Fresh Eggs (26 page)

Donna turns, the dripping colander still in her hands. She stares at Calvin and makes a decision. “It's in the fruit cellar. Behind the wine jugs.”

Rhea starts for the basement steps. Not only has she fooled them, but she finally knows where that drawing is.

Her father erupts: “Wwwwait!”

She orbits on her heels, expecting to see anger and betrayal rippling across his face. But his eyes are still happy.

“Children Services called,” he says. “They're dropping their investigation. We didn't do anything wrong.”

“We're going to do more fairs then?” Rhea isn't thinking about the gawkers or the chicken wire, but about Joon and Jelly Bean and Robert Charles.

Her father's entire head is happy now. “No need. We're going to work for Gallinipper Foods.”

“We already work for Gallinipper Foods.”

“Not that kind of work—we're still going to do that—but working with them at the corporate level. Norman called just fifteen minutes ago. I can't believe you didn't hear us yell for you. You're going to be the company mascot. Commercials. Public appearances. And not only that, pumpkin seed—they're also giving us the first commercial flock of their new 7-52 Super Hens. Seven eggs a week, fifty-two weeks a year.”

Rhea looks at Donna. “Can I get the drawing now?”

Donna, without checking her husband's eyes for approval, nods that she can.

Rhea descends the steps, each step deeper and wider and mushier. Her father's voice is descending the steps with her: “We're flying to Chicago next week. Your first photo shoot.”

Thirty-one

The flight from Cleveland to Chicago takes an hour. That hour takes a hundred hours. Rhea Cassowary has never flown before. Each thump, bump and wiggle of the egg yolk-yellow corporate jet glues her fingers to the armrests. But they land and an egg yolk-yellow limousine whisks them downtown.

It is not a good morning in Chicago. The sky is as gray as the pavement. The limousine zips through neighborhoods filled with people every color but white. Elevated trains rumble past the dirty windows of dirty buildings. The limo driver—a Haitian or a Jamaican—sings questions to them: “Have you been to Chicago before?”

“No,” Rhea's father answers.

“Ahhhh. Then you have never been to Uno's for deep-dish pizza?”

“Can't say that we have.”

“Ahhhh. Everyone want to go there.”

The limousine makes a series of right turns, each street getting narrower. They pull into a parking lot littered with small expensive cars. The driver helps them out. “I will be waiting right here,” he assures them.

Rhea follows her father up a set of concrete steps. He pushes a button by the steel door. The ring throws the door open. “Rhea! Calvin! Come in!”

The voice belongs to a willowy woman with very white skin and very black hair. She is wearing a pin-striped man's suit. Her glasses have thick red rims. “I'm Rikki Coquina,” she says and hands Rhea's father a business card, as if it were an admission ticket to her special world. Rhea manages to read it before her father slips it into his shirt pocket. It says: Alpenhorn & Coquina Talent Representation.

A freight elevator jerks them up several stories. “Jaret has been working on the lighting all morning,” Rikki says as they jerk along. “Sooooo, with a little luck we can get right to work.”

They enter the studio. Styrofoam coffee cups sit on chairs. People in baggy jeans sit on the floor. There is an upside-down moose head on the wall. In the center of the studio a bald black woman wearing red hightops is sitting motionless on a bale of straw, holding a large stuffed white goose. A man with a crazy grin, ponytail to his belt loops, is twisting the black light booms and white umbrellas. Rikki apologizes for the stuffed goose. “It was the only thing Jaret could find for a stand-in. To get the lighting on Rhea's feathers right.”

Jaret suddenly leaps away from his camera and shoos the goose woman off the set. He floats like a helium balloon to Rhea and studies her, his hands folded in front of his lips as if in prayer. He extends a forefinger and lightly touches her face, then pulls it back quickly, as if he's in a museum and the guard will see him touching some priceless antiquity. “Fabulous!” he repeats several times.

Rikki ushers Rhea in to a dressing room where the bald black woman, no longer holding the stuffed goose, helps her dress. There are several costumes on the rack. The one they choose first is a sleeveless egg yolk-yellow tee shirt and a snug-fitting pair of bib overalls, the legs of which are cut and cuffed just above the knee. Rhea watches in the mirror as Rikki gently lowers a wide-brimmed straw hat onto the back of her head.

After she's dressed, Jaret spends an hour making sure Rhea is sitting just right on the straw bale. Then he takes another twenty-five minutes resetting the lights he'd spent all morning setting. Then he fires off several rolls of film. “Excellent! Fabulous! Excellent! Fabulous!”

At noon the alley bell rings, the elevator jerks up, and a man with a turban brings a bag of foil-wrapped sandwiches. After lunch, Rhea is dressed in a sky-blue gingham dress, sleeveless and short. Rikki slips sparkling slippers on her bare feathery feet. They are just like the red ruby slippers Dorothy wore in the Wizard of Oz, except that they are egg yolk-yellow.

While Jaret fiddles with his lights and umbrellas, assistants tear open the straw bale and scatter it. Then a backdrop is unrolled. It is a painting of the inside of a rustic barn. Better than anything Calvin Cassowary could paint. There are no rows of cages inside this barn, no automatic feeders or manure conveyors, no skin-and-bone hens with snipped-off beaks or combs. There are just a dozen or so fat hens with perfect feathers, pointy beaks and floppy red combs, standing wherever they please. There is even a big rooster in the painting, silently crowing his happy heart out. Rikki hands Rhea a red pail that says CHICKEN FEED. They stand her in front of the painting, straw scattered all around. Jaret takes a half hour to get her pose just right. Then he goes to his camera and buries his face, and moans, “For crying out loud. She's crying. Will somebody
please
dry her eyes?”

“It can't possibly work,” Joon Faldstool says.

“I know,” says Rhea, “but we're going to do it anyway.”

Joon buries his face in his knees, wraps his hands around the back of his head. The perch bounces. The hens complain. “It's so goofy.”

Rhea closes her book and drapes her arms around his nervous shoulders. She knows he is right. It is a goofy plan. Not a chance in the world it will work. Still, she knows she has to try. “I will not be the mascot for Gallinipper Foods, Joon.” She playfully tugs on his ears until he lift his head. She kisses him.

“I'm not even seventeen yet,” Joon says. “And you're only fourteen.”

“The perfect ages to do dumb things,” Rhea says.

So Joon agrees, knowing that Rhea's plan is goofy and dumb and probably illegal, even for someone not yet seventeen. A time and date is set. Eleven at night, on the fifth of September. Two weeks from now.

In the morning Rhea and her father fly to Chicago again. To do the radio spots. Rikki Coquina practices the lines with her. “Sound as happy as you can,” she says. “Even try to put a little giggle in your voice here and there.”

Rhea sits in front of the microphone. An engineer eases earphones over her feathered head. Happy piano music trickles into her ears. The engineer points. Rhea reads:

“
Hi, I'm Rhea Cassowary
.

The Feather Girl
.

I bet you've heard of me
.

I love our little farm in Ohio
.

And I love our chickens
.

Just as much as our chickens love

laying big tasty fresh eggs for Gallinipper Foods
.

And eggs are good food
.

Where would breakfast be without them
?

Where would a birthday cake be without them
?

Next time you're at the supermarket

Pick up a dozen Grade A Gallinipper eggs
.

That's my picture on the carton
.”

“Perfect,” the engineer says. “Let's try it again.”

By seven they are back at the farm, eating canned ravioli and canned green beans. At eight Rhea goes upstairs and chooses a pair of overalls and a tee shirt and puts them in a paper shopping bag. She creeps down the basement stairs while the television blares. She crawls out the coal chute. Runs to the back of the garage. Biscuit follows on his short fast legs. The number of demonstrators has dwindled. But there are a few. Some from AAPT. Some from PAAT. Signs but no chanting. No television cameras. Two yawning deputies.

Rhea takes the tee shirt from the bag and dangles it in front of Biscuit's face until he gets the idea and takes it in his mouth. Rhea tugs and he tugs back. It takes some doing, getting this gentle family dog to behave like a wild beast. But Biscuit little by little gives into his primitive nature. When the tee shirt is shredded and soaked with spittle, Rhea stuffs it in the bag and pulls out the overalls. “This is denim, Bisky,” Rhea whispers. “You've really got to work hard now.”

Biscuit barks and snarls and grabs on.

The next night Rhea goes out to read to her chickens. Joon is already in the coop with a sewing needle and the test tube he stole from the chemistry lab at school. While Rhea reads, Joon pricks her finger tips and squeezes drops of blood into the tube. When she can take the pain no more, Joon plugs it with a cork and rushes it to the refrigerator in the employee locker room. He hides it in the bag of baloney sandwiches that's been in there for months.

It takes three more nights behind the garage for Biscuit to shred the overalls properly. Five more nights of finger pricking to fill the test tube.

Rhea's period arrives on schedule. She uses pieces of the shredded tee shirt and overalls instead of napkins. It's a messy affair. But necessary. There has to be a lot of blood.

Rhea keeps up with her homeschooling and pretends to be impatient about the radio commercials. “When are they going to start running?” she asks her father at least once a day.

“They'll let us know,” he tells her.

On Labor Day Gammy Betz and Ben drive up from Columbus for a picnic. Because of the demonstrators, the picnic has to be held in the kitchen. But the hamburgers and hotdogs are cooked on the charcoal grill on the porch and they taste like outdoors. “Rhea made the macaroni salad all by herself,” Donna tells everyone.

Rhea is properly defensive. “How hard is it to make macaroni salad?”

On the night of September fifth Rhea goes to the coop to read. She has been reading to her chickens for so many months now. She is nearly at the end of the book, yet not close enough to finish it tonight, or ever.

Joon comes and gives her the cold test tube of blood. They kiss longer than they have ever kissed. She lets him touch her feathered breasts. Their first time for that. “You know I love you,” Joon says. “Right?”

The chickens are blinking and cackling, begging for more about the thirty birds who have flown so far, through so many valleys, to see the Simorgh, their king. “And you know I love you,” Rhea answers.

Rhea goes back to the house. Says goodnight to Donna and her father. Goes upstairs. It will be eleven in just two hours.

About ten Donna and her father turn off the television and come upstairs. They turn on the television in their room. Which means they will be making love tonight. It will be eleven in just an hour.

Rhea slips out of her nightgown and dresses. Puts on her tennis shoes. She digs out an old pair of sweat socks from the dresser. In one she stuffs her birthday and Christmas cash, eighty-two dollars. In the other she puts the test tube of her blood. Then she takes her Nestlé's Quik can from her bookshelf. She scoops out the feathers and puts them in a Ziploc bag. She wishes she could take the Quik can with her. For years that old can has protected, and respected, not only the feathers from her body, but the feathers of Blackbutt and Nancy, killed while they scratched for spring grubs. She puts the empty can back on the shelf.

Rhea also wishes she could take that drawing of her mother with her. Her father drew it before she was born. It hung in the breakfast nook for a long time. Then it disappeared. Donna told her where to find it in the fruit cellar. She leaves the picture on her dresser.

Another thing she'd like to take is the book Dr. Pirooz Aram sent her. But like the Quik can and the drawing, the book would be missed. She leaves it under her pillow.

She creeps downstairs while the television in her parents' bedroom blares. It will be eleven in just thirty minutes.

She feels her way down the basement steps. Feels her way to the coal bin, making sure she ducks below the clotheslines. She leaves the coal bin door open. The shopping bag with her shredded bloody clothes is hidden behind the Christmas decorations. She pulls it out, unrolls the top, feels inside, just to make sure. The stench of her menses fills the blackened room. She climbs the shelving. Pushes the coal chute open. Crawls out. Leaves it open.

Out front on the road the blue lights of a single sheriff's car are blinking.

Rhea finds Biscuit asleep on the top of the picnic table. “Bye-bye Bisky-boo,” she coos. She kisses his flat head and lets him lick her feathered face.

When she turns to walk away, he pulls himself up on his haunches, ready to follow. “Not tonight, Bisky. Tonight you guard the picnic table.”

But by the time Rhea reaches the edge of the lawn, Biscuit is at her side, wagging and whimpering, knowing something's up. “You win. But you keep your yap shut about this, you hear?”

There is a moon tonight. Stars. The air is warm. Rhea walks between layer houses B and C and descends the manure-soaked fields toward the creek. She stays just outside of the woods, heading north. Head down, tail slowly swaying, Biscuit stays exactly one foot behind her, never once stopping to sniff or pee.