T-Man shakes his head. They hear voices down Lagoon, an argument, maybe a crowd gathering.

“You hear that?” asks T-Man.

“Yeah, yeah.” Simon turns his reddening ear upwind. “Yeah I hear it.”

They start walking down Lagoon to the lake, turning their heads right and left at each intersection. A couple of cars stroll glumly past, trailing bluish exhaust.

The voices grow louder. It sounds like an auction mixed with the barking of kenneled dogs.

“Jesus, we’re missing some action,” says T-Man. He walks ahead of Simon, craning his neck in every direction.

Simon stops. “Hey, T-Man. Those aren’t people.”

“No?”

“Naw. They’re geese. Listen.”

Sure enough, through the murmur and low city noises they hear the rubbery bark of geese mixed with the throaty chatter of ducks.

“Why didn’t they fly south for the winter?”

“Why didn’t we?”

“Yeah, yeah, good point. Let’s go down there.”

So they walk again, quickening their pace, and cross Calhoun Parkway, dead of traffic. Along the iced bank they see hundreds of geese. Some sit up on shore stabbing at the brown grass. Others pump along in the freezing surface while still more set their wings and tilt in with a splash. Mallards skitter over the water to get out of the way.

Simon and T-Man walk up to the shore. The geese part and close in behind them. A couple jog by on the path, eyeing the geese and Simon and T-Man as they try not to step in the scattered goose shit.

“They’re bigger than they look,” says T-Man, squinting at a gander beating his wings against his breast and shaking them back into place again.

“Hey goose,” he says. He takes a half-step toward the gander.

The goose pushes his chest out and rushes toward T-Man.

“Whoa! Whoa! Mean fuckers, too!”

The gander backs away and starts combing the ground with his beak for food invisible to Simon and T-Man.

“Yeah,” says Simon, “and messy.”

The shore is slicked solid with goose dung.

“You know how to cook one of these things?” asks T-Man.

“Sure,” says Simon. “Rip off their feathers, throw them in an over and turn it on.”

“Let’s kill one,” says T-Man.

“How?”

“Strangle him. Can’t be that hard. Looks like they only weigh about twenty-five. You’re all of two hundred.”

Simon looks over the gathered geese and shivers into his collar. His feet hurt and snot drains slowly from his nose onto his upper lip. He shrugs his shoulders.

“Come on, Simon. All this food … just sittin here. Just reach out and grab his neck and twist his fuckin head off.”