WHAT HE WOULDN’T DO to be higher than God about now, running with his boys, free in the sun, on the streets, knuckling rocks at the windows in the abandoned building down from his Moms’. Instead, he wakes to find the same sleety rain, his head ringing as it is drummed from nodding against the window, and he is still on the bus with the same raging hard-on.
They don’t call it Juvey anymore—don’t lock them up like he’s heard they used to—and he isn’t shut up in the house like his primo, Fredo, with an ankle bracelet and a mess of video games. No, he is on his way to being reformed. Re-formed, he has overheard his new social worker tell his Moms, in a new style in a new way, he’ll learn skills, he’ll learn a new way to look at the world.
Two years down of the four years he’s to do. His Moms counts the days with Xs on a calendar in their kitchen like the new social worker told her would be best for showing how far he has come since the morning he was picked up with a gun and a Marlboro Reds box with half a blunt in his coat pocket.
Though he had been trying to tell them from the beginning that there was nothing to remember—look upon; reflect on—from that day when all he had done was get dressed, go out in the alley behind his Moms’ to get high, and head toward school. The next thing he knew he was being thrown up against an unmarked.
The part he never told, would never tell, was how he had heard his boys yelling, running up behind him—he had no idea how many there were, or who was there for sure—and how as they passed he was spun a full 180 on the ice. The blunt was the only thing he could explain, the Reds box he had found in the trash outside the currency exchange down from his Moms’, and he didn’t smoke cigarettes.
Possession—of a handgun, of a controlled substance—at thirteen meant for the first time he could remember he was always under watch, was sent to a school with surveillance cameras in the classroom, they tested his pee weekly—sometimes twice a week—and he wasn’t allowed to hang out with anyone, except his Moms, who still called him Mateo or Teo or Spooky.
His whole body now responded to shouts of Ungarte! though only the Latin teachers or supervisor get it right, but it doesn’t matter, he spends most of his time hiding the fact that whatever even comes close now—Ungarty! Ungrateful! Unguentino!—tears through him the same, from head to foot, like an open box cutter.
His dick won’t let up, each bump the bus takes runs a white-hot electric current from his balls that oozes out of the tip and makes him wonder what will keep him from screaming his head off like the big Mexican kid just this past summer who lost it on the way back to the city, lost it so bad they had to stop the bus. Rolling on the floor screaming so much their supervisor that day had to call in, screaming that took three boys to hold the boy down he was thrashing about so. Gnashing his teeth, screaming until the kid had lost his voice but kept on screaming anyway, screaming until just a girlish rubber toy squeak was coming out when the paramedics came and put a needle in his arm.
They had been out picking cabbage that day. Sweaty and foul as they were from work, they had to stand in line on the side of the highway in the sun, while cars passed and honked, a carful of girls blew them kisses while the paramedics lifted the boy, who by then was no longer screaming but was making gurgling—head and eyes rolling—pigeon-like sounds, as he was carried on a stretcher out of the bus and shoved—like bread into an oven—into the back of an ambulance.
And as much as he tries to remember being taken out the next week, to the same fields, the same farm, bent over for hours multiplying rows of cabbages, remembering that even though they had all seen the screaming kid but said nothing about it and instead complained how much their backs ached at the end of the day, how they thought their arms would fall off, Ungarte can’t help but touch himself. At the same time that he rolls his body away from the boy sleeping in the seat next to him toward the window, he forces his thumb into the top seam of his left trouser pocket until it gives way and he has his hand around it, can huddle into himself and slowly stroke.
He had lost the right to have weekends he could call his own and just roll out of bed when he wanted to, head to the park, to the basketball court, eat what he wanted when he wanted and where he wanted. The first year, he and his group of boys were taken to the city’s parks daily where they had to pick up garbage. The supervisors broke rules, beat boys, swore at them, once he had even seen a boy get spit on.
But there was nothing they could do about it and nobody to tell. The new way, his new social worker told his Moms, is an experiment they are trying that takes a few selected boys out of the city each weekend to redirect their energies. And his Moms trusts her and signed the papers because his new social worker is pretty and white, and somewhere along the way learned to speak Spanish with the clean, clipped, clear precision of a newscaster. His Moms wants to trust her, like in a movie wants to be the brown woman who comes to trust a white woman without having it somehow come flying back in her face.
Often, when he strokes he thinks of his new social worker’s tetas and what the powder he sometimes sees between them smells like. Even though he isn’t supposed to have a girlfriend or anything like that, he sometimes kicks it in the laundry room with a girl—older, probably about twenty-five, who presses her lips against his neck, tells him to pretend a teacher is about to walk in, says to call her Kai, even though he knows her name to be María and he has seen her with her husband and three children—and sometimes it’s the way she unzips him, pushes the crotch of her panties to the side, and, with an insistence that feels like a mix of anger and hatred, shoves him into her, and the way—when she’s done—she just walks away leaving him unsatisfied, hanging out.
Though right now he strokes to nothing at all, a black hole, a still, warm, wet, shapeless place.
Since the year Ungarte picked up trash in the parks, he and groups of boys have been taken out of the city, for country air, for the experience, for whole weekends, his new social worker said, so they would have some sense of how they were to organize their time once their time was their own again.
Before the cabbage farm he had spent every weekend for three months at a dairy, mucking stalls, three hours from the city, and since then he had picked apples, pears, and melons. They raked and shoveled and lifted and loaded, ate, washed, and took care of their bladders when they had permission, slept in barracks built for migrants with a supervisor or two who rotated, keeping watch over them in the night. No hats or caps, hoodies or chains, no jewelry or personal items. They wear security tags that are scanned by the supervisors as they are shifted from place to place, but they should leave wallets, IDs, and money at home. They were free to choose whatever shirt they wanted, as long as it was blue or brown or green or khaki and had no writing or pictures on it and was versatile enough—most wore sweatshirts over T-shirts—for shifts in weather; as long as it was not a sports shoe, they were free to choose whatever they wanted as long as it was a work boot—preferably steel-toed in brown, not black—and appeared to be utilitarian rather than fashionable. They were all issued a jacket in the spring they exchanged for fall/winter ones. It is not really a uniform, his new social worker told his Moms, they get four pairs of khakis and she should let him take care of the cleaning and repairing of them himself.
Sewn tough by prisoners upstate, new, fresh out of the packages, the pants fell like a double-sided drop cloth. Double-stitched at the seams and all sized larger than they are marked. There is no give at all in them except for the pockets—flimsy in their construction, something men who made them predicted boys who wore them would need: a relay of secret hands—opening into a dark, damp, focusless universe of sparks that connected to no real woman, but to thousands, the smell of dank, of fingers and upper lips, a mouthful of unwashed hair, the burn of salt in the corners of his mouth. And just when he is close to letting loose against the back of the zipper, a tear of sunlight jags the sleet and gray outside and bounces him back upright and blinking.
The Hudson rolls black and green opposite the direction they are headed, and through the bare trees it is as if they are being raked through the icy water. To ease the queasy in his stomach he begins to count the heads on either side of the aisle in the rows ahead of him. And it is at fourteen that he gets to the white boy.
Light reddish-brown hair, pale greenish-pale spotted skin, he is called Mueller, but even the supervisors, as though they’ve never seen one before either—wide-set, nearly colorless eyes that first make him appear blind—call him White Boy. White Boy, come here! White Boy, I’m talking to you! Over the last three weeks when they have been sent out to dig, cut, and stack roots into trucks, only once did Ungarte hear one of them call out Mueller!, and it is only by chance that he saw the white boy turn his greasy head toward the sound and walk in its direction.
Sixteen, Seventeen, Eighteen, Ungarte counts. There had never been one before; most looked like he did or some variation of him. Brown boys, black boys, there had even been an Indian from someplace in India that had wanted a girl so much, said he couldn’t speak English too well at the time, so he let her know by pissing outside of her door like a dog until someone in the building caught him. And where Ungarte saw a logic rise out of what the Indian told him—how poor his family was; how they all lived in a one-room; how they needed to come to the US to find out just how dark they were—Ungarte found he couldn’t care and couldn’t appreciate what a white boy could do to get himself put on one of these buses once a week. Twenty. Twenty-One, no reason he could think of why a white boy should have been there. They played golf, they were loved by girls who smelled like cream, they lived in houses like the one the bus turns off the main highway and heads for, houses with gables, rolling lawns, white fences, gardens, trees all around, and the nearest neighbor miles away at another farm. They lived in high-rises with doormen, they took cabs all the time, they drove expensive cars or hired them, they drank scotch and fucked the women in Playboy magazine and married the ones that wore head scarves and dark sunglasses and shopped one store for olive oil and another one that only sold cheese.
Twenty-Eight! the supervisor calls out as he scans Ungarte’s pass and pushes him to line up with the others on the grass.
Not like the military, his new social worker had told his Moms, just something to teach him we live in a world that has rules and a certain order. Hands at his sides, spine straight, eyes forward, despite the wind, the razory specks of sleet that take bites out of his face, nearly twelve heads in front of him, he can see the only one not shivering in the cold is the white boy. He noticed when it was still hot out the white boy didn’t sweat as much as the rest of them, the white boy carried less, took more breaks, required more water, he needed more breaks to go to the bathroom, ate less, took up less space, and now, apparently, handled the cold better. It’s how they do, Ungarte thinks.
Welcome! Gentlemen! the farmer shouts as he walks across the field toward them in a pair of black rubber boots that come up to his knees. It is the first time Ungarte has actually seen the farmer, or the owner of any of the places they’ve worked. He is a white guy, of course, bald and bright as an egg with a great heft of belly underneath a brand-new Carhartt. His hands are as big and pink as raw catcher’s mitts and he throws them into the air, tells them he is happy they’ve come to work with him the next two months, that he wants them to feel comfortable. And then he stops and says as comfortable as they can within the rules and regulations set up by their supervisors. Nearly a hundred and twenty-five years ago, he tells them, Hudson River Farms had been an impossible dream his Dublin-born great-grandfather had of a tiny place he could raise enough food to keep his family of ten alive on, and now with a hundred and eighty acres, over fifty products in a world market, a tiny wish has returned a thousand-fold.
Boys, the farmer starts, and he begins to tell them about what a simple dream can do—how far it can take you; where it can lead—and Ungarte can see that White Boy is the only one who seems to be listening. His blind-looking eyes are on the farmer; he nods his head up and down as though it were tied by a string to one of the man’s big pink fingers. Neither of them—unlike everyone else, even the supervisors—is pounding his feet against the ground and clapping his hands against the cold. And maybe it is because he can—despite the bitterness of the wind, the rush of gooseflesh that runs from his calves up to his neck—just by pushing his hips forward, Ungarte thinks his dick hard again, pushes it forward and up toward the tag on his zipper until it aches to poke out over his waistband, tents the front of his pants so that anyone who looked could see, and he finds himself unable to give a fuck.
Instead of going to work straightaway, they are taken into a white building smaller than the main house that the farmer calls the little barn, though it looks more like a church to Ungarte. The echo from their boots against the concrete floor rises toward the exposed ceiling beams of the vast, mostly empty room. There are rows of white folding chairs set up in front of a screen, and even though the room is heated by a woodstove in a far corner, after standing in the cold, the blast of heat that meets them as they file in is enough to force most of them to take their jackets off while they line up against the wall and wait for their next instruction. No, no, no, the farmer says, no, I want you all to take seats, feel comfortable.
The front remains empty. Ungarte sees most have seats in between the screen and the back, and a hulking figure at the far end of the row to his right slouches and immediately begins to snore once the lights are lowered. And as the screen begins to flicker with hundreds of ducks—white feathered, white billed, streaked with black—he slips his hand in his pocket and his cock instantly bucks and stretches as though it will never stop blooming, turn his breath inside out, force his lungs to work backward.
He sucks his lips into a tight circle as the farmer says, We hatch over five thousand ducklings per year, the farm processes eleven thousand pounds—that’s five thousand kilos—of foie gras. Fa-Wah Gra-ah, he pronounces it for them over and over again and he then begins waving his hands in rhythm for Ungarte and the other boys to repeat. Some catch on, but most continue to look at the screen. The farmer tells them it is the best foie gras outside of France. Some, he says, grinning all toothy and wide as if he is taking them all into his confidence, consider it better, and he raises his hands, Fa-Wah Grah!, to conduct them again. And the fact that Ungarte can hear the white boy’s voice—clearly, over the muttering of all the boys around him—believes he can smell his rotten breath, see his crusty, uneven teeth, causes him to lose it, so as the lights come up he pulls his hand out of his pants without busting a nut.
Even then, instead of going to work, they are lined up and sent crunching across an icy field and into another dining hall. Before the farmer can announce that, here on Hudson River Farms, the help, the management, and the owners all eat together, Ungarte finds himself wishing for a time just months ago when lunch meant a box with a sandwich with orange cheese and wilted lettuce; he wants the two bottles of warm apple juice, the dried-out orange or the over-ripened apple they are used to eating on the side of the road or in the middle of a field. Bright and noisy with the clattering of plastic trays and the low growl of men’s voices, the dining-room smells make him suddenly hungry, a deep-to-the-middle-of-his-stomach hungry that makes him want to knock people in the aisles over, stomp them down, kick them out of the way to get to the hairnetted women passing out trays.
Foie gras, the farmer announces when the trays are placed in front of them, but says they shouldn’t expect it at every meal; this is a one-time special occasion. And the smile he throws is so wide and grinny, proud and self-satisfied, it is only that Ungarte is so hungry he can taste the bottom of his stomach and that he hasn’t asked them to pray that keeps him from getting up and kicking all the man’s teeth down his throat.
He is caught off guard. All he can recall of the film they were shown, all he remembers, is the ducklings, trampling all over each other, and the feathers and the drone of the farmer’s voice. In front of him there is a green salad, some peach slices swimming in a clear-ish juice, and what looks to him like torrejas or buñelos—sweet, like the kind his tía Rachel makes—and it smells like lechón, like Christmas, like waking cold mornings warm, safe and sound alone in his bed with nowhere to go and nothing to do. And it is what promised to be warm on his tongue, go down savory, fill his belly in ways that will make him feel all-over sexy and sleepy, that suddenly turns to shit in his teeth. Exactly what he would think shit would taste like—gritty and warm, as if it was coming directly from the source—with the consistency of clay.
And it is precisely as he realizes he has no idea where to spit, Ungarte turns his head and sees the white boy, grinning like a fool—shit all stuck to his teeth like he’s been lapping at the farmer’s ass—and it makes Ungarte wonder what the boy would look like with his head split open, brains spilling out like a cracked egg, dangled out a window by his heels, submerged underwater, eyes all bulging.
By the clock, they’ll get to work in less than twenty minutes. The supervisors will dole out, show how to do their tasks, and like always, right before the hard work starts, the white boy will complain about his stomach and need to spend the first half hour—when everyone else is breaking his back—locked away in the toilet. He’ll come back, grabbing his belly, complaining. He might get to lie down for a half hour halfway through the day, while everyone else is aching, stinking—ready to pack it in, readied, primed to shove his fist into the first person that says anything—because there were enough supervisors out there who never seemed to see the bullshit in the white boy’s batting lashes, or know enough to know when he was telling a white-boy lie.
Lining up in the hallway, a shoulder against the wall, they wait. Permission, they are supposed to say, and one of the supervisors will tap him ahead to form another line in front of the men’s room. And it is possible that Ungarte is hard just because he manages to call out Permission before the white boy, hard—Permission, he hears the white boy’s voice behind him—because he can hear the white boy’s feet shuffling on the floor the way he does when he’s trying to tell them all his stomach is giving him trouble. Permission, Permission, Ungarte hears behind him, and where it may be any number of the other boys, it only sounds like the white boy begging—Permission, Permission—like the white boy whimpering as if he were being wrung for the last drop of blood. Hard, so deliciously, pearly, shiny hard, with the white boy the next to go in behind him, Ungarte nearly kicks the door open, before ripping at his zipper and blowing his load all over the seat—the back—the rim of the toilet, and the wall directly above it.
He is the best, he is the strongest, the fastest, the smartest, Ungarte tells himself, and between the fifth and sixth weeks of going out to the farm, his new social worker tells his Moms that the reports from his supervisors are all glowing. Always on time, Always takes the initiative, Never complains, Never swears, Never gets in fights, she says, and as she checks each one of his praises off he notices her creamy tetas bounce.
Though when the social worker leaves, his Moms tells him that she didn’t need that immodest woman to tell her that she needs to be proud. She was always proud of him, what she needed was to know that he was safe.
Cuídate hijo, she says each time he’s off to play with the ducks.
Their first day in, the farmer had shown them the difference between ducks and geese, which soon became crystalline to Ungarte when a lone duck dove through the air to catch a goose behind the back of the head. The bird turned its head and within seconds had the duck’s leg in its beak. Within seconds, there had been a skirmish of feathers and squawking when, as if from nowhere, one goose turned into fifty or more, and the farmhands ran toward them, crying out with rakes and hoes in hand, and when it was all cleared, had it not been for the blood, what was left would have been indistinguishable from the feathers, grit, and bird shit in the dirty snow.
This hardly ever happens, the farmer told them, nearly never, he said. Watching the man who had talked about owning everything they could see, standing on land that had belonged to his family forever—that was his to give to his sons—with his mouth wide open, had made Ungarte hard all over again. Never, the farmer had said like he might cry, which made Ungarte all the harder. Never, the farmer said, he couldn’t figure how this had happened. Though the only one of them who asked why was the white boy.
Then again, White Boy was the only one who later asked why they had to muck out the stalls and clean cages when the ducks would only come and shit all over them later. He wanted to know why they needed to use gloves when they were raking up hay if what they were doing was safe, if they weren’t going to get anything from touching duck shit all day long.
White Boy throws long sighs into the air anytime he’s asked to do anything; outside, in the cold, his hate for nearly anything said—any distance they are asked to walk, any new chore they are asked to do, anytime they are told to stand, sit, haul, or shovel—is spit up as icy vapor. Even though the foie gras they had had the first day made him sick—sent him retching into the corners of the barn until he was sweaty with the dry heaves—so sick, he was unable to work—he complains about the orange cheese and bologna sandwiches they get—he’s barely able to stomach an apple—he calls out to the farmer every time they see him, when are they going to get some more of that stuff they had when they first got here. That brown stuff! White Boy screams after the farmer as if the man would somehow not know what he meant.
Hey, Mueller, the farmer will call out, raising a hand in the air as he passes. He knows White Boy’s name. It’s just how they do, someone will mutter around him, but Ungarte lets it slide off him, lets nearly everything the other boys say while they are working slide off him. Like grease on a duck’s ass, he would say if anyone was to ask, but they don’t and he’s pretty sure he’s the only one who would think it was funny, laugh so hard at shit like that his dick goes hard and he can taste blood in his mouth.
He keeps his nose pretty clean, his new social worker tries to translate from the report his supervisors submit for his Moms. But the young woman quickly gives up, and just tells her that he does everything that he is told and more. He wonders how much more is more.
Ungarty! the farmer will call out to him the same way he calls Mueller when he wants to get White Boy’s attention; however, Ungarte is the only boy that he will go up and talk to. Through the supervisors he gives Ungarte what he calls special assignments—Give it to Ungarty, he tells them, he’ll get it done—and when White Boy howls, why is it always Ungarty, the farmer just calls over his shoulder as he walks away, Be more like Ungarty. He’s the most trusted member on his crew, his new social worker tells his Moms, he sets an example for all the other boys, the farmer is placing Mateo in charge of the most important chore that they have, he’ll be the leader for all the boys.
Cuídate hijo, his Moms says before she goes out. When he overhears her talking on the phone to his tía—and to the man she flirts with who runs the bodega at the corner—she now says things like, Teo works weekends, and, While Teo is off at his job. His new social worker now says things like, It has had an overall good effect on him, There is marked improvement in his schoolwork, He has no problems getting on with his teachers or his classmates. Although, as if yanked upright by the flowered housedress his Moms wears before she goes out to clean other people’s floors and feed their babies, it is as if she suddenly remembers there is no paycheck attached to what he is doing. It’s just payment of a debt that will eventually claim more debt. And she loses her smile as she says it again—Cuídate hijo—before she heads out.
Both hands shoved deep into his pockets—each of them bottomless: Full of himself—as he follows the farmer, he counts each crunch of his boots—two to one—against those of the farmer as they cross the icy field. I want to tell you something, the farmer says without turning to see if Ungarte is there or not, you’re going to be in charge of, well more or less semi-in-charge-of, one of the most important functions on this farm. Without this we’re nothing, the farmer yells as he slides the door on a barn none of them has ever worked in before.
This is what we call the twenty-day barn, the farmer says.
It’s the sound that hits him first—the screeching, piercing HelpHelpHelpHelpHelp! of birds and the growl of machine engines—that deafens him, and then it’s the smell. For weeks he and the other boys have been around thousands of birds. They had spent time learning to count the days from lay to hatch; they learned to turn the birds and the bins that separated males from females; they threw seed and filled feeders; they had dug up, buried, and hosed away mountains and mountains of shit, though suddenly there is something in the air in the barn that knots his stomach over onto itself and forces it toward his throat, and it’s the sudden shock of the farmer’s voice—Come on, Ungratey, let’s get started—that makes the boy swallow hard and keeps him from shaming himself.
This is where we bring them at six months, the farmer yells over the din. Unlike in France where they’re kept twisted up in pens, he says, pulling the boy closer to him to yell in his ear, we let them walk around, well, as long as they’re able.
Like beetles scurrying in the light, the four women and one man working in the barn are dark and small and quick between what at first to Ungarte looks like a chaos of Mulards, but he soon can see each woman is seated on a slotted wooden box between two corrals. From one corral, they grab a duck by the neck, turn it upside down, and scan the tag on its foot before shoving it into the box.
Show the boy, the farmer tells the man.
Although the man is not all that old—not as old as Ungarte’s Moms—his face is drawn up like an apple that has sat around too long. His two front teeth are brown and look as though they have been cut in half, and even over the bird stink, he gives off a steamy, stale mixture of tobacco and BO. Ungarte can feel the man’s eyes look him up and down before he spits out ¿Hablas niño?
And Ungarte imagines that it is because Spanish to the farmer is a stream of sounds like the screeching of the birds or the grind of the machines he continues to yell at him while the instructions are given. Don’t worry if you don’t get this right the first time, the farmer tells him, it took me a while, it takes everyone a while.
When the birds get so heavy they can no longer stand in the corrals they need to be put here, the man tells Ungarte as he points to the wall; while at the same time the farmer says, They really don’t feel anything, it’s not as if they have the same kind of gag reflexes we have. They hardly feel it, they don’t know what’s happening, the farmer yells over the man’s instructions of how to shove a duck or goose into the wooden box—feet first, hold the neck tight, push the middle down hard—and the farmer tells him there is no need to be nervous, none at all.
Don’t worry, the farmer cautions as the man shows Ungarte how to stroke the bird’s neck—tells him to hum, so it feels comfortable, but be firm so it knows to be a little bit afraid of you—as he inserts the feeder into its throat. Don’t let the bird pull away from you, the man says, the bird—it’s a bird—it don’t know when it’s full. You’re waiting for the machine to kick off like a rifle, then you pull it out.
Don’t be afraid to make a mistake or two, the farmer says as the man relinquishes and makes way for Ungarte, when I was a boy my first dozen or so were failures, colossal failures. Killed off a dozen and a half of my father’s prime geese in between getting it right.
Ungarte spreads his legs wide as he straddles the wooden box that is still warm from the rump before his. It’s all about getting the right angle the first time in, the farmer tells him, there’s no undoing it once you’ve gone in at the wrong angle, and you just end up goring them anyway if you pull out and try again.
We’ve tried other ways, the farmer tells him as the man wheels the machine in front of Ungarte. For years we’ve tried to develop a bird through training or inbreeding or crossbreeding—whatever they call it—so all they do all day long is eat, but the damn birds forget everything else they need to know about survival, and the fuckers start laying eggs anywhere, the males won’t rut, or whatever it is they do, females won’t brood—they hardly even eat, none of them—and they lay all over the lawn, on the roof, everywhere.
By the time Ungarte reaches for the first bird, he realizes the farmer is no longer talking to him. Over the noise of the machines and the honking and quaking of birds, over the instructions of the man in Spanish, the farmer is just talking. And it is when the man shouts ¡Bueno! that the farmer looks down to see Ungarte grab and successfully feed his third bird. That’s it! That’s it! the farmer is yelling, he slaps the man on his shoulders, That’s it, he’s got it, to which the man says, Yes. That’s it—as Ungarte goes on to feed the fourth then the twelfth then the twentieth bird in a row—like you were born to do this, the farmer says. And he’s all teeth, the man who showed him says as he throws a hand in the air and walks away, and Ungarte is pleased, not because he is good at what he has been chosen to do, but because he’s hard, hard hard hard, so close—so close—hard.
That afternoon, at lunch, the farmer names Ungarte Head of Special Projects. At first none of the other boys can be bothered to lift their eyes from their plates to care, but when the farmer announces that Ungarte will be choosing four of them to work with him on the project, suddenly all but White Boy throw a hand up.
He picks Fulton and Andres because they are both strong and silent and push through heat and cold and sweat and ache like it’s nothing. Villarreal, because he’s smart and quick and never cuts corners and always gets the work out of the way. And, of course, he chooses White Boy, who he knows will whine and complain and cry and clutch his stomach and spit up his lunch and act like a bitch all day long.
There was no way he was going to do that, White Boy insists as the five of them—now named The Feeding Team by the farmer—go back to the barn. No way, no way in hell am I doing no fucking special project, White Boy mutters to himself, though he comes along anyway. Perhaps he realizes he would have spent the rest of the day wet and covered with mud or imagines there will be less work where they are headed.
The barn is warmer and damper than Ungarte remembered it earlier. A sheen rises on the faces of the other boys, and they shed hoodies and sweaters and stand in sweat-marked T-shirts, watching the man give the same instructions. And as Ungarte watches, something strangley lets go in him—even though he is unsure of what it is—he knows he knows what he needs to know before he needs to know, perhaps for the first time ever, before he needs to know it. So, when the man calls out—Fulton, then Andres and then Villarreal as trained and ready to go—and he asks about White Boy, who has begun wearing a trench as he paces four or five feet of dirt littering the air with what he can’t do—how he’ll be sick all over the place if they try to make him, how he had a condition—Ungarte tells the man to leave him be.
Just let him go, he tells them when the other boys complain that White Boy should at least be asked to rake up the shit and cart out the ducks that accidentally die in the middle of feeding. He puts White Boy on keeping the feeders filled to the top—not allowing any of them to go less than halfway full—which allows him to go on complaining. And by the next afternoon, White Boy believes that he has a fever, isn’t sure he can hold his lunch down. He needs to lie down every half hour or so, then every ten or fifteen minutes, and then he just spends the rest of the day arms curled around his belly, trudging between the bathroom at the far end of the barn and a hay pallet he has raked up for himself nearby.
It doesn’t seem to matter which of the supervisors comes through, each kicks the boy’s boots and screams for him to get his ass up and get back to work, but the moment they leave, White Boy starts to complain again and Ungarte chooses to ignore him. The other boys eventually begin to fill their own feeders when they go empty, they rake for themselves and carry the dead birds to the grinder, and at the end of the weekend—when they are all shaking and their muscles are knotted up with ache—as they are counted and scanned back onto the bus headed back to the city, the farmer comes out to say he has never seen workers like Ungarte and his team, never before has he had a group of workers—even the ones we pay—do as much in as little time.
And even though it doesn’t seem to do anything for the other boys—none of them even turn in the direction of the farmer’s voice—Ungarte notices that White Boy turns and waves back at the sound of his own name, his face is shiny and his chest is pushed out. The farmer is waving as their bus heads toward the road, and White Boy is the only one who looks, the only one who turns and waves back. And sitting directly behind him, Ungarte is hard—up and down in his pocket the entire way back.
They are the best group, the most efficient, the most on the job, the famer says over the next couple of weeks as he stops by the boys’ tables while they are eating, when he brings visitors to the farm. He hauls troops of men in suits out to the feeding barn, who tiptoe around bird droppings and puddles of White Boy puke, to take a look at a group the likes of which, the farmer says, he has never seen.
Open wide, Villarreal tells the goose he is feeding as he stops and throws on a grin so wide and forced Ungarte imagines it burns the inside of his ears when the farmer comes around with two photographers. They also take pictures of Fulton and Andres, and the other workers. They get shots of the rafters, the geese, the ducks, the cages, the feeders, the boxes the feeders sit on, the bleeds of gray daylight through the dirty windows high along the top of the barn. The muck, the slush drain, the gutter that runs the perimeter, and then they leave without taking a single picture of White Boy.
What the hell? White Boy yells out the door after them. What the hell? echoes across the field as the photographers head toward the main house without turning to hear where it came from. What the hell? as he looks to the other boys who keep working. He looks to the man who had shown them all how to feed, who simply responds, No que hablo, as he walks away from the boy.
Throughout the rest of the morning, White Boy complains of stomach problems, he asks the others if they can hear the ringing in his ears, see how blurry his vision is, but eventually reclaims his job filling the feeders with a cursing, slamming, angry vengeance. And for hours as he mutters fuck thems—fuck yous, fuck anyone who ever walked up in heres—into the air without any particular target in sight, he makes sure to top each feeder as soon as it is three or four inches down. The next morning, they can all kiss his ass—kiss his shiny pink ass—as he rakes piles of dirt and droppings into another pile of dirt and droppings only to do it and rake it all up again and again. They can kiss it—kiss it, kiss it—kiss my ass all of them until their lips get chapped, and Ungarte recognizes it is just the thought of him spending the rest of the assignment this way, just the thought of White Boy folding and refolding himself in a pile of droppings and dust for the next five weeks that makes him so hard and heady he drops the goose he has just fed and instead of reaching for the next bird he shoves his hand deep in his pocket.
He has wrapped his ankles around the base of the box, presses his thighs into its edges, and thinks he could watch White Boy sweep the same pile of dirt forever when suddenly White Boy stops, drops the rake, and announces he is bored. Never been so bored in my entire life! he yells as he opens the door, and it is as if, caught up short by all the light and cold air he is letting in—he turns two full circles—he realizes he has nowhere to go and there is no one to hear him.
He wanders around a while until one of the supervisors walks through and he lies back down on the pallet, holds his stomach, and scrunches his eyes as he always has. Though, I’m bored! he pops up again when he hears the door slam behind the man. Show me how, he pulls at Villarreal’s shirtsleeve, I’m bored, show me how! But he is shaken off as Villarreal drops the duck he has finished feeding and goes for a goose in one of the cages. Show me, come on, man, show me, White Boy follows him. And just at the moment when Ungarte is certain Villarreal looks as though he is about to send White Boy through a wall, he grabs the bird he was after and pushes past the boy.
No que hablo, says the man who had shown Ungarte how; No que hablo, the man who had shown them all how says as White Boy goes to grab for him, pleading, Show me. Come on, man, show me! when Ungarte comes up and separates the two of them by shoving White Boy away. But it only causes White Boy to turn toward and follow Ungarte, Show me, come on, man, it ain’t going to hurt you to show me. And to his surprise, Ungarte finds White Boy backs up like a dog—You do what you always do! he yells at the boy—as he advances toward him. You do what you always do, he says in a lower tone—one that doesn’t part his teeth and comes out of the center of his chest—and even though the boy keeps talking, he takes a step back for each of Ungarte’s toward him until he falls backward onto his hay pallet in the corner.
Though it isn’t seconds after Ungarte is back to work—has inserted the feeder deep into a mallard throat—that White Boy is up pestering whoever is closest. I’m bored, show me how, I’m bored. And it is not until the duck goes limp in his hands—he feels it collapse; the bottom split out of it—and he feels the sloppy wet plop of innards and the rattling spill of feed on the tops of his boots that he realizes he has gone hard all over again.
Across the barn White Boy goes nearly faceless as an egg, and even though his mouth is open and moving—a red wet vibrating circle in the air in front of him—whatever the boy is saying it is the birds’ screeches, the roar of machines, and a numb thump that floods Ungarte’s ears. Not a sound, but a stream of feathers, bills, wide-open throats that seems to be coming from the top of White Boy’s head, out the back of his neck, that tells him he is actually headed toward the boy through the sea of birds, past the cages and machines.
He hears the squeal of the wire catch on the toilet and the door slam shut, he hears himself counting to ten the way his new social worker has told him he needs to, but it is only as he hears himself counting—one forty-seven, one forty-eight, one forty-nine—under his breath that he realizes he has passed it. And where he hears the wire catch and the door slam again, hears himself throwing the lock, if White Boy says, Don’t, You can’t come in here, I’m sick, My stomach, Leave me alone, he has no idea. He hears himself count seven fifty-two, seven eighty-nine, nine hundred as he lifts White Boy off the toilet, and flips him around. Through the forearm he has wrapped around the boy’s throat—his fist nearly fits in the boy’s mouth—he can feel the quickness of the boy’s pulse. Through the door he can make out the sounds of birds and machines, the occasional yelled instruction, he hears the rhythmic banging of the boy’s head against the back wall, he hears himself reach eleven hundred and fifteen, and his pace slacken before he recognizes he has been muttering, You’ll do what you always do, under his breath.
He doesn’t bother to shower or clean his boots over the rest of the weekend. As if posting a dare, he wears whatever has splashed on him while he waits.
And it is the shift in light that he first notices during the last few weeks of their assignment. Shorter shadows as the days grow longer open sudden golden jags quick as falling stars or lightning-bug flashes of opportunity in the otherwise muddy Hudson. He is awake, increasingly awake with each trip up. Each time the farmer sees him—Ungartey is the best of the best; Never seen anybody get a group to work like he does, that Ungartey!—sets something fiercely animal off in his chest, pricks his hearing to things like the low snore coming out of a boy three seats in front of him, things like the faint smell reminiscent of the undercoat on a goat that comes up in the air when there are twenty or so of them loaded on the bus in the mornings, perch him on the edge of his seat, clear his eyesight toward the slightest movement out of the ordinary. He is primed, readied, and hard.
I’ve never seen anything quite like it, his new social worker tells his Moms earlier in the week, he’s a new man, becoming a model student, dependable—getting stronger every day, taking advantage of everything that the program has to offer. Hold on, mijo, his Moms tells him after the woman leaves, hold on, with each day she takes off the calendar.
Last night in the laundry room, he had turned the stroller with the sleeping baby in it away and bent Kai over the dryer. As they eased into the warm vibration of the machine, deep deep inside her he had found he wanted to tell her there will be no miracles here as much as he wants to tell her a duck’s heart can reach up to a thousand beats per second in flight—he knows, he has looked it up—but to worry about either is a waste of imagination. But when he started to he accidentally slipped and called her María, which in a second caused her to push him off her, tell him she had to go. She collected her panties off the floor and dropped them into the machine she had going and rolled the baby onto the elevator. It’s a big place, he said, even though he knew she was probably at her front door by then, with the kind of logic that wastes a whole duck they’ve bred and tended just for its liver. He thinks she needs to know it is the kind of logic that makes it impossible for a boy to just be holding a gun. He thinks she should know things like that as well as the ways around it. He wants to tell her it is possible to make a white boy—now when he walks around him, looks at him, blows his breath onto his neck—go pink and very, very silent. But he would need to tell a woman who, because her mamá named her María, calls herself María.