KW09b:Chickens (2 page)

“Square feet?” said Joey. “
It’s the same square feet as the condo.”

Bert looked dubiously around. “Different layout, I guess.”

There was a silence. Bert’s good hand fidgeted. His eyes plotted paths around the furniture and through the doorways.

Joey said, “Well. Wanna grab some lunch, a drink?”

Bert declined. He said he’d better use the afternoon to settle in. The two men shared a somewhat awkward hug—how tight to squeeze, how long to cling?—and Joey left. Bert listened for the compound gate to open and close, and then he felt a feeling he knew that he had felt sometime before in the very distant past but couldn’t put his finger on. At length it dawned on him that the feeling was very like the way he’d felt when he was five or six years old and being left behind for his very first day at school.

He spent quite a while unpacking, refolding, and putting away the half-dozen shirts he’d brought along. The shirts were flamboyant and distinctive—teal linen, salmon-colored silk—and though some of the collars were fraying and some of the buttonholes gapped he found them reassuring.  The monograms and the custom stitching reminded him that he wasn’t just some ordinary schmo but a person of elegance and style:
Bert the Shirt,
as he’d been known to friends and enemies alike. Back in the day, he’d had quite a few of both. With his friends he’d rollicked and raised hell. Equally, though, his enemies had been of value in telling Bert who he was, not just a face in the crowd but someone who counted. Lately he had had no enemies.

Fondling the shirts
must have led to daydreams, because by the time Bert had finished emptying his suitcase it was nearly six o’clock. The light had gotten soft and lavender and there were voices coming from around the pool, though he hadn’t noticed exactly when they’d started. There was a gurgling hum that must have been the hot tub running. There was the happy sound of ice cubes landing in the bottom of a glass.

Bert considered stepping out to join his neighbors, but hesitated.
The hesitation surprised him. He was generally the most sociable of men, glad to shoot the breeze with almost anyone, to introduce his dog to people, to offer his opinion on nearly any subject. But in that moment something held him back. It wasn’t shyness; not exactly. It was concern that his unease at being there would show and that he wouldn’t make the sort of first impression he wanted to. He wanted to be seen as easy, regular, not nervous or uncomfortable or needy; like a guy who would fit right in and be a pal even with lunatics and nudists. He needed a little more time to feel that way and act that way.

So he kept his lights low and he fed the chihuahua. Feeling slightly fugitive and a little disappointed in himself, he walked the dog in a tiny private area behind his cottage. He went to bed not long after dusk had faded.

He used the first part of the night to get used to certain things—where the
bedroom window was, the angle at which the gleam from a distant streetlight slanted in, where the little troughs and ridges in the mattress were. The dog lay at his feet, twitching or snorting now and then as it dreamed. Sometimes the old man slept and sometimes he didn’t.

It was around three a.m. when the rooster started crowing from the far side of the compound fence. Bert couldn’t be sure if the crowing had woken him up or if he’d been awake to begin with, but he seemed to hear it before the dog did. A city person, Bert knew nothing about
roosters except that their cry was generally described as cock-a-doodle-doo. This struck him now as totally inaccurate. True, the crowing came in five-note blasts, but there were no hard-sounding letters in it. It sounded like
er, er-Er, er-Errrr.

Bert listened to three or four repetitions of the cry and then the dog woke up. It didn’t wake up gradually. It woke up with a sudden
spasmodic straightening of all four paws and a snapping-back of its neck as though it had been given an electric shock, and immediately it started howling.  The howling seemed designed to mimic the rooster or at least to imitate its cadence. It was high in pitch, improbably loud, and it seemed to be rasping the little dog’s throat. Bert felt bad about the dog’s anxiety and also about bothering the new neighbors on the very first night. He whispered, “
Piano,
Nacho, it’s just a chicken.”

The dog kept howling. Bert reached stiffly down across the twisted sheet to pet it, but he couldn’t quite reach so he sat up in bed and pulled the chihuahua onto his lap. It was quivering and when it wasn’t howling a tiny growl was rumbling
deep down in its chest. Bert cradled it and stroked it but it wouldn’t calm down and then Bert realized that the dog was peeing on his leg. “Oh, for Chrissakes,” the old man said, getting to his feet as quickly as he could manage. He grabbed his worn red satin bathrobe, found the dog’s leash, and headed outside through the sliding glass door that gave onto the pool.

He expected to be alone out there but he wasn’t.
There was a fellow, maybe thirty-five, slightly pudgy, dark hair pushed back in bundles, sitting in a lounge chair in his jockey shorts, smoking a cigarette. Bert didn’t notice him right away, not until he saw the exhaled smoke rising in the low moonlight through the dappled late-night haze. Then he said matter-of-factly, “Oh. Hey. How ya doin’?”

Just as casually,
the other man said, “Good. You?”

“Good.”

A moment passed. The rooster crowed. The chihuahua twitched at the leash and barked in reply. Drawing on his cigarette, the man in the underwear said to the man in the satin robe, “You always walk the dog this late?”

“He’s all worked up,” said Bert. “This is embarrassing but I think he’s scared shitless of the chicken.”

Mildly, the other man said, “Everybody’s scared of something.”

“
Yeah, sure. Plane crash. Cancer. But a chicken?”

The other man just shrugged and smoked.

“It wake y’up?” Bert asked, nodding toward the fence that the chicken was behind.

“Me? No. I don’t sleep at night.”

“Work nights?”

“Sometimes. Not now.
” He left it at that. “You’re new, right?”

“Today. I’m Bert.” He held out a long and bony hand
then remembered it had a cast on it and pulled it back. “Sorry. Took a fall last week.”

“
Ah, too bad. I’m Ted. Good to meet you.”

“Lived here long?”

“Around four months. At the compound, I mean. Key West, six years, maybe seven. Little hard to keep track down here. Cigarette?”

Bert declined but took the offer as an invitation to sit down in a lounge chair next to Ted.
He settled in and the rooster crowed again. The old man jerked his good thumb toward it and said, “And how long’s the chicken been around?”

“This time? Week, ten days.”

“There were other times?”

Ted stubbed out his cigarette in one of those
hurricane-resistant ashtrays with burlap on the outside and beans or ball bearings used to weigh it down. “Other times, other roosters. Plenty of ‘em around. Gone feral. Or could be the same bird coming back, who knows?”

Bert frowned. The dog was
trembling; he could feel it through the leash. It was still trying to answer the rooster note for note but its voice was growing hoarse and labored. “This could be a problem. Dog’ll wear himself out.”

Ted lit another cigarette. He leaned his head back, looked up at the sky, and unselfconsciously scratched his stomach all around his belly button. “Guess we could try to
kill it,” he said.

“Kill it?”

“Or catch it. Or chase it away.”

“
Maybe just chase it away,” Bert said peaceably.

“I know exactly where he is
,” said Ted. “There’s like a narrow little space between our fence and the next one. All overgrown. Tangled. Probably full of bugs and shit for him to eat. Cats would have a tough time getting at him. Cozy. Want to try to flush him out?”

Bert
hadn’t imagined being directly involved in chasing away a chicken in the middle of the night and he fumbled for a moment before he answered. The truth was that he didn’t want to do it. He didn’t see that well at night. He didn’t like bugs, he wasn’t that sure of his footing, and if even cats had a hard time maneuvering in the choked and narrow passage then it wasn’t a good place for him to be. On the other hand, his dog was in distress and it was the first time he was meeting this neighbor who seemed like a nice guy and was offering to include him in something. The old man swallowed, summoned conviction, and said, “Yeah. Sure. Let’s do it.”

“Okay,” said Ted. “Gimme a sec.”

He got up rather heavily from the lounge chair, rearranged his underwear, which had sagged a bit across his bottom, and briefly disappeared into a yellow cottage just beyond the hot tub. Bert assumed he was going to put some pants on but he didn’t. When he emerged a moment later all that had changed was that he was wearing flip-flops and carrying a flashlight. “Ready?” he said.

Bert lied and said he was. Ted led the way along the white gravel path and out through the compound gate
to the driveway. The old man chose his footfalls carefully, trusting to his thin-soled slippers to find safe passage. The rooster crowed at random intervals. The dog seemed to have given up on answering in kind and responded only with a wheeze that softly rose and fell. It pulled at its leash but also kept glancing backward for reassurance.

Just beyond
a wooden enclosure where the garbage cans were stored was the unkempt swath between the fences. Its entrance was partly blocked by a stubby palm whose fronds drank up most of the light from a nearby streetlamp. Stepping around the trunk, Ted pointed the flashlight into the alleyway but the beam soon died in the knotted undergrowth. Still, he advanced, slowly, swatting spider webs at the level of his nose and mouth. Bert followed gingerly, keeping one hand on the fence like a blind man. His slippers crunched over brittle fallen fronds; his toes were now and then captured by snarls of root or stem. The dog no longer tugged the leash but hung back behind his master’s ankles and needed to be lightly yanked. The rooster had gone silent. In the quiet they could hear bugs crawling under leaves.

Holding aside a
n encroaching branch of oleander, Ted looked back and asked Bert how he was doing.

“Dandy,
” the old man said. “Just dandy. How much farther?”

Ted shrugged, his soft middle jiggling slightly with the rise and fall of his shoulders
. There was a thin dashed line of blood on his side where something had scratched him. They pressed on. Thorns pricked at the red satin of Bert’s bathrobe, lifting loops of thread. The dog inhaled something nasty and gave a single wracking sneeze.

Finally they
broke through to a tiny clearing, maybe three feet on a side, where a spongy mat of decaying vegetation was smothering new growth.  In a corner of the clearing stood the rooster. Ted shined the flashlight at it and for just a heartbeat it froze stock-still like a spotlit actor in a stage tableau, throwing a crisp and oversized and menacing shadow. The rooster’s head was black, its eyes a glassy crimson, its comb a liverish pink. There was both white and red on its chest and its feet were a preposterous and pebbly yellow. After a stunned moment it started puffing up the feathers on its neck and strutting inches forward, inches back, with a herky-jerky cadence. Then it started crowing its head off, either in fear or defiance or because it imagined that the flashlight beam was some abrupt new form of sunrise. Er, er-Er, er-ER! Er, er-Er, er-ERRR!
Er, er-Er, er ERRRRR!
There were no pauses for breath between the cries and each one was higher in pitch than the one before.

The dog had hunkered low and was pawing at the mat of leaves,
but scuffling backwards as it did so. Bert swayed in his slippers, trying to keep his balance on the yielding and uncertain patch of ground. Then Ted raised the flashlight like a spear, took a half-step forward and started screaming at the rooster.

He wasn’t screaming words but he wasn’t just making animal noises either. It was somewhere in between
; nonsense syllables but definitely human. The screaming at first shocked Bert but then it seemed to be contagious and the old man found that he was hollering too, as loud as he could, filling and emptying his lungs in a way he hadn’t done for years. The more he screamed the more he wanted to, aches and demons seeming to fly out with his breath, the burn of life seeming to waft back in with every inhalation. The men’s screams bounced off the close fences of the alleyway and came back blurred and blended. The dog joined in, yipping and growling, now straining toward the rooster, quailing no more. Ted bellowed, Bert yelled, and the rooster, backing till it could back no farther, began to flap its clumsy wings. Dust rose from the ground, feathers scratched and clattered, and the bird lifted haltingly, gracelessly, wobbling like a small plane on a windy runway, until it finally struggled up above the level of the fence, threaded and bashed its way through the web of overhanging foliage, and was gone.

Ted gave one last shout, a kind of punctuation.
Bert worked at getting his breath back, his ribcage stretching and contracting inside the robe that was now warm and damp from the excitement. When he was able, he bent down and lifted the dog, brushed filaments of cobweb from its whiskers and its muzzle. “You did it, Nacho,” he said to the creature. “You chased him away. You were very brave, weren’t you?”