142 Ostriches. April Davila
after us.
Breaking away, he looped back. I watched in the rearview mirror as he was distracted again and again by each car that exited the main road. Like a nanny in charge of too many children, he ran in circles, trying to be in nine places at once. The rest of the flock watched with blank stares.
By the time we parked, the rain was falling hard. Plump drops coated the windshields faster than the wiper blades could clear them, and at first I didn’t notice the Dodge Ram waiting outside the barn on supersize tires, floodlights and gun rack rigged to the cab. Its nose aimed down the driveway toward us. The license plate read OSTRICH. It was Joe Jared.
The rain found my arms and face like a thousand incessant questions as I jumped from Devon’s SUV, the photo of Grandma Helen tucked under my arm, and hurried over to Joe’s truck.
His giant boots squeaked against the metal rungs of the truck as he climbed down. I marveled at the crude size of him. Built like an ox with a glandular problem, he had broad shoulders that lifted his six-foot-four frame, and where most men either tapered or bulged in the middle, his body melted down into the two gigantic tree trunks that were his legs.
“Tallulah, I’m so sorry for your loss.” Joe Jared’s voice filled the yard the way an elephant would fill a teacup.
“It’s not a good time,” I said, crouching under the pelting rain and casting glances over my shoulder at the arriving guests, wishing for some way to hide Joe Jared from view. The timing was terrible. I hadn’t told anyone I planned to sell the ranch, and Grandma Helen’s funeral was not the time or the place.
The cars that had followed Devon’s SUV from the church parked one by one along the corral fence. The drivers set parking brakes and held the doors for one another. They flipped up their collars against the deluge and made their way across the uneven gravel of the driveway. An elderly couple I didn’t recognize emerged from the Mercedes I had seen in the church parking lot.
Uncle Scott emerged from the passenger side of Matt’s white sedan. But while his sponsor headed straight for the shelter of the house, Uncle Scott held up a hand to shield his eyes and looked around. It had been about a year and a half since he had visited, but the ranch, like the desert around it, existed on a geologic time scale, and changes, when they happened at all, were nearly imperceptible. His gaze swept over me and Joe. Our eyes met.
“I’ve been waiting twenty years for this,” Joe said, his voice so painfully loud. He held up a manila envelope, the paper quickly collecting caramel splotches in the rain.
“Stop,” I said in an admonishing whisper, waving at the envelope and willing it away. “Let’s go to the barn.” Behind me, I heard Aunt Christine welcoming everyone up onto the dry porch and hoped she would be too busy to search for me. I shoved open the barn door, and was greeted by Henley, the white fur of his snout against my knee. He wagged his tail as I urged him back. Joe Jared followed me in. I rested the photo of Grandma Helen on the workbench and tried to wipe the raindrops from the glass with my hand, but they just smeared.
Joe Jared took off his Stetson and flicked the water from it. He studied the space appraisingly. At roughly twelve hundred square feet, the wooden barn had more space than we needed. It had been built when my grandparents were in the meat and leather business, competing with Joe Jared for customers.
Wishbone Ranch was strictly an egg operation by the time I came to stay, but my grandmother had explained how the eggs used to be incubated until they hatched. The gangly chicks would spend their first year in the barn, living in the stalls that lined the south side of the structure until they reached their full height. At that point, they were moved out to the corral, where they waited to be transported to the slaughterhouse. That was in the eighties, before I was even born. It had been decades since an egg had hatched on our ranch, but Joe Jared would revive that business model: incubator, barn, corral, slaughterhouse.
“You got some damage to the joinery up there,” Joe said, gesturing with his hat to the northeast corner of the barn. At the boom of his voice, our two goats froze midchew and gazed over from the corner where they were tethered.
The barn needed work. I knew that. Owning anything out in the desert meant fighting a constant battle against the weather. Every year, the triple-digit heat of the summer months caused the wood of the barn to swell until the winter winds froze everything, contracting and cracking the posts where they came together. A tapping caught my ear as rain sneaked through a small hole in the roof, hitting the cement floor below.
Under the ruined timber of the roof rested two hulking egg incubators, each roughly the size of a bunk bed. Wide glass doors revealed the shelves inside, stacked with vacant trays that could hold hundreds of eggs. When they were in use, the entire interior of each incubator shifted every twenty minutes to simulate the attention the eggs would have gotten from the hens if they had been left in their nests. But they hadn’t been powered up in decades.
The way my grandma told it, sending the birds to their death always weighed on her. She would get attached, she said. Ostriches could live forty years, sometimes longer, and she hated to see them all butchered when they had so much life left to live.
For two decades, she ignored the nagging sense that she was responsible for so much death, but eventually, she told my grandfather it was time for a change. Eggs weren’t nearly as lucrative, but Grandma Helen had taken pride in the choice, and over the years, it rubbed off on me. It wasn’t that I had any great love for the birds, but it made sense to me that the meat and leather business would wear on a person after a while.
Joe Jared gave a whistle and pulled a Citori shotgun from its rack, paperwork suddenly forgotten. “I’ll give you a grand to leave this when you go,” he said, holding it up to admire the engravings on the side.
“It’s not for sale.” It had been my grandmother’s, a gift from her father when she moved out to the desert, and she’d given it to me on my eighteenth birthday. She treated target practice like meditation, even when we were just shooting at empty beer cans: focus at the top of an inhale, exhale just a little and hold it, steady the aim, pull the trigger. She even showed me how to take the gun apart and clean it. She had taught me so many things, and all she had wanted in return was for me to stay and carry on the enterprise she had spent her life building.
“Two grand,” Joe Jared said.
“Can we get this over with?” I snapped. I retrieved the envelope from where he’d dropped it and handed it to him.
Joe Jared reluctantly set down the shotgun and produced a slim stack of pages. Biting the cap from a pen, he laid the contract on the workbench so we could review it together.
“This outlines the basics,” he said around the cap in his mouth. “Market rate for each of the birds—” Before he could elaborate, an ostrich emerged from one of the stalls in the back of the barn. Her name was Abigail, and she could be a bit of a pest. She walked with a limp due to a badly injured ankle that had never healed right. Because of it, the other birds in the corral would peck at her, so Grandma Helen had allowed her to roam the property freely. She never went far. We treated her pretty much the same as we treated the dog and, like the dog, she followed us around the ranch as we did our chores, but she did have a way of interrogating strangers. Aunt Christine had worried that the inquisitive bird would frighten the funeral guests. At her request, I had spent half an hour the day before luring the limping bird into the barn so I could shut her in until the reception ended. I’d forgotten she was there.
She crossed to Joe Jared and pecked at his giant, silver belt buckle. He chuckled and shoved her away with an oversize hand.
“Sorry.” I wedged myself between Abigail and Joe Jared, trying to steer the bird into a nearby stall, but she skittered out of reach, her feet scratching against the cement floor. I scurried after her.
“Not at all,” Joe Jared said with a smirk.
I hated the amusement on his face. The birds were difficult to wrangle. He knew that, but he also had a hundred pounds on me, easy, not to mention the ten extra inches and a wingspan to match. I had to compensate for my smaller size by being quick. He had probably never chased