Chicken (2 page)

I can’t look at him standing over that stupid grill anymore, all paunchy and proud like some oblivious old gelding puffing himself up for the mares. I turn back to the line, opening my mouth to ask the next haggard mom what she needs, but a flash of something nude over her shoulder gets my words all tangled up in a smirk.

Brant Mitchell has finally bothered to show up.

He’s standing near the end of the line, dusty old cowboy hat cocked back on his head, left thumb hooked in the pocket of his blue jeans, right hand fiddling with the silver dogtag dangling from his neck. His brown eyes are bleary—maybe tired, more likely high—and his lips are mumble-singing “Testify to Love” along with the hyperactive pop-praise band on Sister Sharon’s radio.

“Gimme the works,” says the woman in front of me, wiggling her tar-stained fingers over all the little Tupperware containers between us. “But no onions. Or tomatoes. Or mayonnaise.”

That’s not really the works then, but okay, whatever, lady. I tear off another square of foil and start building her burger. I can feel Brant in the air, a tingle that starts on my skin then worms its way underneath, burrowing through my muscles and into my bones until every part of me feels heavy and fuzzy like an ankle that’s been sat on ’til it’s fallen asleep.

Brant Mitchell is beautiful.

I am not supposed to know that, but I do.

I know it even when he’s not surrounded by a dozen members of Hickory Ditch’s most tragically dressed and morbidly obese, but I know it even more when he is. Not because he makes them look bad, but because he makes them look better. Everyone knows Brant—they’ve seen him leading worship or helping his dad mend their fence or climbing a tree to save their daughter’s dumb cat—and whenever they see him, their frowns flip over and their shoulders un-slump and their eyes get a little less empty. Like they know he’s the only good thing this town has going for it, so they’d better shape up if they want to keep him around. In the ninety seconds since he appeared, I swear that three people quit smoking, two people re-dedicated their lives to the Lord, and at least one woman realized it’s time to leave her good-for-nothin’ husband and get some self-respect.

I’m no different. I stand taller, spread my shoulders, flex my jaw so it looks a little more square. Run a hand through my damp hair even though Mama told Daddy to put me in a hairnet if he caught me doing that so much as once. “Nobody wants ginger on their burger,” she said, and then she laughed and laughed and laughed, which made me kind of pissed since she helps herself to a professional color job every six weeks while I have to navigate the social minefield of this town not just redheaded and ghostly, but wearing oversized two-dollar yard-sale jeans. I hitch them up one-handed now.

Brant’s jeans are also slipping, not because they’re too big, but because he’s so skinny. I can see the sharp outline of his hip bones through his sweaty youth-group tee. It looks exactly the same as the one I’m wearing, only mine is blue and his is nude because when he saw that word on the order form, he got to giggling so much we all thought he’d die or at least puke. But we were the ones laughing when the shirts arrived, and Brother Mackey handed him this one that’s a sickly shade of beige, ten times paler and pinker than any part of Brant Mitchell could ever be.

“I said no mayonnaise!”

I drop the plastic bottle mid-squeeze. A glob falls on the table, but the burger remains pure. The woman sighs anyway. I wrap things up quick and hand the burger over to Sister Sharon. Next customer, I break the rules and skip the eye contact because I can’t look up without looking at Brant, and I can’t look at Brant without screwing things up, so I focus on the clumsy movements of my fuzzy, freckled hands and remind myself that even if Brant Mitchell were like me, there’s no way he’d waste such dangerous feelings on liking me. 

I make it through four more burgers before I have to steal another glance. He’s only three people away, no longer singing, just staring off to the side at something I can’t see. Pretty girl, probably. A tuft of farmboy-blond curls blooms from the space between his sun-burnt forehead and his off-white hat. The looser curls behind his oversized ears show up flaxen against his genuine red neck. If he were a colt, he’d be a sorrel Quarter, one of those yearlings that’s lean and stocky all at once—long legs, broad shoulders, hollow flanks.

I bite my lip and look away.

There’s a heavy lady in a tent-size purple T-shirt with three howling wolves screen-printed across her breasts. She wants a burger with cheese and pickles and more pickles, and I realize she’s kind of fat but mostly pregnant. Telling her we ran out of pickles an hour ago is the scariest thing that’s happened all day.

Next woman is already a mom, and she needs one burger with everything, one burger with nothing, one burger with ketchup and mayonnaise, one burger with lettuce and onions and mustard, one burger with ketchup and tomatoes, and one burger without any meat, just lettuce and onions and tomatoes and cheese. 

An old man asks for double meat, but then complains when the finished product is too tall for his mouth and insists I mash it down to a manageable height, which I do, causing a gag-inducing mixture of mustard, mayonnaise, and meat juice to slop over the sides. I wrap it up and pass it to Sister Sharon, who kindly hands me a stack of rough brown napkins, which are fine for scrubbing the gunk off my hands but useless for scrubbing it off my sensory memory.

And then the heels of Brant Mitchell’s hands settle on the edge of the table and he’s leaning over the paper plates and plastic containers, saying, “Okay, I want four pieces of bread and four pieces of cheese and four pieces of meat. Stack ’em however you like because it’s all going to the same place.” He pats his stomach, which is hard and flat under that nude shirt but nowhere close to six- or even four-packed.

I smooth out the foil and make a burger like this: meat, bottom bun, two slices of cheese, top bun, meat. Brant laughs, so I tear off another square and do it again. I wrap them up and pass them to Sister Sharon. She makes a weird face when she squeezes them, like a guy feeling up boobs and figuring out they’re full of silicone and not whatever it is boobs are supposed to be full of. She shakes her head and starts punching numbers on her calculator.

But Brant doesn’t follow his burgers to Sister Sharon’s table. He keeps leaning on mine so hard it creaks and tilts toward him. His grin is lazy and dimpled, an accidental invitation to eternal damnation.

“Been here long?”

I resist the urge to touch my hair again. “About four hours.”

“Dang,” he says, and the word sounds as funny and false as it always does coming from the mouth of someone who loves to swear but can’t right now because there’s church folks around.

“Dang,” I say, and it doesn’t sound as funny because I don’t swear much out loud even when no one’s around.

“About time for a break, ain’t it?”

“I wish. But nobody else signed up for a shift.”

Brant clucks his tongue. “It’s almost like they don’t even want to go see The Passion Play .”

I tilt my head back, lift my eyebrows. “Is that what it’s almost like?”

Brant lifts his hands, widens his grin. “Just observing, not confessing.”

The Passion Play is one of those outdoor Jesus re-enactment shows with live camels and stuff. It’s up in Eureka Springs, a couple hours from here. I’ve never been, but most of the youth group kids—the lifers like Hannah and Brant—have been four or five times courtesy of fundraisers like this. Some have families that drag them every single summer, like they can’t remember from one year to the next how it ends. Well, I’ve seen the Mel Gibson version and I ain’t ever gonna forget, so I’m not sure this field trip can do much for me spiritually, but there’s one thing it can do and that’s get me out of Hickory Ditch for one whole day.

I sweep bread crumbs and purple onion pieces off the table into the eager pincers of the ants swarming around my dangling boot laces. “So what’s Brant Mitchell’s excuse?”

“I’ve got to sing tonight.” He scratches his throat. “Can’t have that grill smoke irritating my vokes.”

“Ah, well, of course. And I’m sure you’ve been taking similar precautions with other types of smoke?”

His grin closes, but the dimples remain. He cocks an eyebrow and shakes a finger at me. “You, Casper Quinn, are an observant man, and for that, I am busting you out of this prison.”

He takes off his hat and holds it over his heart like he’s about to say the Pledge of Allegiance. “Hey, Brother Russ, can Casper run over and watch the Hop with me? I’ll bring him right back and help out some, okay?”

Daddy turns from the grill, gestures at my table with his dripping spatula. “That’s a nice offer, Brant, but I don’t have anyone else to apply the condiments.”

“I bet Sister Sharon could manage to apply the condiments for a little bit.”

Brant’s eyes swoop over to Sister Sharon, and in that moment, he bears such a remarkable resemblance to Shrek’s Puss-in-Boots that I know she’ll never fall for it. No one can get away with pouring it on that thick.

But I underestimate him. Sister Sharon smiles and flaps her hands in the universal gesture of get on out of here. I duck under the table and pop up  beside Brant before Daddy can disagree.

“But I hope you know how to use a calculator, Brant Mitchell, because there are some darlin’ bags I want to take a look at before the booth closes up.” Sister Sharon hands him his burgers and a wet-from-the-cooler bottle of water he didn’t order.

Brant plucks a clear straw from the tin can beside the old calculator and slips it under his feathered hatband “I pick things up quick, ma’am.”

He places the hat back on his head, tips it in her direction, and flashes that lazy, dimpled grin. She doesn’t charge him a penny.

Somewhere in the park, probably at the same gazebo where the Miss Liberty contestants duked it out last night, someone—either a forty-two-year-old woman with a regular voice or a ten-year-old girl with a big voice—tries and fails to cover Martina McBride’s “Independence Day.” Brant does a better job walking along beside me, sloshing water from his bottle as he mimics the punchy power gesture common to all pop-country divas of the nineties, putting so much soul into the dark lyrics that some of these tourists might assume he, too, comes from a home so broken his mama will set it on fire this afternoon. He doesn’t, but if his daddy catches him belting such a worldly tune, he’ll burn him at the stake for sure.

Our elbows brush—an unspoken agreement that in a crowd as thick as this it’s better to rub against each other than any of these sweaty strangers who reek of soured baby bottles, roasted peanuts, and cigarettes. Always cigarettes. My throat feels thick and chunky from all the smoke and I ain’t even opened my mouth. So much for protecting Brant’s vokes. 

The song ends, and after a garbled introduction and a screech of mic feedback, some good ol’ bro starts warbling one of them country songs about America’s epic amount of freedom. There’s a quick fiddle riff that sounds alright to me, but Brant snorts and shakes his head like a horse with a bee in its ear. He peels back the foil on one of his inverted burgers—I’m holding the other—and all but unhinges his jaw for a bite that would choke a hound dog. His teeth cut through the meat and grease pours down his chin, dribbles onto his chest. 

He stops in the middle of the path, eyes wide and mouth clamped on the burger. Dark spots spread like TV blood stains across his precious nude shirt. A couple of people bump into us, grumble at us, but Brant doesn’t budge. He finishes the bite, chewing real slow like he’s preparing to digest some terrible news along with all that meat and bread and cheese. Finally, he swallows, sweaty Adam’s apple bobbing.

He downs half his water, and then pushes the bottle at me while his cheeks are still bulging. I take a quick but greedy swig, praying he won’t realize this is something I’d only ever do after him. We swallow at the same time.

He mops his face with the inside of his shirt neck. “You know, there are reasons, Casper.”

I wipe my wet chin on my shoulder. “Reasons, Brant?”

He drops his shirt and flattens his brow. “Why you shouldn’t take me seriously when I say stupid shit.”

There are two parks in Hickory Ditch—Blue Park on the north side of the Ditch and Gray Park on the south. This is a blatant attempt by city planners to bring Civil War tourism to a town that didn’t exist until thirty years after the Civil War ended. That’s the kind of town I live in now. The kind that wishes it had existed in time to be part of the Civil War. This likely explains why there are only two skin tones present out on the Blue Park’s amphitheater lawn today—white and will-be-white-again-come-winter.

We didn’t bring a blanket, so instead of sprawling like everyone else, we’re sitting on one of the low stone walls terracing the sloped field, both of us hunched over, elbows on our knees. Brant clutches his second burger with both hands, ripping off a new bite the second he starts swallowing the last. He hasn’t said a word since we sat down, but I know better than to chatter at him the way the church girls do. He gets like this—one minute singing, next minute sulking—and there’s no use trying to draw him out. When he wants to talk, he won’t shut up, so when he is shut up, I reckon that’s exactly what he wants to be.

I dangle my hands between my knees, casting spidery shadows on the trampled yellow grass between my boots. Six hours to go until the fireworks show, but there’s hardly another patch of grass visible in the strips of lawn between the stone walls. Parents doze on ratty old blankets while their bare-chested, ketchup-crusted children chase each other along the walls with colorful, inflatable swords.

A few yards to my left a shirtless guy and bikini-clad girl make out on a pale, fuzzy snowman-printed blanket. He paws at the side of her breast, making it jiggle inside her barely-big-enough top. I can see their shiny, wet tongues poking in and out of each other’s mouths in the moments when their lips part, and I can’t help but think that if Brant and I were allowed to behave that way in public, we’d do it a little more artfully. The guy opens his eyes, catches me staring, and even with his mouth so very busy he finds a way to smirk.