Rick Moody - Demonology

Next was yew trees. Some chemical in the yew tree was supposed to be an ingredient in the toxins for fighting cancers. Maybe my mother was thinking about that cluster in town. I mean, just about everybody in Golden Meadows Estates sported a wig, and so it wasn’t newsworthy later when they found that the development had been laid out on an old chromium dump. Meantime, we actually had a half acre of yew trees already planted on some land rented from the nylon manufacturer downtown, and there were heavy metals there too, which must have been fatal to the yew trees. The main thing is they cooked up this chemical, the yew chemical, in the laboratory by the end of the year.

Mom made a play for llamas. She went down to the Bid-well public library. To the business section. Read up about llamas. But what can you do with a llama anyway? Make a sweater? Well, that’s how we settled on ostriches. The ostrich is a poetic thing, let me tell you. Its life is full of dramas. The largest of birds on planet Earth. The ostrich is almost eight feet tall and weighs three hundred pounds and it has a brain not too much bigger than a pigeon’s brain. It has two toes. It can reach speeds of fifty miles an hour, and believe me, I’ve seen them do it. Like if you were standing at the far end of the ostrich farm we had, the Rancho Double Zero, and you were holding a Cleveland Indians beer cup full of corn, that ostrich would come at you about the speed an eighteen-wheeler comes at you on the interstate. Just like having a pigeon swoop at you, except that this pigeon is the size of a minivan. The incredible stupidity on the ostrich’s face is worth mentioning too, in case you haven’t seen one lately. They’re mouth-breathers, or anyhow their beaks always hang open a little bit. That pretty much tells you all you need to know. Lights on, property vacant. They reminded me of a retarded kid I knew in grammar school, Zechariah Dunbar. He’s dead now. Anyway, the point is that ostriches are always trying to hold down other ostriches, by sitting on them, in order to fuck these other ostriches, without any regard to whether it’s a boy or girl animal they’re trying to get next to. And speaking of sex and ostriches, I’m almost sure that the men who worked on my father’s farm tried to have their way with the Rancho Double Zero product. With a brain so small, it was obvious that the ostrich would never feel loving congress with some heartbroken Midwestern hombre as any kind of bodily insult. Actually, it’s amazing that the pea-sized brain in these ostrich skulls could operate the other end of them. Amazing that electrical transmissions could make it that far, what with that huge bulky midsection that was all red meat, hundreds of pounds of it, as every brochure will tell you, but with a startlingly low fat content. In fact, tastes like chicken, as my grandma said before the choking incident. Okay, it was almost like the ostrich was some kind of bird. But it didn’t look like a bird, and when there were three or four hundred of them, running around in a herd at fifty miles an hour, flattening rodents, trying to have sex with each other, three or four hundred of them purchased with a precarious loan from Buckeye Savings and Trust, well, they looked more like conventioneers from some Holiday Inn assembly of extinct species. You expected a mating pair of wooly mammoths or a bunch of saber-toothed tigers to show up any moment.

I’m getting away from the story, though. I really meant to talk about ostrich eggs. After ten years of trying to get the Rancho Double Zero to perform fiscally, my parents had to sell the whole thing and declare bankruptcy. That’s the sad truth. But it was no shame. Everybody they knew was bankrupt. Everybody in Bidwell, practically, had a lien on their bank account. When we were done with the Double Zero, we had nothing left but a bunch of ostrich eggs, the kind that my parents used to sell out in front of the farm, under a canopy, for people who came out driving. There were three signs, a quarter mile apart, See the Ostriches! Two Miles! And then another half-mile. Ostrich eggs! Five dollars each! Then another. Feed the ostriches! If you dare!

I remember giving the feeding lecture myself to a couple from back East. They were the only people who’d volunteered to feed the ostriches in weeks. I handed them the Cleveland Indians cups. They were dressed up fine. You can either put some of this corn in your hand and hold it out for the ostriches, but I sure wouldn’t do that myself because I’ve seen them pick up a little kid and whirl him around like he was a handkerchief and throw him over a fence, bust his neck clean through. Or you can hold out the cup and the ostriches will try to trample each other to death to get right in front of you, and then one of those pinheads will descend with incredible force, steal the entire cup away. Or else you can just scatter some corn at the base of the electrified fence there and get the heck out of the way, which is certainly what I’d do if I were you. Who would come to Bidwell from anywhere, I was asking myself, unless they were trying to avoid a massive interstate manhunt? Probably this couple, right here, laughing at the poor dumb birds, probably they were the kind of people who would sodomize an entire preschool of kids, rob a rich lady on Park Avenue, hide her body, grind up some teenagers, and then disappear to manage their investments.

Anyhow, that ranch came and went and soon we were in a used El Dorado with 120,000 miles on it. I was in the backseat, with five dozen unrefrigerated ostrich eggs. Dad was forty-eight, or thereabouts, and he was bald, and he was paunchy, and, because of the failure of all the gold-rush schemes, he was discouraged and mean. If he spoke at all it was just to gripe at politicians. He was an independent, in terms of gripes. Just so you know. Non-partisan. And the only hair left on his ugly head, after all the worrying, was around those two patches just above his ears, just like if he were an ostrich chick himself. Because you know when they came out of the shell, these ostrich chicks looked like human fetuses. In fact, I’ve heard it said that a human being and an ostrich actually share forty-eight percent of their DNA, which is pretty much when you think about it. So Dad looked like an ostrich. Or maybe he looked like one of those cancer survivors from Golden Meadow Estates who were always saying they felt like a million bucks even though it was obvious that they felt like about a buck fifty. Mom, on the other hand, despite her bad business decisions, only seemed to get prettier and prettier. She still spent a couple of hours each morning making up her face with pencils and brushes in a color called deadly nightshade,

In terms of volume, one ostrich egg is the equivalent of two dozen of your regular eggs. It’s got two liters of liquefied muck in it. That means, if you’re a short order cook, that one of these ostrich eggs can last you a long time. A whole day, maybe. The ostrich shell is about the size of a regulation football, but it’s shaped just like the traditional chicken eggshell. Which is something I was told to say to tourists, Note your traditional eggshell styling. The ostrich egg is so perfect that it looks fake. The ostrich egg looks like it’s made out of plastic. In fact, maybe the guys who came up with plastics got the idea from looking at the perfection of the ostrich egg. Myself, I could barely eat one of those ostrich eggs without worrying about seeing a little ostrich fledgling in it, because it looked so much like a human fetus, or what I imagined a human fetus looked like based on some pictures I’d seen in the Golden Books Encyclopedia. What if you accidentally ate one of the fledglings! Look out! They make pretty good French toast, though.