Удушье (Choke)

Chapter 19

Black-and-white chickens stagger

around Colonial Dunsboro, chick­ens with their heads flattened. Here are chickens with no wings or only one leg. There are chickens with no legs, swimming with just their ragged wings through the barnyard mud. Blind chick­ens without eyes. Without beaks. Born that way. Defective. Born with their little chicken brains already scrambled.

There's an invisible line between science and sadism, but here it's made visible.

It's not that my brains are going to fare much better. Just look at my mom.

Dr. Paige Marshall should see them all struggle along. Not that she'd understand.

Denny here with me, Denny reaches into the back of his pants and pulls out a page of the classified ads from the newspa­per all folded up in a little square. For sure this is contraband. His Royal High Governorship sees this and Denny's going to be banished to unemployment. For real, right out in the barn­yard in front of the cow shed, Denny hands me this newspaper page.

Except for the newspaper, we're being so authentic it's like nothing we're wearing's even been washed in this century.

People are snapping pictures, trying to take some part of you home as a souvenir. People point video cameras, trying to trap you into their vacation. They're all shooting you, shooting the crippled chickens. Everybody's trying to make every minute of the present last forever. Preserve every second.

Inside the cow shed, there's the gurgle of somebody sucking air through a bong. You can't see them, but there's that silent ten­sion of a bunch of people leaned together in a circle, trying to hold their breath. A girl coughs. Ursula, the milkmaid. There's so much reefer in there a cow coughs.

This is when we're supposed to be harvesting dried cow things, you know, cow piles, and Denny goes, 'Read it, dude. The circled ad.' He opens the page for me to see. 'That ad, there,' he says. There's one little classified circled in red ink.

With the milkmaid around. The tourists. There's nothing less than a trillion ways we're about to get caught. For real, Denny could not be more obvious.

Against my hand, the paper's still warm from Denny's butt, and when I go, 'Not here, dude,' and try to give the paper back. . .

When I do that, Denny says, 'Sorry, I didn't mean to, you know, incriminate you. If you want, I can just read it for you.'

The grade-schoolers who come here, it's a big deal for them to visit the henhouse and watch the eggs hatch. Still, a regular chick isn't as interesting as, say, a chicken with only one eye or a chicken with no neck or with a stunted paralyzed leg, so the kids shake the eggs. Shake them hard and put them back to hatch.

So if what's born is deformed or insane? It's all for the sake of education.

The lucky ones are just born dead.

Curiosity or cruelty, for sure, me and Dr. Marshall would go around and around on this point.

I shovel up some cow piles, careful so they don't break in half. So the wet insides don't stink. With all the cow crap on my hands, I have to not bite my nails.

Next to me, Denny reads:

'Free to good home, twenty-three-year-old male, recovering self-abuser, limited income and social skills, house-trained.' Then he reads a phone number. It's his phone number.

'It's my folks, dude, that's their phone number,' Denny says. 'It's like they're hinting.'

He found this left on his bed last night.

Denny says, 'They mean me.'

I say I understand that part. With a wood shovel, I'm still get­ting the poops, piling them in a