Twenty trays stacked by the floor-drain in the centre of the feed room. Two hundred peeping chicks per tray at twenty trays. Makes four thousand chicks. Sets up this week’s feed. Now to get the feeders stored — stockpiled along the back wall next to the old cement mixer — and then come the fun chores, the rounds. The walk-by of fifteen hawks and all ninety pretty gyrfalcons, but especially the white. That bird. Not a grey barb or vein. Not a fracture. And tomorrow he’ll fly her. First time out. The breach of that bird’s wing — he shakes thinking about it. Thirty years of tinkering and he’s done it. Bred falcons to perfection.
Only he can’t keep his excitement fired as he considers the boy’s weak ankles, the — what’s the kid wearing, a skirt? He looks at the kid, and damn it he has doubt. Doubt that the white will be flawless. And this irritation despite the three decades of breeding gyrfalcons — fifty-plus years’ flying and capture — when no other falconer could coax a gyr to drop an egg. Pah. Axel bends and slides two five-gallon pails out from beside the deep-freeze.
“Take one.” He shakes a pail at the boy, rattling the metal handle. The kid, hesitation from the top down, reaches and backs off. Does he have to coax him? “Take it.” The boy finally takes the bucket. Axel lifts a tray of chicks and dumps them into his own pail. He gestures for the boy to do the same, but the kid just stands there, holding the bucket by the lip. “Get on it.” Axel drops the tray and waits. The kid sets the bucket down and tilts a tray, easing the peepers into his pail. Axel grabs two wooden plugs — circles of plywood cut to fit inside the pails — and tosses one to the boy so that the kid will catch it or be hit. The plug bounces off the boy’s palm and whacks the ground. He rubs his hand down his skirt. Axel fits his own board over the chicks inside the pail, plants his fists in the centre of the board, and presses down. If the kid does not do this. But the kid does, remarkably. Axel counts out one hundred and twenty seconds — the boy staring at his shoes the whole time — then lifts the wood and dumps the dead chicks back into the tray. The kid lifts his own pail and upturns it over the empty tray. The plug clunks out. Chicks tumble after it.
Axel paws through Cody’s tray. At his touch a few birds twitch. He sorts the dead from the merely limp. Twenty or so still cheeping.
“Hold out your hand.” Axel grabs the kid’s hand and tucks the feet of a chick between his fingers. “Watch.” He takes three chicks himself, grips the legs, whacks their heads on the edge of the freezer, and tosses them back into the tray.
The boy opens his mouth, then closes it and pinches his earlobe.
Axel takes three more chicks and busts their heads on the deep-freeze. Again. Through all twenty or so chicks the kid stands there. “Ever been fishing? Haven’t you conked a trout?” What kid hasn’t bludgeoned a fish?
The kid shakes his head. One jerk, to the left, so that the boy could have meant no, or it could have been the kid not listening and tilting toward the question, asking, Huh? Whichever, seems the kid’s already tiring. He’s holding his arm up all right, but the chick dangles from his hand like he has no control over his wrist. What’s the boy done today? Nothing. No, the kid’s pale in the sickly fragile way of not enough scuffling. When Axel was a boy kids were non-stop action. Ha, he remembers when he hopped, goddamn hopped, all the way up a mountainside creek and back — having unstrapped his leg for swimming — and he thought nothing of it. Granted he was older, maybe twenty, and had already hopped freight ships and travelled everywhere there were birds, but the point is when he took off, he was only a year or two older than the boy. The point is, the kid should be ready to break his own neck and care even less about a pail of feeder chicks.
“Don’t piss yourself.” No time for this. Axel takes the chick from the boy and hits it on the freezer. He refills both pails, picks up the plug, and tosses it over. The kid pushes on the wood properly this time. Better.
After ten trays each, the kid is wiping his hands constantly on, yes definitely, a fucking skirt. Yellow fluffs all over him.
“Get used to it.” Sooner the better. Hundred-fifteen birds, the farm at capacity, and each falcon or hawk needs feeding. Axel stacks the trays of dead chicks in the corner by the freezer. He limps from the room, the kid already ahead of him washing at the sink.
Axel braces himself in the entranceway, grabbing either side of the hall, and calls. Kendra gives him a thumbs-up. She’s almost finished vacuuming the car. The neighbour girl is shaking the floor mats over the frozen driveway. And his boy at the sink, the nail brush rough and reddening the kid’s soapy skin, goddamn scrubbing his hands.
The shop-vac shut down and the chicks stored in the feed room. The highway currently car-free, the paddock empty, the cows far-off and still. Axel done yelling instructions at the boy. Blessed silence. The type of quiet that lets her hear distance: crows hidden in the cloud-covered hills. The white noise of the river. Kendra sits in the driver’s seat and coils the shop-vac’s hose. Across the paddock, at the dairy house, the creak and slap of the front door as the neighbour Milo — sweater, no coat — steps onto the porch. He leans on the rail, raises his hand to his eyes, then lifts it further in recognition. Kendra raises her arm in reply.
“He said I could take the day off.” Melanie tugs the passenger-seat floor mat into place.
From the way Melanie cleaned the car, hoovering rock and hay and fluff from the foot-wells like their presence offended her, Kendra expected sarcasm, a vocal bite, or at least a tense tone, but the girl’s words are a flat-out lie. Too obvious a lie. What’s she thinking? That Kendra hasn’t seen Milo senseless on the deck chair the whole summer? Granted, Milo’s polite enough when he hands over the home-brewed spirits he trades her and Axel for clearing the pasture of rabbits, and Milo was decent enough — decent being maybe too strong a word — person enough to have been guilted back to the dairy farm after his old man’s stroke. But Milo definitely hasn’t been up to giving permission for what looks like years. Probably since way before Melanie was born. She doubts the girl has ever asked for permission for anything. The way he’s leaning, like he relies on the porch rail to keep him upright — she can almost smell the stale booze across the distance. So why lie? The lie is so obvious it’s rude. Why’s the girl challenging her?
“Don’t have to cover for him.” Kendra lowers her hand.
Melanie slams the passenger door and leans against it. “Who’s covering?”
“So we didn’t pick you up off the side of the highway?” Kendra snaps the vacuum hose in place and reels in the cord.
Melanie rolls her eyes and stretches her arms out along the top of the vehicle. She looks ridiculous, like Jesus on the cross, or like she’s trying to sell the car. “What’s next?” she says. With her attitude, it’s possible she buzzed her own hair. Though the style seems more in character with the boy at the sink. His coif — it’s almost a mohawk, only the top stripe isn’t gelled and hangs limply over his brow and eyes. The shorter hair at the back and sides is clipped to about an inch in length. Dark brown with a touch of curl. Cute.
The boy — what to do but laugh? — his thin legs, pale and weak. Like sprouts in early spring, or, during a sudden winter warmth, like the translucent, purple-white of January crocuses. His fingers are also violet, but a deeper purple, almost blue, from the icy water he’s washing his hands in. Axel should have looked the boy over before dragging him to kill chicks. The way the kid grinned and rubbed his hands in the bird bins the whole ride here.