Chicken (7 page)

I shrug him off, maybe a little too rough because I hear the click of my bone against his skull. He flops over on his back, tilting his head off the landing to look up at me. There’s a thick, dark smear on the right side of his mouth, lips to dimple. 

“Did you puke again?”

He shakes his head, still laughing, and buries all ten fingers in his curls, pulling them up off his forehead. “Did you piss your pants?”

I elbow him in the temple. “What were you doing in there?”

He takes a deep breath, lets it whoosh out. “I had a cookie. I wanted it warmed up. You know I like my chocolate chips like molten lava.”

I do know that. I shouldn’t know that. What a stupid thing for a guy to know about his best friend. “I know it’s all over your face.”

“Oh, shit.” His left hand hovers. “Where?”

I point. “There.”

He touches the wrong side of his mouth. “Where?”

“Right there.”

He touches his chin. “Where?”

“Right! There!” I poke him just below the smear, hard enough to feel his teeth under his skin.

He juts his chin out. “Get it.”

I picture myself cupping his chin, resting my fingertips on his sharp cheekbones and brushing my thumb inward from his dimple to his chapped lips. I picture those lips closing around my thumb and—

“Gross!” I rap my knuckles against the side of his thick skull.

He laughs this goofy laugh that pulls his lower lip under his teeth. He swipes his thumb across the chocolate and then holds his hand out in that way where you can just tell someone is looking for a napkin. He lifts his head and looks at his dorky, church-dad clothes. Then he looks up at me.

“Pretend I’m Hannah.”

He reaches over his head and drags his hand up my thigh, staining and wrinkling the baggy blue denim of my jeans. I’m suddenly very grateful for that bagginess. Seriously. Thank God for two-dollar yard-sale jeans. 

I knock his hand away and draw up my knee a little. “Hannah would never wipe a drug-infested cookie on me.”

He holds up a finger. “First of all, it’s an herb, like rosemary or catnip, perfectly acceptable for baking—”

“Catnip? Brant, I don’t—”

“Second of all, herbs don’t infest.” He points his two fingers at the streetlight. “Bugs infest.” His hand arcs through the air to point directly overhead. “And bats infest. But herbs?” He jabs me in the soft corner of my armpit, digging in. “Herbs infuse.”

I lurch away, crashing my shoulder into the iron railing. He giggles until he turns red and has to cover his face with his hands. Up on stage, his father winds the song down. His face turns toward us, but his eyes are clenched shut. It makes me antsy anyway.

“Come on now. You’d better sit up.” 

“Give me a hand.”

I shift toward him and hold out my hand. He grasps it so hard he tugs it onto his chest. For a second, I feel his pulse beating in the veins on the back of my hand. It’s all I can do to make myself lift it again, to lift him with it. But once he’s up and moving, he keeps moving, until suddenly he’s standing and tugging on my hand.

“I need to walk some of this off. Come on.”

I pull my hand back. Shake my head. “If my dad looks and I’m not right here…”

He rolls his eyes, but I know it’s at Daddy and not me. A lot of friends might keep wheedling, but Brant’s not like that. He’ll wheedle others on my behalf, but when I say no he listens. When I say anything he listens. That’s why it wouldn’t really matter if my family went to a different church. Avoiding Brant Mitchell is not an option because I don’t want it to be. 

He ruffles my hair before he leaves.

Thirty-seven minutes later, Brother Mackey wraps up his first Catch the Fire sermon—“Seeking Forgiveness/Finding Freedom”—by producing a large sheet of torn and crinkled brown paper—the blank side of an old grocery bag—and inviting everyone down to the altar—the rusty fender humped over the trailer’s tire—to sign The Declaration of Dependence. He’s quick to point out that this is in no way a spiritually binding contract, but rather a symbol of our commitment to finding life and liberty not through the pursuit of worldly happiness but through submission to God’s perfect plan.

“Imagine,” he drawls, “if you got a call from the bank offering you a chance to be debt-free. Your credit cards. Your mortgage. Your truck. Your boat. Your medical bills. Not just paid off, but wiped away. Like they never even happened. A fresh start in an instant. All you have to do is ask. Now who among us wouldn’t jump at that chance?”

From somewhere in the crowd, my father’s voice rings out. “Amen!” 

Brother Mackey smiles in Daddy’s direction, and then gazes lovingly across the rest of his congregation. “So folks, why would you hesitate for even a nanosecond when God is offering to do exactly that with your spiritual debts? We’re told right there in the Book of Psalms, Chapter 103, Verse 12—‘As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us.’ I know there’s plenty of folks out there that would call me crazy, but friends, I believe that’s an offer I can’t refuse. And neither should you.”

Mackey looks off stage and nods. Then he lays the Declaration on the fender and reaches inside his lapel, pulling out a pen taped to a long white feather. Immediately, the kids up front begin jostling for position. As they surge forward, the adults in the back stand and stretch and slowly move in. Brother Mackey kneels, his lips fluttering with prayer as he lays hands on the heads bent over the fender.

Brant Mitchell parts the shadows at the far corner of the trailer, turns and gives Lauren Atkins a hand-up. They cross to center stage, him looking sober and stoic with his fiddle and bow, her looking like Brant’s very own version of tonight’s just-past-full moon—big and round and shiny white. She settles on the sturdy piano bench behind the flimsy keyboard while he fumbles one-handed with the mic his father didn’t bother to lower. It makes an awful racket on the downward slide, and for half a second, I glimpse a stoned smile quirking the corners of his lips and eyes, but then he locks the mic, and his mask falls back into place. He tucks the fiddle loosely under his chin, and Lauren plays the melancholy opening of a song about Psalms 103, Verse 12.

Lightning sizzles in the clouds behind them. Thunder growls and Lauren’s fingers stumble. Brant looks over his shoulder, studying the sky, gauging the distance. He glances at Brother Mackey, who turns just enough to make a discreet finger-rolling motion. Brant sucks in his cheekbones, shrugs ever-so-slightly at Lauren. She makes a WTF face, but keeps playing. Brant Mitchell leans into the mic and sings.

A girl wolf-whistles—generally considered an inappropriate response to a worship leader—but I can’t really judge seeing as how his voice makes all my inappropriate feelings holler like a pack of coyotes. When he coaxes the first haunting note from his fiddle, the veins pop up along both of his wrists, reminding me of when he broke my fall in the leathersmith’s tent, when he put those arms around me and his breath burned my ear. My memory invents eye contact we never made, a non-existent moment when we might have kissed. I want to pound my fists into my temples until I think straight.

The first drop of rain sizzles on the back of my neck. 

Lauren fumbles again, and I look up in time to see Brant smile reassuringly. My guts roil like a nest of baby copperheads. She joins him on the chorus, her feminine cooing contrasting perfectly with his masculine growls. The way things ought to be. 

Brant shuts his eyes. Sweat or tears glisten on the side of his nose. His fingers and bow move effortlessly across the strings. This is what half these people came to see. The boy who can sing and play the fiddle at the same time. The boy who can hit all the right notes on blind faith. All across the lot, arms stretch toward the sky, hands opening and closing like Brant’s music makes grasping God as simple and straight-forward as catching raindrops.

BOOM

An explosion rocks the sky behind me. I look back to see the first spray of red and white sparks raining down over the park. Someone in the crowd shouts, “Hallelujah!” as if Jesus himself struck that match.

BOOM

A fiery blue flower blooms and fades.

Make it stop, God, please make it stop.

The same prayer every time. Maybe that’s why it never gets answered. Can’t blame a busy God for ignoring an unoriginal form letter. But they’re the only words I’ve got. 

I press my knees into my eye sockets. I know I should make myself go down there and write my name on that stupid shopping bag. I know that would make both my parents happy. I know not doing it is going to make them very unhappy. But I just don’t see the point. Because I know something King David didn’t know when he wrote Psalms 103, Verse 12.

The earth ain’t flat.

The earth is round and always, always, always turning. The distance between the east and the west is an illusion not an infinity. They are constantly becoming one and the same. Sooner or later, the lightning in front of me will collide with the fireworks behind me, and there’ll be nowhere for a sin like mine to go but up in smoke.

THURSDAY, JULY 5, 2012

In a trailer house, every storm feels like a war zone. All night long, rain strafed the roof like bullets from a jet squadron. Wind screamed like incoming missiles, shredding limbs from the trees in the woods out back. Every clap of thunder hit us like a bomb’s aftershock, rattling the windows and rocking the floors. 

With no A/C anywhere in the trailer and both my windows shut tight against the onslaught, the stale air in my boxy room was pushing ninety degrees. I hunkered in my lumpy twin bed under my corny, old cowboy sheets and pictured myself as a soldier in a fox hole in Afghanistan. It was going okay until Captain Mitchell went down, and I had no choice but to stretch my body out on top of his body, shielding him until my back was riddled with holes and sticky with blood. When he realized what I’d done, he held me in his arms, kissed my singed and muddy face, and swore that in all his life, in all his heart, there’d only ever been me.

After that, I prayed.

I prayed half the night away. 

I tossed and I turned and I prayed and I sweat.

My damp sheets clung to my chest and my legs and everything else.

I don’t know if I prayed myself to sleep or passed out from the heat. Either way, nothing changed. But I guess that shouldn’t surprise me.

Truth is, I don’t only pray make it stop, God, please make it stop.

Sometimes I pray make it happen, Jesus, please make it happen.  

But this is Hickory Ditch, where nothing ever stops or happens, just hangs somewhere in the middle, a city full of human-shaped mosquitoes suspended in amber. And this is me, engorged with feelings, frozen forever in the moment before I explode. 

The Ditch itself is home to millions of mosquito-shaped mosquitoes, not a one of them safely contained in amber. I slap the back of my neck and come away with two black smudges on my palm. I wipe them off on one of half-a-dozen pockets on my threadbare camo pants. Brant’s old green four-wheeler shudders between my legs, chomping at the bit like a horse, but otherwise nothing like a horse or else I’d feel more comfortable up here, more sure of what I’m about to do. Horses I’m good at. Heavy machinery, not so much.

I glance up at Brant. He’s leaning against a pine tree on the edge of the Ditch, his cowboy hat and white T-shirt spattered with mud, his boots and blue jeans caked with it. A stubby black straw twitches in the corner of his frown as his thumbs slide furiously across the surface of something cupped in his hands. At first, I think he’s typing an angry message on a very tiny phone, but then I remember his parents believe cell phones are the fastest way for a kid to get in touch with Satan, so that seems unlikely. A second later, he grunts and throws his hands up, letting his grimy dog tag fall back into place just below the point of his V-neck. 

 He catches me looking, lifts his chin and his brow. Mouths, You good?

I brace my arms against the handlebars and burrow my butt into the torn, vinyl seat. Even at an idle, the engine on this thing rattles my skull, making my unborn wisdom teeth ache way up inside my jaw. I force a yawn, partly to ease the buzzing pressure in my ears, and partly to appear calm. No big deal. I got this, y’all.

Brant gives me a thumbs up and grins around the straw. He’s a bird dog and my heart’s a covey of quails, exploding in a dozen directions at the sight of his slightly crooked but adequately brushed teeth. I look away.

The Ditch is gouged with tire tracks and littered with broken tree bones. The storm brought dead branches down from the old trees up above and caused little landslides on the steep-sloped banks, ripping out a bunch of scrubby little cedars and pines that were trying to take root. Another year they might have made it, but months of drought had turned previously rich, brown soil into a powder as fine and light as cheap chocolate cake mix. It melted away in the rain, filling the bottom of the Ditch with thick, black sludge—the stuff that brings us here today.

I rub my forehead into the crook of my left arm, a useless move when both parts are so slick with sweat. The Ditch may not hold water—except for that one time when it did and kill the guy like me—but it sure holds humidity. Here at the edge of the Mitchell property, it’s only twelve feet deep, but feels more so when you’re down in it on account of the hickory trees lining the banks, stretching another forty, fifty, sixty feet into the sky, making shade but also trapping heat with their thick, green canopy of leaves. 

There are gaps, of course, places where the limbs of two trees can’t quite meet, but they keep trying, like star-crossed couples always reaching, they claw at the sunbeams driven between them until sooner or later one can’t take it and throws its body across the rift, lays its head down at its lover’s gnarled feet.

Harry Boles stands on the rotting trunk of a tree that did just that, dangling his white shirt—the flag that starts the game—against his muddy knee. With his soft and pasty torso sandwiched between cargo shorts and a fedora—“No,” Hannah’s voice in my head reminds me, “That is a trilby”—he looks like a double-stuffed, plaid Oreo. He shouts something I can’t hear at Tyler Mathis, who’s idling Brant’s newer, black four-wheeler about a hundred and fifty yards away.