Demonology by Rick Moody Page A

reminded me of a retarded
     kid I knew in grammar school, Zechariah Dunbar. He’s dead now. Anyway, the point is that ostriches are always trying to hold
     down other ostriches, by sitting on them, in order to fuck these other ostriches, without any regard to whether it’s a boy
     or girl animal they’re trying toget next to. And speaking of sex and ostriches, I’m almost sure that the men who worked on my father’s farm tried to have
     their way with the Rancho Double Zero product. With a brain so small, it was obvious that the ostrich would never feel loving
     congress with some heartbroken Midwestern hombre as any kind of bodily insult. Actually, it’s amazing that the pea-sized brain
     in these ostrich skulls could operate the other end of them. Amazing that electrical transmissions could make it that far,
     what with that huge bulky midsection that was
all red meat,
hundreds of pounds of it, as every brochure will tell you,
but with a startlingly low fat content.
In fact,
tastes like chicken,
as my grandma said before the choking incident. Okay, it was almost like the ostrich was some kind of bird. But it didn’t
     look like a bird, and when there were three or four hundred of them, running around in a herd at fifty miles an hour, flattening
     rodents, trying to have sex with each other, three or four hundred of them purchased with a precarious loan from Buckeye Savings
     and Trust, well, they looked more like conventioneers from some Holiday Inn assembly of extinct species. You expected a mating
     pair of wooly mammoths or a bunch of saber-toothed tigers to show up any moment.
    I’m getting away from the story, though. I really meant to talk about ostrich eggs. After ten years of trying to get the Rancho
     Double Zero to perform fiscally, my parents had to sell the whole thing and declare bankruptcy. That’s the sad truth. But
     it was no shame. Everybody they knew was bankrupt. Everybody in Bidwell, practically, had a lien on their bank account. When
     we were done with the Double Zero, we had nothing left but a bunch of ostrich eggs, the kind that my parents used to sell
     out in front of the farm, under acanopy, for people who came out driving. There were three signs, a quarter mile apart,
See the Ostriches! Two Miles!
And then another half-mile.
Ostrich eggs! Five dollars each!
Then another.
Feed the ostriches! If you dare!
    I remember giving the feeding lecture myself to a couple from back East. They were the only people who’d volunteered to feed
     the ostriches in weeks. I handed them the Cleveland Indians cups. They were dressed up fine.
You can either put some of this corn in your hand and hold it out for the ostriches, but I sure wouldn’t do that myself because
     I’ve seen them pick up a little kid and whirl him around like he was a handkerchief and throw him over a fence, bust his neck
     clean through. Or you can hold out the cup and the ostriches will try to trample each other to death to get right in front
     of you, and then one of those pinheads will descend with incredible force, steal the entire cup away. Or else you can just
     scatter some corn at the base of the electrified fence there and get the heck out of the way, which is certainly what I’d
     do if I were you.
Who would come to Bidwell from anywhere, I was asking myself, unless they were trying to avoid a massive interstate manhunt?
     Probably this couple, right here, laughing at the poor dumb birds, probably they were the kind of people who would sodomize
     an entire preschool of kids, rob a rich lady on Park Avenue, hide her body, grind up some teenagers, and then disappear to
     manage their investments.
    Anyhow, that ranch came and went and soon we were in a used El Dorado with 120,000 miles on it. I was in the backseat, with
     five dozen unrefrigerated ostrich eggs. Dad was forty-eight, or thereabouts, and he was bald, and he was paunchy, and, because
     of the failure of all the gold-rush schemes, he was discouraged and mean. If