Chicken (20 page)

The black shingles of the barn roof appear through the trees. I whistle. Shetan whinnies and bangs his hooves against the stall he’s been cooped up in. Brant hangs back until we’re walking side by side on this path just wide enough for small, squat dogs to march single file. Our shirtsleeves rustle against each other. 

“Third step is getting filled with the Holy Spirit.”

I bite my lip. “Do I have to?”

“If you want to stay Pentecostal. But if you start swinging Baptist in college, you won’t have to worry about it. Their buck stops here.”

“Does it feel weird?”

He shrugs, sliding his arm against mine. “I wouldn’t know.”

I lift an eyebrow. “Are you telling me we’re at the same stage in our spiritual walk?”

“Yep. I guess I’m just not reverent enough for Him.”

Our knuckles brush, and I have to jam my hand in my back pockets to keep from grabbing his. “Does that bother you? I mean, you want it to happen?”

He swings in front of me and stops me in my tracks. Our chests are so close, I can feel our hearts slamming something back and forth across the tiny sliver of air between us. His breath smells like cheeseburgers and Fritos, which is not ideal but a hell of a lot better than egg salad sandwiches. 

“Can I tell you a secret, Cas?”

I nod, unable to speak over the pounding pressure in my ears. 

He chews on his lower lip, take a deep breath. “I’m ain’t sure if that stuff’s for real.”

I blink. “No. You can’t say that.”

He blinks. “Why not?”

“It’s blas—”

He rolls his eyes. “Doubting out loud isn’t blasphemy. Everyone doubts—well, not my parents, but everyone else.”

My breaths come hard and quick. “Then what is?”

He turns away as suddenly as he turned to me, walks ahead. “The way Mom explains it—blasphemy is when you call something a curse that God intended for a miracle. Like if I said it’s the devil who makes them speak in tongues, that’d be blasphemy. But saying I’m just not sure about any of it—that’s alright. I’ve still got time to change my mind.”

We reach the bottom of the ridge, and I follow him across the equipment parking lot, past the big red tractor and the long brown trailer we’ll be loading Shetan in. 

“But if it’s not real, then why do people do all that stuff? You think they’re what? Faking it? That’d make them all crazy.”

He turns around, but keeps walking, backwards now. “The guy I get my herbs from, he calls it the Holy Shit. He says there are times when we fill up with joy so fast our bodies can’t handle it so we lose our freakin’ minds. Like little girls sobbing over a boy band or sports fans rioting when their team wins. Same thing happens at church, he says. People get so caught up in how good the story’s making them feel, they do things they normally wouldn’t—couldn’t—do.”

“It’s like they can’t even.”

He grins. “They literally can’t even.”

We pass through the barn’s enormous open doorway. The four-wheelers sit side-by-side in the wide aisle, and hundreds of square bales are stair-stepped up the far wall. Sunlight slants through a window at the top of the stack, awash with specks of hay and other dust motes. Shetan hangs his head over the wooden stall he’s been stuck in for the last forty-eight hours and screams his displeasure. I go over and rub soothing circles on either side of his jaw. He snuffles at my pockets like I’m hiding a treat. 

Brant stands way back and glares. “I kicked some hay in there, but he wouldn’t let me close enough to give him any oats. His loss.” 

 “Well, maybe don’t look at him like you want to eat him.” 

Brant snorts. “I wouldn’t eat such rangy old meat if you paid me. Probably already tastes like glue.”

“Don’t be an ass. Come here. You’re my two best friends. You gotta get along.”

Brant shuffles forward, hands in pockets, but Shetan pins his ears back and slams his hoof against the stall. 

Brant leaps back, pointing. “You see? I’m willing, but he ain’t!”

I press my nose against Shetan’s, blowing air into his nostrils like another horse would do. Brant curls his lip and gives us a wide berth, going around the four-wheelers to sit on the haystack. He crosses an ankle over his knee and starts plucking tiny things off his khakis. I look down and realize the lower fourth of my body is also covered in stickers and burrs. Guess I was too blown-over by the things Brant was saying to notice that walking was causing me a considerable amount of pain. 

I limp over to the haystack and plop down beside him, adding more hay dust to the air. Cross my ankle over my knee just like he did and start working on my right boot.

“I hope I didn’t ruin your special day. Talking like that.” He swallows and I can hear the squick of spit in his throat. “If something meant something to you, I’d never want to belittle it.”

“I like it when you talk like that.” I swallow and the squick of my own saliva is thunder inside my head. “And I know.”

We work in silence then, Brant going much, much faster, pulling out five or six burrs for each one I manage to dislodge. Dozens cling to the hem of my jeans, dozens more cluster in the mouth of my boot. The ones that made it to my sock are the worst, poking their spikes through the white cotton right into my leg. A trickle of blood paints the edge of my ankle bone.

After the fourth time I whimper and shake my wounded fingers, Brant leans over and starts tearing the burrs out of my jeans like they’re nothing, tossing them underneath the four-wheelers. Shetan bangs on his stall, makes my ears ring.

“Hold yourself, horse,” Brant mutters.

His head hovers over my lap, so close my breath flutters the hair at the scarred nape of his neck. My leg can’t stop shaking. Brant Mitchell is touching me over and over and over and there is no way I could stop my leg from shaking. He grabs my heel with one hand, scraping his other fingers around the tongue of my boot, knocking the burrs loose like he can’t even feel them. 

“Don’t hurt your—”

His eyebrows slide into a V over his nose, and he scrapes his teeth over his chapped lower lip. “I won’t.”

He shakes his curly forelock out of his eyes. It falls right back into place. I’m overwhelmed by the need to brush it behind his ear, to let my finger trace his hairline to the hollow spot on his temple where his pulse throbs. My stomach flips over. I want so much I could puke. Tears bubble up and my vision blurs. I try to help, grab a burr, but I’m too clumsy, too quick, and it jabs itself deep into my thumb. 

“Dammit.” I shake my hand. Again.

Brant catches it like a firefly, cups it in his own hands. He folds my fingers into a fist so my thumb stands alone. The burr is huge. So many spikes you’d need tweezers to pinch just one. 

Brant yanks it right out. 

He holds it up, showing me how the spikes can’t poke through the calluses on his finger and thumb. “Perks of barely being human.” 

He flicks it onto the dusty floor. 

He does not let go of my hand. 

He is not letting go of my hand.

He is still not letting go of my hand.

He stares at our hands. Runs his fingertips over my knuckles. Blinks. Opens his mouth. A sound comes out—something between a chuckle and a whimper and a breath. When he lifts his head, those beautiful, ragged lips come close enough to kiss. So I do.

I make it happen.

WEDNESDAY, JULLY 11, 2012

When I was a little kid—little like before Laramie existed—Daddy was always off chasing the buckles that would bring in the sponsors that would help him go pro. We lived in a tiny house on a far corner of my grandparents’ ranch. It was too quiet and too dark at night, but Mama was too proud to accept Grandma and Grandpa’s invitation to bunk in the big house when Daddy was out of town. Instead, we slept on our couch with every light in the house turned on. I’d wear my footie pajamas, the ones printed all over with Woody from Toy Story, and we’d snuggle and watch hours and hours of Animal Planet because back then my plan for the future involved being an emergency vet at night and a crocodile hunter during the day. 

But there was this one night when I was sick and kind of out of it, so she tucked me in early on my side of the sectional, and then popped a tape into the VCR. I tried to stay awake, but the movie was so boring and sportsy that after about fifteen minutes I drifted off to sleep willingly. 

I woke up to the sound of sniffling. Mama sat cross-legged on her side of the couch with a bottle of what I now realize was wine tucked between her calf and her thigh. She had their bedroom comforter draped across her shoulders and over her knees and onto the floor. Even though she’d insisted I put all my snotty tissues in a tiny trashcan, she was surrounded by dozens of her own, and I assumed she’d caught my cold, but then in the flickering glow of the television, I could see the mascara trails spilling over her cheekbones, something that only ever happened after she had a fight with Daddy. I sat up, and she put a finger to her lips before I could say anything. She moved the bottle to the floor and opened her arms for me. Once I was in her lap, she folded the comforter around me and I felt like a little joey in her kangaroo pouch while we watched the end of the movie. 

I‘ve never gone back and watched the middle, so I still don’t know what all had been going on, but what happened next was that Renee Zellweger was hanging out with all these ladies in a living room when suddenly the door opens and Tom Cruise walks in and says “Hello, hello,” and everyone gets real quiet, and Renee stands up and just stares at him, and Tom launches into this really long speech that I couldn’t really follow, what with being three and sick and all, but then finally he smolders into the camera lens and says to Renee, “You complete me.” And Mama just lost it. She rocked me side to side and wiped her tears off with my hair. She told me to remember those words if I ever wanted to make a woman happy. 

A week or so later, Daddy came home, but it felt like just as soon as he got there, he was getting ready to leave again, and I just remember being parked in front of the TV, watching one of those weird Nickelodeon cartoons like CatDog, or maybe it was The Angry Beavers, when they—my parents, not CatDog or the beavers—got into a screaming match. Mama said she’d gave up everything to be with him but never actually got to be with him, and he said he wasn’t going to let her stand in the way of his dreams. Then she ran right out the door. He started to go after her, but then I guess he remembered you ain’t supposed to go off and leave little kids alone in case they stick a fork in an outlet or pull a pot of hot water down on their heads. So he plopped down on the couch and watched CatDog or The Angry Beavers, I still can’t remember which because I wasn’t watching so much as worrying about Mama by then.

Finally, I stood, hitched up my little Wranglers, and walked right up to my daddy, put my little hands on either of his knees, and said, “Tell her she complete you.” First, his jaw dropped, and then he laughed. He laughed and he laughed and he pushed his fingers through his thick dark hair and exhaled. He pulled me up ’til I was straddling one knee like a horse, and he looked me in the eye and said, “I don’t know what she’s been telling you, but it don’t work like that. People can’t make each other whole.” 

So in all my dumb little kid innocence, I asked him, “Then what can they do?” He leaned back into the couch and sighed and stared up at the ceiling for a good long time until finally he said, “They can make each other better. That’s what your Mama does to me when I let her.” A few days later, they dropped me off at the big house with Grandma and Grandpa and headed off to a stock show in Laramie, Wyoming. 

I still don’t know who was right. Does love complete us or improve us? Does any of it even apply to me now? Could two people with the same parts ever make each other whole? Could doing something the Bible says is wrong ever make anyone better? I don’t know now any more than I did last week, but I’m done caring. Because the one thing I know for sure is that when Brant Mitchell kissed me back, it was the first time in a long time I felt like any kind of person at all.

On the far left corner of the church, back where the fellowship hall is, there’s an old, weathered, concrete porch with four uneven steps leading down to the vacant lot. I always thought of them as the big kid steps because every summer when we visited there’d be a different set of teenagers hanging out back there before the service. But tonight, crossing the lot toward my girlfriend and my maybe-boyfriend and his kinda-sorta-girlfriend, I realize we’re the big kids now, the ones who’ll be grown-ups next summer, and also that everything is about to get really, really weird. 

Brant and Hannah recline like beautiful, lazy gargoyles on the tilting cement slabs that bookend the steps. I know who I want to look at first, and I know who I’m supposed to look at first, and suddenly I can’t bear to look at either one of them, so I focus on Lauren instead. She’s sitting at the top of the steps, holding her phone at arm’s length and making subtle pouty lips as she tucks and untucks and tucks again a strand of blonde hair behind her ear. She smiles when she sees me, snaps her selfie at that exact moment, and then lowers her phone.

“Casper.” She says it less like a greeting and more like an announcement to the other two corners of our love square, the ones with their eyes squeezed shut against the relentless evening sun. 

Hannah lifts her head just enough to withdraw her arm and reaches for me. I lean over, aiming for her forehead, but her hand catches my neck and guides me to her lips. Her tongue brushes mine, and her fingers dig into my skin, refusing to let me go—it’s been a while since we’ve been alone. I open my eyes a crack and, finding hers shut tight, risk a sideways glance at Brant. 

The clench of his jaw turns his cheeks into shady hollows, his brows into a single, hard ridge over his closed eyes. He nibbles on his left middle finger, almost like he’s trying to discreetly flip someone off. Fear seizes my guts, twines them around its long, cold fingers and tugs them up into my throat.