And when those two days are up I don’t hug or thank him, I meekly shuffle, I flinch, I hear voices, I drool, I follow him into the trailer and stand on a milk crate in a crap-coated stall, where four elderly Flaweds check me for body lice, then dress me in coarse baggies and lead me to a wagon driven by Mollie, a hag whose Flaw is a colossal turkeyneck.
She gives me a friendly smile while smearing antibiotic on her wattles, then hops down and adds me to a line of thirty Flaweds chained to the back of the wagon.
And off we go.
We plod through Eureka and Pacific, camp in a foundry parking lot, get up at the crack of dawn and start south again, past porches overgrown with lilac and piles of junk bikes being sold piecemeal for shack frames. It’s Sullivan, Rolla, Hazelgreen, and Sleeper, where a field behind a former mall is full of singing teens digging roots by torchlight. The days are a blur of fences, distant hills, senior citizens selling moist towelettes on the shoulder. The air smells of fried chicken and coffee, there are laughing girls on porches, tumbling puppies chasing ducks, long tables of steaming food in the sunlight, but none of it’s for us. We get eight Sterno-warmed pork nuggets and a sip of water a day. We get Mollie chirping about the beauty of the land while rubbing bagbalm into our shacklesores. You’d think we’d devise an escape plan or share childhood memories while developing bonds of camaraderie to last a lifetime. But no. We slander one another. We bicker. We victimize an asthmatic ex-database guru from Detroit by stealing his nuggets whenever he has a coughing fit.
By Lebanon I’m bleeding at the claws and Krennup’s composing love songs to Carlotta while slugging brandy on the back of the wagon. We double-time through Marshfield and Strafford and get pelted with eggs by frat boys in Springfield and drenched to the bone in Mt. Vernon while waiting for Krennup to come out of a tavern. When he does it’s with a mob of drunks and he makes me show my feet so they can compare my claws with an almond held by the tallest drunk, and the drunks conclude that every one of my claws is indeed bigger than the almond and give Krennup a dollar each, then tromp inside cackling while I stand barefoot in the freezing rain.
Next morning he wakes us before dawn and marches us out to the Sarcoxie slavemart, a fenced-in mudpatch behind a firebombed Wendy’s.
“Best foot forward, folks,” he says, giving Mollie a playful tug on the wattles. “The sooner I sell you misanthropes, the sooner I get home and wow Carlotta with the profits.”
All morning I stand on a stump as buyers file by. They take souvenir photos of my claws, using pens and matchbooks for scale. They note the cracked flesh and the swelling and doubt aloud my ability to handle fieldwork. They ask can I cook. I say no. They ask can I build furniture or supervise a cleaning staff or create interesting pastries. I say no no no. By dinnertime it’s just me and a set of Siamese twins and a few double amputees sitting hopefully on crates.
Krennup and Mollie glare at me from across the Sterno fire.
“Are we not going to be able to get anything for you?” Krennup says. “Are you literally worthless? Those feet are so off-putting. It’s frustrating.”
“Maybe we could rent a power sander,” Mollie says.
“Not to intrude, folks,” says a buyer nearby wearing a wool vest, “but you’ve talking to this man in awfully derogatory terms. I don’t even talk to my sheep so negatively. I have half a mind to buy this fellow and turn him into a shepherd.”
“If you’ve got fifty bucks you can turn him into dog food for all I care,” Krennup says.
“Oh, come now,” the man says. “What does a comment like that tell us about your self-image? Talk about an inhibitory belief system. You see yourself as someone who needs to sell someone else to a dog-food factory in order to validate yourself. And yet it seems to me that you have some very fine qualities. If nothing else, the fact that you own property says some positive things about your organizational skills and your will to power. Cut yourself some slack, friend. Come down off that cross of your own making, and believe in you!”
“Whatever,” Krennup says. “Do you want him or not? Fifty, firm.”
“Frankly, I abhor this slavery thing,” the man says to me. “But you can’t fight it. So I do my part to treat my people like human beings. My name’s Ned Ventor. I consider myself to be working for change from within the system.”
He shakes my hand, then slips Krennup a fifty and leads me to a wagon with padded seats, where four other Flaweds are sitting unchained drinking lemonade.
“Care for some lemonade?” he says. “Bagel? I hope these seats are neither too soft nor too hard. Please fill out a name tag. Attention all! What I usually like to do is hold a brief philosophical orientation session to get us all on the same wavelength. Any objections? Is this a good time for it? Great! Then let’s begin with principle number one: I trust you. I’m not going to treat you like a slave and I don’t expect you to act like one, not that I think for a minute that you would. Second principle: My sheep are your sheep. I realize that without you, the shepherds, my sheep would tend to wander all over the mountainside, being eaten by wolves or the dispossessed, not that I have anything against the dispossessed, only I don’t like them eating my sheep. Principle three: If we get through the year without a lost sheep, it’s party time. We’ll have couscous and tortilla chips and dancing and, for the main course, what else, a barbecued sheep. Principles four and five: Comfort and dignity. You’ll be getting hot meals three times a day, featuring selections from every food group, plus dessert, plus a mint. You’ll each be getting a cottage, which you may decorate as you like, using a decoration allowance I’ll distribute upon our arrival. Buy a lounge chair, or some nice prints, maybe even a coffeemaker, whatever, have some Flawed friends over for cards, I don’t care. In fact I think it’s great. You come out to the meadow next morning feeling empowered, you give your sheep that little extra bit of attention, all the better for me. My take on this is: I can’t set you free, but if I could, I would. That is, I can’t set you literally free. My business would be ruined, wouldn’t it? But spiritually free, that’s another matter. So I’ll be offering meditation classes and miniseminars on certain motivational principles we can all put to work in our lives, even shepherds. For that matter, even sheep. We’ll be doing some innovative sheep-praising, which you might think is nutty, but after you see the impressive gains in wool yields, I think you’ll do a one-eighty. They come up and lick your hands as if to say: Hey, I like who I am. It’s touching. I think you’ll be moved. Any questions?”
“Where exactly are we going?” asks a petulant Flawed on my right whose name tag says Leonard.
“Great question, Leonard!” Ventor says. “You said to yourself: Look, I want to know where I’m headed. I like that. Good directedness. Also good assertiveness. Perhaps you weren’t quite as sensitive to my feelings as you might have been, given that I should have told you where we were headed right off the bat and so therefore feel at the moment a little remiss and inadequate for not having done so, but what the heck, a good growth opportunity for me, and a chance for you, Leonard, to make yourself the center of attention, which seems to be one of your issues, not that I’m in a position to make that judgment, at least not yet. The answer, Leonard, is: southern Utah. Here, take a look.”