Chicken
Authors: Chase Night
Contents
C
HICKEN
CHASE NIGHT
Asymmetrical Press
Missoula, Montana
“If I have the gift of prophecy
and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge,
and if I have a faith that can move mountains,
but do not have love, I am nothing.
– I CORINTHIANS 13:2
WEDNESDAY, JULY 4, 2012
In the summer of 1994, in a steamy valley between the Ozark and Ouachita mountains of western Arkansas, the sleepy—alright, let’s be honest, comatose—town of Hickory Ditch woke up just long enough to celebrate the fourteenth annual, three-day, Fourth of July festival known as Ditch Daze, which is either a too-cutesy pun on the word days or a too-true description of how a person feels after consuming sixteen pounds of funnel cake and eight gallons of lemonade in a seventy-two hour time frame. Or could be that it’s both. Lord knows these people love their double entendres. The pet groomer who calls her shop Doggie Style, for instance. But then again, nobody over the age of thirty seems to get the joke, so scratch all that. Ditch Daze is probably just called Ditch Daze because people here are dumb.
Nineteen-ninety-four marked one hundred years of existence for Hickory Ditch, and that’s the year my mama, Janet Denise MacWilliams, beat out seventeen girls from Hickory Ditch High and two from Victory Christian for the title of Miss Centennial Liberty Queen. This was a little different than being crowned regular Miss Liberty Queen any other year because instead of a five-hundred-dollar scholarship to Hickory Ditch Community College, Mama received a two-thousand-dollar scholarship, which back then would have just about seen her through an Associate’s Degree.
But what really mattered to her—and what ultimately mattered to me—was that she got to ride on the trunk of a cherry-red Corvette convertible during the Centennial Freedom Parade and throw candy at children, all of whom she recalls—and she recalls it pretty regular, it being the high point of her life and all—were wearing at least one item of clothing featuring at least one character from The Lion King, which is why it was on her mind later that afternoon when my daddy, Russell Wyatt Quinn of Plano, Texas, approached her with hat in hand and asked if she “might like to do something” that evening.
Daddy did not mean to be in Hickory Ditch that day—very few people have ever meant to be in Hickory Ditch—but the combination of a hangover and sketchy directions from a toothless salesman at a fireworks stand got him turned around on his way up from Dallas to a stock show in Fort Smith. With his bull-broken nose and tobacco-stained teeth, he was not the Brad Pitt look-alike that Mama had been dreaming of, but he was tall and tan and twenty-one, and since she was short and fair and only halfway through seventeen, she said yes, she “might like to see The Lion King.”
Daddy took her to the seven o’clock show—she told my grandparents she was going with Miss Centennial Congeniality—and they held hands right away and probably did some other stuff right away, but they have never mentioned any of that, praise Jesus. The credits rolled as the fireworks began, and Mama swears you could feel the love that night, you really, really could, and I guess it’s true because even though Daddy found his way to Fort Smith the next morning, he did not forget his redneck, redhead beauty queen.
For the next five months, he sent her a postcard almost every other day, postcards from places like Missoula and Reno, Salt Lake City and Santa Fe, postcards with silly pictures of jackalopes and serious photos of wild mustangs grazing on the plains. Never more than a word or two scribbled on the back. Just enough to keep her from hooking up with any appropriate-aged boys under the bleachers that football season.
And then December came, bringing Mama’s eighteenth birthday and an actual envelope postmarked Casper, Wyoming. She’d have been happy with an honest-to-goodness love letter by then, but what she got was even better—a one-way ticket to somewhere that wasn’t here. Mama promptly boarded that Greyhound bus, and Daddy celebrated her arrival by even more promptly knocking her up.
Mama swears if Daddy hadn’t been such a strong-willed man, my name would have been Jonathan Taylor Quinn, but since he was—and still sort of is—a strong-willed man, my name turned out to be Casper Russell Quinn. Seems Daddy worried that people would make fun of me for being named after the adorable child star who voiced the adorable lion cub in the adorable movie that literally everyone on earth adored. So he named me after the town where he finally got to bang my mom, unaware, he swears, that the town shared its name with a chubby and emotionally needy ghost-boy who had recently made his live-action, big-screen debut in a self-titled film that a couple people remember fondly, but nowhere near Lion King fondly. More like the way they remember everything else from the nineties fondly. More like Hahaha, oh my God, can you believe we let that happen?!
Standing here now in the midst of the 32nd Annual Ditch Daze Festival, three hours into an involuntary volunteer shift at the Harvest Mission Hamburger Hut, it has become more painfully clear to me than ever that my entire sixteen—almost seventeen—years of existence are nothing but the sum of my parents’ utter inability to make good decisions.
Sweat trickles from my stupid widow’s peak to the top of my nose, every drop swerving left or right into one of my eyes. People in line for a burger probably think I’m crying, and if I don’t get out of here soon, they’ll be right. The Harvest Mission Hamburger Hut is not a hut, it’s a tent, but barely even that. Really it’s just six flimsy poles holding a giant red tarp over a double-decker charcoal grill, two long white folding tables, and a whole slew of red and blue plastic coolers packed with generic sodas, ground beef, and American cheese.
I blink the sweat out of my eyes and try to remember how I felt about this park, this town, and even these people when I was a kid and only had to visit once or twice a year. When you don’t live in Hickory Ditch, there is something undeniably magical about the smothering jungle heat and the ever-present possibility of being killed by a poisonous snake. Not to mention the blood-sucking ticks that cluster behind your knees or the grown women who wander around Walmart in their pajama bottoms and bikini tops. But when you do live here…
Well.
I pick at the scabs behind my right knee through a hole in my jeans, then use the same hand to shoo flies off the burger fixins spread out on the table in front of me. If I thought for one second that sprinkling particles of my crusted blood on the condiments would deter even one person in this line from having their lunch, I’d never do such a thing, but sanitation ain’t as big a deal around here as you’d expect it to be twelve years into the twenty-first century. The next person in line is Brother Raymond, one of the deacons at Harvest Mission Pentecostal Church, and I know for a fact that he don’t wash his hands after he pees, not even on Sunday mornings when he’s got door greeter duty.
“What can I get you, Brother Raymond?”
He rubs his flabby face, twisting his excess skin this way and that as if he really needs to think about this before announcing, “Everything!” exactly as everyone in line knew he would.
“Yessir.” I tear off a square of shiny tin foil and plop a bottom bun right on top of my own blurry reflection. I use plastic tongs, sticky with steam and my own sweat, to pluck a greasy patty from the dented metal tub on my left. Slap the wet beef on the dry bread, cover it with a slice of rubbery yellow cheese, slather it in ketchup and mustard and mayonnaise, and then bury the mess under some wilted lettuce, purple onion slivers, and a leaky tomato ring.
Brother Raymond nods his approval. “Sure is nice to see a young man serving the Lord like this. And on a holiday to boot!”
Daddy swoops in from the grill with a new batch of patties for the tub and says, “Don’t let him fool you, Ray. I’ve got him ankle-chained to this here table.”
Brother Raymond laughs, and I don’t know why it bothers me so much, but for a second, I wish I were the sort of person who would spit on his burger. But I’m not that sort of person at all, so I just smile and wrap the foil around the whole bio-hazardous disaster. I pass it over to the church secretary, Sister Sharon, and she uses a calculator—like an actual calculator that doesn’t do anything but calculate and even spits out a roll of white paper receipts—to determine that Brother Raymond owes the church three dollars for his upcoming experience with food poisoning. Mama was supposed to be our cashier today, but she had a “headache” this morning, most likely caused by not being invited to judge this year’s Miss Liberty pageant, an “oversight of the planning committee” most likely caused by us being trailer trash these days.
I put together twelve more burgers in the next eight minutes. Next time Daddy dumps patties in the tub, he elbows me on the shoulder—my shoulder only comes up to his elbow—and says, “You’ll be good enough for Socky’s soon.”
I shoot him a mean side-eye, but he don’t catch it. He’s already back at the grill, scraping gunk off the bars with a stiff-bristled brush. Running the Hamburger Hut during the Daze is just a volunteer gig—one more way he’s found to repay Jesus for letting him walk again—but he picked up his “mad grill skillz” as a part-time cook at Socky’s, the local drive-in diner, which is staffed almost entirely by high-school drop-outs, so that explains why my thirty-nine-year old father says stupid things like “mad grill skillz” now. Him working there is embarrassing enough, but he’s got this idea in his head that I should work there too. Never mind that I’ve already got a great job doing chores around Sister Bonnie’s place every morning. Daddy wants me to quit because I’m not learning any real world skillz. “Farming is finished,” he tells me at least once a week, “but fast food is forever.”
I asked him once how he figured Socky’s could stay in business if all the farmers and ranchers up and quit like him. Later, when I was done whimpering to my supposedly supportive girlfriend about the incident, she said he was wrong to smack me like that, but right about the rest because in the future all our food will come from labs and won’t even deserve to be called that. Then she shoved her hot laptop onto my crotch and made me spend so many hours filling out anti-GMO petitions that my sperm count dropped. Afterwards, she sighed glumly and said that was fun, but nothing could really be done to change the dystopian path we are on. She drove us to Socky’s and bought us two Pepsi floats and a large order of tater tots. She sipped, I slurped, we crunched, and on the other side of the window, my father limped around the kitchen, deep-frying green beans and pickles.
