Swallowing a Donkey's Eye Page 3

  “I don’t know how she knows. She just knows. Look, I only need to find out if my mother has been receiving and cashing the portion of my salary I have sent home each week.”

  BM leans back in his chair. The chair squeals like a torture victim. He folds his arms over his thin chest and says, “When was the last time you heard from your mother?”

  “Over a month ago.”

  He leans forward, tortured chair screaming again. His look of surprise is over-acting hammy.

  I say, “I know, I know. I usually talk to her once a month, but I slept through my Calling Time the other night.”

  “Tsk, tsk, tsk. Well I suggest you call your mother during your next Calling Time. My God, you have to take care of your family, kid.”

  I stand up. Arms held out, hands open, and I’m begging, pleading. I say, “I know and I’m trying. But I can’t wait another month to call her. In the meantime . . .”

  “There is no meantime. As I’m sure you know, my schedule has been honed and regimented for optimum efficiency. I don’t run the best Barn by accident, son. So, in two days I have my scheduled time with employee records. But I’ll tell you what I’ll do because this is about family. For you and only for you, pal, I promise to make your disbursement inquiry tops on my list. Does that sound good?” He doesn’t wait for an answer. He gets up, walks around the desk, slaps me on the back, punches me in the shoulder, and pats my fanny while shoving me toward the door. Then he walks back behind his desk, turns on the elevator, and two wooden panels slide open behind him.

  “So I guess this means you probably aren’t going to grant me a few days leave of Farm so I can go check on my mother.”

  He steps into his elevator and presses a button. The sprinklers come on. Water assaults my feet and ankles. BM says, “Time to get to work, son. Another day and all that,” and he winks, which is all somehow worse than him laughing or making a lame wisecrack about the chances of leaving Farm being Jack and shit, somehow worse than him just saying no.

  There’s no fanny-pat invite to join him in the elevator and the doors close. I walk back to the staircase, the decaying and descending spiral: my symbol.

  6

  THE APPLE OF HIS EYE

  So now I’m thinking about piss-girl and everything she said. Dwelling on would be a more apt description, or obsessing. My mother with a junkie, my mother homeless, my already-once-abandoned mother who I then re-abandoned, left alone in City. . . .

  The idea was that me being a gainfully kept, penned-in employee at Farm would make us enough money for our lives to be at least tolerable if not totally dreamy. Everything hasn’t exactly worked according to plan. Maybe it’s time for a new plan.

  Jonah and I pull pitchforks and shovels out of the shed, preparing for another stall-filled workday.

  I say, “I’m so sick of the smell of this place.”

  Jonah says, “The smell of this place doesn’t bother me. I’m used to it.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “No pun intended, right?”

  I mock scream. “It’s physiologically impossible to get used to a smell. You smell because microscopic particles, physical matter belonging to whatever it is you smell, land on receptor cells, waiting to be processed by the brain.”

  “Yummy.”

  We walk to a stall. Jonah works the password on the antiquated, tour-friendly lock. The Chicken calls out our names from across the Barn. He heads our way, driving a four-seat ATV. He and his chicken suit take up the two front seats.

  I say, “This place stinks.”

  “Smells authentic, right?”

  “Why not genetically alter the animals not to smell, right? It’s always there. Every morning, lunch break, quittin’ time. Every night when I go to bed. Doesn’t matter how many showers I take. I smell it and there’s no getting used to it. Because it, the smell, is an it. It exists.”

  “Nope. I’m used to it,” Jonah says. He ignores the approaching Chicken and opens the stall door, loosening a chewy waft of animal and wet hay mixed with manure.

  “No, you’re not. You’re just ignoring your nose. Your nose tells you this place is wrong, and you ignore it, just like everyone else. Why should their noses be any different than their eyes and ears?”

  “What’s got you all wound up?”

  “Long story. So what do you think the Chicken wants?”

  “Who cares? I hope that motherfucker moults.” Despite their Social Night double date, Jonah is back to hating the Chicken. He gets like this whenever he punches in, whenever he’s on Farm time. He immerses himself into his pissed-off Farm-hand role.

  The Chicken pulls up next to us and says, “Gentleman, you may put away your pitchforks. You have been temporarily assigned to Orchard today.”

  I ask, “Picking or ground duty?” Picking is better than ground duty. Both are better than the stalls. I wonder if BM is trying to throw me an I-won’t-look-up-your-records-right-now bone. If he is, I’ll accept it like a greedy, half-starved mutt. Look who’s the dog again.

  “I don’t know, but I’m to escort you there. Please join me, gentleman,” he says and points a wing at the back seats. “Oh, and Jonah. Would you please cover your tattoo for the ride over? We may pass tours en route.”

  Jonah puts on his hat, mumbles something about an egg-laying errand boy, and climbs in the back. Chicken and I ignore him.

  We ride through the length of the Barn 5 enclosure and emerge into bright sunlight. No one talks. I lean back (Chicken’s feathers tickle me if I don’t), close my eyes, and aim my face at the sun. It feels so good on my skin, so right, even though I know there’s nothing innately good or moral about that giant ball of gas. I inhale, trying to smell the sun, trying to get it inside me, and on this most unexpected and welcome trip outdoors, there are new, even joyous smells: cut grass and flowers (we must be passing the Greenery now but I’m not opening my eyes to see) and fresh manure-less soil, and Orchard and its blossoming trees and fruit. But underneath it all, a virus infecting the system, is the smell of our Farm, the real Farm. The shit and piss and slaughtered carcasses and giant compost heaps and machinery exhaust and hours upon hours of human sweat. It’s on Jonah and on me and it’ll never leave us.

  Our moment in the sun is heartbreakingly brief. The ATV jerks to a stop at our new work area. Jonah sneezes, wipes his hand on the back of my overalls, and says, “This hay fever is gonna kill me.”

  Orchard is immense. Sixteen square miles of apple, pear, orange, palm, maple, rubber, and eucalyptus trees planted and grown in grids. Farm engineers its trees to withstand the climate and to be able to grow in such proximity. The canopy blots out the sun and sky if you’re on the ground and not on one of the grid-roads.

  The Chicken leads us to our new gear and brusquely gives us our assignment. Jonah waits until the Chicken and his ATV disappear, then says, “Of course we get fucking ground duty. No sun for us dirty pigs.” He sneezes again.

  Ground duty: gathering up all the fallen fruit by hand. Apples today, as Chicken dropped us in the apple-grid. I say, “It’s better than the stalls.”

  We wait at the grid-road to let pass a Harvester (a heavy duty ATV hitched to a flatbed loaded with white scaffolding almost forty feet tall). The pickers nested in their carefully assigned areas of the scaffolding, wave and laugh at us. Apparently, us ground-duty folk are low on the Orchard food chain.

  Jonah says, “That’s the only cool job in the place. They’re in the sun all day, climbing up and down the scaffolding like kids on a jungle gym. And we’re stuck at the bottom like moss. We’re fucking mobile moss, man.”

  We lead our sputtering hand-cart across the road. The sun warms our backs for the brief road traverse, and then it’s back under the canopy. We park the cart just off the side of the grid-road. It can’t crawl between the crowded trees or over the gnarled and exposed roots, which sucks. We have to gather fallen apples in our satchels and lug them al
l the way back to the cart and the grid-road. Farm has the technology to harvest fruit and pick up fallen apples with more efficient machines, but since Orchard has been the most popular Farm area to tour, the higher ups, the mucky-mucks, have focus group data that supports workers gathering apples by hand as more quaint, more tour-friendly.

  “So tell me about your long story.” Jonah says.

  We walk into the dark heart of the apple-grid. The thinnest of rays breaks through some leaves, but it fades out when the wind blows through the canopy. The light ducks and hides from us.

  “What long story?”

  “When you came out of BM’s office, I asked you why you were so wound up. You said ‘long story.’”

  I don’t feel like talking about it. So I attempt to distract Jonah, the self-appointed expert on Farm operation procedures, with this: “I can’t believe there aren’t more leaves and apples on the ground.” Tree roots snake over each other, blanketing the ground. A short grass covers what little space the roots don’t claim. There are only a few still-green leaves and a handful of apples beneath each tree.

  “You serious? Farm engineers its trees to grow apples with stronger stems, so the apples hardly fall.” Jonah pounds the trunk of a tree with his righteous fist. “They could make it so the apples never fall, if they wanted. But tours seeing no apples on the ground wouldn’t seem right. So they’ve perfected trees with a pick to fall ratio of 28.5:1.”

  “Now I know you’re making shit up.”

  “Nope. No shit. Don’t ever forget, this place is all about the show. And the leaves don’t really fall either, unless they’re accidentally knocked down by careless pickers. Well, there is one autumn-grid in the northwest corner. Raking those leaves is such a colossal pain in the ass. You wouldn’t believe it.”

  “I believe it.” I bend down at the base of a tree and pick up three apples.

  Jonah walks to the tree across from mine, and says, “So back to the long story. And why did you meet with BM before the shift? Is this day-trip the result? You and BM are chummy-chums now? I didn’t think you were an ass kisser.”

  I say, “No, nothing like that. I wanted to make sure my salary disbursement was working right. Just checking to see if my money was going where, you know, it was supposed to. Doesn’t matter, he wouldn’t look up my info.”

  “So we get rewarded with a day in Orchard?”

  I pick up more apples, my satchel almost full. “I guess so.”

  There is no follow-up question. That’s because like most of the rest of us Farmhands, he doesn’t pry or ask about anyone’s past. Asking about the past, about pre-Farm life only reminds us that we’re stuck at Farm.

  I’ve been Jonah’s roommate for two years and I know nothing about the why of Jonah’s tattoo or his family or anything else that was him before Farm. He knows nothing about the pre-Farm me. That’s just how it is.

  We work in silence, filling our satchels and walking back to the road to dump them in the cart. Tours go by. We wave and smile. Jonah with his hat on, that hat covering his past. I think about my mother the whole time.

  I say, “I was checking to see if my mother is getting the money I send home, Jonah.” I think about what it means if in a few days BM tells me Mom hasn’t been cashing the checks. I think about what it would mean if she doesn’t answer the phone when I try to call her next month.

  “What?”

  “Today. My chat with BM. It was all about trying to make sure money is still going home to my mother.”

  Jonah takes off his hat and shakes his head, beard and fake-beard fly around. Then he puts it back on.

  I keep talking. “Remember that crazy chick I told you about?”

  “Piss-girl?”

  “Yeah. She knew my mother’s name.”

  “You gotta promise to point her out to me next time.”

  “I will. She told me my mother was on the verge of being homeless.”

  “Me and her need to meet and greet.”

  “Enough with the piss-girl.”

  “Sorry, mate.”

  “What am I going to do if piss-girl was telling the truth?”

  Jonah doesn’t ask what happened to your father? or why would your mother be homeless? or where did she live? or where is she now? or how much money do you send home? He doesn’t ask why did you leave your mother to come here? Jonah follows all of Farm’s rules, including the unwritten ones: thou shall not ask why or how somebody came to Farm because no one is willing to answer thine questions about the biggest mistake of their lives.

  Jonah shrugs. “Don’t know, guy. But that sucks.” He walks to another tree, one farther away from me, and picks more apples, real fast, like he has to catch up on work because of our little chat.

  Jonah puts on big airs about hating this place, but he is this place. That two-faced phony is Farm. He wants nothing to do with this problem, my problem, and now I’m just a rusty cog in the Farm machine to him. The kicker is I actually feel ashamed, like I should apologize for my apple-picking inefficiency. But I’m also pissed, pissed at him, at BM, at Farm, at my mother, at myself for allowing all this to happen.

  And just like that, I’m ready to do something, ready to break rules. I form a new plan: I drop my satchel and claw at the trunk of the nearest tree, scrabble for a grip or foothold.

  As a kid, I used to climb on my apartment building’s fire escapes and shimmy up lampposts. There was this one time, late afternoon, close to dinner, and I remember the sky was the same colour as our brick apartment building. The sky was made of those same crumbly bricks. I climbed up my usual post, the one with the burnt-out bulb. Green paint flaked off under my fingers. I got to the top and made the hero’s leap to the fire escape, which had its own flaking black paint. I was only eleven. My parents’ bedroom window was two floors above me. They’d gone in a half-hour previously and locked their bedroom door. I spider-crawled up the fire escape, and the metal shook under my weight. I was afraid the thing might fall down with me on it, a broken elevator car. But I thought it would be cool, too. I could ride it down like it was a skateboard. I made it to my parents’ window and hovered outside. I was a vampire bat, testing the hole-filled screen. The lights were off and it was dark inside, but there was my father’s naked pale skin pressed up against my mother’s brown skin. I knocked on the frame and yelled, “Lovebirds.” I’d planned only to yell boo or something similarly jokey-scary, something to teach them to not lock the door on me. My father was outside and waiting on the sidewalk before I slid back down the lamppost. He was shirtless and wearing baggy gray sweatpants with paint and coffee stains, those skinny legs of his lost somewhere inside. I said, “Dad, put a shirt on, you’re embarrassing me,” then tried to laugh it all off. He didn’t laugh. He was embarrassed and pissed, so he grabbed me, and said, “I knew you’d climb up there.” My father had always claimed he was psychic, but only after something had already happened. He dragged me inside the apartment and threw me into my room. He didn’t hit me, but he squeezed and yanked on my arm awful hard. I cried and pretended he broke my arm. Mom stayed in the bedroom. Dad joked about the whole thing the next day, but for a week, Mom couldn’t look me in the eye. The still sore-armed part of me enjoyed her embarrassment.

  I wonder what Jonah or Chicken or BM or anyone else here would say or do if I told them that story. I wonder what they’d say if I told them that the post-Dad-desertion Mom was no longer embarrassed so easily.

  I slide down the trunk, scraping up my arms and hands. Damn thing is too wide and thick for a shimmy. Would Jonah care that I’ve never climbed a tree?

  Jonah says, “What are you doing?” but then he turns around, shows me his back.

  “I’m climbing this tree. If I make it up, I’m going to pick an apple and eat it.”

  “Are you fucking nuts?” He still hasn’t turned around and he still picks up fallen apples.

  “Nope. Just going home.”

&
nbsp; “You do whatever it is you’re doing, guy. Leave me the fuck out of this. But you’ll never get out of here if you climb that tree and eat a new apple. Trust me,” he says and adjusts his hat to make sure none of that face is showing. He shakes his head at me then disappears into the trees. I wish he’d at least take off the hat.

  As angry as I still am, much of me is hurt and shocked that Jonah isn’t physically stopping me from climbing the tree, that Jonah really doesn’t seem to care what I do. Shit, I’m losing steam. I let go of the tree and wipe my hands on my pants. I can’t climb the thing anyway. I pick up my satchel and put it back on my shoulder. It’s heavy.

  I weave through the trees looking for Jonah. No sign yet. I pull an apple out of the satchel. It isn’t any good; it has bruises and is flat on one side. The apple must’ve fallen from up high.

  There he is, and I run up behind him and knock off his hat. He doesn’t turn to face me. All he gives me is that tattoo face, that fake face.

  As loud as I can, I yell, “Boo!” If there are birds in the canopy above, I imagine they’re scattering. Then I bite the apple. And it’s bitter.

  7

  LAW AND ORDER

  Within an hour of apple-consumption Farm Security (them with their double-barrel shotguns, straw hats with shot-glass-sized blue sirens flashing on the top, and their blue overalls) cuffs me, removes me from Orchard, transports me to the cavernous main offices, and dumps me in a darkened conference room. After another hour or so of waiting, a fleet, a veritable army of lawyers enters the big dark room, and they keep it dark. Spotlights appear from the ceiling only when necessary. Throughout the meeting, a general rumble of lawyer-speak is always present. They accuse, they argue, they pick through my Farm contract, and they argue some more. They yell at me. They call me names. They try to get a rise out of me. I give them nothing. They read eyewitness reports. They read character descriptions from BM, Jonah, Chicken, and others. They read a list (a small list) of people I’d slept with while at Farm. They constantly remind me how many millions my case and the lawyers’ fees are costing Farm. This goes on and on and on. I only ever leave my seat to go to the bathroom. I eat small meals and sleep while sitting at the conference table. The lawyers don’t leave. When lawyers tire, new ones take their place. This goes on and on and on. After two days of interviews, of badgering, of case studies and histories, of going over the surveillance vids, of reciting and memorizing contractual codes of conduct, of insisting to them that I acted alone and that Jonah was not on the grassy knoll, they convene to make an official recommendation. I sleep while they deliberate in an adjacent room. After only two hours, the lawyers reappear and make their recommendation: death.