Chicken (5 page)

Brant runs until his left foot hits the edge of the Ditch, and then he is not falling, not failing, not breaking his fool neck. He’s flying. Like it ain’t even hard. Like breaking the most basic law of physics is just some boring thing he does every day. 

He lands on his hands and the pointy toes of his boots.

For a long moment, no one knows what to do. No one knows what we’ve just seen. Then the phones come out and the cameras start clicking. All at once, everyone is screaming, clapping, whistling. Some dumb little kid gets so worked up he tosses his popcorn everywhere. Mathis swears and spits over the white fence.

Brant jumps up, crowing and pumping his fists. Photographers and city officials swarm him. He looks over his shoulder, searching the faces along this side of the Ditch, and I wonder who he’s looking for right up until the moment he’s looking at me. He grins and waves and shouts something I can’t hear, and I grin and wave his cowboy hat and let out an awkward whoop.

Tyler Mathis snorts. “What don’t make sense is that Hannah would pick a dickless little shit like you when she could have had Brant.”

Brant’s hat freezes in the air above my head. Mathis has never made a secret out of wanting to do disgusting things to my girlfriend, so I expected him to take the opportunity to do it again, but this is an all-new lure and I bite hard and fast.

“What would Hannah want with Brant? They’re like siblings.”

“Reckon you know the answer better than anyone.” He slaps Brant’s hat onto my head so hard it folds down the edges of my ears. “Faggot.”

The crowd is breaking up around me, elbows crashing into my back, steady as waves. I am eroding. Every second I spend here I feel more and more of myself being washed away. I know it’s not safe to feel like this. I know I should be able to tell a grown-up that I am afraid. But I can’t because around here losing oneself is a good thing. It means we’re making room in our hearts to be more Christ-like. There’s no one I could tell who wouldn’t congratulate me.

When I lift the brim of Brant’s hat, Mathis is gone. So at least there’s that. I press my hip against the white wooden fence and follow it to a blue-and-gray footbridge. The old, peeling planks creak under the shuffling feet of several absurdly fertile families. A screeching toddler tosses a stick of blue cotton candy into the Ditch, adding to the heap of paper plates and plastic bottles already down there. Another toddler begins to wail. Their mom hauls them off the bridge, dangling them by their wrists.  

I hear the clip-clop of boots, and a second later, Brant Mitchell plows through another dawdling family, who ought to be pissed, but instead they whoop and try to slap him on the back. He jogs toward me, grinning, a sheen of sweat plastered on his dangerously red face. His wild blonde curls have wilted into brownish strings.

When he hits the end of the bridge where the wood meets the sidewalk, he doubles over, hands on knees, and vomits up four pieces of bread, four pieces of meat, and four pieces of cheese. All over the sidewalk and the toes of his boots. A couple of chunks splatter onto mine. The dawdling family gasps and groans. Some jackass laughs. 

Brant stays bent over, clutching his knees so tight his arms are trembling. The scars on his flushed neck are practically glowing pink. I go to put my hand on his shoulder, but he shudders and hacks and unloads his breakfast with a thick, wet blarp.

I jump back. I don’t know what the hell that used to be, but it’s all I can do not to add my perfectly normal frozen pancakes to the grisly mess spilling off the sidewalk into the matted grass. The colors are all wrong, and it’s full of tiny white shards like bone. I can feel the horror rising off Brant’s hunkered back like invisible steam, hot enough to scald me. 

He clears his throat, but when he speaks, his voice sounds like he upchucked ground glass instead of beef. “I, uh, did a little squirrel huntin’ this morning.”

I glance at the puddle. My stomach heaves, but I grit my teeth. “You might want to think about doing a little squirrel cookin’ in the future.”

I expect some smartass comeback, but he just nods. He slaps his knees and straightens up. He swipes a hand across his mouth and comes away with a gross yellow smudge on his knobby wrist bone. He curls his lip and rubs the gunk off on his jeans. He won’t look right at me.  

“I reckon if the Health Department caught me in the Hamburger Hut like this, they’d shut the club down.”

I kick at a fly buzzing around my shoe. “I’ll give Sister Sharon your apologies.”

He jams a hand in his pocket and pulls out a thick roll of twenty dollar bills. His winnings. He thrusts two at me. “Here. Give this to your daddy. Send some lucky kid to the Passion Play. Just don’t let it be me.”

I take the money because I know it will keep my dad from telling Brant’s dad that Brant went back on his word. Brant’s mouth twists to one side, opens like he means to say something, and then snaps shut. He sighs and rubs his neck.

“You still coming tonight?” I ask.

Brant snorts. “You know I’d have to be dead to get out of that.”

I kick another fly. I don’t know why this feels like the awkward end to a very weird date. I hate that I like it feeling that way. I hate that I get so caught up in the feeling that when Brant Mitchell holds out his hand, I think he means for me to take it. But just for a second. Then I remember his hat on my head. As soon as I take it off, I can feel the circle of hair it left plastered to my scalp and the cowlick it stirred up over my widow’s peak. Brant whistles as I hand him his hat. 

“If this’s how you looked after a rodeo, Cowboy, I can’t believe you had to come all the way to Hickory Ditch to get yourself a girlfriend.”

I roll my eyes, and he punches me on the shoulder. He plunks his hat on his head and tugs the brim down over his eyes. Then he nods once and spins on his boot heel. I run my fingers through my damp hair as I watch him walk away. He looks okay—shoulders squared, stride steady—but there’s something not quite right. I stare at his back longer than I should. Anyone could see me. Mathis. Daddy. Laramie. But I keep watching until finally, just before he steps beyond my eyes’ ability to see, it hits me. For the first time ever, Brant Mitchell looks naked in his nude shirt.

Dusk comes early, thanks to a mean-looking pack of storm clouds dogpiled over the western hills. A cool breeze blows in, ruffling my stupid red hair and rustling the stupid red tarp sagging low enough to painfully brush my forehead, which is now also stupidly red. I punch the tarp out of my face. It’s all that remains of the Harvest Mission Hamburger Hut. The tables, the grill, the slimy Tupperware and empty coolers—all loaded in the church’s rusty cargo trailer. Booths are coming down all around us, their leftover Styrofoam lizards and inflatable penis snakes wrangled into minivans and truck beds for the bumpy ride to the next comatose town.   

For one stupid second, I think about asking Daddy for money to go buy that belt before it’s too late, but then I remember his tense phone call with Mama earlier over another insufficient funds fee, and I accept the fact that it’s already a couple of years too late. Instead, I help him unlash the tarp from the six flimsy poles. It flaps and snaps in the rising wind like a pirate sail, but we manage to fold it, meeting in the middle like we do when Mama makes us fold sheets. He pulls the big square of plastic against his chest—so much boobier now than it was before Socky’s—and squeezes all the air out. He tosses it back to me.

“Throw that in the trailer while I pull up these poles.”

I do what he says. I know he’s pissed that I was gone so long today, but he ain’t showing it yet. Like the brewing storm, I know it’s gonna be a big one, and I wish him and the weather would both just get it over with. I promise myself that if me and Brant—I mean, Hannah—if me and Hannah have kids, I won’t ever do that to them. If I’ve got something I want to yell about, I’ll just do it so they don’t wind up as anxious as me. I probably won’t even do that. I’ll probably just skip to the part where we both feel sorry and eat too much ice cream. 

Daddy hands me the poles, and I slide them into the trailer. Chunks of black dirt crumble off the sharp ends and fall through a rotted-out hole in the floorboards. Daddy slams the door, and a couple of girls walking past cower and run for cover. It takes them several yards to figure out it wasn’t thunder; when they do, they laugh and shriek, “You’re so stupid!” 

I wonder if they ever think about kissing each other. 

Daddy elbows me in the shoulder. “Ain’t you already got a little filly around here somewheres?”

That’s his way of reminding me not to commit the deadly sin of lust. I shrug and slink over to our old brown-and-beige Chevy’s passenger door while he limps around to the driver’s side. I give the stubborn handle the secret handshake that makes it come unstuck and hoist myself up, avoiding the angry, yellow foam mouth torn into my side of the vinyl bench seat. It bites if I get too close; one of the many reasons I never wear shorts. The main one being that I’m a horseman and horsemen do not wear shorts. 

In the old days, Pentecostals used to share my conviction that knees are unseemly, but I guess they’ve changed their tune this century because not long after we moved here, I walked into the kitchen one morning and found Daddy drinking his coffee, reading his Bible, and wearing a pair of baggy khaki shorts with an elastic waistband. He shrugged and said he didn’t feel like wrestling his bad leg into blue jeans every day. He’s always trying to get sympathy that way. Making little comments about his reconstructed back or his rearranged guts. Musing out of nowhere how good it is to walk. Well, it don’t work on me. Man his age had no business getting in that rodeo ring. He should have been content to sit in the stands and cheer for me.

Daddy climbs into the truck, wincing. He winces again when he leans out to grab the door and pull it shut. He presses his back against the seat and exhales. The lines extending from his eyes match up almost perfectly with the silver streaks in the hair above his ears. Since the accident, he’s been aging even faster than the President. I’m sixteen and I’ve already had to change my father’s bedpans, and one day, probably sooner than later the way he’s been treating himself, I will have to do it again. 

He starts the engine and checks the side mirror. The one-lane road in and out of the park is clogged with the mass arts ’n’ crafts exodus. He tilts his head against the rear window and closes his eyes.

“Might have overdid it today.”

“Got your pills?”

He pats his breast pocket, making the hidden bottle rattle, and opens his eyes. “You didn’t do your old man any favors this afternoon.”

I look out the window. Shrug.  “Sorry, sir.”

The old seat squeaks as he shifts and squirms, trying to get comfortable. I wait for a lecture about responsibilities and consideration, but it never happens. When I risk a glance, he’s staring out the window, and I realize it’s over. That was it. Three hours of anxiety for nothing. I can feel it all draining down into the soles of my feet, curling my toes inside my boots. I’m just about to ask if I can get out and walk to church, but then the truck lurches forward, and I nearly bonk my head on the dash.

Daddy eases the truck and trailer into a gap between cars, and now instead of idling, we’re inching along. I settle back and fasten my seatbelt. Daddy jiggles the wheel like you’d jiggle the reins of a sleep-walking horse, but of course the truck doesn’t respond.  

“Seatbelt,” I remind him.

He looks at me like he’d forgotten I was even in the truck. “So you all revved up for this revival or what?”

Or what. I am definitely or what. But I smile and say, “Sure am.”

He reaches over like he’s gonna pat my knee, but then his hand loses steam and plops down in the middle of the seat. It lies there twitching like a shot bird. Once upon a time that hand could reach up inside a horse and pull out a brand new horse. Now look at it.

“Seatbelt,” I remind him again.

Harvest Mission Pentecostal Church could stunt-double for the world’s largest ear of Indian corn. Random red and brown bricks are speckled throughout the pale yellow walls. A cracked and peeling roof covers the long, narrow building like a dried-out old husk. A steeple rises up like—I don’t know, I guess the simile ends there, a steeple’s just a steeple, but still, everything else, yeah, big ear of corn. But don’t let it fool you. Sure, come autumn, we’ll be going on hayrides and refusing to celebrate Halloween, but the harvest in our mission has nothing to do with pumpkins, squash, or pears.

No, our mission, should we choose to accept it, is the harvest of souls. 

And if we don’t accept it?

Well. That’s what revivals are for. 

Tonight, as Ditch Daze ends, Catch the Fire begins. Where one celebrates freedom from political tyranny, the other celebrates freedom from spiritual tyranny. That’s how Brother Mackey pitched it when he was passing the offering plate anyway. Folks in these parts get real jumpy around a word like tyranny. It reeks of mandatory sex education and Mexicans who won’t learn to speak English. Maybe one day I’ll grow up and be afraid of those things, but for now, every time I hear the word tyranny, I just think of Brant Mitchell beside me on our church pew, nudging me with a tiny T-Rex arm or scraping two claw-like fingers along my hairy wrist. Sometimes, while staring straight at Brother Mackey and nodding like he’s in full agreement, Brant will make a dinosaur sound in the back of his throat, so soft and low that only I can hear him. He’s determined to crack me one day, but I’m the master of the Sunday morning poker face. If he knew that sometimes, days later, I’ll remember some stupid thing he did and get the biggest, dumbest grin—

This one vanishes as soon as I round the corner and find Mama and Laramie sitting on the wide, concrete steps coming down the right-hand side of the church front. Well, Mama’s sitting. Laramie is slumped into her lap, wailing loud enough to be heard even over the Newsboys song blaring from the vacant lot on the left side of the church. Daddy’s limp all but disappears as he rushes past me and crouches in front of them. He strokes her back with the hand that wouldn’t pat my knee, and says, “Hey, hey now, what’s wrong?”