Why Peacocks? by Sean Flynn

Author:Sean Flynn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2021-05-11T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

Monday morning, Burkett was in blue scrubs, wide-eyed by the side of Julie’s desk. “Man,” he said, slowly shaking his head, “this just keeps getting worse.”

“It’s been two days,” I said. “How much more could go wrong?”

“It’s all the stuff that was already wrong,” he said, turning toward the back and motioning for me to follow him. “I’m still finding things out.”

Carl was on the operating table, standing up, eyes closed and wrapped in blankets, a bandage taped to his neck about halfway down. The floor was littered with bloody swabs and torn packaging of medical supplies. Burkett had been pulling rubble out of my bird for hours, all of which he’d collected in stainless-steel bowls. There were pebbles and sparkles of glass and undigested feed and bits of his stomach lining that looked like soggy rice paper. There was also that donut we saw in the X-ray. It was a copper grommet, almost the size of my fingertip.

“He’s gotta have copper poisoning, too,” Burkett said.

“Bad?”

“Really bad. Very toxic. Don’t see it often, though. I had a chicken come in a few months ago, got it from a pebble with a little speck of copper ore in it.”

Carl had a whole grommet in his gut.

Burkett’s theory was that Carl had scratched the grommet out of the dirt—it could have been there from an old tarp that rotted away fifty years ago—got a stomachache, and ate all the pebbles and other rubble to make himself feel better, except he only made himself sicker because some of that rubble was poisonous. There was, oddly, some relief in that. After Saturday’s diagnosis of lead poisoning, Louise had an acute panic that Carl had picked it up from the dust around the barn. Considering the boys used to run around in that dust, and still played hockey and basketball in the old hayloft, she was already researching lead-abatement companies. Because the idea that you might have done permanent neurological damage to your children is the kind of anxious thought that has to be promptly addressed, I deployed the most sophisticated diagnostic tool I could find on a Saturday afternoon: a couple of store-bought lead-test kits, the ones that tell you if the ancient paint on the windowsill is toxic. I rubbed fiber swabs in a dozen different spots around the garbage coop that afternoon. The results were all negative, which was encouraging but, I assumed, not scientifically reliable.

If Carl’s primary problem was a chunk of copper in his belly, that was good news. If he’d given himself lead poisoning from eating pebbles flecked with lead and, most likely, fragments of actual lead, instead of breathing in ambient dust, then Louise could stop pricing out decontamination procedures. I was making some optimistic leaps, but none of the other birds was sick, and the pediatrician had never raised concerns. The toxins, it seemed, were contained to Carl.

I stroked the back of his neck and he opened his eyes halfway, then shut them again. He was groggy from the anesthesia.

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