It sounded like a traffic accident, or a car chase like the ones in American movies. A car that sped up and then braked hard, hot rubber screeching on the asphalt.
Anders and I had been mucking out the chicken house all morning.
The perches were no longer perches, but poles of petrified chicken shit; the chickens had long since left the nesting boxes, which were stuffed with trampled cakes of straw and dung and lice. Instead, they laid their eggs in hollows scratched out in the chicken farm and found time to brood, their mothers’ warmth making the eggs inedible. Anders grunted and cursed, calling them “little assholes.”
“They’ll get a fever,” he said. “And then they’ll stop laying eggs. We can’t afford that. And we have enough chickens for this year.”
I’d heard it all before, but it didn’t matter. I just let him go on, as Anton called it. He would start with long, convoluted monologues about the pigs and chickens—the number of chickens last year and the year before—and if you interrupted and asked him about a detail, he’d answer about something else entirely.
I was wearing long pants, and had tied a bandana around my mouth before prying the dark pies of straw and chicken shit off the wet concrete floor. Every step we took released fleas in a dancing cloud over the straw.
The whining tires and the slam of a car door made Anders cower. Someone was shouting outside now. First a man, then a woman, whose higher-pitched voice broke into a scream.
“Who . . . ?”
Anders wiped his face and stared at the door, eyes wide, breathing heavily through his wet mouth.
Another furious exchange of words. Now the man and the woman were talking over each other. Anders put his hand over his face and pulled the corners of his mouth up into a strange grin. Both excited and frightened. I laid a hand on his shoulder like I’d seen Anton do.
“I’ll go out and look,” I said, setting the fork down. “You can stay here if you don’t want to come.”
He nodded, seeming calmer already, but now there was nothing to hear except the wind’s whistling under the rafters.
I left Anders and jogged through the pigpen in Anton’s heavy rubber boots, but I didn’t see the man. Just the car spraying gravel up the driveway, then speeding away onto the road. A light-blue Volkswagen with a flower garland over the bumper that had spilled Ellen out into the yard as a kind of gift from providence.
I’d already jerked off three times to a new fantasy about her. The plot was simple: me with a fishing rod over my shoulder whistling when I surprised her, naked in the marl pit, after which she smiled at me frivolously, freed me from my shorts and underpants and said something like, “You won’t become blind from this, at least.”
Why she was naked to begin with, my overexcited imagination hadn’t found a way to rationalize, but that hadn’t mattered so far. I had thought of her often and even cycled past the commune a couple of times, but hadn’t seen anything other than a pair of dirty boys sitting and splashing their bare feet in a hole they’d dug in the mud in the front yard.
Now Ellen seemed both more and less disheveled than when I’d last seen her. As though she’d just woken up and hadn’t had the time to get dressed and put herself together. Out of it, as Mom would say. She was bleeding a little from her lower lip, but wiped it away with the back of her hand in a careless motion while blinking forcedly out at the road. Her sunglasses had slid so far down her nose that it was impossible for her to see anything through them, and she looked only half-finished, with one arm in a long, moss-green woolen coat that was far too warm for the sunshine. Large tufts had broken free from the long braid hanging over her shoulder. When she saw me, she pushed the glasses up into place, turned around and picked up the backpack sitting next to her.
“Not now, Utzon,” she said, turning her back to me, and I paused, unsure what to do with the soft voice and turned-away face. Anton appeared in the back door and hesitated, but stuck on his wooden clogs and walked through the yard.
“Well, Ellen.”
She just shook her head, and Anton sent me a meaningful look over her half-covered shoulder. The unseasonable green wool coat had fallen even farther down and was now dragging on the ground.
“Jacob, maybe you should . . .” he said.
Reluctantly, I turned around and began walking while Ellen said something I couldn’t hear.
“I don’t think this is a good idea,” said Anton.
“Just a couple of days,” she said. “I have nowhere else to go . . .”
Despite me walking as slowly as I could, the last of the conversation disappeared under my creaking rubber boots and a tractor that drove past. I half turned while entering the stable and saw Ellen wipe her eyes several times with a green coat arm scrunched up in her hand as Anton took her backpack. There was something despairing in his hunched shoulders—as though something had gone seriously, irreparably wrong when he’d carried her suitcase across the yard to the farmhouse. Ellen followed after him without saying another word.