Swallowing a Donkey's Eye Read online

  “That’s so sweet. Who is she?”

  When he doesn’t answer, I give him two more whacks on his arm with the shovel.

  “Ow! Stop it! Okay, she’s the Duck.”

  Fuck a duck. I hit him again. “So let me get this straight. You knew about their planned attack, which means you knew about the donkey bomb waiting for me and Jonah, didn’t you? You son of a bitch! You let us drive out there. Jonah’s dead because of you.”

  “No. No, I had no idea how they were getting in. I swear.” Chicken’s voice goes castrati-high. He begs and pleads, and feigns ignorance to the donkey bomb and the coup in the coop. After the attack started, he says he heard about the perimeter fence explosion, and he drove out to check on me and Jonah.

  I don’t really care if he’s telling me the truth at this point as long as I can use him to get me back into City. I hit him one more time with the shovel. He cries out, but there isn’t much force behind the blow. My movement is limited in the duck suit.

  I say, “So your group calls themselves Farm Animals Revolution Today. You really call yourselves FART?”

  “The founder was an ex-Barn Manager who liked the idea of media broadcasting terror reports using the acronym FART. He insisted it would help recruitment and viewer ratings with such a jokey name. I even heard he focus grouped the thing.” Chicken rolls down his window and spits sunflower seeds out of his beak.

  “Where’d the hell you get those?”

  “What? The seeds? I had them on me. Brought them with me, inside the suit.”

  “You always carry seeds with you?”

  “Most of the time. Why? Is there a problem?”

  We drive for another mile or two. He spits more seeds. I sit and stew.

  Then, up ahead there’s a truck and two automatic rifle toting Cows blocking the access road. Chicken slows and I say, “Let me do the talking,” even though I have no idea what I’ll say.

  “No. I can get us through this. I know the password.”

  I really don’t have any other choice than to trust him. We stop, the Chicken waves and says, “Baby beluga in the deep blue sea.” The Cows lower their weapons and look at me. I wave and quack. It’s all good enough for the Cows. They funnel us onto a dirt road to our left, one that disappears into a thicket of trees.

  “Nice password. I thought you said you didn’t know anything, weren’t a part of the group.”

  “I only know a few things because of Sheryl.”

  “Sheryl?”

  “The Duck.”

  “Right. I really don’t like her.”

  “I surmised. So what’s your plan?”

  I blow a lot of air through my duck beak. “I’m working on it.”

  The Jeep’s wheels bounce around in deep ruts. The Chicken says, “We’ll be at the camp in three or four miles, I think.”

  “How do you know? Have you ever been there?”

  The Chicken hems and haws his way through a yes. Then he says, “I know it looks bad, but I’m telling you, I didn’t know anything about the specifics of today’s attack, didn’t know anything about the donkey bomb, all right?”

  “Jonah was right about you, Chicken.”

  He shakes his head, and I know I’m imagining an expression (must be my concussion) on his chicken head, but he slumps and looks hurt. “Look, let me make it up to you. Maybe I can help scrape you up a new vehicle and some IDs, something to help you get back into City.”

  “No thanks.”

  “Or I can give you directions to Dump. You could hitch a ride on one of the automated trucks. It’s easy.”

  I like that second idea, but I’m not telling him that. I say, “Stop here. Now. Or I start swinging the shovel again.”

  All the fight has gone out of this rooster. He pulls over, stops, and doesn’t say anything. To his credit, he knows enough not to say he’s sorry, to not lie to me again. I tell him to wrap his arms around his chest, and he does. I take the tips of the Chicken’s arms/wings, stretch them as far as they go, and tie them together. Voila, a makeshift straight jacket. I do the same to his chicken feet, and then I rolled him off the road, into the base of a thick bush. Should occupy him for at least an hour, maybe more.

  I jump in the Jeep and start back down the double-secret dirt road, presumably toward the FART camp. I think about how easy that was with the Chicken. How he wordlessly complied with everything I did to him. He’s back to being a good company man.

  20

  DON’T CALL ME JONAH

  I curse myself for dumping the Chicken before asking how his ex-girlfriend—the revolutionary piss-girl Duck—knows my mother. How does she know that Mom is living with a junkie and on the verge of being homeless? Maybe the Duck was completely bluffing. Maybe Mom’s terminated bank account is a coincidence, though that strikes me as highly unlikely.

  It’s too late to turn around and try to pry out some Chicken answers to those questions, because I’m here. I lay on the baby beluga password to a couple of coyote-looking guards, pass the checkpoint, and hit the camp.

  Hidden among the trees, there are ten to fifteen large olive green tents forming a central compound, and dozens of smaller, individual sized tents dotting the area along with parked Jeeps and fifty or so people milling around. Some wear full animal suits, some wear the body with no head, and a few wear camo fatigues. It’s kind of nice seeing someone, anyone, not wearing overalls.

  FART members dressed in their campy mascot suits wave at me and the Jeep with their hands, and with their guns, some give me thumbs up, at least, the ones who have thumbs. I imagine Farm and then City under siege, attacked by these oversized stuffed animals. Teddy and Pooh Bears with machine guns, Pound Puppies with grenades and donkey bombs, and they dip their foam tongues in our blood during this, the first of the last wars, fighting plush-tooth and plush-nail, fighting like humans.

  I continue my slow roll through the camp. I’m nervous about passing through the checkpoint at the other end, as I don’t know if a simple password is going to allow me to simply drive toward City. My feathered-belly full of nerves is well founded as I find the checkpoint on the other side of the camp, and it’s more heavily fortified: six machine gun toting guards and an iron barred barricade. I’m not driving through that. Baby beluga or not.

  I turn around and park the Jeep next to three others in what looks to be an empty car pool. I’m hot and I smell, and ducking into one of the bigger tents to hunt for water and a change of clothes is something I consider. I decide not to press my luck. Instead, I take my trusty shovel and, with everyone else too busy to watch this duck, disappear into the woods.

  The sun peeks through the clouds long enough to show me where it’s setting, which is good, because it gives me a bearing on my position. I need to head south, across the Farm access road and hopefully, if I can trust the Chicken, to Dump and their automated trucks.

  It’s completely dark out by the time I emerge from the woods and hit the empty Farm-access road. There’s a fog smelling of salt air and exhaust. There are no stars and no moon visible in the sky, not that I expected to see anything this close to City and its omnipresent smog and cloud cover. But I am close enough to see City’s neon aura to the East. I cross the road, keeping City’s glow to my left, and wade into a field of duck-bill-high tall grass, hopefully toward a different access road.

  I stumble up gravel embankments and into mouldy troughs, through weedy patches, and crash through the muck and mire of a stagnant swamp, raising armies of mosquitoes and gnats that are able to find the cracks and breathe holes of my suit.

  Hours pass. The swampy land finally gives way to a field of dried brush, then a flat and arid stretch that fills my lung with dirt and sand, the used minerals of a dead land. The bugs are still with me, though, and still getting bigger somehow. The good news is that there’s a truly appalling smell filling my nostrils, one that I’m not used to. Dump can’t be too far away.

>   One more mile of walking, my feet hit the jackpot. Pavement. I’ve found another access road.

  Sticking my hitcher’s thumb out isn’t going to work. Quickly, I gather rocks and dried branches and lay them across the road. Hopefully it’s enough to slow down and temporarily stop an automatic truck, but not enough to close the road. We’ll find out. I sit in the bushes on an elevated embankment, and wait. It’s here where I take stock: I still don’t know for sure if I’m in the right spot. I don’t have any ID on me. And even if I do get into City, don’t get picked up in a street sweep or at the border, and by some miracle I find my mother, how am I going to help her? I’ll likely be deported to the Pier with her.

  I try not to sweat the details, and just hope that if Farm is truly in the midst of a revolution, me escaping will slip through the cracks, and I might be able to access my bank account somehow once in City. That, and I’m still wearing a duck suit, white feathers covered in muck and dirt, and it’s all I’ve got.

  My wait at the side of the road is surprisingly brief. An automated garbage truck rumbles down the access road. I think it’s a garbage truck, anyway. It’s too dark to glean a positive ID and the thing motors along without its headlights on, which is good news because it means the truck is in fact automated. It rolls to a stop before hitting my little road block, the pile of sticks and stones that couldn’t break any bones. Once stopped, all manner of lights flash on: headlights, taillights, floodlights. The silver beast is a rear loading garbage truck, small front cab, and all metal and engine.

  I jump out of my hiding spot and creep to the back of the truck. Up front there are electronic blips and bleeps. It must be scanning the road, determining if it can safely pass over the road block, which hopefully it can. I grope the rear side panels and find a button. I press it and the pneumatic compacting door opens. The garbage smell almost knocks me off my feet, but I climb inside the trailer.

  The compacting door closes behind me. I figured that would happen, but it’s still hard not to panic in the utter darkness of the closed trailer and give into visions of the door pressing me into flesh cubes. My duck feet slip and slide on the coating of leftover slime and gunk from its most recent Dump deposit.

  The compacting door doesn’t press me flat and the truck moves under my feet. We’re off again and going up an incline. I slide up against the door, mashing my beak pretty good. I sit and hug my knees to my chest, to try to limit how much I slide, but I move with the slightest pitch in the road, falling left, right, front, back, as if direction has any meaning in the total darkness. And I laugh at myself, out loud, the manic sounds echoing off the tin can walls. I laugh because I’m still in a duck suit. I laugh because I’m stuck in the belly of the mechanical whale with no idea of how I’m going to get out.

  Don’t call me Jonah.

  21

  GETTING ATTENTION

  There’s this:

  I was in sixth grade. I’d run home, again. Skipped out on the City bus, the unused tokens adding up in my backpack. I had no one to protect me. Jimmy wasn’t out of school yet and no one else from my neighbourhood went to the private catholic school downtown. St. Sebastian’s School, named after the saint who was plugged full of arrows. At that time Dad was a fill-in math teacher even though he never liked math. He usually stayed late to give the older kids extra help, or at least, that’s what he told me. Can’t say I ever saw him giving extra help, and Dad-the-psychic was always lousy ESPing that I needed him or his help. He sent me home by

  myself usually.

  I skipped the bus and ran home because I was ducking those Coomer Project boys from two blocks north. They had a rep for taking kids off the bus and knocking the snot out of them, or making them eat stuff in Dumpsters, or making them give hand jobs or all of the above. I’d never been caught by the Coomer Project boys or seen them in action, but the stories of their exploits were good enough for me.

  No bus. I opted for duck, cover, and run.

  Mom knew what I was doing. She must’ve heard the jingle of metal when I ran into my bedroom and dumped the tokens into the not-so-secret stash I kept in my underwear drawer. But she never said anything to me.

  I emerged from my bedroom, breath and galloping heart rate slowing down to a mere panic. Mom was in the kitchen and she leaned into the hallway. She said, “Everything okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Come here.”

  I walked down the hall. I tried to hide my shaking legs and sweaty forehead but there were no hiding spots. I said, “What?”

  “I want to give you some attention.”

  Attention was something she’d learned from her mother, so she’d told me. Mom hadn’t given me her version of attention in years. I’d long grown out of it. We never said as much. It was a silent agreement, one that made sense and had permanent age boundaries in place. I was almost a teenager. Clearly too old for attention. I was embarrassed she was even bringing it up.

  She put a hand on my shoulder and led me into the living room, then said, “Lay down.”

  I cocked my head, and couldn’t speak without a rush of tears falling out.

  She dropped to her knees and patted the rug. “If you don’t want any attention, that’s fine. I understand.”

  I lay down on the rug, on my back. The ceiling above me had cracks in the plaster. Mom tied her straightened hair up so it wouldn’t fall into my face, then swung a leg over my stomach so that she kneeled above me. She smiled and hovered for a second. “We haven’t done this in a while,” she said and leaned forward. Our noses were only a few inches apart. She cupped my head under her hands. “Oof! Your head is much heavier than it used to be. My little baby is so grown up now.”

  “Mom.”

  “Okay, here’s your attention.”

  She twitched her hands up and down. My head bobbed in a gentle and soothing yes motion. My face pushed up toward her round, still-young face and fell away and back up and away again. Our noses touched every so often and we giggled when they did.

  This is part of why I’m going to look for Mom in City even if it means my own Pier deportation, arrest, or death.

  22

  LOOK WHO CAME TO DINNER

  The truck has stopped moving. I hear voices outside, and some banging on the truck, but I’m strangely unconcerned that I’ll be found or caught. Though I am a little frightened of what that means about me.

  The truck starts again, going up another incline. Over the grumble of engine and wheels, I hear faint traffic noises. And with that, I know I’m in and riding the City streets in style.

  The truck stops again, abruptly. This time the pneumatic pistons groan and I brace for an onslaught of light that doesn’t come. It’s still night, or early morning. There’s some light, and it’s artificial, engineered, of course; street lamps and neon signs and headlights, but nothing too bright. Not even bright enough to make me squint. The City light is dark and dirty. I don’t know what I was hoping for or expecting. Maybe a baptism, a cleansing by golden light to welcome the prodigal son back to City. Nothing ever works out the way you want.

  Two garbage bags fly in through the half open door. I fend them off with a wing and crawl toward the open door, and get there, swinging my legs out first, and kind of just spill onto the street. There are two garbage-collectors on either side of the truck. One has his hand on the compacting door button. They look at me, then at each other, shrug, and hop on the back of the truck and continue on their route. They didn’t throw the escapee dressed like a duck more than a glance. They couldn’t be more ho-hum if they tried. So much for City’s famed no-one-gets-in-without-Us-knowing-about-it security system. That said, my head is on a swivel looking for any sign of City Eye, the surveillance vid that supposedly covers every inch of City.

  I’m in the Industrial Center with factories and plants and smoke stacks towering above and around me. This is good. This means I’m in the south side of City. My old neighbourhood is
only a handful of blocks northeast from here.

  It takes a minute to lose my sea legs, and then I break into a jog, past the occasional diner and convenience store, past crumbling warehouses that lean on newer ones, past rows of smoke stacks, their mouths stained to ash, spitting their guts into the sky like they’re doing everyone the favour of spewing their toxins a hundred feet above us instead of right in our faces.

  Quickly enough I make it out of the Industrial Center and into the South End tenements. Here are the high rising apartment buildings and poverty-track housing mixed with decaying antique brownstones. Here’s my old neighbourhood.

  It’s 4:30 AM. I spied the time from an ATM. There’s a hard wind and needling drizzle dampening my feathers. I’m freezing, but maybe it’ll knock some of the garbage-truck smell out of me. Sirens wail, but they’re far away and don’t seem to be coming closer. I pass a few shop owners. They sweep their sidewalks and prepare to open for the morning rush, but I don’t pass anyone else on the street. The occasional cab drives by, the on-duty lamps dark.

  I have no money or ID and I’m dressed like a duck. I have no friends or acquaintances here. No contacts. Nowhere to hide. Nowhere to go. Except my mother’s apartment. I’m on autopilot, walking through memories to my childhood home. There’s no thought as to what happens if Mom is there or if she is not there. There’s no if anymore. Just my walking. And I’m walking the plank, but I’m ready, calm, accepting of whatever lies ahead.

  There’s my building. It looks an age older than I remember. The lamppost out front is down to one working bulb, and it flickers. No lights are on in the building. I stop myself from shouting to old friends who were probably never really my friends, who surely no longer live there. The sidewalk is cracked and displays its soupy papier-mâché of old newspaper strips, market bags, and cardboard food-containers. I find hints of drug paraphernalia too; nothing as overt as needles or vials or clips, but dead lighters (although I fish around and find a lighter that works), browned strips of filter paper and shards of bottle glass with caramelized spots.