Chicken (8 page)

Mathis pulls off his stupid trucker hat, dog-shakes the sweat from his mullet, and then puts the hat on backwards like he’d rather protect his hair than his eyes. He leans off his four-wheeler and something big and white arcs from his lips, splats on the side of the Ditch. The guys perched over his head whoop and holler, and I figure it must’ve been some sort of bet. They’re drawing this out on purpose so I’ll be rattled and more likely to lose in an interesting way, preferably something involving flames.

Feminine laughter tumbles from above like a rock lobbed right at my head. Lauren. The rest of the church girls are clumped around Colton’s big blue cooler, waiting on us good ol’ boys like well-trained girls from a country song, but Lauren, she’s gone rogue. I can’t really blame her seeing as how whenever she’s around, those other girls suddenly get very loudly concerned with whether or not they look fat. Lauren doesn’t have to ask. She knows, but doesn’t give a crap. Them smaller girls hide behind shapeless, Scripture-printed, XL Tees while Lauren wears shorts that hug her huge butt and tight colorful tops that believe firmly in the separation of her breasts and belly. Hannah calls her the Patron Saint of Haters Gonna Hate.

I can’t hear what they’re saying, but she keeps buckling and unbuckling her knees like maybe Brant will think she’s falling and try to save her. When that doesn’t get him to touch her, she takes matters into her own hands—matters being Brant’s right arm. She strokes his corded muscles, slipping her fingers under the hem of his sleeve. He smiles—eyes half-lidded, dimples half-flared—and gives in, flexes. Lauren makes a big show of not being able to wrap her whole hand around his bicep, but just when I’m thinking yeah, well, he’d need three hands to wrap around yours, Brant’s eyes slide toward mine and go into an exaggerated roll. 

A flash of white. A wild shout.

Mathis’ four-wheeler bellows like an angry, black bull fighting to break loose from the mud.

“Shit!” Brant wrenches his arm away from Lauren, waving me on. “Go! Go! Go!”

I kick into gear and jam down the gas lever. My four-wheeler answers Mathis’ challenge like an aging green dragon, wheezing as the wheels spin, slinging hard clods of mud onto my face and arms. I shut my eyes as she lurches out of the muck with a sloppy fart.

The Ditch fills with the roar of our engines, the sound pressing in even harder than the heat. We should wear ear muffs. We should wear goggles. We should wear jackets. But we don’t. None of the above. Hot wind and lukewarm mud pelt my skin as I surge ahead, blind, leaping over ruts and landing hard on the other side, grinding fallen saplings into splinters. 

Bite my tongue, taste it bleed, rusty salt water running down my throat. Don’t choke. Open my eyes. Legend has it this is how the Pitcher boys died. Arms, legs, everywhere. Blood, guts, and brains falling like rain. Their mama had to shoot herself to scrub her memory clean.

Twenty feet in front of me, Mathis bares his teeth like a rabid skunk too crazy to turn away.

I jerk in my right arm, shove out my left, force this poor old dragon to fly up the north slope.

Mathis plows through the mud where I’ve just been, fish-tailing his tires to fling up a tidal wave behind him. 

It slams me like a solid thing, nearly knocking the handlebars out of my grasp. I veer to the left to bring her back down, and for one horrible instant, she wobbles in the air, and I’m sure this is it, we’re going over, and the Unholy Ghost will be there to drag my soul down—

But she steadies and I take my hand off the gas, letting momentum carry her across Mathis’ tracks and up the other side. I swerve before she gets very far and we roll to a stop in the middle of the Ditch.

The guys come scrambling and skidding down the north bank, like the wildebeests from my mother’s beloved Lion King. If those wildebeests had been whooping and grunting and chanting, “Chicken! Chicken! Chicken!”

I roll my eyes behind my hands as I scrape the mud off my face. I reckon this is the only game on earth where shaming the loser is more important than celebrating the winner. Maybe because everyone involved secretly understands that the winner is an idiot destined to die young, and the loser is the one with at least half a brain, the one who knows it’s more important to survive than be brave. And so, in a strange way, their obsession with heaping humiliation on the chickens of the day is really an act of praise, a hint of what’s to come in the future when guys like me have big companies, big bucks, and big-titted wives while guys like them pretend they weren’t our bullies but our playful best friends. It’s something to tell myself anyway.

They circle me, crushing my legs against the searing metal guts of my dragon, punching my arms and my back, shoving their sweaty palms against the sides of my face, breathing baloney and mustard into my ears. Bawk-bawk-ba-bawk! interspersed with peals of coyote laughter and caveman growls. They are the choir boys gone crazy, this ravine is their desert isle, and I, of course, am the pig. Not that any of them would know what that means since I was the only boy in English class who actually did the reading last year, but hey, boys like these don’t need to read because as long as one of them can hold you upside down over the toilet, another one can steal your notes. 

Two hundred yards away, Tyler Mathis sits on the black four-wheeler, picking his teeth with a pocket knife, wondering if he’ll watch wrestling or baseball tonight, Little Ty gurgling with visions of gas station beef jerky. He doesn’t expect any praise because he knows the point was never his glory but keeping me in my place. 

Of course, if I’m the Piggy in this hillbilly Lord of the Flies, that makes Brant Mitchell my Ralph, and just when I’m fixing to suffocate in the midst of all this deli-flavored carbon dioxide, here he comes, trotting down the middle of the Ditch, boots belching in the sludge, lazy fists punching the air like he’s battling invisible ninjas that aren’t trying very hard.

This is my cue that I’ve taken enough abuse, and I thrust my elbows into the slippery crowd, catching Harry Boles on the chin and Colton Dixon in the ribs. Not hard enough to hurt, just enough to give the impression that I can fight for myself, that I wasn’t just waiting on Brant and his white hat to save me, that every day is not like yesterday in the leathersmith’s tent.

“All right, all right,” Brant drawls, stopping a few feet away. “We’ve got weather coming. Beat it, boys.”

Everyone looks to the sky, their filthy paws frozen all over my back and shoulders like this is an altar call and they’re just laying on hands. There’s a charge in the air, prickling what little body hair hasn’t been plastered to my skin, along with the weird yellow light that comes when a blue sky fades away mid-afternoon. Leaf shadows dance across the Ditch as a breeze stirs in the real things. A not-far-off rumble sounds to me like a passing eighteen-wheeler, but Mathis must hear it as thunder because he starts in making Unholy Ghost noises. 

It don’t take but a second for the others to chime in like a pack of hyenas. I might be scared if their actions didn’t speak so much louder than their spooky nonsense words. All those grimy fingers let go of my shirt, slide off my skin, and the guys take off as quick as they can without running. Only the stench of lunchmeat chewed by unbrushed teeth remains. 

Brant stands like a tree unbending in their cackling stream. When they’re finally past him and the suck-and-pop of their boots in the mud has drowned out their gibberish, he ambles on over, yawning and stretching and scratching his chest.

His hand falls next to mine on the rubber grip. “I’ll take it from here.”

I sling my leg over the back of the seat and hop off the other side. He looks me over like he’s inspecting for wounds. I’m fine, but his gaze makes me shaky. 

“You know you don’t have to do this, Casper. You’ve got a girlfriend. You’ve always got an excuse to be busy.”

I look away, down the Ditch toward the west where fast-moving clouds have turned everything below the trees into a big, black wormhole. Maybe if I run straight at it I’ll come out the other side in an alternate universe where I never have to lie or hide.

“I want to.”

Brant shrugs, maybe even shakes his head. Hard to say. He throws his leg over the seat, nearly kicking me in the chest, but I don’t step back. He looks up at me, and then glances at the rack on the back, the place where coolers and camping gear and heterosexual guy friends ride. I shake my head, but for some reason, I still can’t get out of the way. He puts a hand on my shoulder and pushes me back like I’m a little brother being dismissed. My skin flushes hot enough to dry my coat of mud. What he does accidentally is worse than anything a hundred guys like them could do to be mean.

He kicks into gear and squeezes the gas, leaves me coughing in a dirty cloud of exhaust. An unmistakable crack of thunder drowns out his engine. After it fades, I hear the first raindrops skittering across the leaf canopy. Somewhere beyond those trees, out in the middle of the hay field, a bunch of girls are squealing and half a dozen trucks are revving up.

A strong gust makes the skinny old pines sway and creak, rattling their brittle branches and sharp needles against the sturdy limbs and soft leaves of the hickory trees. It’s barely even cool, but I shiver and hunch my shoulders, drawing an invisible coat tight around my chest. I walk as fast as these heaped-up ruts and pools of liquid sludge allow, willing my ears not to turn the whistling wind into a drowning man’s screams.

A couple hundred yards up the Ditch, there’s a ramp that Brant and Brother Dean carved into the north slope for getting the four-wheelers in and out without gruesome accidents. By the time I climb the ramp and wade through a brambly stretch of woods, the last pickup’s tail lights are bouncing over the cattle guard way across the field. They turn left on the gravel road and vanish behind the honeysuckle grown up over the fencerow. 

Brant waits on the green four-wheeler under the umbrella of an enormous cedar tree. He scrapes fresh mud off his dog tag with the edges of his thumbnails. When he sees me, he lets it fall against his chest with a jingle and a soft thud. He juts his chin at the black four-wheeler sitting out in the field where a hard, fast rain is mercifully washing the sweat from Mathis’ ass crack away. 

We stow the four-wheelers in the old red barn at the foot of the tall, piney ridge the Mitchells’ cabin sits on. There’s a dog path up through the briars and trees, but it’s steep and slippery so we take the long way around. I let Brant keep the lead even though he’s not running near as fast as I’d like to be. His cowboy boots gouge chunks of blue gravel from the uneven driveway, slinging them backward into my shins. I’m struggling not to clip his ankles, but if I ran ahead I wouldn’t get to see the burnt-orange points of his shoulder blades shining through his wet, white tee like the twin suns of Tatooine. I’m also struggling not to jump on his back, wrap my legs around his waist, and ride him up the road with my hands over his eyes like one of those corny old couples discreetly selling erection medication in a western-wear magazine—not that I need any help in that department.

Halfway up the hill, the beagles begin to howl. They stream down the road, swarming around our legs with their funny, O-shaped mouths pointed at the sky like little kids tasting the rain. Tri-colors, lemon piebalds, blue ticks with black saddles, red ticks with mahogany capes. Fat beagles with legs like sausages. Skinny beagles with ribs you could break off and barbecue. All of ’em hunting dogs, none of them pets. Brant hates them because their prey drive’s too strong for him to have a cat, not even down in the barn to catch mice. Someday, whenever we’ve left Arkansas to live in Austin, Atlanta, or Asheville—I can’t decide which—I’m going to surprise him with a black kitten we’ll name Garth Vader Mitchell-Quinn.

We slog through a bottleneck of beagles between two old farm trucks propped up on cinder blocks and finally reach the shelter of the garage. It’s a cavern of redneck treasures, lit by a cluster of bare bulbs—one regular, one painted yellow, and one jittery fluorescent spiral that makes me feel a little bit sick and a little bit sad every time I walk by. We squeeze between his dad’s workbench and a red-and-white pickup squatting on flat tires, it’s bed heaped with assorted farm junk poorly hidden under a ratty blue tarp. Smells like gasoline and wet beagles in here.

Brant looks over his shoulder. “Call your mom and tell her not to worry about picking you up. You can ride to Catch the Fire with us.”

I lift my arms, let them fall back to my sides with a loud, wet smack. “I can’t go to church like this.”

Brant hops over a red metal box overflowing with obscure tools I can’t name. “You can borrow something. C’mon. Mom’ll make me do Bible study if you go home.”

I step over the toolbox. “I’m soaked clear through. You gonna let me borrow your panties too?”

He shrugs. “Washing machine’s gotta earn its keep.”

“But my boots—”

He turns around, grabs me by the shoulders. “Listen. You have to stay because I told Lauren that’s why she couldn’t. If I show up without you, she’s gonna do that thing.”

“What thing?”

“You know. That thing girls do. Hannah’s always doing it to you.”

“Ah, yes. That thing.”

He thumps me on the chest. “Yeah. You know what I mean.”

He turns away, and I feel my forehead crumpling. “So wait. Is she like your girlfriend now?”

He throws up his arms. “We’re negotiating.”

I don’t know if he means Lauren, who seems ready to sign a lifelong contract, or his parents, who say no solo dating until he’s eighteen. But I have a hard time believing—or maybe I just want to have a hard time believing—they’d let him go on group dates with Lauren, even if she is his co-worship-leader. Before this past May, she didn’t even go to Harvest Mission. Brother Mackey discovered her at the Hickory Ditch Little Theatre, killing it in the spring production of High School Musical as the whitest Gabriella Montez the world has ever seen. Brant was the director’s first choice for Troy without even auditioning, but Sister Cindy saw the word Disney and said, “Get thee behind me, Satan.”