Chicken (9 page)

Brant kicks off his boots and drops his hat on the hood of the truck. The wavy hair on top is golden and dry, but the back is damp and brown, plastered to his scars. He starts peeling off his soaked shirt, shoulder blades kicking under the translucent cotton like a newborn calf struggling out of its sac. He yanks it over his head and tosses it on the dusty concrete in front of the screen door, behind which there’s a splintered wooden door standing open, letting out the sounds of running water, clinking dishes, and inspirational family radio. 

He presses his face against the screen and hollers, “Mama! Could you bring me and Casper some dry clothes? Boxers too!”

Sister Cindy doesn’t reply, but the water shuts off and tired feet shuffle across cheap linoleum. Brant leans his back against the door’s metal mid-beam, folding his arms over his bare chest. His sharp hip bones poke over the drooping band of his waterlogged jeans. I look away.

Left of the door, there’s an enormous deep freezer where the Mitchells store venison and other wild meats. Heavy brown tools hang on a pegboard above it. Wrenches. Axe heads. Lumberjack saws. A giant bear trap that’s probably illegal. Man things. Stuff that Brant will transfer to his own garage one day when his father dies in the real future where we don’t share a home or a cat, probably don’t even know each other at all.

Brant reaches into his pocket and comes out with a crumpled black straw. He blows off the lint. “Do you know what it does to me, Casper?”

I squirm in my clingy, wet pants. “What does what do?”

Brant puts the straw in the corner of his mouth, leans an elbow against the wall. “Leaving this house every day, seeing this junk every day. You know what that does to a man?”

I scratch the mosquito bites on the back of my neck. “Can’t say that I do.”

“Makes me hungry.” He scowls at the old brown tools. “For a Cracker Barrel breakfast.”

I roll my eyes, but now that I think about it, he’s right. The tools do look like something you’d find hanging on the walls of a Cracker Barrel restaurant. Suddenly, I have a fierce craving for bacon. Unfortunately, Cracker Barrels exist only in cities on the Interstate, and Hickory Ditch is not on the Interstate.

Brant pulls out the straw, blows make-believe smoke at the ceiling. “You have any idea what it’s like to live with an unscratchable itch like this?”

I scratch another bite on the side of my face. “Conway ain’t that far. They serve breakfast all day.”

He grins. “Alright, I’ll tell my mom we’re skipping church, and then we’ll tell yours we’re going for a ride in my truck.”

I lift my hands, take a step back. “On second thought.”

Brant sticks the straw between his teeth. “So you reckon I could sell ’em this crap after the old man kicks the bucket?”

I move over between the truck and the freezer. “I think they got enough saws, but maybe the trap. Yeah. The trap for sure.”

“Nah, that’s the only thing I’ll want to keep.”

“What are you gonna do with a bear trap?”

He pries a piece of mud off his stomach. “Hang it on my wall.”

“Why don’t you just sell it to Cracker Barrel, and then eat there every day?”

Brant grins and slaps the wall, making the smaller tools quiver on their pegs. “You know what you ought to be when you grow up? A conflict resolutionist.”

I frown. “That sounds like a girl job.”

“Nope. Guys can do it. Especially guys like you.”

I’m not sure if his words put the chill in me or if I’m just now noticing that the water in my shirt has gone cold. “Guys like me?”

Brant lowers the straw, exhales. “Yeah, you know. Nice guys. Sensitive guys. What’d the hippies say? Guys who make love not war?”

I jam my hands in my pockets to hitch up my soggy pants. “I could make war if I wanted.”

“Sure, but you don’t ’cause you’re too busy with the other.” He leans in, rests his arms on the dusty freezer, and wiggles his eyebrows. “Am I right?”

“Wrong.” I comb a hand through my sopping hair. “You know Hannah took the pledge.”

Brant snorts. “Her and every girl on Teen Mom.”

“And you, as I recall.”

He shrugs and grabs his crotch. “Can’t let Han and Chewie fall into the wrong hands.”

My nose wrinkles up. “Seriously? Chewie? That’s a terrible name for a testicle.”

He smirks. “You’ll soon see that you’re wrong.”

I use the hand still in my pocket to tug the fabric away from my own junk. I consider telling him how Hannah’s pledge prevents her from touching or even seeing my balls, but did nothing to keep her from naming them Fred and George.

“Anyway, you’re the one who breaks up fights. You be a conflict revolutionary.”

“That’s crisis prevention, not conflict resolution, you dumb cowpoke. I keep bad things from happening. You come up with better ways to do shit.”

He cringes and looks over his shoulder because if his mother heard him say that word, she’d wash his mouth out with lye soap for sure. 

“You sound like a man who’s been talking with Doctor Sister McKee.” 

“Yep. You know.” He flicks his straw in the general direction of the trash bins. “For my impulse control issues.”

He leapfrogs onto the freezer, landing on his knuckles and socked toes. Then he throws back his head, claws at his chest, and lets loose a terrible howl that cracks in the middle when he takes it too high. I brace myself for the pounce, but it still slams my knees into the truck’s sagging front fender. Brant ropes his wiry arms around my torso, jabs his hip bones into my guts, and shakes me from side to side, snarling and screaming, snapping his jaws around my shoulders and neck. 

I shove him off, hard enough that his butt hits the edge of the freezer. He yelps and grabs at his rear end, takes off running around the garage, knocking things over on purpose. He throws a gas can into the air, and I duck for cover, but it lands on the rough, concrete floor with a hollow, plastic thud.

He plunges out the door into the rain, does a figure eight around the broke-down trucks, beating on his chest like a monkey but yowling like a sick cat. The beagles join him. Brant snatches up a tri-colored puppy, pulls its floppy scruff between his lips and mimes biting it, or at least I think he’s miming. Surely he’s not wild enough to eat a puppy.

The screen door squeals and slams against the concrete wall. “Brant Mitchell! You stop acting like a demoniac this instant! Put that puppy down!”

Brant cringes and drops the wiggling pup into the whirlpool of hounds. He wades back, spitting fur and wiping his lips. Now all of his curls are brown and stuck to his scalp. Inside the garage, he pauses to shake himself. 

“I was being a werewolf, not a demoniac.”

“Same thing, Brant David. Don’t open doors you don’t know how to close.” 

Sister Cindy is a small woman made large by her hair. It rises in a fountain of large, sprayed curls before spilling over in a mass of tightly-coiled ringlets that cascade down her shoulders like two giant poodle ears resting atop her denim-encased bosom. She holds a stack of folded clothes in front of each enormous breast. I take the one she offers me and turn around quick, before she can notice the fading outline of the boner her son’s antics gave me.

Brant saunters over, his dark wet jeans sliding down his butt in a style definitely not allowed around here. He takes the clothes from his mama, who purses her lips at his cocky grin. She goes back inside, and as soon as the door slams, Brant wiggles his hips and his jeans melt right off his legs.

I keep my eyes on the clothes I’ve laid out on the hood of the truck, pressing my crotch against the grill and trying to think about awful things. The mangled pieces of the Pitcher boys come to mind, and I wonder why no one tells stories about their ghosts roaming the Ditch, looking for lost souls to take home to Satan.

“Hurry up,” Brant barks. “It’ll be time for church at this rate.”

I take off my shirt and toss it on the hood with a loud thwack. I feel his gaze on my back, and looking down at myself, see the softness on me that he’s never possessed. Love handles, Hannah calls them, though she always stops just short of handling them. I suck in my furry, freckled stomach, unbuckle my frayed canvas belt, and drop my camo pants. They look like wet mulch raked up around my feet.

“Stop looking at me, weirdo.” I glare over my shoulder and get an eyeful of everything. He wasn’t lying—the ball on the left is clearly a Wookie.

“Relax.” He takes a pair of green boxer-briefs off the top of his stack. “I’m just conditioning you.”

“For what?”

I try to kick my pants aside, but they’re stuck on my boots.

“Locker room this year.” His boxers rustle as he pulls them up his hairy legs. “They pick on you because they smell your fear. You gotta show ’em you don’t care.”

I stand up straight, kick off my left boot. “I’ve been in locker rooms before, stupid. I ain’t scared.”

“All right. Show me. Drop those tighty-whities.”

I watch the blush bleeding down my arms swallow my freckles whole. I look back at Brant, at the smirking mixture of challenge and confident disbelief on his face. A volcano of defiance erupts in my chest, shooting hot plumes of stupid up my spine and into my brain. I picture us clashing antlers like a couple of yearling bucks, pushing against each other, testing our strength for the hell of it, not for winning any does. Blood surges through my veins, pulsating in my throat and my stomach and the inside of my thigh, hardest of all in my ears and the fleshy part of my hand. But I don’t get hard because for one impossible moment I am totally in control of my feelings and my body.

I yank down my underwear, ready to turn around and introduce him to Fred and George, but the wet cotton briefs cling to my ankles, tripping me up. I catch myself on the metal ram perched on the hood of the truck, and it screams, loud and rusty, while Brant Mitchell howls at my full moon.

Brant opens his mouth, shoves half a hotdog inside, bites it off, chews. Takes a slug of water, and then eats the second half the same way. As soon as his glass hits the table, Sister Cindy dips her plastic salad tongs into the big blue pot boiling on the stove and pulls out another weenie. She flops it onto his plate where it immediately leaves a red stain because it takes an awful lot of food coloring to make something called a weenie look like something a human wants to eat. Brant takes a bun from the bag in the center of the table and uses it like an oven mitt to pick up the so-called beef.

I cut mine into seven little bites. Normal guys like Brant don’t have to worry about anyone commenting on the way they eat, but nice guys, sensitive guys, guys who make love not war, guys who are chickens and conflict resolutionists—we do. It’s irritating because if everyone would just settle down about sex for a second they might realize that these weenies bear only a passing resemblance to our wieners and that it was stupid to ever start comparing the two. The world is full of cylinders and tubes and shafts that don’t have to be double entendres, and I am wearing Brant’s boxers and need to think about something else.

I chug from a can of off-brand soda that don’t taste anything like the name-brand soda it’s supposed to mimic. The Mitchells ain’t rich, but I know they aren’t hurting enough to need to settle for this. I reckon Sister Cindy just wants to look humble in the check-out line at Walmart. Same as how she strives to be the most humble woman at church by wearing homemade ankle-length jumpers that turn her into a shuffling denim tube.

Brant groans when she turns off the stove. 

Sister Cindy sighs. “And they shall say unto the elders of his city: this our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice. He is a glutton.”

“And a drunkard!” Brant tips an invisible bottle to his lips. “Deuteronomy 21:20.”

His mother shakes her salad tongs at him. “Wine is a mocker. Strong drink is raging. And whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise. Proverbs 20:1.”

“Ah, yes, but—The Son of man came eating and drinking, and they say, Behold a man gluttonous, and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners. But wisdom is justified of her children.” He slaps the table. “Matthew 11:19.”

And here it is. The reason I should pray make it stop instead of make it happen. Because it can’t. Brant’s future has been decided. This time next year he’ll be packing his bags for some school down in Texas where all the good Pentecostals go. He’ll major in Biblical Studies and minor in Worship Ministry, and four years later, he’ll come home with side-parted hair and a humble yet fertile wife, ready to fulfill the two deepest desires of his parents’ heart—a home full of God-fearin’ grandbabies and a church without Mackey’s troubling modern ways. 

I nibble at the cold hotdog pieces on my paper plate while Brant and his mom volley increasingly complicated Scriptures back and forth ’til they might as well be speaking in tongues. They do that in church all the time—speak in actual tongues. Not Brant, but his parents. One second, Brother Dean will be leading us in a chorus of “The Good Old Gospel Ship” and Sister Cindy will be jangling away on her tambourine, and then suddenly they’ll just start jabbering like a couple of auctioneers. Auctioneers who often get so moved by their patter that they sob and moan and fall flat on their backs like those funny goats you see on YouTube. It’s called being slain in the Spirit—when it happens to Christians, not the goats—and it’s pretty much the most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen, but I can’t say that out loud to anyone because blaspheming the Holy Spirit is the only sin that can’t be forgiven.

Sometimes I think about doing it. To take all this pressure off. Then I’d know for sure where I’m going when I die, and I wouldn’t have to worry, wouldn’t have to be afraid of the way that wearing Brant’s old ringer tee makes my body burn in a way that kissing my girlfriend never does. People could scream all they want that I’m going to Hell, and I could shrug and say, You’re right, I am, but not because I’m in love with Brant.

“Casper, are you feeling okay?” 

Sister Cindy presses the back of her hand to my forehead. Her skin is rough from decades of humbly washing dishes in the sink. I look at Brant, but he’s staring out the screen door into the carport, chewing at a dirty hangnail on his right index finger.