“Shut the door or get out.” Axel rattles the gearshift. Melanie swings the door closed and hits the lock. If Axel even noticed her head, he doesn’t care. Kendra probably guesses. But the kid, the boy, he doesn’t know anything — he could surmise whatever, even the truth. Her cheeks flush and she pulls off her gloves and presses the backs of her hands to her face, then her hair. Damn her for wearing all her secrets on the outside.
There’s no buckle, or the buckle’s trapped under the cushion, down the crack behind the seat where the blonde girl’s sitting, so he holds the seatbelt strap across himself with the metal clip in his hand, faking it, and riding, for the first time ever, gloriously unrestrained.
The car rounds a curve and he tenses to avoid tilting further into the girl. Axel drives fast, and the car rides low, heavy with all four passengers. The torque is different than that of the Greyhound, and it pulls at his stomach when the corner ends and the car picks up even more speed. He squeezes the metal, and the head of his seatbelt heats in his hand. He thought Axel would be dull and, you know, old. Wrong. Axel’s way past old, he’s old enough to be interesting: he’s ancient. And then there’s Axel’s fake leg, and Kendra who was introduced as Axel’s apprentice, and this crazy car full of birds. For over twenty-four hours in the aisle seat of the Greyhound, trapped in the licorice stink of the washroom’s automatic flush and the armpits and cologne of the man next to him, Cody had imagined what this year would be like with Great-Uncle Old: farm-ish, boring, lonely. Wrong. Being in a speeding car with an ancient one-legged uncle, leaning against a girl’s wet lumberjack coat, surrounded by the barny scent of so many baby chickens — this is a thousand times better than he could have hoped. This is incredible.
He rests his elbow on the curved rim of a tray and dips his fingers into the chicks. The one he cups cheeps — the sound could scratch glass. And from such a tiny bird. He can feel the wiggly warm breath in its rib cage. He runs his palm above the backs of the chicks. So many. The movement arouses the flock and chirps fill the car. Truly loud.
They’re so soft. He should fill a room with chicks, like those ball rooms in malls for toddlers. And he could be covered with the chirpers. They probably don’t weigh much. How many chicks would it take to fill a room? The car is full, how many are here?
“How many birds?” Cody leans forward so that his head is in the space between Axel and Kendra in the front. “How many?”
Axel presses the gas and rounds a corner. Kendra uncrosses her arms and cracks open the window. She’s old too, not too old, but definitely adult. Over twenty, or even his mother’s age, thirty-something. She has a pale spray of freckles over her face, ears, and neck that look like they might carry on down her skin. Her dark hair, pulled into a tight braid, hangs over her shoulder. Despite the almost wet smoothness of the braid itself, the ends below the elastic are kinked. Cody’s best friend back home had hair like that — she couldn’t keep it out of her mouth.
He sits back and pulls the seatbelt tighter. Pale blue-grey eyelids blink at him from the trays, like clouds in the chicks’ sunny, fluffy bodies. The beaks, open and chirping, are too many to count. Holy hockey, they are loud.
And numerous. The trays are stacked so high on his right he can’t see out that window and has to look left, past the girl, to see the pastures, snow, and under the snow weird purple bulges that he’s just now figured out are, delightfully, cabbages. Fields of cabbage, of cows — not milk-carton cows, but tan and chestnut things with low-slung pale, peachy-white udders — that stand in the pastures with snow on their backs.
Uncle Ancient-Axel pulls off the highway onto a gravel road, a long driveway really, and finally — finally — Cody’s feet are on ground, his canvas sneakers wet and muddy. He stretches, stuffs his hands into the pockets of his hoodie, and breathes deeply. A zest hangs in the air under the clouds and over the snow, mingles with the smell of the girl who’s now standing beside him: cow and wet felt and hay. The girl looks maybe fourteen, hopefully fourteen, his age, or at least thirteen. Or fifteen is fine, too.
He pushes back the hood of his sweater. The car is parked between a small black pickup and a low, one-storey building. A barn, or workshop maybe, with an outdoor sink and shower beside the entryway. Then there’s a cedar-shake house with a porch. Beyond the house, further up the drive, rows of skinny sheds. He tugs his backpack from the car, walks to the porch, and sets the bag out of the snow under the eaves. The sheds are clustered under netting that’s tented over their entire area. They look cheap — plywood structures with two doors each. The outer door is a chicken-wire cage about two feet deep. The inner door is part plywood and part old-style Western prison bars.
The plywood is streaked with what look like splashes of white paint, and the fibreglass roofs seem bleached, but the bars gleam. Cody rubs his ear. If this were a horror movie, Axel’s farm would be the place to avoid. To the left, across a barbed-wire fence, cows meander around a red barn and house. A dairy farm? Past the two properties, trees and treed mountains. He brushes his bangs out of his eyes. No chickens, but they would be penned in this weather, wouldn’t they?
“Where’s the chickens?” Cody calls. The girl, standing by the car, straightens her glasses and snorts.
Axel slams the driver’s door and limps around to the back of the car. He pops the hatchback. Cody walks back to the drive and follows. His sneakers have no grip, and he skids on the slush and gravel. Axel lifts the top tray from the stack in the rear of the car. Cody leans over the chicks in the tray underneath. They’re silent, maybe dead. But no. They blink, twitch their stumpy wings, and start to chirp.
“Pick it up.” Axel tilts his head toward the trays with a fast, impatient jerk. Kendra has already fetched a shop-vac, and Melanie, the girl, stacks the trays from the back seat beside the car.
Cody tugs the sleeves of his hoodie down over his fingers and grabs both sides of a tray from the trunk. He lifts, hoisting it higher than he intended — the chicks are so light, they are nothing but fluff and sound. He looks around again for a pen or chicken house.
Axel crosses the drive to the workshop/barn and manages the stairs, hopping each step on his good leg and swinging the fake up after. Cody follows gingerly, testing the grip of his sneakers on the wood steps. The entry is a hallway with two doors in the left wall, and an outside sink and shower built into the right. The sink is deep, square, and stands on thin steel legs. The shower is a sheet of plastic pushed back from a nozzle, a square of rimmed plastic flooring with a drain, and the whole nudie stage opens on a sightline to the driveway and the world.
Axel throws open the second door on the left, the one further along the hall, and drops his tray of chicks onto the patched linoleum floor inside. He shoves the tray into the room with his foot and holds the door open waiting for Cody. Cody bends, sets his tray of chicks on the ground, and slides them into the room. Axel slams the door. When it doesn’t latch, he bumps it into place with his shoulder. Cody follows Axel back outside, heads to the car and picks up another tray of birds. Kendra leans into the car and the vacuum pitches higher. Melanie tugs out a floor mat. Cody’s legs below the knees are freezing. Stupid to have worn the kilt without jeans or leggings, but this cold is not the cold he’s used to. A leaching cold, like the cold that hangs out in the low corners of swimming pools, or the murky sand at the bottom of lakes. His kilt, okay, is maybe unusual — his aunt shook her head when she dropped him at the bus stop — but here even his sneakers are out of place.