Rick Moody - Demonology

Over the years, my dad had assembled an ostrich freak exhibition. There were lots of genetic things that could go wrong with an ostrich flock, like say an ostrich had four legs, or an ostrich had two heads, or the ostrich didn’t have any head at all, just a gigantic midsection. Maybe the number of genetic abnormalities in our stock had to do with how close the farm was to a dioxin-exuding paper plant, or maybe it was the chromium or the PCBs, whatever else. It was always something. The important part here is that the abnormalities made Dad sort of happy and enabled him to have a collection to take away from the Rancho Double Zero, and what’s the harm in that. Not a lot of room for me in the backseat, though, what with the eggs and the freaks.

The restaurant we started wasn’t in Bidwell, because we had bad memories of Bidwell, after the foreclosure and all. There wasn’t much choice but to move farther out where things were cheaper. We landed in Pickleville, where it was real cheap, all right, and where there wasn’t anything to do. People used to kill feral cats in Pickleville. There was a bounty on them. Kids learned to obliterate any and all wildlife. Pickleville also had a train station where the out-of-state train stopped once a day. Mom figured what with the train station nearby there was a good chance that people would want to stop at a family-style restaurant. So it was a diner, Dizzy’s, which was the nickname we had given our ostrich chick with two heads. The design of our restaurant was like the traditional style of older diners, you know, shaped like a suppository, aluminum and chrome, jukeboxes at every booth. We lived out back. I was lucky. I got to go to a better school district and fraternize with a better class of kids who called me hayseed and accused me of intimate relations with brutes.

My parents bought a neon sign, and they made a shelf where Dad put his ostrich experiments, and then they got busy cooking up open-faced turkey sandwiches and breaded fish cutlets and turkey hash and lots of things with chipped beef in them. As far as I could tell, just about everything in the restaurant had chipped beef in it. Mom decided that the restaurant should stay open nights (she never had to see my dad that way, since he worked a different shift), for the freight trains that emptied out their passengers in Pickleville occasionally. Freight hoboes would come in wearing that hunted expression you get from never having owned a thing and having no fixed address. Sometimes these guys would order an egg over easy, and Dad would attempt to convince them that they should have an ostrich egg. He would haul one of the eggs out of the fridge, and the hoboes would get a load of the ostrich egg and there would be a terrified flourishing of change money, and then these hoboes would be gone.

My guess is that Dad had concluded that most midwestern people were friendly, outgoing folks, and that, in spite of his failure in any enterprise that ever had his name on it, in spite of his galloping melancholy, he should make a real attempt to put on a warm, entertaining manner with the people who came into the diner. It was a jolly innkeeper strategy. It was a last-chance thing. He tried smiling at customers, and even at me, and he tried smiling at my mother, and it caught on. I tried smiling at the alley cat who lived in the trailer with us. I even tried smiling at the kids at school who called me hayseed. Then an ostrich egg ruined everything.

One rainy night I was up late avoiding homework when I heard a really scary shriek come from the restaurant. An emergency wail that couldn’t be mistaken for anything but a real emergency. Made goosebumps break out on me. My pop burst into the trailer, weeping horribly smashing plates. What I remember best was the fact that my mother, who never touched the old man at all, caressed the bald part of the top of his head, as if she could smooth out the canals of his worry lines.

It was like this. Joe Kane, a strip-club merchant in Bid-well, was waiting for his own dad, Republican district attorney of Bidwell, to come through on the train that night. There’d been a big case up at the state capital. The train was late and Joe was loafing in the restaurant, drinking coffees, playing through all the Merle Haggard songs on the jukebox. After an hour or two of ignoring my dad, Joe felt like he ought to try to say something. He went ahead and blurted out a pleasantry,

— Waiting for the old man. On the train. Train’s running late.

Probably, Dad had thought so much about this body that was right there in front of him, this body who happened to be the son of the district attorney, that he started getting really nervous. A white foam began to accumulate at the corners of his mouth. Like in your chess games that kind of pile outward from the opening, maybe dad was attempting to figure out every possible future conversation with Joe Kane, ahead of time, so he would have something witty to say, becoming, in the process, a complete retard.

He said, for example, the immortal words, — How-de-do.

— How-de-do? said Joe Kane. Did anyone still say stuff like this? Did kiddy television greetings still exist in the modern world of schoolyard massacres and religious cults? Next thing you know my father’d be saying poopy diapers, weenie roast, tra la la, making nookie. Just so he could conduct his business. He’d locate in his imaginary playbook the conversational gambit entitled withering contempt dawns in the face of your auditor, and, according to this playbook, wasn’t anything else for him to do but go on being friendly, and he would.

— Uh, well, have you heard the one about how Christopher Columbus, discoverer of this land of ours, was a cheat? Sure was. Said he could make an egg stand on its end, which obviously you can only do when the calendar’s on the equinoxes. And when he couldn’t make the egg stand, why he had to crush the end of the egg. Maybe it was a hard-boiled egg, I don’t know. Obviously, he can’t have been that great a man if he had to crush the end of the egg in order to make it stand. I wonder, you know, whether we ought to be having all these annual celebrations in honor of him, since he was a liar about the egg incident. Probably about other things too. He claimed he hadn’t crushed the end of the egg when he had. That’s not dealing fair.

To make his point, my father took an ostrich egg from a shelf where two or three were all piled up for use that night at the diner. The counter was grimy with a shellac of old bacon and corn syrup and butterfat and honey and molasses and salmonella. He set the egg down here.

— Helluva egg, Joe Kane remarked. — What is that, some kind of nuclear egg? You make that in a reactor?

— I know more about eggs than any man living, my father said.

— Don’t doubt that for a second, Joe Kane said.

— This egg will bend to my will. It will succumb to my powers of magic.

— If you say so.

My dad attempted to balance the ostrich egg on its end without success. He tried a number of times. Personally, I don’t get where people thought up this idea about balancing eggs. You don’t see people trying to balance gourds or footballs. But people seem like they have been trying to balance eggs since there were eggs to balance. Maybe it’s because we all come from some kind of ovum, even if it doesn’t look exactly like the kind that my father kept tipping up onto its end in front of Joe Kane, but since we come from some kind of ovum and since that is the closest we can get to any kind of real point of origin, maybe we’re all kind of dumb on the subject of ova, although on the other hand, I guess these ova probably had to come from some chicken, or vice versa. Don’t get me confused. Joe had to relocate his cup of coffee out of the wobbly trajectory of the shell. A couple of times. My father couldn’t get anything going in terms of balancing the ostrich egg and so why did he keep trying?