Dirty Chick (4 page)

TEDDY BEAR CAMELS

A
few weeks later, Peter went for a hike in a local nature preserve, leaving me home with the kids. And that's when the cow got out again. I checked on her in the morning, when I went out to feed the dogs and the chickens. She was just standing there in her paddock, looking innocent and chewing her cud. But then I took the kids to the grocery store. And when we got back, she was nowhere to be found.

Now, if your chickens get out, it makes a charming rural tableau. And if your dog gets out, it's a mild annoyance. But when your cow is staggering down the highway snacking on daisies and dodging sedans, it's a big fucking problem. If the cow causes an accident, you're legally liable, not to mention the possible carnage.

Most of the time, we got her back in her paddock. Peter and I would go running into the garden with long sticks of bamboo, yelling “
Baaaaa!
” and “
Go, cow, go!
” which are technical terms for cow herding. Most of the time, this worked. But sometimes Lucky
would disappear for days, and we could only hope she was staying away from moving vehicles.

As far as I was concerned, she could stay gone, but we had promised Katya and Derek we'd keep her safe. And there was the unpleasant chance she could be hit by a car, which would have been messy, and probably dangerous for the driver. So I had to retrieve her. I wasn't all that sure how to do this by myself, as cow herding wasn't a subject they'd covered in liberal arts school, but I thought I'd improvise.

“Stay here,” I told Miranda. “
And don't get out of the car
.”

“Okay, Mama,” she said, nodding. “I promise. You go get Lucky?”

“Yeah,” I told her. “Something like that.”

Silas, who was listening to his Dart, said nothing.

So I grabbed a stick—because even if I had a lasso, I wouldn't know what to do with it if it slapped me in the ass—and went off to find the cow.

Lucky was easy to locate once I got to the road, standing as she was in a patch of kikuyu grass and lowing at passing cars. I endeavored to catch her attention.

“
Baaa!
” I screamed. “
Baaa
!
”

Despite my efforts, the cow did not interpret this clamor as a request to return to her paddock. Instead, she correctly assessed me as an amateur without a clue. Ignoring me utterly, she ducked into our neighbor Hamish's garden.

This worked out fine, because Hamish is a dairy farmer. So while he probably would have preferred not to have our cow gobbling his roses, at least he knew what to do with a four-legged beast when he saw one. Besides pick up a stick and yell, “Baaa!”

Then the real problems started. “Mama!” I heard. “I'm coooooming!”

That sounds a lot like Miranda
, I thought, with impressive naïveté.
But it can't be Miranda, because she promised she wouldn't get out of the car.

That's when I noticed my three-year-old trotting down the center of the highway. Her height was just right for this, because she was short enough to be completely invisible to any speeding motorist.

“
Miranda!
” I hollered in a terrifying roar I did not know I possessed. “
Get. Out. Of. The. Road. Now!
”

Predictably, she burst into tears. But she got out of the road.

“I'm sorry, Mama. I'm sorry,” she sobbed. “
Please!
I want to be your
friend
!”

So I slapped her.

No, just kidding. I snuggled her up and held her close and carried her back to our property, where Silas was still in the car. Like a little angel child, he had done what he was told.

I opened the car door.

My son was squatting in the passenger seat clutching two patties of warm poo. Having already spread a good deal of it over the car's upholstery, my purse, and my cell phone, he seemed unsure what to decorate next. He looked to me as if for inspiration.

I took a deep breath and counted to ten, just as the anger management people suggest. Then I plucked the patties from Silas's hands and flung them in the bushes.

With two delinquent poo incidents so close together, I don't want to give you the impression that Silas is one of those tricky poo-obsessed children who smear it on the walls or flick it around. Now, at five years old, he was basically toilet trained. The problems arose when he wasn't near a familiar toilet and didn't have the words to ask for one. Had he been able to speak, I feel confident he would have asked to be let into the house so he could use the bathroom like
a normal child. But he didn't know how to ask. So he had had an accident. Then, faced with a number of rogue turds in the back of his mother's car, he had done the only other thing he could think to do: he spread them on things.

I made sure Hamish's front gate was closed. I knew Lucky would be safe across the road for a few days, but as far as I was concerned, that solo cow-wrangling escapade was the final straw. Country life was complicated enough without dodging traffic to chase after livestock. We asked around the neighborhood and eventually found a farmer who was willing to let Lucky eat his grass until Katya and Derek came back. He came over to pick her up, and A Thousand Pounds of Anarchy left our lives forever.

Now we just had the young chickens to care for, in addition to a few dogs and cats. It seemed time to expand our menagerie. If that comes as a surprise, considering it was April and we'd already banished or murdered the majority of the animals we'd had charge of, then I must tell you one thing: Peter hates computers. He knows it's the best way he can earn a living, and he feels fortunate to be able to support his family, but basically he hates working at a desk all day. He's always casting about for business ideas, preferably ones that involve his working outside.

“I'm thinking alpacas,” he announced one day, tapping away at his tablet. It was Sunday morning and we were sipping our coffee in peace. Phoenix, the shaggy old dog, sighed contentedly on the floor. Silas and Miranda were still snoring soundly in the other room.

“Alpacas?” I asked. “Isn't that like a llama?”

Rolling his eyes at my ignorance, Peter showed me his tablet. “Alpacas are a
type
of llama, but not all llamas are alpacas. See?”

The Google page he had up displayed a procession of alpacas, each one cuter than the last. If a teddy bear made it with a camel,
that's what their babies would look like. Alpacas are long-necked, soft, and fluffy, with enormous dark eyes and the most insanely long eyelashes I've ever seen. They come in many colors, too: white, black, and spotted, and a color called rose-gray, which I swear to God looks like purple. That's right: purple teddy bear camels. That's how cute these things are.

“How much?” I asked, breathless with desire.

“Twenty thousand dollars,” Peter said. “For a good one.”

I swallowed abruptly, and hot coffee flew up my nose. “Twenty—
what
?!
For a
camel
?
We're saving that money for a
house
!”

“Not camels.
Camelids
,”
Peter corrected me. “And I'm thinking it's a good investment. We could produce fine fiber, even sell it later on. Then, when we get a second one, we can breed them and sell crias.”

“So
forty
thousand dollars,” I repeated dumbly. I reflected on this use for our life's savings. “And sell crack?”

“No,
crias
,”
Peter repeated. “Baby alpacas. They're very cute.” He typed into his tablet and showed me more pictures, this time of
miniature
purple teddy bear camels.

“Jesus,” I commented. “That's fucked-up.”

“I know, right?” Peter finished his coffee, a big grin on his face. “It's a fantastic business idea.”

Later that day, I ran this fantastic business idea past Autumn, who is an actual New Zealander who grew up on a farm. Unlike either of us, she also had some experience working with fibers. I sat at her long wooden dining table while she bustled about the kitchen making coffee. She did this with surprising dexterity, since she was balancing her three-year-old son, Titou, on one hip while juggling sugar and hot water.

I noticed that Autumn didn't proffer her opinion lightly. Instead,
she collected the data. And she did this by peppering me with questions.

“So, what's the product you're trying to sell? Would it be fleece or—”

“Pashminas,” I said. I don't know why I said pashminas. I think I just wanted one.

“So, very large scarves. And you'd sell these for—”

“Five hundred dollars.”

Autumn sucked her teeth. “You wouldn't get much of a market for five-hundred-dollar scarves here in New Zealand.”

“No, like, to wealthy tourists. And maybe we'd ship overseas.”

Maris, Autumn's younger daughter, slipped into the room. She was bleeding from a jagged head wound. Ignoring us, she reached for a well-worn paperback and curled up on the soft wicker sofa.

“Uh, Maris?” I asked. “Are you okay?”

She smiled benignly, causing the lumpy red gore to dribble down her temple and onto her cheek. Her elder sister, Nova, wandered in and pulled up her sleeve to reveal a slashed wrist. She sat down in the armchair and got out her sketchbook, at which point I noticed twin incisions at the base of her neck.

“Autumn?” I raised one eyebrow. “Is there something wrong with the girls?”

Autumn rolled her eyes. “Would you take it outside, please? I'm tired of cleaning tomato sauce off the furniture.”

“She dead now?” Titou wanted to know.

“Yes.” Maris glanced up. “I can't go outside. I'm dead.”

“Maris,”
Autumn snapped. “
Now
.” She stepped toward her daughters, and the two girls screeched and ran, dropping their books as they fled.

Autumn shook her head, gently lowering Titou to the floor. She
poured the coffee into mismatched mugs, one of them hand-painted with hearts and polka dots by a child. Then she sat down across from me. Titou crawled beneath the table, where he settled in with a coloring book and some crayons.

“Sorry about that. I don't know if it's the
Twilight
books or what. They've just got so
morbid
lately. Maybe we should get a television.” Autumn sipped her coffee pensively.

“Please don't,” I urged her. “I think they're wonderful.”

“We do go through a lot of tomato sauce, though. And they scare their brother.” She checked under the table. “You all right, Titou?”

Titou, engaged in covering a page with a crimson crayon, said nothing.

“He's fine. But anyway. About your business.” She put down her cup and clasped her hands in thought. “Look, I just don't see it. You'd have to card the wool, then spin it and weave it. You'd need a whole fleece for a scarf that size. So if you're doing it by hand, then carding—that's five hours; then ten hours of spinning and maybe another twelve of weaving. Don't forget setting up your warp; that's another few hours.”

“So, like, a week?” I asked.

Autumn nodded.

“For a scarf?”

She smiled. “And minimum wage in New Zealand's coming up on thirteen dollars an hour.”

I did some quick math in my head. “So basically it would cost more to make the scarf than I could ever sell it for.”

She nodded.

“Then there's equipment and taxes and shipping,” I said, ticking the items off on one hand.

Autumn kept nodding, a smile playing about her lips. She was beginning to enjoy this.

“And I'd still have to pay for the twenty-thousand-dollar camels.”

“Who'd produce only one fleece a year.”

I set down my coffee cup, shut my eyes, and massaged my temples with my fingers. “Why did I marry an English major?”

Autumn laughed. “Don't ask me! I married a French chef, and he's retired. We're always broke, but we do eat well. D'you want some pineapple upside-down cake?”

“Yes, please!” came a voice from beneath the table.

After stress-eating cake at Autumn's, I went home to Peter and suggested that possibly twenty-thousand-dollar alpacas were not the greatest business idea ever.

“You're always crushing my dreams,” he grumbled. “Dream crusher.”

“Tell you what,” I suggested. “Let's just get a couple of cheap ones. Discount alpacas. Let's see if we even
like
them before you start your camel empire.”

So we started calling local breeders. And that's how we met Gay and Mike, alpaca enthusiasts who are also insane. A former stay-at-home mother and a computer programmer, respectively, these two had retired from their sensible lives to breed alpacas. They purchased show-quality animals, sometimes for tens of thousands of dollars, then sold their babies to neophytes like us.

“Oh, they make wonderful pets,” Gay crooned to me over the phone. And she's right. Alpacas are a perfect livestock for the beginning farmer, because they're very expensive and totally useless. Bred by the ancient Incas for their fleece, they produce no meat, milk, or eggs. Instead, they give off attitude. Lots. And lots. Of attitude.

But at the time, we didn't know that. I just thought they were crazy cute.

“When can we come round to see them?” I asked. We set a date, and the following weekend, Peter and I found ourselves driving out to a real live alpaca farm. When we parked in the driveway, everything seemed relatively normal. Gay and Mike were a couple in their late sixties, both with white hair and skin tanned gold from their work outside.

“So glad you've come to meet the boys!” Gay greeted us with a wide smile. “Come, come inside.”

Miranda tugged on my hand. “Mama, are those 'pacas?”

I looked where she was pointing, and indeed they were. Dozens of alpacas in every imaginable shade: black ones, brown ones, white ones, and purple ones. Their necks were long and elegant, and they had little puffballs of fleece at the tops of their heads. One of them even had polka dots.