BERG HAD MOVED TO Talinas a few weeks earlier to house-sit for Nell’s friend’s mom, who was traveling to Bali. Her name was Mimi. She was sixty-five and it was the first time she’d been out of the country. Mimi was retired and, in her retirement, she had devoted herself to pottery. She had many earth-toned coffee mugs and her yard was filled with ceramic bunnies, all of them standing stony watch like scouts in a frontier army. Mimi had left him a six-pack in the fridge and some eggs and several blocks of cheese. She also left him a long list of things to do, including watering the plants, caring for the chickens, and feeding and walking the dog, Fish. He was a leggy black dog who didn’t like making eye contact. He was very smart but very anxious and whenever Berg reached out to pet him he would draw back and give him a skeptical, sideways glance. The chickens so far had proven easier to deal with. There were four of them and they were all named after state capitals: Sacramento, Atlanta, Baton Rouge, and Lansing.
Berg spent most nights at the Tavern. He would sit at the bar, stoned on Perc 30s, drinking beer and watching baseball games he didn’t care about. He often ended up in conversations with the owner of the bar, a man named Ed Conotic, whose family also owned the other bar in town, the Western, which was located on the bay, next door to Vlasic’s Boat Works. Ed Conotic hated Nick Vlasic and often told long, convoluted stories which concluded with Ed or one of Ed’s family members suffering some grave miscarriage of justice at the hands of Nick Vlasic or one of Nick Vlasic’s family members. Ed also liked to tell stories about his stepbrother, Gary Conotic, who, were it not for a freak staph infection caused by a dirty knee brace, might have made it in the NBA.
“He could shoot the lights out,” Ed said. “Played on that team with Walt Weir that went to the state semifinals. Could shoot the lights out.”
Ed was not really interested in listening to what Berg had to say, or what anyone had to say for that matter. He was one of these old men who seemed to have chosen his profession so that he would have a convenient and unassailable soap box from which he could express his opinions. This suited Berg fine: he was not very interested in discussing his life.
Also at the bar was Tom, an older rancher with coarse, unfinished features. Tom was slowly settling into dementia and he was no longer able to add sums well. Every time he settled up his tab, he’d count and recount his money, licking his finger before removing each dollar bill and placing it on the table.
“Oh hang on, let me start again,” he’d say, shaking his head. Sometimes Ed Conotic came over and counted the money for him.
“You’ve got seven here, Tom. Three beers so you owe nine.”
“Oh I knew I was missing a few. Knew I was missing a few.”
There was John Coleman, too, the fisherman, and a younger guy he hung around with named Dennis Lapley. And there was Claire, an engineer for the water district, and her boyfriend, Lenny, and Joe Leggett, who delivered gas tanks and had fought in the Korean War and seemed to have a lot of hobbies. On Friday nights, there was a guy named Woody who played a thirty-minute set of his own country songs, which were mostly about deer.
“This song’s about a deer I saw that went and disappeared behind a hillside,” he would say. Or: “This is a song about two small deer and one medium deer that I saw on the road by the Dance Palace.”
The only person Berg had talked to about pills was Lapley. Berg could tell he was an addict the moment he met him: the small bruises on his arms, the runny nose, the constant sniffing. Lapley was from Oregon but he’d worked in construction in Talinas for a few years now. Berg suspected that he was in his thirties but he wasn’t sure. His eyes were small and dull and it seemed like the skin on his face had been stretched tight and then stapled across his jawline. Unlike Berg, Lapley shot up, and he once asked Berg if he wanted to join him in the bathroom.
“Nah, man,” Berg said. “I stay away from needles.”
“It’s the same thing,” Lapley said. “You’re kidding yourself. It’s the exact same thing.”
Lapley said he was a volunteer with the Sheriff’s Department and claimed he could arrest people. Berg didn’t believe it. A dopehead volunteering with the Sheriff’s Department? Lapley seemed to lie about almost everything. But when he spoke about the two times he’d been through withdrawal, Berg had the sense that he was telling the truth. Lapley’s descriptions reminded Berg of his own experience: sweats, muscle spasms, watery eyes, stomach cramps, violent shaking.
“I did it all on my own,” Lapley boasted. “And I know, if I wanted to, I could do it again. Don’t need no damn rehab center holding my hand.”
Berg had gone to rehab. For the first two weeks they’d put him on Clonidine, Baclofen, Meloxicam, and Gabapentin; 50 mg Seroquel or 100 mg Trazodone to help him sleep. And then, after the first month, Clonidine as needed, Vistaril for anxiety, B12 vitamins, a slow tapering of his Gabapentin dose, peaking at 1600 mg. Antidepressants, too, mostly Wellbutrin, 150 mg, but also 30 mg of Prozac.
It was important to identify your triggers, they had told Berg, to know them and track them. Eliminate your supply. Remove the numbers from your phone. And he had done this, deleted Eugene’s number from his phone, all the people he’d ever taken pills with. When the opportunity to house-sit for Mimi materialized, it seemed like a good first step toward reestablishing a sober life. If he moved up to Talinas, he could stay with Nell while also putting some tangible distance between himself and the world of his addiction.
But shortly after he moved up there he’d relapsed. He was over at Gloria and Jerry’s for a neighborly dinner and, during a trip to the bathroom, he couldn’t resist opening the medicine cabinet. Gloria and Jerry were old people and old people in America always had opioids. Like fifteen different kinds of opioids. It was as if they had been collecting them since the ’60s, planning to bring them over to Antiques Roadshow and get them appraised.
The next couple of weeks were immensely pleasurable. Berg’s stretch of abstinence had lowered his tolerance and he was able to get high in a way that had eluded him in the months prior to rehab. He stopped calling his sponsor, stopped going to the NA meetings in Pine Gulch. When his supply ran out, he began to casually enter homes that appeared unoccupied. He usually picked homes that were along the hiking trail, and he always carried a walking stick with him. If someone caught him, he would say he was lost and had been looking for some place to use a phone.
Every addict has a story about the impermanence of their addiction. For Berg, at this time, the return of Nell would constitute the end of his use. She was still on tour, had been on tour for the last two months. He was only doing this until she returned, having one last affair with opioids before he buckled down and endured sobriety for the rest of his life.
This was why he had gotten sober in the first place, why he had gone to rehab and quit his job at Cleanr and moved up here. He was sick of the city. It was all garbage and noise and men with gelled hair. He intended to go clean in more than one sense: he wanted to find work that was simple and fulfilling, to live a life of health and exercise and fresh air. But at the moment, these ambitions seemed distant.
One morning, after a night of drinking at the Tavern, he woke up with a headache. The headaches had a creepy, slinky quality at first, as if he were prey and they were stalking him. The pain was not there but he knew it was on its way, knew that a slight movement or sound could catalyze it. He took a couple of Vicodin and started a pot of coffee. While he was waiting for the coffee, he headed down to the coop to feed the chickens.
It took him a few moments to process the scene of carnage he encountered. One of the chickens, Baton Rouge, was missing and there were feathers and blood all over the plywood floor. Sacramento and Atlanta were pecking at Lansing, who appeared gravely wounded. Berg yelled at the two of them and shooed them away and then picked up Lansing, who had a bad wound near her neck. She shuddered in his arms and he whispered calming things in her ear. When she seemed still enough, he began walking toward the house.
He couldn’t leave her outside but he couldn’t let her run around loose inside Mimi’s house either. In the end, he decided to place her inside Fish’s crate. He pulled out Fish’s bed, which was covered in black dog hair, and laid down newspaper for Lansing. Fish trotted over, clearly disturbed. He kept looking at the crate and then looking back at Berg, waiting for someone to explain this obvious injustice.
Back in the kitchen Berg consulted the note Mimi had left him and found the number he was looking for.
“If there are any problems with the animals,” she had written, “call Ben at 415-327-6688.”
Berg called Ben and began explaining, in great detail, what he had found in the chicken pen.
“Blood everywhere,” he said, and then he repeated it: “everywhere!” As he relived the scene, the drama of the moment really took hold of him. He was a little stoned now, the headache receding but still there.
“I’ll be right over,” Ben said.
Ben was in his late thirties, with thinning hair and some kind of red streak in his right eye. He wore a white shirt with holes in it and a camouflage baseball hat. He had tattoos on his knuckles. Ben surveyed the coop for a minute and discovered a gap between two of the boards. He kneeled down, examined the crevice, and then issued his verdict:
“Looks like a coyote got ’em.”
“A coyote?” Berg said.
“Yep, must have snuck right through here, picked his favorite chicken, and scurried off for a nice dinner.”
Ben told Berg that he should build a wire fence around the coop. He said the fence should go down eighteen inches underground to prevent the coyotes from burrowing beneath it.
“And what do I do with the wounded chicken?”
“The wounded one? Where is she?”
“I put her in the dog crate.”
Ben looked like he was about to say something but thought better of it.
“How bad is she injured?” he asked.
“Pretty badly,” Berg said. “There’s a big gash near her neck.”
“From the coyote?”
“It seems like it. And the other chickens.”
“Well, I would just put her out of her misery then,” Ben said.
“Kill her?”
“Yeah, she’s just going to suffer otherwise.”
Berg thanked Ben for his help and walked back up to the house with a sick feeling in his stomach. This is what you have to do, he said to himself. You’re helping the chicken. This is life in the country. This is nature. Coyotes attack chicken coops and chickens get weird neck wounds and then you have to kill them.
He walked into the kitchen and picked out the largest blade. It suddenly seemed like a very small blade and he wondered whether Mimi had something larger he could use. He looked through the shed but the only potential substitute he found was a pair of garden shears, but this seemed cruel, medieval somehow.
Back in the kitchen, he opened the liquor cabinet and grabbed a bottle of whiskey. He took a long pull, winced, and then picked up the knife. When he turned around he noticed that Fish was several feet away, staring at him. What will this guy do next? he seemed to be saying. He is out of his mind. Berg gripped the knife tightly and walked over to the dog crate. He knelt by the crate and began cooing to the chicken as if she were a cat. Berg had only ever owned cats and all the noises he made toward animals were cat noises.
“Come on out, Lansing,” he said. “Come on, sweet girl.”
But the chicken did not want to come out. She had been attacked by a coyote and then attacked by her fellow chickens, whom, Berg imagined, she’d probably considered her friends, and now she was finally safe in this strange plastic box and there was no way she was going to come out. She scurried to the back of the crate where Berg could not reach her. It was a big crate. Fish was a big dog.
“Come on now,” Berg said, reaching for her with one hand and holding the knife with the other. “Come on out here.”
He thought about trying to kill the chicken while it was still inside the crate but this seemed difficult, physics-wise, and then there would be blood all over the crate and Fish would never forgive him. He set the knife down on the kitchen table and paced around the room thinking about what he should do. He could call Ben again and ask him for help. He could try tipping the crate upside down. Or he could let the chicken live. This option began to take hold of him. He had never wanted to kill the chicken in the first place, he thought. That was Ben’s idea. Why not let her live inside the crate?
He walked out to the coop and filled a bowl with chicken feed. The other two chickens were sitting silently on their straw, as though nothing important had happened that morning. “You’ve shown your true colors,” Berg said aloud to the chickens. “Pecking an injured friend. Kicking her when she was down. You guys are sick.”
Back at the house he placed the bowl of chicken feed in the dog crate along with a teacup of water. Then he read online about how to care for a wounded chicken. They recommended putting the chicken in a dark place with some kind of heating lamp, so he brought over an electric heater and he draped a blanket on top of the crate. Fish stood by the whole time, the permanence of the situation beginning to dawn on him.
When the crate was fixed up, Berg made himself a bowl of cereal, sat down at the kitchen table, and e-mailed Mimi to tell her what had happened. After he wrote the e-mail he began to look through his inbox. A newsletter from the hippie temple in the city he’d gone to once or twice for the High Holidays. A link to a basketball highlight from his brother. And, finally, an e-mail from Nell: the band was back in California now and she’d be home in a week.
He walked back over to the crate and looked at Lansing. Blood all over her feathers but no blood dripping. Outside, a light rain was falling. Morning calls of birds and the bark of a dog and, in the distance, the grind and rip of a circular saw. He picked up the teacup of water and held it to the chicken.
“Drink,” he said. “You need to drink.”