The Taste of Penny (5 page)

The leg hair returns—what looks like sprinkles of pepper on my calf. And after, as it sprouts into hair, nothing happens for a few days. Then the strangest thing, I wake up one night to a scratching at the tent-flap. The wind is wilder than usual but the snow is beginning to melt, signaling the beginning of the end of the resort season. I unzip the tent-flap and see the
Dawg Food Here
sign tumbleweeding across the snowy plain in the wind. A chirp makes me look down and there is a dog halfway out of the burrow. I'd swear it's the exact burrow that I plugged up with the PJ boxers, and I wonder if it ate them or maybe used them for bedding.

“Your tongue will grow back,” it says in a squeaky voice. “You may think it's something magical, but it's not. It's basically just skin. Meat and skin, and it will grow back. It will heal, not unlike a wound, and then you will go find me—I mean her. Give me a jerky stick.”

It's looking at me. I recognize her by her grey eyes.

“Okay, so you've found me out,” the prairie dog says. “I was never good with deception. Never even bothered with it. I'm sorry about the thing with the local. He was a big man and sometimes big men woo me.”

I hold out a jerky. The prairie dog snatches it with its teeth.

I want to ask it if it's a hallucination. And how is it halfway out of the burrow? Is it levitating there? Or does the burrow curve such that it can stand like that? I say, “Are you a symptom?” and it replies, “Please.” I toss another jerky and eat one myself. I sit there with the tent-flap open watching the prairie dog, and the prairie dog sits there half out of the hole blinking back at me.

When it finishes the second jerky, it disappears down its burrow and I zip up the tent-flap.

In the morning, like every morning, I stick out my tongue at the mirror. I see something new and open the tent-flap to let more light in. Tiny buds all along the severed edge, small pinkish buds and buds on top of buds on top of buds, mini-cauliflower clusters—regrowth.

Minnow tosses a trowel through the tent-flap. I stick out my tongue and emerge pointing at my face, but he doesn't pay attention. “There's an emergency, Scoma. Hurry.” He's ignoring His Side or My Side. He's running and digging out burrows. I'm slower, feeling hung-over though I haven't drank since Montana.

I trowel a hole and a dog pops out, spooking me. The prairie dog makes a laugh sound and disappears again.

“
Bitssss
,” I say.

“I need a big favor, Scoma,” he says. “A chicken farm was wrecked by freak winter tornados last night. Now they're going to slaughter them. If you can drive, we can run some recon.”

There is no question I owe him. I go to the chest for my camo shirt/pants set and we drive with the sheet flapping behind the Civvie like a cape.

“Did you hear what they're calling you?” Minnow says.

I turn my mouth into an “o” and pinch my eyebrows together.

“The dogs,” he says. “You're Feh-feh
.”

“
Veh-veh?”
I say.

“You should be flattered. Technically, that's not a predator name. They understand, you and me are with them.”

He flips on the radio news and it gives us the whole story. Inexplicable tornados. Took out a chicken farm on the edge of the state. Sixty-four laying-hen buildings, each 600 feet long and 50 feet wide, 85,000 chickens per. Inoperable watering, feeding, and heating systems. They say they can't be saved. It's too dangerous. So, more than one million chickens will be killed to prevent them from dying. An interview with some Department
of Agriculture poser: “Under state law, they need to be buried or burned or rendered. And the process has to be done humanely too. These chickens are not going to die of cold.”

“God damn right-on about that,” Minnow says. He begins shaking. “When we get there my people will have certain—how should we say?—oh fuck it. If someone tells you to do something, do it. And don't follow me. I hate that.”

I look away when we pass road kill. And there is nothing else but that big wide sky and then a city of warehouse-like things appear in the distance and the traffic bottlenecks. The laying houses are arranged in six perfectly symmetrical rows. The tornadoes have lifted the roofs off several and the smell of bird shit is heavy in the air. We slow to a crawl. Finally, cars pull over and we do too and walk toward the chicken farm. I recognize the heat of the breath of many small, nervous creatures.

We walk the line of stickered cars. There's tree, bird, and Operation Ivy stickers, X's, little fig leaves, a bumper that reads ANABAPTIST AND PROUD OF IT. And then there's all the government issue, the emergency vehicles, a snorkel truck. I misdetect at first, but folks peel out of the way for us. Pretty soon the street is packed with punks and hippies and funny hats all whipping around, then making way. It looks more like the run-up to a Lollapalooza than a chicken protest, and Minnow is the Perry Farrel. He swaggers, an “I'm in charge here” on the tip of his tongue, more and more buds on mine.

 

When we hit the perimeter, the Agriculture Spokesman, surrounded by firemen, is giving a speech: “There's nothing to be done for them. We've saved all we can. The new plan is to gas the laying houses, then render. We'll need you folks to disband.”

“We'll all carry out one,” Minnow says. “One man, one bird!”

The crowd chants, “One man, one bird. One bird, one man.” Someone in back shouts, “One woman.”

“The buildings are a tangle of cages and chickens and manure pits below. This is going to be a Herculean task,” the spokesman says.

“You don't need a Hercules to carry one chicken,” Minnow cries.

“Don't need a Hercules to carry one chicken,” the crowd chants. “One man, one bird.”

“Woman,” the voice in back shouts again, drowned out in the second chorus of “Hercules.”

“The danger is too great to allow people inside the buildings to, as much as we'd like, rescue the birds,” the spokesman says.

Minnow backs into the crowd, chanting and punching fists into the air at the spokesman. I don't follow him. I walk down the road a bit to the point where the crowd thins and sit on a snow-covered rock, wetting my camo pants. I stare at the dismantled laying houses. I can make out the off-white puffs that are the chickens, pacing in their cages. I hear the low rumble of a mass clucking.

I roll my eyes, checking for the long gone defector beauty mark, and touch my finger to the multiplying bumps on my tongue. Then I feel a shove on my shoulder and turn to see the pear-shaped bearded guy from the Buzzard Workshop. I stand up. “You're the one run off with my knife,” he says. He towers over me.

“
Canth theak
,” I say.

He stares.

I point to my mouth.

“Where's my knife?”

I pat my pockets, and hold out my empty palms.

“I've run into your type before,” he says. “Only just they never stole my knife. Every year hundreds of moose are killed by cars or trains. Hundreds. A road-killed moose is a unique opportunity. One hundred and twenty-five pounds of meat will stock a freezer for a year. That's just over 25 percent of a moose. It's not like deer. Deer you hang to sweeten the meat. You can taste the difference between a back strap and a brisquet. Moose is different altogether. It's a community event. It's environmentally sound. It's a lot of fun.”

I nod and shrug, hoping he'll understand, I didn't run away to antagonize his cause. I didn't mean to steal the knife. A body alone is not capable of communicating this.

“I don't know about your type,” the bearded guy says. He turns and I watch him climb into his Gut Deer? truck.

From the opposite direction, gas trucks break the long horizon. The crowd has begun to peel out, to admit defeat. The drivers of the gas trucks receive some instructions from the Agriculture Spokesman, and they park in front of a laying house. They run hoses inside the buildings and pull massive plastic tarps over them one by one.

I'm getting cold. The orange sun is setting. Plus, I realize that I really don't want to be here when all these chickens die.

Then I see what seems to me to be two skiers from the resort, in their ninja gear, something—maybe skis—between them. Then it crystallizes, it's Minnow and someone else and the thing they're wielding may be a giant can opener. I try and block the reflection of the sun off the snow with my hand.

“They've got the Jaws of Life,” someone screams. Two firemen bolt down the embankment. The clunky fire suits make their legs short, and they run stilted.

Minnow and his co-conspirator rake the Jaws of Life across the bottom edge of the cages along an exposed section
of the laying house. The gas truck drivers drop their tarps and converge on them. One of the firemen trips and goes face first into the snow, his yellow fire helmet like something obscene but natural growing in the winter. Before I know it, I too am running down the embankment toward them.

Minnow and the other guy are prying up the cut edge of the cage, opening one whole side of the enclosure, releasing what might be thousands of them simultaneously.

“Go,” Minnow screams.

One of the firemen tackles him and the gas truck guys go for his friend, but they're slowed stepping through all the bewildered chickens. The sound, that rumble of clucking, is off the charts when I reach them.

The chickens hop and flutter. White feathers hang in the air, but at first I think it's snowing again. Everywhere you step is bird. The snow comes up to their bellies and they fumble, moving like popping corn across the field.

The fireman is holding Minnow's hands behind his back. He's face first in the snow. He looks up and I see that he is bawling. He is biting his upper lip, gazing out across the snow—between here and the horizon there is nothing but the remains of the laying house roofs and a spreading band of chickens clearing the perimeter into only deeper snow.

Minnow sees me and mouths, “Go.” I glance to my left and see the other fireman, up now and beelining for me. I run behind the birds shouting at them to go, go, go, go, go. I snatch one up and it's warm in my hands. I tuck it under my arm like a football. I pick a point where the snow meets the big sky, and I aim to make it there.

BROTHERMAN'S HAS A LITTLE PROBLEM WITH ITS local competitors, The Two Men And A Truck crew. The Two Men And A Truck crew are former cops.

Now Sam is standing on the side of the road with a current cop, and his finger, a part of himself which he loathes, pokes into the meaty ball in the corner of his eye. At first he's shocked to see the thing there and thinks it's someone else's. But he recognizes the sad condition of his own digit in the bright glare of the street light as it misses his nose completely.

This sad condition was a constant source of embarrassment. Just the other day two girls, strangers in some waiting area, suggested that he get a manicure.

“I don't even know you,” he said to them.

“They're really bad,” one of them said, “your nails.”

“But do you think it's your place to tell someone something like that?”

“They're disgusting,” said the other one.

Sam had always known they were disgusting fingers, spindly and crooked from breaking them as a kid. He couldn't recall ever having a full nail. He bit them down to nothing—a habit he'd recently been trying to break, going around with hot sauce coating them, reeking of cayenne and vinegar.

The surprise of that one appearing where it isn't supposed to and sticking him in the eye makes him lose track of the penny hidden under his tongue, and swallow it.

Immediately Sam begins—maybe this isn't the right word—
sensing
the penny in his stomach. He experiences two distinct sensations: the pressure of his palm on the back of his eyelid, and the discomfort of the penny inside him, a presence. If he moves the hand, pain lights up in his eye.

Sam and the cop stand there a few silent minutes looking at each other on the side of the road. The cop looks at Sam, and Sam looks at the cop. Sam blinks his good eye. He keeps the other eye covered with his palm, pointing his fingers outward like lashes. He doesn't even want to touch himself with them. Not in the eye, not on his dick. He wants to keep his fingers away from himself.

Sam doesn't know what to do with his other arm so it hangs limp at his side. He does not have his swerve on.

“So it's like that is it?” the cop says.

“Like how?”

There is no response.

“I think I really did something to my eye,” Sam says. “I can't seem to take my hand away from it.”

“You know what I think, sir?” the cop says.

“I don't know.”

“I'll tell you. I think your eye's not hurt. I think you're
trying to get out of something.” The cop believes Sam to be bullshitting. He believes him to be drunk as well.

“Oh it's hurt. It's definitely hurt.”

“And I don't suppose you could pass any more tests then, huh?”

“It'd be difficult. I am happy to try. It'd not be easy. Not one bit. However I am cooperative. I will do what you ask. I am being cooperative.”

The cop walks Sam to the squad car. He jostles him some, testing his swerve for himself. Sam is steadfast. Never mind he missed his nose. Sam is the best drunk driver you'll meet. He'd been pulled over not because of the seatbelt either. No one can see that you're not wearing your seatbelt. Everyone knows that is some bullshit excuse law. He'd been pulled for his magnetic signs, and he should have known better.