Dirty Chick (21 page)

“I just thought we'd know him forever,” I kept repeating as we drove. The sky was overcast, the day heavy and humid. “I liked him so much, and I knew we wanted to stay, and I thought we'd be friends for ten or twenty years. I thought we had so much time.”

Peter nodded, saying nothing.

The wake was at Skin's mother's house, in a tiny seaside community called Whananaki. We drove a winding road to get out there, giant ferns and native trees pressing in on both sides. When we emerged from the bush the road straightened, and we pulled into a coastal village. Cars were parked everywhere. There wasn't any need for an address or even for directions—Doreen's house was overflowing with people.

It had started to rain, and we got out awkwardly, pulling on
raincoats and unfolding umbrellas. Most of the faces we saw were unfamiliar, but everyone smiled grimly and nodded.

Inside, there must have been two hundred people. Lish was there, looking pale and shocked. I gave her a fierce hug, then I went to find Doreen, who was laying out platters of food—soups and sandwiches, roast chicken and cakes.

“Do you want to see him?” she asked once we'd hugged.

Peter nudged me. “You go with Miranda. I'll stay with Silas; then we'll go up later.”

I looked over at Silas, who was standing in a circle of enormous Maori men, all wearing boots and black leather jackets. They didn't seem to mind. And Silas, in his tiny blue raincoat, looked as if he were joining in the conversation.

Taking Miranda's hand, I followed Doreen up to the living room. We took off our shoes at the door. A simple plywood casket sat in the center of the room, surrounded by soft futon mattresses. There were people everywhere, most of them Ngapuhi, and I was a little nervous about how Miranda would react. I wasn't sure what the cultural protocol was. I hoped she wouldn't start talking about farts. I wasn't sure she even understood what she was looking at.

Skin lay in the open casket, his body surprisingly small and compact. He had his biker jacket on, and his favorite hunting knife was strapped to his belt. There was a patch on his jacket that read “Born to Ride.” I took Miranda's hand and knelt beside him. I opened my mouth to explain what was happening, but before I could say anything, Miranda's voice rang out loud and clear in the crowded room.

“You were a good teacher, Skin. But you're dead now.” Then, fearlessly, she bent down and kissed him on his grizzled beard.

I swallowed, horrified. But all around us, people started to laugh. Behind me, Doreen patted Miranda on the head. “That's right, darling,” she murmured. “That's well said.”

Doreen pointed to a collection of Magic Markers scattered around the room. “They're for you to write your good-byes,” she encouraged. “On the casket. The little ones, too. Skin loved the little ones.”

I looked at what had already been written there: “Catch the big one in heaven, mate” and “Skin, you always took care of our Whanau.
*
Now I'll take care of yours.” Miranda scribbled some drawings on one end, and I took a black pen and wrote, “Skin, I was lucky to know you.”

When I looked up, I realized the room was full of children. The casket was covered with kids' drawings. My eyes blurred, and I noticed the cross at Skin's head. “Isaac Shayne Anderson,” the marker read. His name wasn't Skin, and it wasn't Dennis. He'd been playing with us all along.

Two days later, we buried him. The church funeral was in the middle of a workday, and Peter couldn't leave the office. But Silas didn't even have school that day. His teachers were going to the service.

Becca and I squeezed into a tight parking place and coaxed the children out of the car. We made our way to the tiny cemetery at the top of the hill, with the century-old white chapel at its center.

I looked around at the carefully ironed shirts, the flushed cheeks and fidgeting children, and after a while I realized that every single person we knew in Purua was in attendance. Nick and Amanda
were there with all their daughters, each one turned out in a new skirt and Mary Janes. Autumn and Patrice stood together with their kids, and Bill and Sophia. Then there were the pirates: Skin's best mates and cousins, guys who wore motorcycle jackets and Jim Beam T-shirts, with wide gaps in their teeth when they grinned.

The professional farmers had turned out, too—the tall, grumpy men who worked all day and never slept enough. There were Hamish, John, Dave, and Graham—men who worked huge farms with hundreds of stock. They almost never left their animals, their fencing, or their land.

Silas was at the far end of the cemetery, looking for ways to escape. He was running on a freshly filled grave, watching his shadow dance on the grass. I went down to fetch him, but when I took his hand, he squealed as if I'd slapped him. “No! No! No!” he protested. “Home. Bus.
Away!
”

“
Silas
,
”
I hissed. “You've got to come away from there!
”

I dragged him away from the grave, and he let out an ear-piercing screech. Mourners began proceeding toward Skin's grave site, and six young men in black bore the casket on their shoulders. Silas didn't care about any of this. He sat on the ground and refused to get up, and each time I yanked him, he only screeched louder.

Rebecca hurried over with Miranda. “Is everything okay?” she asked, worried. “Do you need me to sit with him?”

“I can't make him calm down,” I said finally. “We should go. This isn't fair to anyone. Can you take Miranda?” She nodded, and I reached down and lifted Silas. He continued shrieking, kicking at my legs and trying to bite my shoulder. He looked like a tiny kidnapping victim.

We crept out of the cemetery in disgrace. My cheeks burned, thinking how wild my son was. I was fixated on getting back to the
car, pumping up the air-conditioning, and getting out of there, getting back home where no one could hear my kid screaming.

Once we left the cemetery, Silas began to calm down. We made it back to the car and buckled up the kids. A milk truck passed, headed for the highway, and then I started the ignition and pulled onto the narrow dirt road. The service had only just started, so the street was still lined on both sides with cars, a narrow path in the middle our only escape hatch.

We drove past the cemetery and down the road. The milk truck's red brake lights flicked on. “What the . . .” I frowned. Then I laughed, a quick, sharp burst.

“Oh God,” I moaned. “We're stuck.”

I got out of the car and walked up to the truck, leaving Becca and the children behind.

“Can't move,” the truck driver grumbled, indicating the road before him. Large, dusty pickup trucks were parked on both sides, and while the passage between them was wide enough for a small car, there was no way his truck could squeeze through.

“Is there a back road?” I asked. “Maybe I could reverse and go the other way.”

“Could do,” the driver conceded. “'Cept there's a bloody huge logging truck coming up behind me. He'll be here in two minutes.”

I headed back to the car, where Miranda had grabbed one of Silas's books, and he was now beating her over the head with the other one. “Mama!” she shrieked when she saw me. “Silas is going to dead me!”

Rebecca smiled thinly, reaching for her ear buds and turning on her iPod. I sat back in the driver's seat and turned up the air-conditioning. The massive chrome grill of a logging truck took over the whole of our rearview mirror.

“That's it,” I sighed. “We're not going anywhere.”

I settled back in the parental misery of being stuck in a car with two warring children. I counted to a hundred, trying my best to tune out the screams from the backseat. Vehicles hemmed us in on all sides, before us a steadily narrowing corridor of farmers' shiny SUVs, beat-up family vans, motorcycles, and pickup trucks—the entire motor population of Purua.

The service was blessedly short. After no more than twenty minutes, the congregants began to disperse. The traffic jam was obvious, and as people began to notice it, they hurried to their cars.

I rolled down my window as Amanda walked by. “What are you doing?” she asked, bending down to talk.

“Silas was freaking out,” I explained. “We didn't want to bother anyone.”

“Nobody cares about that,” she scoffed. “It doesn't matter. There're children everywhere. You should have stayed.”

“Really? I felt bad.”

“Well, you shouldn't do. We all love Silas. Don't we, Silas?” She winked at him.

“Bus,” Silas replied.

“I'm having a dinner tonight,” Amanda said. “It won't be a raucous thing. I just thought we could get together, eat some food, and remember some good things about Skin.”

“We'll be there,” I told her. She took my hand and squeezed it. As if by magic, the road ahead was clear. I grinned and started the ignition.

That night when we got to Amanda's, she was slicing a leg of lamb and the wine was already flowing. Silas and Miranda went off to the living room with the other children, swiping thick slabs of bread and butter on the way.

Abi sat next to the wall, barricaded behind a large bowl of salad. “Why did we like him so much?” she wondered out loud.

“Well, he'd have saved you from the zombie apocalypse, for one!” Amanda joked, passing around a platter of lamb. “Skin had a lot of skills.”

Nick helped himself to the meat. “I'm a little offended that you all want him to defend you. You can spar with me anytime. I'll teach you all the self-defense you need.”

Zane burst out laughing. “Oh man, I'd like to see that! Nick versus Zombie!”

“It wasn't zombies anyway,” I murmured. “He got done in by his own heart.”

Peter, who had been quiet until now, spoke up. “You know what I liked about him? The guy did what he wanted. Like when he came to our house that day, to roast sheep on a spit. Nine or ten hours, he was just sitting there turning this meat. And I said, ‘Don't you have to work?' And he goes, ‘Nah. Can't work today. I'm roasting a sheep.'”

“There was a pastor at the wake,” Amanda mused. “It was interesting. I mean, not the Jesus part, but what he said was ‘If I ask a woman what's most important, she says the husband. If the husband is gone, she says the children. If the children are gone, she says the house.'”

“The house?” I asked, skeptical. “I'd think it would be the rest of the family.”

“No.” Amanda smiled. “It's the house, because he said the dreams of the family—the
moemoea
—are in the walls.”

There was a silence while we gathered this in. “Great,” I commented. “We've got two more months in our house, then we're out. And I'm gonna lose my dreams, too?”

“Nah.” Amanda turned her fierce eyebrows on me. “Pitch a tent on our lawn. She'll be right.”

I felt my cheeks get hot then, at her easy generosity. I still didn't know what we'd do with the farm animals, but at least my panic about having shelter started to ease. “Thanks,” I told her, embarrassed. “You guys have done so much for us. And Autumn, too. We'd be a mess if it weren't for you—”

Amanda cut me off. “Don't be stupid. You'd do it for us.”

“I'm just very concerned,” Autumn interjected, “about this zombie apocalypse. Skin had all the survival skills. We're stuffed now. Who'll protect our families?”

“We'll have to take care of each other,” Amanda said softly. “Now we're the family.”

THE BINGLEE-DOO

A
t the start of December, the broody hen got tired of the responsibilities of motherhood and abandoned her eggs, leaving me with a clutch of half-formed chicken abortions.

“What am I supposed to do with these things?” I asked Peter, showing him the pile of cold eggs. They looked normal on the outside, but she'd been sitting on them for two weeks. I shuddered to think what was curled up inside.

“Feed 'em to the dog,” Peter suggested matter-of-factly. “That's good meat. It's like chicken veal. She'll love it.”

Gingerly, I cracked an egg over Kowhai's food bowl, my eyes screwed shut. The ensuing sound was not what you'd expect when cracking an egg, which is nothing. Instead, I heard a distinct
thunk
.

“Oh, God, this is
so gross
.”
I moaned, taking the stainless steel dog bowl out to the back deck. Kowhai bounded along behind me, her tongue lolling.

Not wanting anyone to make an omelet with these ghastly things, I prominently labeled the box of eggs, “Chicken Foetuses for Kowhai. Do Not Eat.” That second sentence was probably unnecessary, but the eggs didn't really seem to trouble Peter. The situation called for specifics.

In fact, the box of aborted chicks in our refrigerator seemed an apt metaphor for country life, at least as far as we were concerned. Here we'd thought we had a new life in Purua, and now it was coming to an end. We had just one month left in our rented home and no plan for another place to live. Since the two houses we'd looked at had fallen through, no other possibilities had come our way.

This had led to a series of sleepless nights for me, wherein I was awakened by brutal questions such as
What the fuck do I do with the goats?
Like it or not, we were now the custodians of nineteen animals. I could bring myself to plan for some of them. The chickens and sheep could be slaughtered. Anyone would take a healthy cow, because they're worth money. And I felt sure we could pawn off the racist alpacas on Sophia, who found them elegant and didn't know about their fighting teeth.

But I had a soft spot for those baby goats. Not only had I watched them come into the world, but I'd knocked up their mother, put up with her pregnant moods and bad behavior for five months, and brought her special treats when she had cravings. I felt like a second parent to those kids. At the very least, I felt like their baby daddy.

The problem was that Moxie and Stripe were horrifically ill-behaved. I was the only one who found their car-jumping antics hilarious. Guests had started parking at the top of the driveway and walking five minutes to our front porch rather than risk getting
their paint dinged up with hoof marks. If permitted to roam, these goats worked like lawn mowers, chewing up every plant and vegetable in their path: the roses, the vegetable garden, the bark from native trees. And when plants weren't enough, they started in on people, sucking on our hair and nibbling at our shirtsleeves.

“Premal will take them,” Peter suggested one evening. “That guy from work, the one who eats colostrum. He says goat is fantastic. And now's the time to slaughter, when they're young and tender.”

“You're kidding, right?”

Peter rolled his eyes. “We're not starting this again, are we? You can't put them in a sling and lick their assholes. That's got to stop.”

“Sure,” I conceded. “But I really don't want to eat them. I want to stay out here in the country, but somewhere with proper fencing, and milk them. For cheese.”

It sounds simple enough, but “proper fencing” for goats means building a maximum-security prison on your farm. Goats are tireless escape artists. You can try to restrain them with electric fences, but they have the creepy superpower of knowing the moment the power to your fence goes out. Then they'll jump right over it or blast on through. If they're not sure, the mother goat will sometimes push her babies onto the fence, as a heartless science experiment, to see if they get shocked. And if they do get zapped, goats don't jump backward like every other barnyard animal. They jump forward. So, essentially, the electric fence acts as a catapult projecting them on to freedom.

The only truly reliable alternative is goat fencing, which looks more or less like the walls of a prison camp. Eight-foot posts enclose lengths of wire mesh, which are then sunk into the ground, because goats can also dig. We asked a couple of farmers how much it would cost to build some, but as usual, they just shook their heads.

“Aw, ya don't want goat fencing,” Hamish corrected me.

“Sure I do,” I protested.

“Too dear. Stick to the llamas.”

“
Alpacas,
”
I corrected him. “And what do you mean ‘it's too expensive'? How much?”

“A lot,” Hamish replied, and took off again on his quad, leaving me to wonder,
How much is a lot? Five hundred dollars? One million dollars?
The answer remained mysterious.

Then, on top of all those worries, Silas was now beating people up. His epilepsy medicine had a number of known side effects, including “increased aggression” and “hyperactivity.” In practice, this meant that when he was frustrated, he didn't just moan and call it a day. Instead, he hit me in the face.

One night before Christmas, Autumn and Patrice came over for dinner. I was heading back to the kitchen to grab the ice cream, Silas trotting along behind me.

“Ice keem!” he was chanting. “Ice keem!”

“You'll get your ice cream,” I told him. “Go back to the table and wait, please.”

Silas found this answer subpar. He grabbed for my thigh and started clawing at the skin. I returned to the table with ice cream, bowls, and a pair of red welts down my legs.

“I have noticed,” Patrice observed, “that he is sometimes more aggressive at school. He is hitting, sometimes biting. Is the drug doing this?”

“Yep.” I nodded. “It's a known side effect. But what are we gonna do? We can't let him seize all the time.”

“Of course.”

“What do you do when he hits?” I asked. “Do you punish him?”

“I put him in the cock room.”

“The
cock
room?” Peter repeated.

“The
cloakroom
,” Autumn corrected.

Finally, in the middle of December, an appointment opened up for an EEG. I imagined that the brain waves would paint a picture, and then all the doctors would gather round. They'd stroke their chins, look thoughtful, and murmur, “Ah, yes. Of course. The binglee-doo. We can fix this.”

“I hope you're not getting your hopes up too high,” Peter cautioned, seeing the glint in my eye as I packed Silas's bag for the hospital. “It's not like they're going to see a giant bus on the screen, then reach in, pull it out, and the kid'll be quoting Shakespeare.”

“Bus,” Silas argued.

“I'm not looking for Shakespeare,” I sighed. “I just want to learn more.”

Silas needed to be asleep for the technicians to get an accurate scan of his brain, so the first thing they did when we got to the hospital was lead us to a private room. A nurse wearing green scrubs the color of toothpaste dimmed the lights, and once she'd taken Silas's vitals, she offered us a sedative to help him sleep.

I took off my shoes and curled up on the bed with my son, grateful for a rest. I'd been up at intervals all night, turning a new batch of Camembert and wondering why I was slave to a pile of milk curd. I was just starting to doze off, Silas's head tucked in the crook of my arm, when someone punched me in the nose.

“Ow!” I squawked, sitting up. “What the—?” Silas was kneeling on the bed, a massive grin spread across his face.

“Bus!” he exclaimed, then kicked me in the pelvis.

“Silas!” I cried, holding both his arms in mine. “No hit! That's mean!”

Silas just laughed, then wiggled out of my grip, slid off the bed,
and launched his little body at me, pummeling at me with both his fists. It actually hurt, even though he was five years old and weighed no more than forty pounds. I bent down to talk to him, and he slapped me in the face.

“Arrrgh!” I choked out a strangled cry, then forced myself to count to ten. This hospital room was festooned with signs featuring slogans such as “This Is a No-Hitting Place,” and “Violence Is Never Okay.” At that particular moment, I disagreed. Actually I think my son could have done with a good cuff on the back of the head, but I held myself back.

When the nurse came in to check on us, I was cornered in the darkened room, both hands flat in front of me to ward off the blows from my homicidal first-grader.

“Help,” I gasped. “He won't stop hitting me.”

She sat on the edge of the bed. “Is this normal behavior for him?” she asked placidly.

What kind of a fucking question is that?
I wanted to snap.
This child is the Antichrist.
But instead, I blurted, “I have no idea. This is not my son.”

Of course, I meant this figuratively, as in “This behavior is so unusual that it does not in any way resemble ‘normal' for my son,” but I think I freaked out the nurse. Immediately, her eyes widened, and she took a fairly hostile tone when she asked, “Then what are you doing here with Cyrus?”

“Silas,” I corrected. Then I backtracked. “I mean, he is my son, but this is very strange behavior. What did you give him for a sedative? Methamphetamine? He's acting psychotic.” Silas was now slamming his little body into mine, trying to take me out at the knees.

The nurse seemed reassured, though she made no move to
protect me. “I'll get the doctor,” she said. “Sometimes, with these sorts of children, the sedative can have an opposite effect. We'll try an alternate drug.”

Then she left me with the midget psychopath, who was hollering “
Out! Out!
Away!
” and trying to drag me to the exit.

“At least it's not ‘bus,'” I muttered, and steeled myself for the next round of drugs.

I coaxed Silas onto the hospital bed, tempting him with a blue latex glove that I blew up like a balloon. I tossed it to him, and he batted it back.

“Good!” I smiled. “Ball. Throw ball!”

“Ball,” Silas repeated, the old familiar glint in his eye. He reached for the glove, and then his arm just kept reaching. Both arms shot out, rigid. And then he was tipping backward.

I lunged for the call device, hitting it four times in a sharp staccato. A nurse came in, her mouth open to speak. Then she was at the bed in two quick strides and hitting the call button for backup.

“How long has it been?” she barked at me.

“Fifteen seconds,” I stammered. “Twenty. This is the worst one I've seen.”

Silas jerked involuntarily, as though his small body were caught in the mouth of an invisible dog, shaking him and shaking him. The skin around his lips went from gray to blue. Two more nurses entered, but there wasn't anything they could do. One held him down; the other scanned her watch.

“Time?” she asked, touching me on the shoulder, because I didn't look up.
Come on,
I urged Silas silently.
Come back, Silas.
“One minute ten,” I snapped, glancing up at the clock.

“Someone get the doctor,” I heard one of the nurses say. Then a nurse turned and speed-walked out the door.

At two minutes twenty, Silas was still. I leaned over him on the bed, smoothing his hair and kissing his cheek, which was cool and damp. The doctor walked in then, this one a balding, slightly befuddled young resident. He asked for a description of the seizure and took notes, then looked down at Silas and awkwardly patted his knee.

“Well, the good news is, he's sound asleep now,” he observed. “We won't need a sedative to do the EEG.”

The door swung open and the technician moved in with her rolling computer. She leaned over, marking small dots on Silas's head where the electrodes should go.

I sat there, my book forgotten on my lap, as she drew on my son. Then she started attaching wires to his scalp. By the time she was finished, Silas looked like electronic spaghetti. Then, to complete the picture, she fit a hairnet over the top.

“Keeps everything in place,” she explained.

I never thought I'd be sitting in a New Zealand hospital watching my disabled five-year-old get his brain hooked up to a computer. But, then again, I'd never expected any of this. Didn't think I'd carry goat shit around in my purse or pull hot guts from a freshly killed turkey. Didn't think I'd stay up all night flipping milk curds, or feed chicken abortions to my German shepherd.

Twenty minutes into the procedure, Peter called my cell phone. “How you holding up?” he asked, concerned. “Do you need me?”

“That's okay,” I told him. “I got this.”

The technician was watching brain waves plod slowly across her monitor, and suddenly they all went nuts. The black lines swung wide, getting so large and dense that her monitor looked black. I watched the technician's face. She leaned in, concentrating.

“How's Silas doing?” Peter was asking.

“I don't know,” I told him. “I'll let you know how it goes.”

And it was true, I didn't have a clue how Silas was. The technician wasn't allowed to tell me a thing, because we had to wait for the doctor's report. When she finished the EEG, they released us from the hospital, and we didn't know anything more than before.

We had a new prescription that raised Silas's medicine dose again, and the new drug levels made him stumble and fall. A few days later, Silas wandered out of bed in his chocolate-brown moose pajamas, his tousled blond hair sticking out in all directions.

“Baaaaahh . . .” he moaned at me, his eyes glassy. “Baaaaa . . .”

“Mama?” Miranda asked.

“He sounds like a ghost,” I observed, watching as Silas staggered into a chair.