Rick Moody - Demonology

Next, Dad got down the formaldehyde jars from up on the shelf, and started displaying for Joe Kane some deformed ostriches. In his recitation about the abnormalities he had names for a lot of the birds. He showed Joe the fetus with two heads, Dizzy; she was the sweetest little chick, and then showed Joe one with four legs. He showed Joe two or three sets of Siamese twin ostriches, including the set called Jack ’n Jill. This pair could run like a bat out of hell. My dad’s voice swelled. He was proud. He gazed deeply into yellowed formaldehyde.

Joe Kane tried to figure an escape. He looked like an ostrich himself, right then, a mouth-breather, a shill waiting for the sideshow, where the real freaks, the circus owners themselves, would go to any lengths, glue a piece of bone on the forehead of a Shetland pony and call it a unicorn, for the thrill of separating crowds from wallets. Wasn’t there any other place for Joe to take shelter from the buckets of rain falling from the sky? Must have been a lean-to or something. On the good side of the tracks.

— This bird here has two male appendages, and I know a number of fellows would really like it if they had two of those. Imagine all the trouble you could get into with the ladies.

Ever notice how in the Midwest no one ever kisses anyone? That little peck on the cheek people are always giving one another back East? Nice to see you! Much less in evidence here in the Midwest. Probably it accounts for the ostrich farmhands and their romantic pursuits, turned down by wives, just looking for some glancing physical contact someplace, with a mouth-breather, if necessary. They came home, these working men, to wives reciting lists of incomplete chores, because of which they’d just get right back into their pickups and head for the drive-thru. They’d sing their lamenting songs into drive-thru microphones. My father had seen a man once slap another man good-naturedly on the shoulder after a friendly exchange about a baseball. This was at a fast-food joint. He was sick with envy right then. And that’s why, since he’d just shown Joe Kane an ostrich fetus with two penises, he decided to chuck Joe under the chin, as a sign of neighborly good wishes. My father came out from around the counter — he was a big man, I think I already said, 250 pounds, and over six feet — and as Joe Kane attempted to get up from his stool, my father chucked him under the chin.

— Take a weight off for a second, friend; I’m going to show you how to get an ostrich egg into a Coke bottle. And when my magic’s done you can carry this Coke bottle around with you as a souvenir. I’ll give it to you as a special gift. Here’s how I do it. I heat this egg in regular old vinegar, kind you get anyplace, and that loosens up the surface of the egg, and then I just slip it into this liter bottle of Coke, which I bought at the mini-mart up the road, and then when it’s inside the Coke bottle, it goes back to its normal hardness. When people ask you how you did it, you just don’t let on. Okay? It’s our secret. Is that a deal?

What could Joe say? Dad already had the vinegar going on one of the burners. When the egg had been heated in this solution, my dad began attempting to cram the thing into the Coke bottle, with disappointing results. Of course, the Coke bottle kept toppling end over end. Falling behind the counter. Dad would have to go pick it up again. Meantime, the train was about to come in. Hours had passed. The train was wailing through a crossing. My father jammed the ostrich egg, which didn’t look like it had loosened up at all, against the tiny Coke bottle opening, without success. Maybe if he had a wide-mouth bottle instead.

— Last time it worked fine.

— Look, I gotta go. Train’s pulling in. My dad’s —

— Sit down on that stool. Damned if you’re going to sit in here for two hours on a bunch of coffees, eighty-five cent cups of coffee, and that’s going to be all the business I’m gonna have all week, you son of a bitch. I know one place I can get this egg to fit. Goddamn you.

And this is where the ostrich egg broke, of course, like a geyser, like an explosion at the refinery of my pop’s self-respect. Its unfertilized gunk, pints of it, splattered all over the place, on the counter, the stools, the toaster, the display case of stale donuts. Then Joe Kane, who was already at the door, having managed to get himself safely out of the way, laughed bitterly. My father, his face pendulous with tusks of egg white, reached himself down an additional ostrich egg and attempted to hurl it at Joe Kane. But, come on, that was like trying to be a shot-put champion. He managed to get it about as far as the first booth, where it shattered on the top of a jukebox, obscuring in yolk an entire run of titles by the Judds.

Next thing that happened, of course, was the bloodcurdling shriek I already told you about. Sorry for it turning up in the story twice, but that’s just how it is this time. My father, alone in the restaurant, like the bear in the trap, screamed his emergency scream, frightened residents of Pickleville for miles around, especially little kids. People who are happy when they’re speculating about other people’s business, they might want to make a few guesses about that scream, like that my dad was ashamed of himself because the trick with the ostrich egg didn’t work, or my dad was experiencing a crisis of remorse because he couldn’t ever catch a break. And these people would be right, but they’d be missing a crucial piece of information that I have and which I’m going to pass along. My father screamed, also, because he was experiencing a shameful gastrointestinal problem. That’s right. It’s not really, you know, a major part of the story, but there was this certain large food company marketing some cheese snacks with a non-nutritive fat substitute in them, and that large company was test-marketing its cheese snacks guess where? Buckeye State, of course. Where these companies test-marketed lots of products for people they figured were uninformed. These snack foods were cheap, all right, a real bargain compared to leading brands, and they had cheddar flavoring. Only problem was, since your intestine couldn’t absorb the non-nutritive simulated fatty acid, it was deposited right out of you, in amounts up to two or three tablespoons. The food company was trying to find out how much of this we’d tolerate in Ohio, this oily residue that didn’t come out in the wash. If you ate a whole bag, it could be bad. So, truth is, on top of having egg on his face, my dad, right then, was having a rough day, and he wasn’t tolerating it too well.

You’ll be wanting to know how I know all this stuff, all these things that happened to my father in the restaurant, especially since I wasn’t there and since Dad would never talk about any of it. Especially not anal leakage. Wouldn’t talk about much at all, after that, unless he was complaining about Ohio State during football season. You’ll want to now how I know so much about the soul of Ohio, since I was a teenager when all this happened and was supposed to be sullen and hard to reach. Hey, what’s left in this breadbasket nation, but the mystery of imagination? My mother lay in bed, hatched a plan, how to get herself out of this place, how to give me a library of books. One night she dreamed of escaping from the Rust Belt, from a sequence of shotgun shacks and railroad apartments. A dream of a boy in the shape of a bird in the shape of a story, a boy who has a boy who has a boy: each generations dream cheaper than the last, like for example all these dreams now feature Chuck E. Cheese (A special birthday show performed by Chuck E. Cheese and his musical friends!) or Cracker Barrel or Wendy’s or Arby’s or Red Lobster or the Outback Steak-house or Boston Market or Taco Bell or Burger King or TCBY or Pizza Hut or Baskin Robbins or Friendly’s or Hard Rock Cafe or KFC or IHOP or Frisch’s Big Boy. Take a right down by Sam’s Discount Warehouse, Midas Muffler, Target, Barnes and Noble, Home Depot, Wal-Mart, Super Kmart, Ninety-Nine Cent Store. My stands at the end of the line. Fresh poultry and eggs. Eggs in this county they’re the biggest darned eggs you’ve ever seen in your whole life.