One of them — maybe the same one — jabbed a shoe into Dobbs’s side.
The men were dressed in brown jumpsuits. They had faces, with features. There were name tags embroidered on their chests in gold script: MIKE and TIM.
Mike was the short one, the sleeves of his jumpsuit rolled. Limp flames licked at his forearms.
“What is it?” Dobbs said.
“It’s almost time,” Tim said. He was fat, and his crooked nose whistled when he breathed.
Mike folded his arms together, and the flames seemed to extinguish one another. “Sergio says you’d better be ready.”
Nineteen
The kid working the counter at the feed store had a long, downy swan’s neck and an Adam’s apple that bounced along like a Ping-Pong ball.
“What kind of chickens do you want?” he said, voice bending like a rusty hinge.
Michael Boni hadn’t come prepared for questions, and he found it hard to believe a kid like this could possibly know any more about birds than he did.
The Ping-Pong ball bobbed and swerved. “Meat or eggs or both?”
The kid was leading him down the hall to a garage-like space in the back. There was a shift in the air, a tanginess like a crowded bus terminal, but not entirely unpleasant.
The birds were huddled together in a wire pen laid with sawdust, chirping like cheap watches. The pen was even cruder than what Michael Boni had made for Priscilla. Inside, the chicks were tumbling over one another, white and yellow and brown. There were red warming lamps with aluminum shields and some sort of contraption on the floor the birds were huddled around. Whether it was food or water, he couldn’t tell. Just the sight of it made Michael Boni realize how little thought he’d put into this.
But how hard could it be? He’d been thinking of crusty old farm women tossing apronfuls of seed here and there in the dirt, the same lazy way Constance planted her garden. What was a chicken compared to a caique? Priscilla, his spoiled princess, more dog than bird. A chicken was like a goldfish that laid eggs.
“See any you like?” the kid said.
Michael Boni came another step closer. “They’re so small.”
“That’s the idea.”
With Priscilla, the choice had been simple. Michael Boni hadn’t been looking for a pet, least of all a bird. One afternoon he’d gone to the store to pick up some new saw blades, and in the parking lot there’d been a man in work boots standing beside a truck. When he saw Michael Boni coming, the man had held up the smoldering nub of a cigarette, like a torch to guide the way.
“I’ve got something for you,” he’d said.
The man was wiry and unshaven, and his jeans were torn at the crotch. He lifted a tarp in the back of his truck, and there were three cages in the bed, the thin metals bars dull and dented. The bed itself was scraped and battered, raw steel showing through the red. Maybe the dinginess of everything else was what made the birds look so beautiful, with their patches of green and yellow and orange. There were two in each cage. To Michael Boni, they looked like parrots, but they were smaller and peculiar. The pair that caught his eye were hanging upside down from their perch, like bats. The smaller of the two had a flame-orange crown, and she looked at Michael Boni with her head cocked, as if he were the unusual sight.
Michael Boni came closer, and the man pulled the tarp all the way back. On cue, the tiny bird with the orange crown righted itself, hopping down to the floor of the cage. Its partner did the same.
A moment later the two birds were on their backs, wrestling like kittens. Michael Boni had the sense he was watching some sort of vaudeville act.
“What are their names?”
The man rolled the extinguished butt between his fingers. “Whatever you want them to be.”
Michael Boni gave him twenty dollars for the pair, cage included.
As the truck’s engine rumbled and caught, hacking in place, Michael Boni drifted over to the open window. “What do they eat?”
“Bird food?” the man said, reaching for the crank, closing the gap. Then he was gone.
Michael Boni named the one with the orange crown Priscilla, a name fit for a princess. The black-headed one was Caesar.
Forgetting the blades, he went straight to a used bookstore near his apartment, and in the third book he tried, a hardcover branded with library stamps, he found a picture of a twin to Priscilla but with a bit more yellow at the throat. It was the first he’d ever heard of a caique.
Two days after Michael Boni took the birds home, Caesar began plucking feathers from his chest. Michael Boni brought him seeds and fruit, but Caesar wouldn’t eat. The book didn’t explain why. Michael Boni might have thought it was normal, but Priscilla’s appetite was good. She ate her share and Caesar’s, too.
The next morning Michael Boni found Caesar on his side on the bottom of the cage, breathing heavily. The bird didn’t object when Michael Boni picked him up. He seemed to like being cradled, nestling his head in the warmth of Michael Boni’s armpit. They passed the day that way.
Twenty-four hours later Caesar was dead. There was no hiding what had happened from Priscilla. When Michael Boni carried Caesar outside, leaving Priscilla alone in the cage, she responded by flinging herself against the bars.
Michael Boni buried Caesar in the yard. Afterward he came back inside. Priscilla was flapping and strutting around angrily. He opened the door to the cage, wanting to hold her, to comfort her. The nip she took from his hand later healed into a crescent-moon-shaped scar.
A week passed before she would let him touch her again.
The baby chicks in the pen at his feet had none of Priscilla’s personality. Maybe that would come later. So Michael Boni picked five that looked energetic and healthy. The kid also gave him a sack of rations and another of scratch.
“What else do you need?”
There was a long silence as Michael Boni squinted at the balls of fluff in the box. Only now did it occur to him to wonder what Priscilla was going to make of this.
The kid kept staring at him, waiting for an answer.
By then, spring was over, and the hot soup of Michigan summer had begun, Michael Boni’s second in his grandmother’s house. Unlike his old apartment, which at least had a window unit, his grandmother’s place had no air-conditioning at all, no escape from the swelter.
Carrying the box of chicks inside from the truck, Michael Boni thought about the red bulb at the feed store. Was it really possible the birds would need even more heat than this? The book he’d bought to learn about caiques was strictly exotic. Nothing at all in it about chickens. So Michael Boni brought the box into the bedroom, pressing it against the radiator.
Down the hall, Priscilla was pacing. He could hear the clatter of angry claws on the bottom of the cage. How did she know? He’d come in through the front door to avoid passing her room. Could she smell the chicks? Could she hear the muffled cheeps?
“I’ll be there in a minute,” Michael Boni said, hoping the sound of his voice might calm her.
There was no way to get to his workshop without passing Priscilla’s door. He darted past as fast as he could, but the moment she saw him, Priscilla let out a squeak.
“A minute,” he said. “Just a minute.”
He returned from the shop with a garbage bag full of sawdust. Priscilla followed him with her beak, wailing like a siren.
“Just a second,” he said.
He sifted the sawdust into the box a handful at a time. The five chicks fled into the farthest corner, huddling, whistling their own alarmed tune. He nestled a ramekin of water and another of rations into the sawdust.
As soon as he turned on the heat, the pipes began to thunk, seeming to ask if he was sure. It was a good question. During his first winter he’d discovered the radiator could be as cold as a sewer pipe one moment and then bolting like a steam engine the next.