Chicken (4 page)

Brant fondles a dark brown belt etched with running wolves. It’s the prettiest I’ve seen, but he frowns and drops it back on the stack. He tucks his half-chewed straw into his pocket and leans across the table toward the old man, who’s still trying to sell that fancy knife to the slightly less-old man.

“You got anything with cats?”

The old man glares and holds up a finger.

“I just need to know if you have anything with a cat. Real quick.”

The old man sighs and transfers his wait-a-minute finger to the other old man, who ignores it and makes his escape. The old man sighs again.

“A cat? Like a house cat, son?”

“Well. I guess that could be cool if you have it, but I was thinking more along the lines of something big.”

The old man shakes his head. “I don’t think I’ve got anything with any sort of cat.”

Brant stares. “You don’t like cats?”

The old man shrugs. “I like ’em okay. I’ve just never had any demand for cat belts.”

Brant rakes his teeth over his lip. “Can I demand one?”

“Sure, but it’ll cost more than one of these. What about a fox? I think I’ve got a nice fox here somewhere. That’s a little like a cat.”

Brant shakes his head and slaps his hands on the pile of belts. “It’s more like a dog.”

The old man shrugs, turning to greet yet another old man. “Well, if you decide you’d like to custom order—”

Brant scowls at the man’s back. He grabs two handfuls of belts and then lets them slide out of his fingers in a way that makes a long, sharp farting sound. I bite the insides of my cheeks so as not to laugh, but then I remember Hannah ain’t here to scold me for being crass. Brant wrinkles his nose and elbows me in the ribs, flicking his thumb at the old man. He goes to grab a bunch of belts again but only comes up with one. 

“Whoa, hey, you see this one?” He offers it to me.

The belt draped across his palms is reddish-brown and etched with galloping horses. There’s a blank space on the back for a name to be embossed. I take it from him, smoothing my thumbs over the ridges of the horses’ flowing manes. I picture it with my silver buckle from the Dallas Youth Rodeo, the one I don’t wear anymore because everyone around here thinks barrel racing is only for girls. But I’d wear it with this. I’d wear it every day. I’d wear it and remember who I used to be. Plus, and I guess more importantly, it’d keep these stupid yard-sale jeans on me.

Brant whistles. “This belt’s made for you.”

I sneak a peek at the dangling price tag and drop it quick. 

“Seriously. You should get it. It looks like that old saddle from your pictures.”

He ducks his head as soon as he says that, and my heart bucks in my chest. I let my eyes run over the impossibly perfect belt. Shake my head.

“No money.”

“Ask your Daddy.”

I snort. “He’d say, ‘Ain’t that a belt you got on, son?’”

“Yeah, a fat man’s belt! That’s why you’re always losing your britches.”

“It’s fine. I just need to poke another hole in it.”

Brant frowns, his cheeks even more hollow. “A man needs a nice belt.”

A thick, hairy arm reaches around me and snatches up the belt. “So why are you trying to waste one on Cassie?”

Brant lunges for the arm but stops just short of colliding with my chest. “Give it back, Mathis.”

I’ve heard it said that there are all kinds of intelligences in this world, and that it isn’t fair to judge a person solely on book smarts. For instance, I know a lot about horses and a little about books. Mama knows about being pretty and spending money. Laramie knows about Taylor Swift and Nickelodeon cartoons. Daddy knows everything about cattle and crops even if he’s pretending not to these days. Hannah knows all about books and British television and social justice on the Internet. Brant knows about Jesus and music and manual labor. Tyler Mathis has shown no aptitude in any of these areas, but he happens to be one of the world’s leading experts on intuiting shameful secrets.

Brant’s fingers flex near his hips like an Old West sheriff itching to draw his pistol. “You heard me.”

Mathis laughs and loops the belt over my head, pulling it tight around my chest, pinning my arms to my sides. He cinches it with a good yank that rocks me back on my heels, and then he keeps pulling ’til my head is nestled between his soft, sweaty man-boobs. I don’t bother struggling; movement would only further stimulate his prey drive. 

Brant’s hands close into fists, veins popping up like blue lightning bolts along his wrists, biceps suddenly filling out his shirt sleeves. “Give. It. Back.”

“Here you go.” Mathis shoves me forward. “Bet you can’t get it off without giving him a boner.”

Brant’s hand lands on my shoulder, keeps me steady. We don’t make eye contact. He reaches around me with both arms and unbuckles the belt, yanks it off with an Indiana Jones whip-crack. He spins me around to face Mathis.

“No boner, Mathis. Guess he’s saving it for his girlfriend.”

“Or maybe it’s just too tiny to tell.” Mathis looks at my crotch, and for one terrifying second, I think he’s going to grab it.

But then the old man is shouting and leaning across the table, ripping my belt out of Brant’s hand and shaking it so hard the buckle jingles warningly, like a rattlesnake with bells for a tail. 

Brant grabs my shoulders, plowing me into Mathis, who stumbles backward out of the tent. The camo netting sways behind us. Brant lets go of me, but we keep trotting until we’re out of the booths, standing in a breathless triangle on the edge of the crowd forming to watch the Hop.

Mathis wheezes and shakes his fist. Brant joins in, making a high-pitched jingly sound. I chuckle, not having anything to add to the imitation, and just like that, we’re pretending nothing else happened. There’s this part of me—this wrong part of me—that imagines Brant is just tricking him, lulling him into a false sense of safety before he hauls off and gut-punches him. But what’s left of the right part of me knows this is just how it is. Forgive and forget. 

Brant plucks his straw from his pocket and blows off the lint. He sticks the chewed-up end in his mouth again, letting the other end bob on his lips like a burnt-down cigarette. He juts his chin toward the west where gray clouds are slowly gobbling up the blue sky.

“Reckon we’re finally gonna get a good rain.”

Mathis lifts his Confederate-flag trucker hat, runs a hand over his greasy mullet, and settles the hat back. “I could use some good mud.”

Any time Mathis opens his mouth, it smells like someone opened a bag of beef jerky. His teeth are the same color as his dirty blond mustache. To further his mission of bringing sexy back to Hickory Ditch, he’s wearing a bright green T-shirt that says, “Kiss Me. I’m Your Cousin.” Well, it used to be a T-shirt, but then he ripped off the sleeves, so now it’s a tank top with snotty green strings dripping down his arms. He’s tall and flabby, but not exactly fat, more like a football player whose muscles somehow got sucked out from under his skin.

“If it turns up, I’ll give all y’all a call tomorrow,” Brant says. All y’all meaning all the other pigs from youth group who enjoy wallowing in mud.

“I seen Harry and Colton a while ago. If I see ’em again, I’ll heads-up ’em.” Mathis spits on the sidewalk for no apparent reason. “Where you off to?”

Brant jerks his head at the crowd. “Gonna watch these jackasses jump in a hole.”

Mathis squeezes his stomach. “You know I’d win if it weren’t for Little Ty here.”

Lots of guys nickname their junk, but it takes someone pretty special to nickname his gut. Or maybe he’s acknowledging that with his shirt tucked in like that he looks about four months pregnant. 

“I’d win if it weren’t for—” Brant’s hand moves to pat his flat stomach, but freezes. His head snaps up and his eyes look totally clear for the first time all day.

Two-hundred-and-twenty-eight years ago today, America became a country, and eighteen years ago today, my parents became a couple, and four years ago today, I became a queer. I don’t know why it couldn’t have happened on the twenty-second of March or the third of December, one of those empty calendar boxes that has to be filled in by hand if you’ve got something you want to remember and can be left blank if you’ve got something you need to forget. Maybe then it could have slipped my mind as quickly as my dinner on January fourteenth or my dreams on October ninth. Ignorance wouldn’t make it any less true, I guess, but it would sure make living here a lot less the opposite of bliss. But this way, my only hope of forgetting is if Hannah is right and the economy re-crashes and the government collapses, paving the way for a dystopian civilization to come along and abolish all pre-existing federal holidays.

My grandparents brought me and my sister to watch the Hop, but we couldn’t see anything from the spot where they’d set up their lawn chairs. Laramie squalled until they relented and let me take her down to the white wooden fence that runs alongside the park section of the Ditch to keep dumb little kids like her from falling in. She climbed onto the lowest rail and rested her elbows on the top, leaning forward until her feet stuck out in the air behind us. A stranger told her to cut it out, and she snapped her silver teeth and kicked her legs like a mermaid. I hauled her off and made her hold my hand even though she had fine, sticky strands of cotton candy wrapped around her fingers and powdered sugar caked in the creases of her palms.

Two college kids pushed in behind us. I mean, I don’t know if they were actually enrolled in college or not, but they were definitely in that grey area between teenager and adult. A pretty girl with summer freckles and long straight hair the color of freshly-baled hay, and a stocky guy with summer pimples and the same color hair only his was short and bristly. He wore one of those sleeveless white undershirts that Hannah says I’m not allowed to call a wifebeater, and his hulking torso stretched the cotton ribbing to its max. He made the manliest menswear item on earth look as tiny and flimsy as one of my little sister’s camisoles. 

The girl came so close I could feel her breezy sundress tickling the crook of my knee. The guy stood beside her, but reached forward with his right hand to grip the top rail, hemming me in. Stranger danger alarms clanged in my head. Despite their country fresh appearance, there was a wildness about the pair, a spark in their eyes that danced to a rhythm only they could hear, a song that wouldn’t even sound like music to anyone else’s ears. I pressed my chest to the fence and wondered if they could see the prickled hairs on my neck.

But I couldn’t keep my gaze from following the veins that climbed the guy’s arm like leafless ivy, from roaming the muscled hills of his shoulder, from sliding across the thick ridge of his collarbone until it finally came to rest in the shadowy hollow of his throat. He smiled at me then—that awkward, sort-of-scared smile young adults give to kids, an apology to a prisoner from a newly freed man. He dropped his arm and took a step backward out of my personal space. 

The girl sucked in a sharp breath, the same breath Mama sucked in every time Daddy dropped onto a bull’s back. A new guy stepped up to the mark. He had dark, tousled hair and a sharp, scruffy jawline. He was built like a dancer, like the guy who played the prince in The Nutcracker that one time Mama took me when Daddy was away, and it wasn’t fair that I could remember that body so clearly all those years later when I could barely recall the Sugar Plum Fairy’s at all. The guy on the mark locked his fingers behind his head, stretching out his elbows until his shirt rode up, revealing his fur-lined abs.

The guy behind me grunted and nudged the girl hard enough to make her boobs graze the back of my head. “Did anyone ever tell you your boyfriend is a sexy beast?”

The girl slammed her elbow into the slab of his ribs. He laughed, showing crooked teeth. Our eyes met again. This time he winked, and I knew that he’d seen. Not anything particular I did. Just me.

Just everything.

Brant Mitchell is on the mark, getting set. He rolls his shoulders and shakes out his hands. Breathes in, bends over, and then straightens up in an arms-over-head, shirt-lifting stretch. Sweat shimmers on the fine, blond fur between his belly button and blue jeans. No one needs to tell me he’s a sexy beast.

His cowboy hat sits on my head, smelling of dusty grass and dank weed. I know it’s stupid, but I take a couple of long, deep breaths, hoping the odor might possess some sort of leftover calming effect. I understand now why that girl was so nervous when her boyfriend was standing where Brant is standing today. The thing that normally makes the Hop so much fun isn’t very funny when you’re in love with the show-off whose neck might break. 

But her boyfriend’s neck didn’t break. Didn’t even get rope burn from landing in the net. Because he made it. He made Hickory Ditch history. Just barely—he had to haul himself up from the ledge—but it counted because he didn’t fall in. I try to force that fact to make me feel better, but it only makes Brant’s chances seem more improbable. Sure, they have similar bodies, but young as he was, that guy was still a grown man, and Brant Mitchell is just a kid. I mean, seriously, is this even legal? Shouldn’t his parents have to sign some sort of waiver?

Mathis stands beside me. Sweat gushes down his side like he’s got a faucet tucked up in his armpit. He blots his damp, doughy chest with his balled-up shirt. 

“So where’s Hannah?” he asks, and her name on his lips makes me angry.

“At the lake.” And then because I don’t trust him, I add, “With her brother and her dad.”

Brant crouches, right foot on the mark, both hands touching the dirt. He tosses the hair out of his eyes. Grabs his dog tag and kisses it and then tucks it under his shirt. 

“It don’t make no sense,” says Mathis.

“Lots of people go to the lake for the Fourth of July.”

He scoffs, but before he can say anything, the Hop Master shouts, “GO!”

Brant goes.

Every stride’s a leap, a blur, even in his cowboy boots and heavy jeans. 

The crowd is hot and tired and losing interest, but some folks muster up whistles and cheers. I recognize a couple of whoops from church. Some girl screams like she’s rooting for an Olympic athlete. But a lot of guys are laughing and shouting things like, “Go home, goat roper!”