Chicken (32 page)

He runs. Up the ramp and through the trees. This will be tricky. There’s no way I could climb the back side of this mountain in the dark and make it home by sunrise. We have to go up the road, right past the house where Brant and his parents and two dozen beagles sleep. But there’s no turning back now. I’m getting what I came for. I’m getting the power to forget.

Shetan gallops across the field. The tall grass glows white under the moon, laps at our legs like waves rolling to a beach. The sense of being followed, guarded, hunted, whatever, is gone. It’s me and Shetan and the moon and this field. It disappears under his churning feet, and we are coming to the gateless gate, and I remember the cattle guard and tell him to jump. 

He flies over it like Brant flew over the Ditch, and then we’re on the county road, passing Brant’s house and all its dark windows, but the beagles are baying, and I see them from the corner of my eye, pouring out of every nook and cranny around the carport, billowing around the broken trucks and the trampoline and trampling Sister Cindy’s flowerbeds, and there is Brant’s truck shining in the moonlight, and if I could, I would go curl up in the bed and wait all night for his parents to leave and surprise him in the morning, and he would say he didn’t mean it, and I would say let’s run away, and then the truck is behind me, the house is behind me, the beagles are behind me, and Brant Mitchell is behind me.

Someone is here. There’s a car in the yard. 

Shetan stands behind it, snorting and wheezing, his black body aglow with white, frothy sweat. Guilt creeps up on me. I haven’t been careful with him. We’ll have to rest before we turn back. Somewhere. I guess we can’t stay here. I wonder if maybe the car was always here and I didn’t see it because we came up from the back. The cabin looks dark and empty. 

I circle Shetan around the clearing, keeping close to the trees. His sides heave between my legs. The bright side is he’s probably too tired to go anywhere while I’m in the cellar. I slide off his back, hug his soaked neck, and whisper apologies. Beg him to be okay. He shakes out his mane and clears his nose all over my shirt. I flinch and wait for a light to come on in the house, but the darkness remains. I can’t actually imagine any house ever feeling more empty, so much like a darkened church.

Still, I stay sneaky as I cross the yard almost on my hands and knees. Someone might be in there. Someone who wants to share their weed even less than Brant. I half-crawl to the porch and hunker down, pressing my left side against the rocks as I pass beneath the black living room window. 

I turn the corner and come to the cellar. In and out. Just one plant. Then we’ll find a safe place to rest. Are they looking for me? How will I explain the pot if I run into a cop? Maybe I didn’t think this through—no matter, I’m here. I’ll figure out the rest once I’ve got it.

I wrap my hands around the rough handles on the slanted cellar doors. I’ve opened one an inch before I notice the chain and padlock lying in the grass beside the rusty old hinges. My hands are like a ghost’s under this moon. I am invincible because I’m already dead. No trouble could be worse than what I’m already in. 

I pry open the door. So much heavier than I thought. I get it up to a right angle, and then it slips from my grasp, crashes with a metallic clank as it lands on its own lock and chain.

Something jangles down below.

I stare into the black square in front of me.

Jangling. Heavy feet.

I remember Brant saying something about a pit bull, but it sounded like an excuse. I mentally calculate the length of the chains bolted to the wall. If I press myself against the other wall, I don’t think it can reach me. I suck air down my lungs like a diver going into the deep. I am in way, way too deep. 

I place one foot on the steep wooden stairs. The dog growls.

Sounds like a really big dog.

Another step, another growl.

A really, really big dog.

A third step, a third growl.

Heavy breathing. Jangling. Shuffling feet. Saliva sloshing between teeth. Whining, growling, slobbering. Louder with every step. The moon is bright, but not bright enough to reach. Chains and claws scrape the floor. 

Just one plant, and then I’ll run back out. Slam the door. Get on my horse and ride away. I can do it. I’m already here.

I take one more step.

The dog throws itself to the end of the chain with a bark that’s more of a roar. The air sizzles as its teeth snap close enough to splash drool on my arm, and then I’m screaming and slipping and my butt hits the corner of the stairs and pain flares up my spine. My boot is in a mouth, and I’ve heard terrible things about pit bulls, but nothing as terrible as this. I kick and kick, but it holds tight. Its eyes flash in the slender beam of light from above, and I see the long canine muzzle—nothing like a pit bull—and the fangs sinking into my rubber sole. I am going to pass out from shock and be eaten alive and that’s how this whole stupid story will end.

But then arms. 

Forcing their way under my own, encircling my chest, jerking, yanking, heaving until I’m out of my shoe and my limp legs are banging against the stairs as I’m pulled out of the ground, and the thing in the cellar is howling, howling, howling and I am being thrown. My head hits the earth and for a second I am gone.

I come to. 

Brant Mitchell is here.

He stands over me, naked and drenched and half-way hard. I forget the monster in the cellar because now it all makes sense. The breakup. The car. It must be Lauren’s. He’s figured out how to have sex after all. 

I fling myself at him from the ground, but he catches me by the shoulders and pushes me onto my knees. “You little asshole.”

I point at the cabin. “Is she in there?”

“That’s what you’re worried about?” He laughs, doubling over, clutching his stomach and rolling his neck. “Casper, you have to go. Now.”

“Did you bring her here?” I scream.

He groans, grabs the back of his head. “No! I promise. Just go.”

“Then why the hell are you naked?”

“Because—” He claws at his face. “You have to leave.”

“And that!” I point at the cellar. “What the hell is that?!”

The wolf snarls and clanks its chain. Brant doubles over again, his dick swinging. He feels around in the grass like he’s blind until his fingers touch the edge of the open cellar door. “No time—”

I jump up, catch him by the shoulders and shake him hard. “Tell me!”

He leans into me, nearly topples us both. His hands slide down my back as he sinks to his knees, pushes his face into my stomach. I cradle his head, digging my fingers into his wilted curls. His head rolls back and he looks up at me with wild yellow eyes. His lips pull back in a sneer, teeth bared. It’s like last Friday, but a thousand times worse. I scream for help. He shakes his head.

“No one else,” he whispers.

I drop to my knees, hold his face in my hands, run my thumbs over the soft hair on his cheeks. “What?”

He pushes his forehead against mine. “There’s no one else—”

Then he shoves me so hard I do a backflip. My head smacks the ground and I see Leo and Virgo and a million other stars whose name and shapes I’ll never know. But back on earth there is howling and snarling and puking, and I know I can’t stay in space. 

I get myself right side up, and he’s right where I left him, crouched in the grass, his shoulder blades pointing up at the moon while he vomits onto the earth.

“I’m going to go get your parents—”

His head comes up, puke dribbling from his lips. “They can’t know. Any of this. Can’t know. Promise—and keep this one.”

“You’re sick. Just let me take care of you.”

He laughs. It rumbles out of his chest like a purr. He claws at the back of his head again. “Casper. You have to leave. Right now.”

“I’m not leaving you like this.”

I step toward him and he swipes at me with one long arm. “Yes. You are.”

“Brant—”

“Casper Quinn, if you do one thing for me in your life, you do this right now. Get on your horse and get out of here.”

I shake my head, try again to get to him. He screams and it tears open the night, all the nights, forever, for the rest of my life. Then he throws his head back and laughs, dragging his fingers down his face. 

“There are reasons, Casper.”

He rushes me. I stumble back onto my ass. He retreats into his crouch, shaking and sweating and rolling his shoulders. He lifts his head, but the face I love is not there. The cougar’s mouth pulls back in that famous hellish scream you hear about but never hear, not until your ex becomes a monster right in front of you. I throw my own hellish scream at the sky.

Brant—the cougar lashes his tail. Rushes me again, swiping and missing. I scoot backward, unable to get my legs under me. Still screaming. All of us screaming. Boy and wolf and lion and horse. 

And horse. Shetan’s shriek shatters the moon and the thunder of his hooves knocks the stars from the sky. He is here. Over me. On his hind legs. His front legs tearing down what’s left of the cosmos. 

The lion swipes at the horse, and the horse plunges downward, driving his sharp hooves at the lion’s back. I keep scooting farther and farther from the impossible scene until my back hits a tree, and all I can do is watch my horse and my boy, my lion, my what? They are darting and striking and screaming and the thing in the cellar is howling and throwing itself to the end of its chains, and this is too much, way too much. I just wanted some weed and now this.

The thud of a hoof on flesh. The cougar cries out and rolls away from Shetan’s lancing feet. He drags himself onto three legs and bolts for the woods. Shetan follows. I hear them crashing and shrieking until the ground tilts and the forest fades to black.

FRIDAY, AUGUST 3, 2012

The former governor of Arkansas stands behind the pulpit. “The next thing you know they’ll want to marry animals. It’s a slippery slope, folks. A slippery slope.”

Brother Mackey lifts his hands and shouts, “Amen, brother! A slippery slope!”

The plaster walls of the church become the mud walls of the Ditch, melting like chocolate, bubbling over my feet, a hot brown liquid carrying all the broken baby trees away. The pulpit remains, but the governor is gone, and the mountain lion sits where the sermon notes should be. It smiles a lazy, dimpled, sharp-toothed grin and leaps, running toward me like it ain’t in no hurry. A hand catches me by the back of my shirt and hauls me up, up, up, and then I’m lying on the ground, listening to the lion snarl while Caleb Courts bandages the tooth marks between my ribs. 

Sister Bonnie’s voice asks, “Where is he now?”

And a man says, “I don’t know. He could have gone miles by now.”

Sister Bonnie’s voice asks, “Can’t you track his smell?”

And the man says, “Only if he touches the ground.”

Sister Bonnie’s voice says, “Will you call the others?”

And the man says, “That’s complicated.”

Sister Bonnie’s voice says, “He’s a child. Make it simple.”

I wake up on a pile of hay in Shetan’s stall. 

Sister Bonnie leans over the rail, watching me like I used to watch newborn foals discovering the weird world of existence. My throat is splinters and glass, my mouth is week-old bread. I run my fingers through my matted hair and feel a swollen knot on the back of my scalp.

She doesn’t wait for me to ask. “You came to see your horse, and when he wasn’t here, I guess you curled up and went to sleep.”

I furrow my brow, knowing that’s not quite right, but unable to process what I remember. “Where’s Shetan?”

“He’s fine. He’s with my son. He took him on a trail ride.”

I sit up, every muscle screaming like a—like a lion. I shake my head. “No. I rode him last night. To Brant’s—”

“You must have dreamed it.”

“No, I—”

“Casper.” Sister Bonnie opens the stall and kneels in front of me in the hay. “You dreamed it. You were here all night. Do you hear me?”

My head hurts so bad. I squeeze my temples between my index fingers. “But I saw him. I saw him—”

Sister Bonnie takes my face in her hands. “Casper. Listen to me. This is important. Whatever you think you saw, wherever you think you’ve been, I am telling you that you were here all night. If anyone asks, you were here all night. Do you understand me?”

I don’t, but I do. I squeeze my eyes shut, and she pulls my head on to her shoulder. “You’re good boys.”

A wheezing truck pulls into the front yard, and I don’t have to see it to know it’s my father’s. Two doors open and close. Footsteps hurry across the dirt and gravel and grass.

Sister Bonnie holds me at arm’s length. “You were here all night.”

Brother Mackey barrels through the open barn door. Daddy limps behind him.

“Praise the Lord!” Brother Mackey shouts as he comes right into the stall and lifts me to my feet, hugging me to his chest and pounding my back.

He drags me out into the aisle without even offering his aunt a hand. I wait for the dramatic moment when Daddy falls at my feet, begs for my forgiveness, for this, for everything. But he just stands there, five feet away, staring at me. 

Mackey nudges me forward. “You need to apologize to your father.”

My brain is too foggy to know that “Why?” is the wrong thing to say. 

Brother Mackey launches into an increasingly red-faced sermon about respect and obedience and doing enough to hurt my family already without running away from the problems I’ve caused them. Sister Bonnie comes out of the stall, manure stains on her mom jeans, and looks at my Daddy, giving him a chance to say something. Then she turns around and pops Brother Mackey right on his cheek. 

“If I’ve said it once in your life, boy, I’ve said it a thousand times—quit running your big mouth.”

SUNDAY, AUGUST 5, 2012

Stiff yellow grass stabs me in the back. Angry red ants sting my ankles. My chest goes up and comes back down. My heart contracts and relaxes. Blood moves through my veins. This is what reality feels like.