They see it from a few miles off - the Clements’ chicken barn. A beacon under the bleached-out stars, fluorescent light leaking through the slats. The older boy Escobar leads along a dark strip of trees; Weasel follows, shrugging the backpack, watching the ground and the feet ahead. Not quiet but not speaking, they crunch over dead twigs and corn stubble, empty cans and shredded plastic bags. The lint of the world collecting anywhere it’s allowed to, anywhere it’s not in someone’s way. Which is almost everywhere. Parking lots and roadsides, cornfields with no corn. What men forget or ignore, this is left for their boys.

 

Insects scream and bark from the hedgerows, and the sweat stings as Weasel wipes it from his split lip, his bruised eye. The glow of the barn sharpens as they approach, a temple of peeling paint and old gray wood. At the door their ears prick to the restless sounds of the crowd inside, babbling like children. On the hill off to the right, the Clements’ porchlight illuminates a concrete foundation and a closed screen door; a corrugated roof over some piles of curated junk. It’s like most places around here. But the barn has something special.

 

They set their bats against the outer wall, two dull bells ringing through the thin wood planks. Weasel lets down his pack and lifts out the bolt cutters. Escobar watches, arms crossed, as his acolyte raises the padlock, turns it in his hands. Then, carefully, Weasel fits the bolt cutter jaws around the steel loop of the lock. They slip. Esco pulls down the bill of his newsboy hat and crosses his arms. Weasel tries again, forcing everything into the blades. The handles bite his palms, bruised ribs throb against the strain. The tool buckles and falls, the insolent lock slams against the wood. Holding his side, he looks up toward the house, then back to Esco. Weasel clears his throat, hisses at the lock to break. Blames the cutters. Esco blames him.

 

“Use something else, then.”

I don’t have anything else. He thinks it but doesn’t say it.

 

Eventually, the blades cut through. The lock breaks and drops heavily into the dirt. The door swings open, smooth and quiet, and they raise their bats from where they lean against the wall, stepping into the heatless light. Flexing their grips against the dirty duct-taped handles. Chickens part around them as they enter, a mottled white chorus of anxious clucking.

 

“Escobar --”

“What, fucker?”
“What if they hear?”

Esco stares.

Weasel looks back toward the porchlight. “Don’t they make a noise?”

“No.”

 

Escobar adjusts his hat again, smiles at the unease as it ripples through the barn. Weasel watches him. He doesn’t look like it, but Esco’s actually pretty well off. He and his older brother both have their own rooms, and there’s a whole separate room in their house just for watching TV. Not just the living room, it’s a whole separate room, with its own furniture and everything. But you wouldn’t know when you see him, with the greasy acne and the grandpa hat, and his clothes too big.

 

Esco takes the first swing. A big windup, then a miraculous explosion of white distracts from a life reduced to broken china. Weasel chokes a flinch, turns toward the pieces of ghost floating above. Long white feathers tailspin through the air, the little downy ones drift away slowly, lost balloons. The flock scatters, and the barn, everything is slowly flooded out in the rising pulse, the roar of blood in the ears like an endlessly crashing wave. The heart beating his temples. Escobar swings again, and a corpse of linguini rockets out from another brilliant white catastrophe; it collides with the wall, wasting gobs of canned tomatoes. The chickens are a whirlpool of panic, but it’s so far away through the body’s own noise, you can’t hear it. Like he said, no sound.

 

Weasel’s fists on the bat are hot or cold or stiff or limp and he hasn’t even done anything with it yet. He swings a few times, back and forth, chasing the weight of the weapon and listing away from the pain in his side. Escobar smirks at him, looks at the feathers pasted to the end of his own bat. The chickens swirl and crash around like someone’s shooting into a crowd, feathers everywhere. But the only sounds are heart and blood, the drum and the roar.

 

Escobar turns around and looks at him for a minute. “Hey Weasel.” He’s about to say some asshole thing, he always does. Shiny and red and arrogant under that stupid hat, a condescending fuck-you grin. Weasel braces for it.

 

But he says, “Which one’s your dad?”

 

What’s he talking about? Which one’s your dad?

 

No one even knows Escobar’s real name. Just that he lifted the fake one from some famous drug lord no one had heard of, probably thought it was cool or intimidating. It’s a little weird to call this white eighteen-year-old a Spanish drug lord name, but no one really disagrees with him. He gave one kid a broken finger, kid had to wear a splint for like a month. Anyway, at least he got to choose his nickname. Esco knows everyone’s real name, but that doesn’t mean he uses it.

 

Esco turns and searches, picks out another one and hunts it down. Pounds a pile of squealing edicts into the dirt; driving lessons, shouting matches, stolen liquor.

 

Wading into the writhing mass, all running in terror but going nowhere, Weasel takes another couple swings into the crowd, left, right. Waves of chaos anticipate the bat. Each swing is a miss; shame, and relief.

 

Escobar grins dryly, through the swell of blood. “You have to pick one.”

 

So Weasel picks a chicken. White like the rest, but with a few darker feathers on one wing, it looks lopsided and kind of dirty. As soon as it’s been singled out, the chicken seems to know it. His head jerks left and right; picks up speed a little, but hesitates. He doesn’t run.

 

Weasel’s first steps quicken, the chicken tries to fly but doesn’t make it off the ground. The bat comes down vertical but the chicken dodges, steel bounces off the straw floor, arms ringing dull with failure. A few more swings miss, even though the chicken’s still not really getting too far away. The rush swells and breaks against the backs of Weasel’s eyes, heat and salt rising with each shaky breath as he’s drawn along behind the bird. Blindered. The harder the chicken runs, the harder Weasel chases him.

 

He bends down and grabs up a handful of wet straw and hurls it out in front of the bird; immediately, it darts back towards him. Weasel startles back, catches his step, the bat whips up sideways over his shoulder and pulls fast down into the body, like chopping wood – then a thick muted pop. Wings scrape against the straw, legs churning, slowing. Breath hisses away – broken things, lost watches, dissipating like smoke. Failures, consequences; feathers blacken to wilted spinach. The grip loosens. Its structure collapses, and everything else goes with. Deserved it.

 

The ocean, the waves recede. Sound is returned, and it’s quiet. He watches it die.

 

**

 

They run with the bats clasped against their bodies, blood and shit and straw in their hair. Only a few hundred yards to the safety of a deep eroded streambed and a thin strip of oak trees, relict memory of forest amid acres of abandoned farmland. They lean back against the tall clay, panting, still clutching their weapons. Their only tools, only defense. Weasel shakily smudges a tear from his eye, leaving blood.
 

The water hurries past their feet as the drumbeat softens and slows. Escobar straightens and spits into it derisively. Styrofoam and splinters. He turns to Weasel.

 

“Does it feel better?”

Weasel spits too, touches his ribs, his lip, his eye. Still hurts. But he had forgotten.

“Yeah.” He breathes in sharp. Out, slow and shaky. “Yeah. Fuck yeah.”

“Fuck yeah.”