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Authors: Antonia Murphy

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“Bus,” Silas replied.

“That's all he says anymore,” Peter pointed out. “Have you noticed? Bus. Bus-ah-bus-ah-bus.”

Silas put his hand over mine. Very seriously, he looked up into my eyes. “Bus,” he repeated.

I had no idea what he was saying.

“Mama?” Miranda wandered in, naked with her shiny black gumboots and a gold purse over one shoulder. “Can I please have a chunk of cucumber?”

“Sure.” I got up off the couch, wiping my eyes with the back of one hand. Sometimes it floods me: I picture Silas as he'd be if he weren't disabled. He'd be building forts, mixing zombie poison, asking questions about the chicken tied around his dog's neck. I shut my eyes and breathed, composing myself before turning around.

“Don't you go meet with the Slovaks today?” I asked Peter,
pulling a cucumber from the refrigerator. “Why don't you see if you can go buy us a house?”

Peter laughed, which is what he does when I'm being completely unreasonable. “What about Michiko's place? We've got an offer in on that one.”

“Yeah, well, she hasn't accepted it. If we get a better deal with the Slovaks, we can pull out at any time.”

It felt good to have extra options all of a sudden. Peter went off to get dressed, and I sat down with my e-mail.

“Bus,” Silas demanded. “Bus-ah-bus-ah-bus.”

I looked at him, concerned. “Bus? There's no bus today. It's Saturday. Wouldn't you like to have some breakfast?”

“Silas doesn't want breakfast,” Miranda interpreted through a mouthful of cucumber. “He just wants a bus, Mama.”

I got up to make him a peanut butter sandwich. “Well, he might not be able to talk so much, but he still has to eat.”

Peter emerged wearing a worn orange T-shirt and jeans. “You want a house, baby? I'll go buy you a house.” Peter loves making deals. With a happy grin, he kissed me on the cheek and took off.

“So,” Miranda said when Peter had left, “what do we do now, Mama?”

“I don't know what you're doing, but I am sitting. And checking my e-mail.”

This might have been a mistake. Gay and Mike, our alpaca breeders, had sent me a series of messages, each with the subject line “Orgling.” I clicked on the first one. It contained several explicit YouTube clips of alpacas in intimate embraces. Here were the teddy bear camels thrusting away at one another, a kinky Peruvian subculture that now I couldn't unsee. “I wanted you to know that alpacas don't just spit!” read Gay's chatty e-mail. “They also orgle,
which is the sound they make when they mate.” Then she closed: “Alpaca porn, whatever next?”

From the kitchen, I heard heavy breathing. “What are the 'pacas doing?” Miranda wanted to know. “In that movie?”

“Orgling,” I muttered, closing the e-mail.

“Oh.” Miranda nodded sagely. “Orgling. That's good.”

I went into the kitchen to see what was happening. Silas had three different pot lids down on the floor and was spinning each one separately. When one slowed down, he gave it another spin. And he was breathing heavily, almost hyperventilating.

“Silas?” I asked, bending down. “Are you okay? What's up with the pots?”

“Bus,” he replied predictably. Then: “Pah-mmmm.”

“Pot? Are you playing with the pots?”

“Pah-mmmm. Bus.” He gazed up at me then, but his big brown eyes didn't look urgent and sharp anymore. They seemed far away.

My laptop chimed. I went to check my in-box. “What is it, Mama?” Miranda asked. She was trying to stuff the rest of her cucumber into her little gold evening purse. “More 'paca movies?”

“No.” The message was from Michiko, through her lawyer. I clicked on it.

Duncan has said he will not sell for this price because he wants more money. This is a very shame result. So sorry.
Michiko.


Shit,

I swore under my breath.

“Mama,” Miranda called from the kitchen. “I think Silas is orgling.”

After no more than an hour, Peter's car pulled into the driveway.
“Papa's home!” Miranda rushed outside to meet him. I knew it couldn't be good that he was back so soon. Through the window, I saw her offering him the mushy stub of cucumber from her bag. Peter smiled and pretended to eat it.

“So, Master Dealmaker,” I greeted him when he walked back inside, “how did it go in Slovakia?”

Peter sat down at the dining table, gratefully accepting a glass of water. “Strange,” he said. “Very strange. The guy's on a respirator, he has a patch on his eye. I thought he was gonna keel over right there while I was talking to him.”

“Yeah?”

“They had it all worked out. They took twenty percent off the price. Well”—he smiled modestly—“fifteen. I dropped them down to twenty.”

“That's fantastic! When can we move in?” I gave him a big kiss on the mouth.

“There's just one thing.” I waited. “They want us to cut Kim out of the deal.”

“What?
Are they high? We can't cut out the agent! It's illegal!”

“What's ‘high'?” Miranda asked.

Peter shrugged. “He said if we wanted to worry about agent fees, we could just—”

“—go live in the suburbs,” I finished for him. “Well, that's the end of
that
house.” I flopped down next to him, pressing both hands to my forehead. “God, is anybody
normal
out here? Fondling goat tits, tying dead chickens to dogs. Michiko's deal fell through because her creepy husband wants more money! And now the one-eyed man—”

“He still has his eye I think,” Peter corrected. “It's just got a patch on it.”


Patch
-eyed
man who wants to rip off the agent. What are these people
thinking
? Is everyone out here completely insane?”

It was a good question. Miranda had wandered outside, still with no clothes on, probably to chase a chicken. Silas was still hyperventilating in the kitchen. And we were so busy complaining that no one remembered to check on him.

The southern winter passed without further mishap. We tended our animals and kept searching for homes, sipping fruit wine by the fire at night. But at the start of October, I finally put my foot down. Adding up the cost of the feed we'd lavished on our three turkeys, each bird now cost about eighty-five dollars, and they were still strolling around in their pen, trilling and eating our food.

Peter called up Skin. “If you could just show us how to butcher them,” I heard him asking. “If you could just show us the first time, Antonia and I really want to learn how to do it ourselves. Do you think you might have some time? Like on Saturday?”

Apparently he did, because that weekend Silas was riding his trike around the palm tree when Skin's gold sedan rolled down our driveway. Silas stared as Skin got out of the car and pulled off his oilskin, balling it up and shoving it in the passenger-side window.

“Got an axe?” he asked.

This wasn't usually what people said when they came round for a visit. “Uh, yeah,” Peter said, heading out to the garage for the tool.

Skin turned to me. “Normally you don't kill them in any month with an
r
in it. That's when they eat the crickets, and the meat goes off.” He started walking toward the turkey pen, nodding at the birds. “But you've got 'em in the pen here, so she'll be right.”

“No crickets, I don't think,” I stammered. “Just really expensive feed. I'm getting sick of paying for it, actually.”

Peter returned with the axe, and Skin pointed to the back of the
house. “We'll do it over this way. Derek's got some old tree stumps round the side there. Make a good chopping block.”

“Mama, what are you doing?” Miranda wanted to know, emerging from the deck with That Baby wrapped in a sling. Ever since she'd seen me carry Ba around the house, she'd wanted to wrap her dolls in baby carriers. I hoped she wasn't treating them for constipation.

“Well, Magnolia, Skin's gonna show us how to cut a turkey's head off,” I explained, hoping she wouldn't be too upset.

But Miranda was a country girl, and she immediately saw the possibilities. “And if Jabberwocky is too mean to us, then we will cut his head off, too.”

“Jabber what?” Skin asked.

“Our rooster,” I explained, rolling my eyes. “She wants to cut its head off.”

“Yes,” Miranda told him solemnly. “And we will never put it back on.”

“Good on ya, Miranda,” Skin laughed. “You show that rooster who's boss.” He stretched the turkey's head out on a tree stump and raised the axe in one hand. With a crushing blow, he hit the turkey square on its neck, sending the head shooting across the grass.

“Go fetch that head, will ya, love?” Skin gestured to Miranda. When she scampered off, he muttered, “Can't stand roosters meself. Angry bastards. Fight first and talk later. 'S no good.”

Miranda brought the turkey head back just as Skin was setting aside the carcass. Her hands and wrists were slick with blood, but it didn't seem to bother her. “See this?” Skin asked, taking a head in two hands. He pulled a flap of muscle at the base of the skull, making the turkey's beak open and shut. In a rasping falsetto, he squeaked, “Hullo, Miranda. You're a very lovely girl. Would you like to play with me?”

“Oh,
gross
,”
Peter said, groaning, but Miranda's eyes grew wide with joy.

“Wow!” she crooned. “Skin made that turkey talk!”

Skin picked up the next bird, chopping its head off as easily as the first. “Fight first, talk later,” he continued, as though there'd been no interruption. “I used to be like that. Can't go to town no more.”

“Why not?” Peter asked.

“Aw.” Skin shrugged, then chopped the head off the third turkey. “Every time I go to town I get arrested.”

He sat on a stump then, handing each of us a warm turkey carcass. “Here,” he offered. “Let me show you how to pluck 'em. You'll need to know, once you be killing that rooster of yours.”

Skin stuck his hand up a hot turkey's ass then, just as easily as if he were slipping on a glove. Wincing, I followed his lead. I thought it would be disgusting. I wrinkled my nose, bracing for a wave of nausea. But it felt surprisingly delicious, like the inside of a warm cherry pie. Except with no cherries and more internal organs. We sat together on stumps, pulling guts from our turkeys and chatting amiably about life. The evening sun lit everything in a pumpkin-hued light. Jabberwocky crowed in the distance, the leaves of the great totara tree rustled, and it was surprisingly lovely to sit there and eviscerate birds.

Skin talked about his daughter Amber, who was coaching sports for special-needs kids. Shyly, I told him about Silas.

“Ah, kids'll be who they are, not a thing you can do about it,” Skin observed. “Take our Liam. That's our nephew on Lish's side. Born delayed, just like your Silas. Doctors said he'd never walk. But now he runs just like the rest of 'em. Doesn't talk like they do, but that's just him. ‘That's our Liam,' we say, an' we love 'im.”

Silas and Miranda crouched near the guts pile, poking at sludgy
things with sticks. Our two cats paced back and forth on the thick wooden fence, hoping for scraps.

“This here's the gizzard,” Skin showed us, slitting open a mysterious crimson organ with his knife. I was startled to see rocks inside, along with a handful of corn.

“That's how they get the nourishment, see?” Skin pointed inside with the tip of his blade. “Turkeys eat the stones, and the hard rocks grind up the maize. Makes it digestible. Anyways,” he flicked the gizzard over his shoulder. “Cats love 'em.”

It occurred to me then that in a lifetime of cooking and eating animal meat, no one had ever shown me how to slaughter and prepare my own food. It was a more useful skill than French verb conjugations or the canon of Western literature I'd studied in college. When I first met this guy, I'd thought he looked like a pirate. Now I felt lucky to know him.

Before he left, Skin hung up the turkeys on the back deck, explaining that they'd have to bleed overnight before we could freeze them. Peter walked him out to his car.

“D'you want to know my real name?” Skin asked Peter, right before he left.

Peter feigned surprise. “It's not Skin?”

“Nah.” Skin balled up his jacket and stuffed it through the open passenger-side window. He got in behind the wheel. “That's my nickname. I was a twin, and I was always the skinny one, so they called me Skin. Real name's Dennis.” And with that, he took off.

Peter reported this bit of knowledge back to me in the kitchen. “Doesn't seem like a Dennis,” I commented. “Maybe that's why he changed his name.”

“Yeah.” Peter laughed. “That and the part about getting arrested. Both good reasons to change your identity.”

I guess Skin enjoyed Peter's company, because the next day he called us at eight in the morning to invite Peter out to play.

“Be doin' some pigs out Pipiwai way,” Skin offered by way of explanation.

Peter wasn't sure about this. “He must mean slaughtering them, or maybe butchering them?” he wondered as he hung up the phone. “And I like bacon. I eat the stuff, so I should learn what goes into it, right?”

So he did learn. And what goes into pig farming, apparently, is flying nut sacks.

The day was devoted to pig castration, an athletic endeavor in which two men hold up a series of screaming piglets while some guy slits open their scrotums.

Peter made the next part sound highly scientific. “He lops off the nut and flings it,” he told me later, looking pale and slightly traumatized. “There were nut sacks flying everywhere. One hit me in the head, one bounced off my arm, and I had nuts sliding down my gumboots.” He reached for a beer. “We can never get pigs.”

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