Love & Darts (9781937316075) Read Online Free PDF Page B

swirls the towels and rinses his
hands. “They’ll sit over night. You ready?”

 
JULY & THE BUFF
ORPINGTONS

    Before their necks are broken they are beautiful.
These chickens live under a tent for a week in July. The heat wraps
up and around the sides of the tent and hangs thick in the middle.
The day is hot but it is hotter inside the tent even with its
shade. The bird cages are steel mesh wire. Not big, flimsy hexagons
but little, tight squares less than half an inch across. At the
places where the wires cross over each other the metal is built up.
There is a matte coating over it that hides the welds. Slow, scaly
feet move easily over the open-work wires but are careful,
intentional.
    The fans are humming. They are old and
rattling—real metal fans that hang in four corners of the tent. The
air is heavy and even these industrial fans are ridiculous against
such weight. Smells circulate but air barely moves with the fans’
futility. It is so hot for the birds that someone, some thoughtful
caretaker, brought a plastic home-use fan. Everyone has a fan like
this. It’s the kind that sits on dingy golden carpet in hallways,
by sunken couches in living rooms, on cherry veneer tables beside
beds where love gets made, and on top of
endlessly-flashing-noon-‘cause-no-one-knows-how-to-reset-the-time
microwaves in disinfected kitchens. So, having seen such fans
everywhere else, it’s not so strange to see one in the poultry
tent. Someone has pushed the darkest brown button and pulled the
white peg up so the fan will oscillate on top of the middle row of
cages. As the fan directs and redirects its effort, pink, purple,
blue, and white ribbons sing out, fluttering enough to draw
attention to particular cages. Those wire rooms for the birds are
lined up as a single-file perimeter around the sides of the tent
and two deep back-to-back down the center. Observers flow as if
channeled through thick-walled ventricles of a heart.
    Feathers move slightly as the fans push the
air. There are bits of feathers gathered down around the wooden
stilt-legs of the cages on the limestone gravel. There are feathers
in the fans. And feathers in the cages. And feathers in the taut
fraying jute ropes of the tent. Just downy white and gray pieces
mostly. The few good, big, pretty, golden feathers are picked up
quickly and swept away to shaft-stroking wonderlands with the
giggles of little girls.
    The chickens pick up their bony, intentional
feet and slow-dance, sometimes even with flapping wings. They turn
and their feet seem backwards. Then, not forgotten, the bodies
turn. With short jolts, their heads betray nothing held in
confidence. The eyes focus and then turn away. Strangers read names
of the owners out loud and point, showing each other whatever they
see as important. We do it, too. “Come over here and look at this
one.”
    For twenty years my mother has taken me and
my father to the fair. We go through the sheep barn. We go through
the cattle barns, dairy and beef. We look up at the names painted
on the rafters: names of friends, and brothers of friends, and
fathers of friends. Green paint on old white paint. We remember our
head, our heart, our hands, and our health. Sandals fill with dust
as we walk down the missing-lightbulb midway. We eat something
familiar because it’s only once a year. There is no anxiety for
goldfish swimming through food-color-dyed waters in dirty bowls and
no mortal fear for the cheap stuffed nothings everyone wants to
win.
    We wander slowly through it all. It is hot,
July. We stop. I want to watch the boys throwing darts at a rainbow
wall of slack balloons. Because there is no sense of impending doom
for that child who paid for his three chances. He aims while my
father crosses his arms over his chest and stares. We feel the
imminent impact. We want the child to perform well, to win the
biggest, best prize: the huge stuffed tiger. But who can really
hope for so much? And what responsibility does this child