Barn 8 Read online

  Memorization, too. She was good at that. “Farms that fail the audit develop a plan in cooperation with the UEP,” Cleveland was saying. “The auditor does not participate in the problem-solving process.”

  And yet, her skills did involve heading toward an objective at full speed, not looking left or right, not slowing. She did like fitting consequences, dramatic implications, grand gestures, universal questions. She would have been great in a cult. She hated inexactitude, hated not being listened to by the regional director. Janey’s arguments were interesting, but not persuasive.

  Janey didn’t realize that the line of reasoning truly compelling to Cleveland was Janey herself.

  SHE WOKE. Where was she? Still night, her husband asleep. A thought or a dream or a memory was running away from her and she leapt over the boulders of her mind to chase it.

  The look on Janey’s face, the smile (see that? the girl had been beaming for the first time). Cleveland had done this, was wringing that smile from Janey, as Olivia had once wrung it from Cleveland. That face was working on Cleveland while she slept. Where had she seen it?

  That ridiculous girl, the one who’d followed her up and down the grates, sucked on her giant pop drinks, gotten her hair caught in hens’ claws, yelled out the window, the incompetent, unruly, ill-natured daughter of the long-limbed, long-lost, lovely Olivia, this girl had, out of her misplaced disdain, thought of this. It was exactly the sort of idea Olivia would dream up (Cleveland was certainly wrong about that). Like a weed unbolting from the ground in the dawn, Olivia, coming to life. She’d been there all along.

  Single-mindedness is a stubborn trait. The question about Cleveland was, which trumped: the UEP guidelines or Olivia (transferable to the daughter)?

  She rose, put on her bathrobe, and went out to the patio. Too warm for March. The neighbor’s hideous security light came over the fence and tossed in long shapes of harsh light. The backyard was shiny with a rain that must have come and then taken itself away while she slept. The sky was clear now, opening up, morning approaching but not yet arrived.

  Cleveland knew just how to do it. Happy Green Family Farm. They had someone among them who had surely thought of this before.

  She lay back in the lounge chair, pulled the wool throw over herself, and took up her phone. She texted Janey, It would have to be a whole farm. She closed her eyes, listened to the soft buzz of the neighbor’s security light, like the soft buzz of her mind. Olivia, nodding, grateful from the grave. Cleveland curled on her side and stayed there until her husband slid open the glass door after daybreak and said, “What could you possibly be doing out here?” All she could think to say was, “Dreaming.”

  OF COURSE JANEY couldn’t know this, but if she’d stayed, had not left her mother, had not gotten it into her head to run away and find her father, her mother still would have died in a car crash that day. Janey would have been beside her. They’d be headed to Ikea to buy flowerpots and porch chairs, but instead Janey would watch her mother die on the bridge and she herself would live on. She would not move to Iowa (though she’d eventually meet her father, and they’d have two awkward meals at IHOP when she was thirty). Instead she’d go live with her mother’s best friend, Judy, who’d never had a daughter, and instead of rage, a great sorrow would underpin all Janey’s doings. She’d play competitive chess and be on the debate team through high school. She’d go to college. She’d study political science and philosophy and eventually apply to law school.

  One day, as a student in the Columbia University Environmental Law Clinic, she’d help file a suit against the EPA for “failing to enforce the Clean Water Act” on four Iowa-based layer hen farms. Industrial farm fans, each tall as a man, blow massive amounts of shit and dander and chemicals into nearby streams and rivers, polluting the local water. The suit would name three of the very farms she’d snuck onto with Cleveland—coincidence, fate, or divine design. So despite what Janey contended, she would have turned out to be arguably a somewhat similar person, with or without her teenage escape to Iowa. And those farms would not have seen the back of Janey no matter what.

  Instead, that suit against the EPA went on without Janey. It was lost. More suits followed. And still more will come. They will all be lost. No one will be able to beat those fans.

  At a five-foot wingspan, with a body weight of 280 pounds, aluminum scales, and a wire-mesh skin-like covering, those industrial farm fans are the very distant descendants of the Archaeopteryx, the earliest form of bird. Their cousins, the warm-blooded hens, are born with the fans’ roar, they grow up with it. For the hens the fans are the sound of the earth—as sea turtles think of the ocean, as humans think of the sound of the air. It’s the last sound the hens hear, other than their own voices, as farmhands stuff them at the end of their lay into the carbon dioxide cart (which according to UEP guidelines must cause “rapid loss of consciousness until death,” though the guidelines do not specify how long “rapid” is—does not all life hurtle rapidly toward death?).

  In fact the fans will be one of the last things to go.

  In the coming decades Earth will continue to heat, irregularly at first, in patches. There’ll be energy shortages, then crises. Families will spend more on energy than on rent. In the late days, air conditioners will become illegal and anyway too expensive to run. Only the richest 10 percent (so don’t worry) will be able to sit and have quiet conversations in cool air (not that they will do much talking, their faces inches from their screens as they fight with people all over the world). Box fans, tornado fans, tower fans, ceiling fans, all species of fan will evolve and fill homes.

  A firm of architects, coincidentally headed by a female descendant of Victor Gruen, will design an apartment complex with industrial fans making up the northern walls. Doors will roll down over them like a garage. Fan-wall apartment complexes will multiply. Around them the landscape will swirl with storms and waves. The Americas will turn into mostly desert and the islands will sink into the dead sea.

  In the final decades, that sound—a low pulsing powerful hum—will take over, rise off the earth, muffle what’s left.

  Then one day all the fans will fall silent.

  2

  THE FIRST NIGHT the auditors showed up, Dill was sitting at the bay window with the lights off, thinking he’d lost it all. But he was wrong. He had much, much more losing to go. Each night the auditors showed up, in fact, he’d lost a little more, so that their arrivals marked time, each visit another tick, because that year was Dill’s undoing. The fabric that wrapped him was unwinding, the layers loosening and dropping to the ground, and when the outer fabric was gone, he himself was disassembled, piece by piece, taken down, and hauled off.

  When the auditors first came (though he didn’t know who they were yet), their headlights lit the driveway gravel dust, so that they seemed to arrive in a cloud of smoke. He was alone at the window while his husband and the dogs and the other animals in there slept. So far he’d lost only his job, director of undercover investigations, and that had been going on for weeks already, his joblessness. He was almost used to feeling unused, unneeded, unheeded. But a few hours earlier he’d driven by the Iowa branch office and seen the sign was down. That had made it real: they were going to carry on elsewhere without him.

  He squinted through the bay window into the dark at the vehicle that stopped halfway down the drive. Two figures hopped out and pulled some boxes off the backseat. Must be a couple of his investigators who had or hadn’t heard the news. Or maybe some old investigators, wandering through. Or maybe even the old, old investigators, the original gang riding in, ready to take sides, his side. For eight years Dill had supervised the unruly force of undercover investigators who posed as farmhands, wore secret cameras, and recorded the various categories of casual animal abuse and neglect. But now that his eyes were adjusting to the distance, he could tell by their very postures—he could see only their silhouettes—that these were not investigators. No investigator stood like that. Besides, investiga
tors didn’t turn up in twos. They were solo creatures, more Frankenstein’s monster than Quixote.

  He had no idea who these people were.

  They left their boxes in the yard with the trees and the stars and the cold and the dew. They got back into their car and drove off.

  The second night they showed up, a week later, they were more brazen and he was in a worse mood. They pulled in front of the house, headlights flashing across the windows. A few of the dogs (there were seven) lifted their heads off the tile. The rest dreamed on, paws twitching. Worst watchdogs. He rose from the kitchen table and went out there because his husband, a banker to whom he’d been married six years, had had just about enough of Dill’s “crazy animal people” but had not yet, as he had by the third night the auditors showed up, had just about enough of Dill himself.

  That second night he wondered: Are these the same assholes as last week, the ones who left boxes of spent layer hens in the frost for him to deal with, or are these altogether new assholes? He stepped out onto the porch, where one of them, a young woman, was halfway up the steps with a box. She froze.

  He raised a palm. “Lady, whatever you’re selling, I don’t want it.”

  Damn if he didn’t hear clucks coming from the box. So it was the same assholes. She lifted her chin over the box. “These girls come free.”

  “This ain’t no charity.”

  And he finally made the connection. These must be the same assholes who’d been leaving chickens at the office. Of course. He’d been a little distracted lately, considering.

  He stepped closer to get a better look. The other one, older, was stepping out of the car. They had on uniforms, but not farmhand uniforms. These were not investigators, not whistleblowers, none of the usual crowd that showed up at any hour bragging or complaining or crying.

  Oh, he knew. Fucking auditors. Fuck him.

  “Keep your fucking voices down,” he said. He wrestled the box from her. “You’ll wake the whole house.” He slammed back inside. He carried the box through the kitchen to take the hens out back.

  The third time they showed up, Dill got out of bed as soon as their headlights swept the bedroom where he was feigning sleep, normalcy, sanity—faking as a desperate ploy, not that the banker was believing it—and Dill leapt up because the banker woke at once, shielded his eyes. “More of your friends?”

  Dill ran out to the porch, pulling on his coat, and waved his arm, down, down, to tell them to fucking turn off their lights, and then waved his arm again to tell them to go around, go around the fucking back, fuckers, and then he followed their car on foot to the shed and the barn, where the banker earlier that night had threatened to deposit Dill and his belongings and his eleven animals, saying, “No one on earth could take much more of this.”

  “More of which?” said Dill, because if he knew what piece was worst, he might be able to shut it up or turn it off or stamp it out.

  “More of you.” Which was really unfriendly.

  The banker’s esteem for Dill had been on a long steady decline, but it had started out so high and proceeded downward so slowly (Dill suspected it had begun its descent a few days after they met) that it had taken years and years. Even if Dill had somewhat approximated the nearly supernatural version of himself the banker had imagined on their introduction, Dill was destined to fall somewhat. Law of familiarity. Add to that, Dill had been at the height of his professional (and therefore sexual) powers when they met and he hadn’t yet gone mad: the director of investigations the very month he and Annabelle had completed six new investigations and been all over the news. Their crew was small, fresh, a renegade rag-stitched team that year, not quite respectable, but better than respectable. Runaway successful. After that month, even as their little group grew, stretched, strengthened, organized, moved out from under him, and turned into a giant nonprofit Godzilla, Dill himself began to lose traction, and it was an awfully long way down from what the banker thought he was getting. One can only imagine the lasting (likely lifelong) disillusionment Dill had bestowed on the banker. The banker would forever see the world differently and worse because of Dill, as a place where beauty is suspect and love flawed. Well, boo-hoo, Dill thought. Welcome to the world, asshole. I never told you to love me that way.

  So when the auditors showed up the third time, he thought for sure he was coasting along the seafloor now, that this was as low as it got: waved out of the game, sent home in shame with his mitt, diminished to ashes in the banker’s eyes, threatened with expulsion from the (albeit rocky) Eden of his marriage. He knew exactly who they were this time—Cleveland Smith, 34, and Janey Flores, 20—had run their plates, done his research, because he was still a fucking professional.

  At least he wasn’t high anymore. That had to be worth something. No steps, no sponsor: he’d never been good at taking orders. No amends: the banker didn’t want to hear it. That much had been explained to him. It was up to the wider public if they wanted to forgive him. He’d thought that being sober would be an improvement but it certainly was not. It couldn’t get worse now.

  But he was still wrong.

  He walked over to the barn door, where back in the day Annabelle used to train new investigators by throwing cinder blocks at them, not that Dill recalled precisely what the point had been in that.

  They got out of their car. Actual auditors, how Annabelle would have laughed!

  Could they be FBI dressed as auditors? Though what could the FBI possibly want with him now? Sure, when he had investigators out all over the farms maybe. Besides, they didn’t seem to know he’d been fired and that could be only inept big ag, not FBI. “A few more for your revolution,” the older one, Cleveland Smith, said. She thought she was talking to the top man, which Dill did nothing to correct. Why should he?

  “Since when did audits get into delivery?” he said, to let them know he knew exactly who they were.

  “Cute,” she said. “Funnyman.”

  “Tell me this,” said Dill. “What is even the point in being an auditor? All you do is go and look at a place.”

  She was lifting chickens out of the car and letting them flap into the barn.

  “Homeland food defense, right, that’s what you call it?” he went on. “I bet you pulled this chicken out of a pile of manure eight feet high. That’s what you’re defending?”

  This, while the younger one scraped excrement out of the backseat with a piece of cardboard. “What happened to the towels? I put towels back here,” she was saying.

  They’d brought a hell of a lot of chickens this time, Jesus. They were taking some out of the trunk now.

  “I can’t imagine what you’re doing this for.” He leaned against the car. “Getting shit on your vinyl, for what?”

  Cleveland closed the trunk. “These are incidental removals.”

  “Oh, that’s beautiful,” he marveled. “What in the Jesus fuck is that supposed to mean? That sounds exactly like you morons.”

  At least they weren’t activists. God save him from the activists.

  The younger one walking around the side.

  The fourth time they showed up, they’d figured it out: Dill had been fired. He was living in the shed now, where the banker had banished him, had helped him haul out a few bags of crap and said, “I’m not saying it’s over. I’m saying it’s almost over,” and where back in the day Annabelle used to unwrap the buttonhole cameras and say to the investigators, “Equipment rule one: do not break the equipment.”

  The auditors drove up and said, “We hear you’re not such a hotshot anymore.”

  Dill shrugged. “The movement spits people out.”

  It was true. The animal rights landscape was built on a graveyard of exiled heroes. Founders fight or fall out of fashion. There isn’t always room for the old guard.

  He didn’t tell the auditors (because he was still a fucking professional) that if they thought they were the only ones still coming to him, they were mistaken. Investigators still turned up now and then (where else w
ere they going to go? the needy little shits), though less, and they still left him long messages on his voice mail, “I need to talk …” though less because it obviously wasn’t his job anymore, to talk to anyone, ever. What he was telling them all: Off duty. Out of service. Final sale over. Fuck off. And the investigators, one by one, were obeying (that was Annabelle—she had trained them to follow an order).

  But the auditors were still coming. And a small part of him was grateful.

  The fifth time—or was it the sixth?—they called first. By this time Dill had assembled a semblance of a living quarters back there, beddish structure, proper faucet, coffee apparatus, dogs in the yard, birds in the run, his mind flickering with memories: Annabelle making the investigators do push-ups, drag tires. The banker opening the screen door, calling across the field, “Mimosas anyone?” wearing a T-shirt with a chicken on it in solidarity (ah, the banker loved him then), while the trainees prepared for twelve hours a day of bending over bottom-row cages, of shoveling piles of feces, faking a personality, fearing detection. A sort of Art of War boot camp. Investigators are half-wrecked soldiers.

  Earlier that evening of the fifth or sixth time, the banker had come walking down from the main house, over the overgrown grass toward him. Dill had flung open the shed door to let in the last of the day’s late-March light, and was fool enough to be excited when he saw him. Dill was kicked back on the cot, light dropping over his face in lines. A few chickens were poking around. When the banker arrived, Dill caught his face and his heart fell because he knew what the banker saw: a barely sober, jobless, rageless man. Dill had never been easy and now the banker could expect years of this at best—years, or however long it would take, if it ever did take. He stood in the doorway and said to Dill, “I don’t see this getting any better.”

  “You’re telling me,” Dill said.

  It was one thing, the banker explained, when Dill made so little money all those years and had an insane, overwhelming job. At least he had a purpose and conviction. It was another thing entirely now. No vision, no plans, no prospects. Who knew if he was high or not, since he was a masterful liar. His entire profession wasn’t speaking to him.