When he was forced to put his wife away in a public asylum, Mr. Kurtz became determined that his son would succeed. He didn’t want Ralph to be a grease monkey, to learn how to take things apart and put them together again. He wanted his son to go to college and make a lot of money so his wife could be in a private asylum, where the patients weren’t chained to the walls. He didn’t want Ralph anywhere near him or the garage. The boy was standing in front of him now, and Mr. Kurtz saw the parts of himself—helpless, uncertain—that he wanted to forget. He began to rub his nose. Ralph braced. He knew it was the windup.

Later Ralph slipped out his bedroom window and rode his bicycle to the Mintons’ farm. There were faint glimmers of movement in the yard. He smelled hay and the damp scent of lost feathers. He crouched next to the fence.

A small group of birds moved across the yard, snoods waving like pendulums in the breeze. The moonlight reflected the white in their wings. Ralph caught his breath as they approached him. He could see the bubbling of skin on their heads. The surface looked impressionable, like poured red wax. They watched Ralph as if they already knew his thoughts.

“Am I nuts?” he asked.

He could feel the turkeys moving closer.

Mrs. Minton stood in the doorway, forcing a smile. Joey Rudolph was on her porch, and he was looking for her son. She’d guessed why the teacher had put the boys together: a crazy kid, a bastard, the sick son of a turkey farmer. They were all on the outskirts. Whatever happened to Danny, she would feel it was her fault. “He’s cleaning out the shelters.”

Mr. Minton had caught his son in the kitchen when he was supposed to be in the fields. Now Danny was raking mounds of dung and feathers out of the wooden hutches into piles, a bandanna around his nose and mouth. The turkeys huddled together away from him, warbling impatiently.

“I’ve been thinking,” Joey shouted when he got close enough. “Maybe we could go on a trip or something.”

“Where?”

“Well,” Joey said from the fence, “just away from here for a start.”

Danny thought about the way his father had looked when he walked into the kitchen. Good for nothing, Mr. Minton had shouted. You don’t care about anything! But Danny cared about many things. He was fourteen years old. He cared about what his father thought, he cared about pleasing his mother, he cared about losing his virginity, and he cared about his friends.