Fresh Eggs (29 page)

It's easy ridding the inside of flies. Outside it's impossible. The layer houses breed flies by the zillions. You can spray and hang fly strips every two feet but the flies keep coming. They swirl in swarms and escape through the roof vents like tracer bullets. They infest the garage and the tractor shed and use the flat top of the picnic table like an aircraft carrier. They venture far and wide across the manure-sodden fields, lingering on the muddy banks of Three Fish Creek and then buzz up the long slope toward Maple Creek Estates. They rest on the ten-foot privacy fence, then invade.

Calvin empties the dustpan and goes upstairs. Donna is still sleeping so he goes to Rhea's room first. The room isn't much different than it was the night Rhea disappeared. Her clothes are gone from the closet and the New Kids on the Block Posters aren't thumbtacked to the walls anymore, but her books and dolls and games are still on the shelves and the same tulips-and-daffodils comforter is on the bed. He goes for the flies on the window. There have to be a dozen of them.

Two years ago, the Maple Creek Homeowner's Association filed a new lawsuit over the flies. The jury was bused out to Maple Creek to see just how bad the infestation was. And it was bad. But Michael Rood III did a couple of clever things. First he called all the officers of the homeowners' association as witnesses and one by one asked them if they ever ate eggs. Every one of them admitted they did. Then he offered them a deal: Would they enter into a binding contract with Mr. Cassowary, promising never to eat eggs again? In exchange Mr. Cassowary would personally come to their homes every day, twice a day, and swat their flies.

It was silly idea, of course. A sarcastic idea. And of course not one officer of the Maple Creek Homeowners' Association bit. Then Michael Rood III said, “Then perhaps you can swat the flies yourself, and leave Mr. Cassowary to his enterprise, producing the eggs you can't live without.”

The jury once again found in Calvin's favor. Then Michael Rood III did an astonishing thing. He called a press conference on the courthouse steps and announced that his client, although just exonerated, was a good and caring neighbor and a man of science always looking for ways to improve his operation. “Here's what Mr. Cassowary is going to do,” he announced, taking his huge briar pipe from his seersucker sportscoat and rubbing it like a magic lamp. “At his own expense he's going to introduce
tenebrionids
to his manure pits.” He lit his pipe and shook the match while reporters tried to spell the word in their heads. He chuckled. “In everyday language they're called darkling beetles. Cute little beetles that like dark stinky places. The beetles will eat the fly larvae and everybody will be happy. You see folks, people can get along just fine if they just trust one another and cooperate.”

The darkling beetles arrived by UPS, and Calvin and Jimmy Faldstool sprinkled them into the manure pits. A month later the people living in the big houses in Maple Creek Estates not only had flies everywhere, but darkling beetles everywhere, crawling in their dresser drawers and kitchen cupboards, burrowing into their mattresses and sofa cushions, marching right across their breakfast plates, their twitchy little legs getting stuck in the egg yolk. The Maple Creek Homeowners' Association filed a $30 million lawsuit, now pending.

Junior Jr. dives from the perch and spears the darkling beetle ascending through the crack in the floor. He crunches and swallows. He puffs his breast and
brucks
victoriously.

Unfortunately, there are almost no other chickens left in the coop to admire—or envy—his performance. Over the years, disease and old age have taken a heavy toll on the flock. Today, there are just his brother George Herbert Walker Bush, at this moment cowering behind the water crock, and his bony sister Leili. Their mother was a mixed breed named Mary Mary Bo Berry. Their father was the terrifying Mr. Shakyshiver. They hatched just five months before the Feather Girl disappeared, in chicken terms a lifetime ago.

Yet as long ago as that was, Junior Jr. still remembers the Feather Girl coming into the coop at night to read to them from the little book she spread across her lap. He didn't understand a word she was reading. But he still remembers the soft and patient sounds that tumbled from her beakless face. He remembers this one collection of sounds in particular:

“
By pain and grief the pilgrim is perplexed

But struggles on through this world and the next
—

And if the goal seems endlessly concealed
,

Do not give up your quest; refuse to yield
.”

The man named Calvin still comes and feeds them, and pours them a crock of clean water. But he won't let poor old Leili set. So it finally looks like the end of the line—the line that goes way back to that lusty Cuban with the black tail feathers, Maximo Gomez.

But Junior Jr. isn't complaining. He is The Rooster. He has a hen to ride and a brother to torment. He has a wire fence that keeps coyotes out and rotting floor boards that let plenty of those delicious darkling beetles in.

Calvin finishes with his morning fly-swatting and starts with his morning beetle-bagging. It's a gruesome process. He understands why Donna wants no part of it. You've got to snatch the little buggers between your thumb and forefinger—which is anything but easy—and then flick them in a plastic bag. Every morning you can catch about thirty or forty of them. Then you lay the bag on the porch and go at the beetles with a rubber mallet.

Calvin has nine beetles in his bag and a tenth wiggling under his thumb when the kitchen phone rings. “Hello?”

“Good news,” Sophia Theophaneia says. “We've successfully removed DNA from Rhea's feathers.”

“So soon?”

Sophia laughs a little. “It's been six months, Mr. Cassowary.”

“I guess it has—so it's all gone well?”

“We were thrown for a loop once or twice,” she admits. “Some of the feathers you brought us were real chicken feathers.”

“What do you mean real chicken feathers?”

Sophia apologizes. “I didn't mean to say Rhea's feathers were fake chicken feathers. They're human feathers, aren't they? But there were chicken feathers in the bag you gave us. Somehow they got mixed in with Rhea's. When that chicken DNA showed up on our computer screens—
Whoa!
”

The apology does nothing to assuage Calvin's anxiety. “I took the feathers right from Rhea's cemetery urn. They're the same feathers the sheriff's deputies found.”

“It's a mystery, to be sure,” Sophia says. “But one we don't have to solve. The important thing is that we've successfully isolated and activated Rhea's DNA. All we need now are Donna's fresh eggs—and a decision to proceed, of course.”

After the call, Calvin goes straight upstairs to the shower. He is quivering. His breaths are a half-inch long. He hops out of his jeans and underwear. He twists the knobs until the spray is the exact same temperature of a mother's womb. He sits on the shower floor and pulls his knees up to his chin.

Donna, surprisingly, has been for the cloning from the start. “It's a way for us to have a child,” she whispered as they flew home from their first meeting in Chicago with Bob Gallinipper, “to put an end to all this frustration, this rift between us.”

“There's no rift,” Calvin whispered back.

Donna tore a wad of Kleenexes from the box in her lap. “You know damn well there's a rift. The Jeanie rift. The rift that kept me from being a good mother to Rhea because I wasn't her real mother. The rift that keeps me from being a real wife because I can't give you the heir this farm demands. Now I can be a real mother and a real wife.”

“But aren't there some bigger questions here?” Calvin asked.

That's when Donna's sinuses dried up the way they did during sex. “We can't afford to think about the bigger questions, Calvin. This farm is a financial house of cards. The second the economy goes bad or some new cholesterol study comes out,
pbbbbbt!
”

Calvin had always admired Donna's cool, accountant's view of life—focusing instantly and unambiguously on the bottom line—but at that moment he wanted to stuff Donna's
pbbbbbting
tongue right down her throat. “I am not going to recreate Rhea just to save the farm.”

That's when Donna really let go with the psychological ice cubes. “Isn't that why you and Jeanie created her the first time?”

Calvin's whisper took on the intensity of a scream. “I can't believe you said that.”

Donna answered calmly, and firmly, proving once again she was the adult in the marriage. “I'm not saying you and Jeanie didn't love her. Of course you loved her. She was a living expression of your great and wonderful love for each other. I understand that. I accept that. But don't tell me you weren't relieved to meet your ancestral obligation.”

Calvin's brain was frozen on her
great and wonderful love
comment. “I love you as much as I—”

“I know—I know. You love me and I love you and Bob Gallinipper loves us to pieces.”

“He's a good man.”

“He's a businessman who lost his golden egg.”

“So Bob and I are just a couple of cold capitalist bastards?”

“Get off your high horse,” Donna said, peeling back her fingers one by one. “No. 1, we need a child for personal, psychological reasons. No. 2, the farm needs an heir. No. 3, Bob Gallinipper wants his mascot back so he can sell more of our eggs. In sum, this cloning thing isn't some filthy crime against God and nature. It's a good thing that makes everybody rich in every way.”

The spray from the shower head pours over Calvin like rain over a toad, clogging his eyes, forming little puddles in the hollow of his ears. He has to decide—one way or the other. He wants another child. But this cloning thing is such a sick and dangerous thing. And it wouldn't be Rhea. It would just look like Rhea, a completely new child in Rhea's image.
Imago dei
. If only Donna could conceive on her own. The pressure would be off, Bob Gallinipper's offer not so damn tempting. What if they go ahead with this and God doesn't approve? Will he make the Cassowarys pay for a hundred generations? Still, when God wanted a son of his own He intervened with nature, didn't he? So maybe God does approve. Maybe there are some bigger issues here. Galactic issues that humans simply can't fathom. Maybe God wanted Rhea to have feathers. Maybe He wanted all humans to have feathers, to survive some strange and dangerous future not yet revealed. Then those coyotes spoiled it for everybody.

And so when Donna crawls out of bed, sniffing the salty phlegm from her throat, asking him what he's doing sitting on the shower floor, wasting all the hot water, Calvin looks up and says: “If you want to do it, it's all right with me.”

After the eight slowest days in human history drag by, they are on the corporate jet to Chicago, and the stainless steel, lab-coated world of Special Projects Director Sophia Theophaneia.

There are contracts to sign. Secret contracts that can never see the light of day. One contract absolves Bob Gallinipper of any and all personal responsibility. Another absolves Gallinipper Foods of any and all corporate responsibility. Another prohibits any officer or employee of Gallinipper Foods from divulging the truth about Donna's pregnancy and the subsequent birth—should there be a pregnancy and subsequent birth.

Three days later Sophia Theophaneia gathers Donna's eggs and places them in laboratory dishes. The center of the cells, the nuclei, where Donna's own genetic codes are kept, are removed, and replaced with the genetic material rescued from Rhea's feathers.

Calvin and Donna take the egg yolk-yellow limo into Chicago and have pizza at Uno's, slow dance to jazz at the Moosehead Bar & Grille, try to forget they are waiting for important news. Back at the hotel they start to make love. But they can hear the TVs in the adjoining rooms. And if they can hear the TVs, then the people in those rooms surely can hear them huffing and puffing. So they watch TV, too.

During the night Calvin has a dream. He is in one of his layer houses trying to glue a broken egg back together. It is the last egg he has, and he needs it to complete a dozen. Norman Marek is standing next to him with the open carton, growling at him to hurry. The walls of the layer house suddenly dissolve and he sees Jeanie in the field below. She is twirling like Julie Andrews in
The Sound of Music
. Calvin hands the gooey, glue-dripping egg to Norman and rushes to her. But when she sees him coming, she begins to giggle and run toward the creek. He pursues her through the broken cornstalks. The hard ground turns to mud, the mud into manure. Calvin has had this dream so many times before that even in his sleep he knows what it means.

The next dream is a new dream. Even in his sleep, where anything can happen, it catches him by surprise. Donna is atop the picnic table, on her back, screaming, writhing, sneezing, trying to give birth. Norman Marek is telling him to remain calm, that Bob Gallinipper will be there any minute to deliver the baby. Sophia Theophaneia is there, but she is completely disinterested in Donna's plight, playing Frisbee with Biscuit instead. Then there is a great gush of water between Donna's legs. A monstrous egg slowly slides from her vagina. Calvin catches it. The shell crumbles in his hands. Squirming in the yolky goo is a creature half human, half Leghorn. It has huge unblinking eyes on the sides of its narrow face. Instead of a nose it has a beak. It has tiny human hands and ugly rooster's feet. Both fingers and talons are wriggling. It is covered with feathers. Bob Gallinipper is suddenly there, taking the creature from his hands, lifting it skyward, the way Kunta Kinte lifted Kizzy. When Sophia Theophaneia looks up and sees the wriggling creature, she shrugs and giggles impishly and says, “Whoops!”

That
Whoops!
slaps Calvin awake. He spends the rest of the night in a chair by the window, watching the sparse traffic on the interstate.