Fresh Eggs (20 page)

“It is,” he answers. He is smiling easily.

This time of the morning there is no one on the sidewalks and only a few cars on the street. Her father circles the square and turns onto South Mill Street. Rhea now knows where they are going. They are going to the cemetery. “Wait here,” her father tells Joon after they park.

The grass is still wet. By the time Rhea and her father reach the row of Cassowary graves their feet are soaked. The strawberry plants circling Jeanie's grave are tall and thick and shiny with dew. The berries are red and plump.

It has been three years since Rhea and Calvin were there together, though he has come every year to tell Jeanie about the difficulties between him and their daughter. So Jeanie is up to speed about the feathers and that unfortunate plucking episode.

“As you know,” Calvin tells Jeanie, “I've been a real schmuck. But everything's okay now—copacetic as Norman would say. Anyway, things are okay, and Rhea and I are on our way to the Burgoo County Fair, to make the money we need to save the farm. You'd be proud of her.”

The three of them can't possibly finish all the berries, so after eating all they can, Rhea leaves a few on the top of all the Cassowary gravestones.

Calvin and Rhea are both crying as they walk back to the truck.

“You miss her, don't you daddy?”

“Sure I do.”

“We're going to start coming again every year, aren't we?”

“You bet. I'm sorry I—”

“It's okay, daddy.”

Calvin puts his arm around her. “I've never been able to figure that Bob Gallinipper out. He's such a money-grubbing asshole. Yet he gave us that strawberry plant when your mother died. I told you how it was from his own grandfather's grave?”

“Some people are hard to figure,” Rhea says, trying to figure her father out.

It's midafternoon when they finally arrive at the Burgoo County fairgrounds. “Soon as we park the trailer, Joon and I will go over to the midway,” Rhea's father says. “I think you should stay in the trailer—until we get the lay of the land.”

Rhea knows what he's saying. “Until we see if people are going to laugh?”

“Nobody's going to laugh, pumpkin seed. Anybody does, I'll punch them in the nose.”

“Get their dollar first,” says Rhea. They look at each other and giggle. They feel close. Father and daughter on a great adventure. Saving the farm together.

Her father parks the house trailer in a flat field west of the fairgrounds. There are dozens of trailers and buses and RVs parked here, homes for the vagabond entrepreneurs who'll be selling every imaginable enticement during the week ahead. “Joon and I'll be back soon as we get things set up,” her father says. “Five or six probably. I'll make hamburgers.”

For hours Rhea sits at the small table in the front of the trailer, peeking through the venetian blinds that cover the window, watching people come and go. There are healthy girls with freckles and ponytails wearing 4-H tee shirts, pulling cross-eyed goats or carrying cages of rabbits. There are mysterious people with dark Gypsy skin, arms wrapped wide around cardboard boxes of stuffed animals. There are bowlegged farmers in bib overalls, arm-in-arm with pudgy women wearing shapeless dresses. There are skinny men balancing huge cowboy hats on their heads, toting toolboxes and long extension cords. When she turns and looks out the side window, she can see the midway rides, sticking above a row of closely planted evergreens. From the little window in the rear, she can see the animal barns, the long roof of the grandstand, the light poles surrounding the racetrack.

She tries to nap but can't. She tries to read from
The Conference of the Birds
. But the poems don't sound the same without Mr. Shakyshiver and the hens there to listen. Without Joon there to listen. Joon and her father do not return until eight.

“Sorry. Took a lot longer than I expected,” her father says. His face and hands are dirty. His hair is soaked with sweat.

Joon sits across from Rhea. He doesn't say a word. He is just smiling. Just happy to be there, apparently. He'll eat with them, and work all day at the exhibit, but he'll have to sleep in the back of his Gremlin. That's already been decided.

“Well, let's get those hamburgers fried,” her father says. “One or two, Joon?”

“Two if that's okay.”

“Two it is. Rhea, find the Fritos, and the paper plates. We'll eat better tomorrow. Open a can of fruit cocktail or something. You like fruit cocktail, don't you Joon?”

“Sure.”

“You locked the snow cone wagon, didn't you? We don't want anybody walking off with our eggs.”

“It's locked.”

“These midway people are pretty spooky. You should see them, Rhea.”

“I saw a lot of them from the window.”

“You kept the door locked, didn't you?”

Rhea, tearing open the paper plate bag with her teeth, nods.

Her father does a good job frying the hamburgers. The Fritos are a little stale. They watch the sky turn purple-black. Watch the midway lights come on. Listen to the hyena-like laughter seeping through the thin walls of the trailer next to theirs. At ten Joon gets the hint and goes off to sleep in the Gremlin.

“Just remember that I'm proud of you,” her father says.

“I will,” says Rhea. She puts on the cloak Donna sewed for her, pulls the floppy hood over her head. Donna said the hood was called a cowl. Her father helps her from the trailer. Locks the door. Makes sure it's really locked. Makes sure that the doors on the pickup are locked and really locked. He takes a fat breath of the French fry grease air. “Let's go make some money!” he says.

They enter the midway. The rides are just beginning to crank up. Calliope music is
oop-poo-pooping
. They pass one exhibit where the world's smallest horse can be seen for a dollar. A colorfully painted semitrailer promises the world's largest collection of exotic snakes, featuring Big Liz, a thirty-foot anaconda from the jungles of Brazil. They pass a tiny dark-skinned old woman sitting in a lawn chair, beneath an enormous green-striped umbrella, selling useless carnival junk: tee shirts with cheeky sayings, baseball caps with fake women's breasts on the brim, fuzzy brown monkeys and shiny pink pigs dangling on sticks, Mylar balloons in the shape of Bugs Bunny and Tweetie Bird, Dayglo sunglasses and cheap jewelry.

They reach their exhibit.

“Daddy, your paintings look great,” Rhea says. She saw the canvases when they were hanging in the barn a hundred times. But now, here in the sunlight, surrounded by the colors and sounds and smells of the county fair, they look bigger and brighter. She takes a shy look over her shoulder to see if her father's artwork is luring any of the fairgoers. None yet. But a few heads are turning.

They slip under the chain that hangs across the entrance like a smile. Rhea's father turns on the music.
Blimmm … Blimmm
.…
Blimmm … Blimmm
.… the first mournful notes of Pachabel's Canon in D Major. “Donna decided we should try the Pachabel first,” her father says, turning up the volume. “We'll go to something peppier if enough people don't come in.”

Come in. If enough people don't come in
. The reality of what she's agreed to do slides up and down her spine like a pizza-cutter. She feels the feathers on her neck sticking out. In just a few minutes her father is going to remove that chain and people are going to hand him dollar bills. They're going to shuffle around the corner of the canvases and start their gawking and their stupid questions. And this will go on all day, until eleven tonight. And then tomorrow. And then all summer.

“Well, pumpkin seed,” her father says, “time to get the show on the road.” The wobble in his voice tells her he's feeling the reality of this thing, too.

Rhea throws back her cowl and unties the shoe-knot on her cape.

Joon Faldstool watches the cowl fall away. He focuses on the delicate golden circlet that rests on the back of Rhea's head like a halo. He has seen her bare head before, the tiny white feathers cascading in neat rows toward her neck and shoulders. But he has not seen much else of her. And if the painting on the canvas is correct, then he's about to see quite a bit.

Rhea finishes untying the knot at her throat. She takes a huge breath and lets it motor-boat from her pursed lips. She peels the cape from her shoulders and then swings it around and jumbles it into a ball and hands it to her father.

Though he's standing a good six feet away, Joon's nostrils have captured Rhea's seeping breath. He fills his lungs with it and then lets it escape through his own suddenly rubbery lips. The costume is beautiful. She is beautiful.

Without the baggy sweatshirts and overalls she wears at home, she looks much smaller, thinner, more petite.
Petite
. That's the word. The costume is sort of ancient Egyptian. Sort of Olympic figure-skater. It is made of yellowy gold silk. The neckline is high. A
V
of blue, green, red and silver sequins extends nearly to her waist. Low on her hips is a wide belt of white and gold plastic pearls, clasped by an oval blue stone the size of an Easter egg. The pleated skirt is neither too full nor too snug. It ends just above her knees.

What Joon looks at most are her feathers. The costume is sleeveless. So he can see her plump upper arms. He can follow the feathers down to her narrow elbows, and down her slender forearms to her wrists, where they fray like frilly cuffs. His eyes drop quickly to her legs. The feathers ruffle over her knees, then descend smoothly over her shins and calves to her ankles where, without the slightest ruffle, they disappear into satin ballet slippers.

“Wow,” he says without thinking, “you look so cherry.”

Rhea, embarrassed, explains to her father that cherry means cool.

“I know what cherry means,” Calvin Cassowary says.

Yes, Calvin Cassowary knows what cherry means. Knows that Joon didn't mean cool. Knows that feathers or no feathers, Rhea is a fourteen-year-old girl and Joon, big ears or no big ears, is a sixteen-year-old boy. He remembers the night on Blanket Hill, at Kent State, when he popped Jeanie's cherry, and his cherry, too. And now he's got to deal with a sex-crazed boy selling Ice Noggies just three feet from his half-dressed daughter, twelve hours a day, all summer long. Oh, he knows what cherry means.

Rhea has been sitting in the high-backed Victorian chair for twenty minutes now. The Pachabel has numbed her nearly to sleep. She hears her father nervously cajoling people to buy a ticket. “Covered head to toe with real feathers!” he's barking. “A beautiful quirk of human evolution! A metaphysical marvel!” She also hears Joon's timid plea: “Ice Noggies! Gitch-yer eggnog-flavored snow cones right here!”

Then the head of a man peeks around the canvases. The head has a bright blue Ted's Plumbing & Heating cap pulled tightly over a fringe of curly gray hair. The head smiles sheepishly. It doesn't advance. Nor does it retreat. It just floats there. Rhea now hears the voice of a woman. “Let's just leave, Ronnie. I really don't want—”

The floating head says, “Come on, Louise. We already paid our dollars.”

“You're a sucker for every trick that comes along,” says Louise.

“She looks real enough. Come on!”

And so Ronnie and Louise slide around the canvases and grin their way towards the stage. “Hi, young lady,” Ronnie says. Louise says nothing.

“Hi!” Rhea says. She stands up.

“So you're really covered with feathers?” asks Ronnie. “Like other people are covered with skin?”

“I've got skin, too. Under the feathers.”

“The man outside said you started growing them when you was five.”

“Just a few at first.”

Louise gets up the nerve to ask a question: “Did you want to grow them, or did they just grow?”

“They just grew.”

“Well, you're a real pretty girl,” Louise says.

Ronnie and Louise gawk for another minute without saying a word, then smile and say good-bye. “Do you think they're really real?” Rhea hears Louise asks from the other side of the canvases.

Hears Ronnie answer, “They're real feathers, but whether they're really hers, who knows.”

Hears Louise say, “Then why'd we waste two dollars?”

All in all, Rhea decides, it went pretty well.

Next inside the canvases is a tall, stringy man with black shoulder-length hair and a blue-suede cowboy hat decorated with turkey feathers. His black tee shirt reads: No, I
DIDN
'
T FART
—I
SMELL LIKE THIS ALL THE TIME
! He needs a shave and a tube of Clearasil. His girlfriend needs a bra. Her stomach fat is puffed over her Indian-bead belt like the top crust of a dinner roll.

The first thing the stringy man says is, “Bummer! I thought she'd be naked!”

The girlfriend slaps his butt. “Be nice.”

The stringy man presses himself against the stage. “Can you lay eggs?”

Rhea forces a laugh. “No, I don't lay eggs.”

“Been plucked yet?” he asks.

It's Rhea's turn to say, “Be nice.”

“Can I have a feather?” he asks, reaching.

The girlfriend takes him by the back of his belt and drags him toward the exit. “Come on, let's go see the rabbits.”

As they retreat, the stringy man clucks, “Pluck-pluck-pluck!” and thrusts his bony hips toward Rhea. “Pluck-pluck-pluck!”

Rhea can feel the tears trickling through the feathers on her cheeks. This one did not go so well.

The day goes on. They take a break for lunch. Hot dogs, and fries, watery Cokes. The afternoon lasts forever. They go to the trailer for Cassowary-style tomato soup and that promised can of fruit cocktail. Rhea tries to nap, but cannot. They hurry back to the exhibit. The midway is crowded with people, a goodly portion of them happy to plunk down their dollars to see Rhea the Feather Girl, or to try an Ice Noggie.