize the details? They’re of no use to me otherwise.”

“Sure,” I said, trying to keep my voice light. “I can do that.” The mention of eggs reminded me again of the one lone egg that morning. It was a fluke, I told myself. It had to be. Maybe it was the pressure change before the storm, or all the well-wishers who had been coming and going with their trays of pasta. It would blow over. Everything would be fine. There was no need to worry Joe Jared and jeopardize the sale of the ranch by disclosing the details of one unusual morning.

“You heading in?” He indicated the house. Through the windows, I could see the small crowd of people gathered. The light inside looked cozy against the surrounding storm.

“I’ve got a few things to take care of out here.”

“Yeah,” he said, pulling his Stetson low. “I hate funerals too. Again, I’m sorry for your loss. Your grandmother had a good head on her shoulders.” And with that, he ducked out into the driving rain and made his way to his giant truck, drops bouncing off the brim of his hat. He beeped his horn at the girls, who were jumping in the puddles beside the house, and then he was gone.

I regarded the photo of Grandma Helen. It had been part of Aunt Christine’s vision for this whole reception thing, but I hesitated to bring it to the house. Grandma Helen had hated crowds. She would have been out there in the barn with the dog and me, finding any excuse to keep to herself.

Henley’s tags jingled as he followed me to the workbench, where I found a nail and hammered it into the wall, leaving enough sticking out to hang the frame on. She would be safe there. The dog and I stood side by side, considering the woman who had loomed so large in our lives.

The dog whimpered and cast an accusing glance at me.

“Don’t look at me like that,” I said. “None of this is my fault.” I pointed at Grandma Helen’s image. “She made her choice.”

Resentment surged in me when I thought about her leaving me alone on the ranch, followed immediately by guilt. I didn’t have any proof she had taken her own life. For all I knew, it had actually been an accident. Uncertainty gnawed at me. If she had steered into oncoming traffic on purpose and it had been her last-ditch attempt to manipulate me into staying, then selling was an easy way to win the argument. If not, selling was a terrible betrayal.

Over the din of the rain, I heard a low croak from the stall where Abigail was penned in. She lifted her beak to the ceiling. She was missing the rare treat of the rainfall.

Her favorite thing in the world was when Grandma Helen turned the hose on her. She would scramble in circles, dodging the stream of water while snapping at it with her beak. In the desert, folks tried hard not to waste water, but every now and then, Grandma Helen would indulge her feathered friend for a few minutes and play. To Abigail, rain was one extended hose session. By tomorrow the storm would blow over and the rain wouldn’t return for months.

“I can’t let you out,” I said, imagining how Aunt Christine’s church friends would react to finding an inquisitive, soggy ostrich between them and their cars. “I’m sorry.”

Abigail lowered her gaze to stare at me, annoyed. The small feather on the top of her head, the one that rose up like a question mark, looked almost painted in place.

The ostriches didn’t have expressions, exactly. They didn’t have lips to curl in anger or ears to lay back in irritation. With the ostriches, it was all about posture and sound. Friendly curiosity manifested in lilting head bobs—all the better to reach around and pilfer from the pockets of the unsuspecting. Aggression was hard to miss. A bird about to charge would lift its wings forward, suddenly appearing twice its size. Distress could be heard for miles as a low, whooping reverberation.

I grabbed Abigail’s beak and pulled gently. It was a playful invitation I’d seen Grandma Helen use with her a thousand times. When Grandma Helen did it, Abigail responded by pulling away and trying to peck at her hand, initiating an oversize thumb war, but when I did it, the bird just stared at me.

“Whatever,” I mumbled. I was wasting time anyway. I needed to know if there were more eggs. “Let’s check on the rest of ’em,” I said to the dog.

In the corner of the barn, I found the seldom-used raincoat we kept on hand and pulled it on over my dress, tucking the folded manila envelope into the pocket for safekeeping. There was something so satisfying about moving through a storm without getting wet.

The steady rain landed on the hood of the coat with hollow thumps. My boots sent sprays of water with every step. The dog trotted along beside me as far as the corral gate, then veered off to inspect a nearby sagebrush. He knew better than to come into the corral. The birds weren’t usually aggressive, but they were powerful and dumb. A stray kick from a spooked ostrich could kill a grown man, let alone a dog, and he had enough sense not to put himself underfoot.

Grandma Helen hadn’t let me into the corral until my fourth year on the ranch. By then, I was seventeen and strong enough to handle myself, but I never did find her level of comfort around the birds. I was forever flinching at their pecks and ducking out of their way.

Inside the corral, I fed the flock even though it was early yet for their dinner. As they gathered around the trough, I squeezed through them to survey the nests and saw a collection of empty pockmarks in the sand. I watched the birds as they fed. I just didn’t understand it. They didn’t appear sick. Aside from their soaked feathers, which drooped against their cheeks, they were the picture of health.

One of the hens, making her slow way to the feed trough, pecked at the shiny yellow vinyl of my raincoat. Her broad beak curled down slightly at the edges, giving her a disgruntled look that was emphasized by the sag of her wet feathers. I pulled down her beak to inspect for any signs of respiratory trouble, but her nostrils were clear and her eyes showed no signs of swelling. She blinked.

“What the hell?” I said, releasing her. She meandered away from me with a lazy gait, shoving herself into a spot between the other birds at the trough.

One hundred forty-two ostriches and not a single egg. It didn’t make any sense. Those exact birds had been laying eggs consistently for years. Biologically speaking, they should have another three decades or so of good egg-laying left in them.

Of course, when Joe took over, they would all be slaughtered. Maybe not immediately—he would need to wait until a batch of eggs hatched and a new crop of birds grew into the supply chain—but within a year or two, every bird standing there in the corral would be gone. A wave of nostalgia washed over me. Life was shifting. After nearly fifty years, our family would no longer center around Wishbone Ranch.

The oldest of my cousins might remember the family business, but the youngest was only six. At best, the ranch would be a foggy dream to her. She wouldn’t remember coming out for weekly family dinners or holding out grain through the fence for the birds to pluck from her hands while she squealed at the thrill of interacting with an animal so much bigger than herself.

I shook my head to clear it. My presence was overdue in the house. I had promised Aunt Christine I would stick with her plan for the day, so I needed to get myself inside.