Chicken (27 page)

I look at Brant, and he shrugs. “Well, then, if I love it, it’s not weird if I listen, is it?”

Brant and Laramie share a very long stare. Finally, Laramie turns back to me. “Come fix the TV.”

“Hold. On.”

Her lips fold in on themselves, and I know she’s getting ready to scream. 

I jump up. “Okay, okay, okay.”

Brant claps me on the back. “I got to get going anyway.”

“No, wait—”

But he doesn’t even let me walk him to the living room. He just squeezes past Laramie and disappears. I glare at her. She glares back. I hate Yellow Number Five.

WEDNESDAY, JULY 18, 2012

I don’t see Brant until church time tonight, and then he’s too busy with Lauren and the rest of the worship team to talk to me before the service. I sit with Hannah in the side pews, ignoring the steady drumming of Tyler Mathis’ shoes on the bottom of my seat. She used to tell him to stop when he pulled that crap, and for a while his crush even made him listen, but he’s gotten a lot bigger and meaner in the last six months and now nobody but Brant says anything to him. His parents are so old some say he’s adopted, others say he was a surprise. Then there are those who figure his real mother was one of the couple’s older children. They seem like nice enough people, the kind you see on the news trying to explain why they never suspected their little pumpkin would shoot up a school.

Inspired by our new local celebrity, Brother Mackey delivers an unusually calm sermon titled “Whose Lion Is It Anyway?” in which he delves into the theological reasons why God uses lions as symbols for both Himself and Satan in the Scriptures. A lot of folks start nodding off, but I go out of my way to look curious and alert because it’s nice to be reminded that Mackey ain’t all fire and brimstone. He likes studying the Word and sharing his findings the same way Hannah loves explaining the confusing parts of Doctor Who. He’s kind of a nerd, really. That’s why Brant’s parents only pretend to like him. They reckon the Bible is meant to be believed, not understood. If God didn’t want there to be mysteries he’d have spelled everything out clearly. If some parts don’t make sense, He must have put them there on purpose to test our faith. 

The service ends with a lackluster altar call. Brother Mackey leaves the stage looking a little defeated by the congregation’s general lack of interest. His wife greets him with a kiss on the cheek and draws his hand to her enormous belly. I wonder what he’ll do if that baby turns out like me. That knocks my generous feelings down a few notches.

Mathis leans forward, shoving his face between me and Hannah before we can stand up. He makes a finger pistol and a gunshot sound.

“I don’t care if it’s God or the devil, the only place a cat like that belongs is on my wall.”

Hannah rolls her eyes. “There aren’t any cougars in the Bible so that sentence doesn’t even make sense.”

“A lion’s a lion, sweetheart.”

I put my hand on his forehead and shove him backward. “Don’t talk to her that way.”

Hannah’s eyes go wide, but not as wide as Tyler’s. His mouth spreads into an ugly, yellow sneer. “Cassie’s balls finally dropping?”

I stand up, take Hannah by the hand. “How ’bout you just shut up?”

We march through the sanctuary and out both sets of swinging double doors. On the porch, Hannah fans her neck with one hand. “Don’t tell Tumblr, but that was hella sexy.”

“No kidding,” Brant says, leaning hard against the railing. I didn’t see him and his girlfriend follow us out.

“I might even let him tickle my feet with his nipple,” Lauren adds. She’s holding tight to Brant’s hand. 

Hannah rubs my chest. “Nope. These bad boys are all mine.”

“Not tonight.” Brant grabs me by the neck, pulls me under his arm in a playful, aggressively heterosexual manner. He even throws in a noogie for good measure. “Your boy and I have plans.”

We drive way out past Sister Bonnie’s, even farther than the arena, until we’re going over one of the mountains. Brant pulls off just before we reach the top and we bounce down a one-way gravel road. Honey suckle brushes the sides of the truck and the bitter weed sprouting from the center line rattles against the undercarriage.  

We pass a faded brown-and-yellow Forest Service sign and emerge from the woods into the shadow of the fire tower. He parks under a double-barreled streetlight that’s already gathered a swarm of early-rising night bugs. I open the door and hop down. My feet crunch on the dry yellow grass. I reckon it would only take one dropped match to turn the ancient, spindly tower into a six-story torch. 

But as we get closer, I see that the tower’s wooden legs are mounted on a concrete pad surrounded by a huge square patch of white gravel. Set halfway back in that patch, there’s a tall chain link fence topped with razor wire. The gate is secured with a heavy chain and multiple padlocks. 

“Folks kept hanging themselves,” Brant says.

I picture corpses dangling in the still summer air, backlit by the setting sun. I shudder.

He bumps my arm. “Come on.”

We follow a dirt trail lit with dim, orange lamps for a couple hundred yards into the woods. They remind me of the cabin’s basement, and I realize that Brant wasn’t lying—he hasn’t been high all week.

Brant carries the poles and the Styrofoam cup full of live bait, and I carry the tackle box and cooler. He’s wearing this threadbare white shirt that says Star Wars in peeling black letters on the chest. He got it at a yard sale, and we suspect the words were ironed onto the shirt by some geek’s mother in the late seventies. He’s close to outgrowing it, and when he takes the long strides needed to climb over gnarled roots, the shirttail rides up, revealing the band of his boxers.

I reach forward and rest my fingertips just above his tailbone. When he doesn’t flinch I press my palm against his skin, smoother here than anywhere else I’ve been able to touch him.

He swats my hand. “Hold your horses, Cowboy.”

A few minutes later, we pass a crude sign that says Nite Fishin—probably not installed by the Forest Service—and emerge on the bank of a small, man-made pond. The water glows orangey-red, but I don’t know if it’s from algae or the lamps. A dock juts out in the pond, though I can’t imagine anyone hauling a boat all the way out to this mud puddle. Brant goes clomping out there in his big old boots, oblivious to the missing and tilting boards. I’d rather stay on the solid bank, but I’m tired of this Jesus and Peter thing we got going where he’s always charging ahead and then calling out for me.

The dock groans under my feet, but I make it to the end without it collapsing into the leech-infested water. I drop the tackle box and cooler, sit cross-legged next to Brant as he spears a worm on his hook. 

“Hand me a leg,” he says.

I open the cooler, releasing the aroma of cold, fried chicken. Real fried chicken from his Mama’s kitchen, not that stuff they serve at Wings of Glory. Not that stuff we’ll be eating two weeks from today while our friends and family pat themselves on the back for giving their money to a company who uses that money to make sure me and Brant can’t ever get married, not in any state we’d actually want to live in anyway. 

“Wait.” I close the cooler. “You’ve got worm juice all over your hands.”

He splashes his hand in the water. “There. Hand me a leg.”

“I’d rather you not talk to me the way your dad talks to your mom.”

“Please hand me a leg, you sexy, sexy man. Better?”

“Yeah, but you’re still filthy.”

He elbows me. “Come on, Cas. Live a little.”

“I have been. That’s why I’d rather you not die.”

He kisses me on the nose. “Then don’t starve me, darlin’.”

I hand him the chicken leg. He holds it in one hand, tearing at it with his teeth while his other arm casts his line. The bobber lands with a soft plink, and then Brant sets the pole on the dock. I pull out a chicken leg for myself while he baits my hook without me even having to ask. I don’t know what it is; I can handle having all kinds of horse dirt under my nails, but touching big fat night crawlers ain’t really my thing. 

Once my line is cast, Brant clears his throat. “I’m thinking maybe this Friday we should do a double date.”

I lick grease off my chin. “I don’t know.”

“I know it’s weird, but at least we’d get to spend time together. We could pretend the girls are lesbians and they’re on a date and we’re on a date.”

I shake my head. “This sounds like a train wreck.”

“But we had a great time at the movies.”

“Things were different then.”

“You keep saying that.”

“Because it’s true.”

“Please? Colton can only communicate with computers, and Natalie is like really super obsessed with the Duggars. You know how I feel about that.”

Brant hates the Duggars—the ones from TV—because his parents are part of the same movement to skip birth control and let God bless you with as many children as He sees fit. Mama went to their wedding when she was still a teenager, and she says Brother Dean and Sister Cindy made a big show of committing her womb to the Lord in front of everyone. And then—Brant. Just Brant. They went to doctors, but no one could figure it out, said they were both in perfect health. So they reckon Brant must be something mighty special if God wanted them to spend all their time and energy raising this one bull-headed boy when they were willing to raise twenty.

“Maybe. But I don’t like seeing you together.”

He snorts. “How do you think I’ve felt all year?”

“You’ve liked me that long?”

He tosses his bare chicken bone into the marsh weeds. “Longer.”

I tug on his curls. “Tell me.”

He shrugs. “I can’t remember when I didn’t.”

We fish in silence for a while. The sky turns that perfect shade of dusky blue and the chorus of frogs, crickets, and cicadas drowns out the rumble of log trucks on the mountain road. I eat two chicken legs, leaving the gristle and the fat, but Brant gnaws all of his down to clean bone.

“So you think Lauren will make a good preacher’s wife.”

He snorts. “I ain’t gonna be a preacher, and I ain’t gonna have a wife.”

I bite my lip. “You thinking about real colleges?”

He laughs. “I wish.”

I reel in my line, swing the empty hook over to him. He tears me off part of another worm. I throw it back out in the middle of the pond.

“There’s plenty of financial aid if your parents won’t pay for it. You don’t have to go where they want you to.”

“That’s only for parents who can’t. If they just won’t, then you’re screwed.”

“That’s stupid. There must be some way—”

He puts a hand on my knee. “Don’t. I’d make a rotten college boy anyway.”

“You can still come with me. Wherever I go.”

He sighs and looks up at the sky. “Your folks gonna go for that?”

“I’ll be eighteen. It’s not like they’re going to be able to help me anyway. We’ll get jobs. An apartment. A cat.”

He grins. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. A black one. We’re gonna name him Garth Vader Mitchell-Quinn.”

I blush because I didn’t mean to say the last name part out loud. His reel clicks as he turns it, drawing his bobber back toward the dock.

“You been giving this some thought.”

“All my thoughts.”

He tucks his pole under his knee and turns to me, caressing the side of my face with his wormy hand. “You are my favorite thing, Casper Quinn. But don’t get your hopes up, okay?”

I turn my head out of his hand. “Dammit, Brant.”

He rubs my shoulder blade. “Hey, I’m sorry, okay? Bacon?”

I square my jaw. “We’re getting out of here. Both of us. Don’t you ever tell me any different.”

He bumps his head against my shoulder. “You told me we had to be honest.”

“I didn’t tell you to be stupid.”

“Promise me you’ll go. Whatever happens to me, you gotta go. With Hannah to college or whatever. You just gotta go.”

“I didn’t tell you to be noble.”

“I can’t help it. Look.” He points to the horizon. His finger traces a constellation, but I can’t make it out because it’s not one I already know. “That’s me.”

I sigh, exasperated at this non-sequiter. “I don’t know what this is.”

“Leo. The sign of noble stupidity.”

I give up and lean against him. “Where am I?”

“There.” He traces another outline off to the left behind Leo. “Virgo.”

“The sign of eternal virginity. Great.”

He laces his fingers through mine—so much chicken grease and worm slime. “It’s actually the sign of anal-retentive bossiness, but you can see how the one leads to the other.”

I elbow him hard in the ribs. We get quiet again, listen to the forest sing. Fireflies blink in the woods. A pair of white eyes glints between two pines, and then something heavy crashes through the brush. Our red-and-white bobbers float in the middle of the pond, which I’m beginning to think is empty. 

I set down my rod, look up at the stars, but can’t make out either of the shapes Brant showed me. “The Lion and The Virgin. Sounds like one of them dark, European fairy tales.”

The corner of his mouth pulls back, revealing his sharp canine. “You ain’t ever heard it?”

I shake my head. “It’s a thing?”

Brant reels in his line, rests his pole on the dock. He scoots closer, slips his arm around my shoulders. He points at Leo, but I still don’t see how it’s a lion.

“Once upon a time, there was a dangerous beast who lived all alone in his castle in the woods. He acted angry because he was just so sad. But then one day—” His fingers moves over to Virgo. “—a handsome peasant stumbled through his gates, and—”

I blow air out my nose like a horse. “That’s just Beauty and the Beast.”

“Yeah, so?”

“So you can’t just change a classic to suit yourself.”

“Of course I can, Casper. That’s what make stories so amazing.” He waves his hand across the glittering horizon. “They aren’t stars. We can change them.”

FRIDAY, JULY 20, 2012