Man Descending (4 page)

Thompson gave her his beatific Buddha-grin and shook his head from side to side, very, very slowly.

A thunderstorm was brewing. The sky was a stew of dark, swollen cloud and a strange apple-green light. The temperature stood in the mid-nineties, not a breath of breeze stirred, my skin crawled and my head pounded above my eyes and through the bridge of my nose. There wasn’t a thing to do except sit on the bottom step of the porch, keep from picking up a sliver in your ass, and scratch the dirt with a stick. My grandmother had put her hat on and driven into town on some unexplained business. Thompson and my aunt were upstairs in their bedroom, sunk in a stuporous, sweaty afternoon’s sleep.

Like my aunt and Thompson, all the chickens had gone to roost to wait for rain. The desertion of his harem had thrown the rooster into a flap. Stanley trotted neurotically around his tethering post, stopping every few circuits to beat his bedraggled pinions and crow lustily in masculine outrage. I watched him for a bit without much curiosity, and then climbed off the step and walked toward him, listlessly dragging my stick in my trail.

“Here Stanley, Stanley,” I called, not entirely sure how to summon a rooster, or instil in him confidence and friendliness.

I did neither. My approach only further unhinged Stanley. His stride lengthened, the tempo of his pace increased, and his head began to dart abruptly from side to side in furtive despair. Finally, in a last desperate attempt to escape, Stanley upset himself trying to fly. He landed in a heap of disarranged, stiff, glistening feathers. I put my foot on his string and pinned him to the ground.

“Nice pretty, pretty Stanley,” I said coaxingly, adopting the tone that a neighbour used with her budgie, since I wasn’t sure how one talked to a bird. I slowly extended my thumb to stroke his bright-red neck feathers. Darting angrily, he struck the ball of my thumb with a snappish peck and simultaneously hit my wrist with his heel spur. He didn’t hurt me, but he did startle me badly. So badly I gave a little yelp. Which made me feel foolish and more than a little cowardly.

“You son of a bitch,” I said, reaching down slowly and staring into one unblinking glassy eye in which I could see my fate looming larger and larger. I caught the rooster’s legs and held them firmly together. Stanley crowed defiantly and showed me his wicked little tongue.

“Now, Stanley,” I said, “relax, I’m just going to stroke you. I’m just going to stroke you. I’m just going to pet Stanley.”

No deal. He struck furiously again with a snake-like agility, and bounded in my hand, wings beating his poultry smell into my face. A real fighting cock at last. Maybe it was the weather. Perhaps his rooster pride and patience would suffer no more indignities.

The heat, the sultry menace of the gathering storm, made me feel prickly, edgy. I flicked my middle finger smartly against his tiny chicken skull, hard enough to rattle his pea-sized brain. “You like that, buster?” I asked, and snapped him another one for good measure. He struck back again, his comb red, crested, and rubbery with fury.

I was angry myself. I turned him upside down and left him dangling, his wings drumming against the legs of my jeans. Then I righted him abruptly; he looked dishevelled, seedy and dazed.

“Okay, Stanley,” I said, feeling the intoxication of power. “I’m boss here, and you behave.” There was a gleeful edge to my voice, which surprised me a little. I realized I was hoping this confrontation would escalate. Wishing that he would provoke me into something.

Strange images came into my head: the bruises on my aunt’s legs; Thompson’s face drained of life, lifted like an empty receptacle toward the ceiling, waiting to be filled, the tendons of his neck stark and rigid with anticipation.

I was filled with anxiety, the heat seemed to stretch me, to tug at my nerves and my skin. Two drops of sweat, as large and perfectly formed as tears, rolled out of my hairline and splashed onto the rubber toes of my runners.

“Easy, Stanley,” I breathed to him, “easy,” and my hand crept deliberately towards him. This time he pecked me in such a way, directly on the knuckle, that it actually hurt. I took up my stick and rapped him on the beak curtly, the prim admonishment of a schoolmarm. I didn’t hit him very hard, but it was hard enough to split the length of his beak with a narrow crack. The beak fissured like the nib of a fountain pen. Stanley squawked, opened and closed his beak spasmodically, bewildered by the pain. A bright jewel of blood bubbled out of the split and gathered to a trembling bead.

“There,” I said excitedly, “now you’ve done it. How are you going to eat with a broken beak? You can’t eat anything with a broken beak. You’ll starve, you stupid goddamn chicken.”

A wind that smelled of rain had sprung up. It ruffled his feathers until they moved with a barely discernible crackle.

“Poor Stanley,” I said, and at last, numbed by the pain, he allowed me to stroke the gloss of his lacquer feathers.

I wasn’t strong enough or practised enough to do a clean and efficient job of wringing his neck, but I succeeded in finishing him off after two clumsy attempts. Then, because I wanted to leave the impression that a skunk had made off with him, I punched a couple of holes in his breast with my jack knife and tried to dribble some blood on the ground. Poor Stanley produced only a few meagre spots; this corpse refused to bleed in the presence of its murderer. I scattered a handful of his feathers on the ground and buried him in the larger of the two manure piles beside the barn.

“I don’t think any skunk got that rooster,” my grandmother said suspiciously, nudging at a feather with the toe of her boot until, finally disturbed, it was wafted away by the breeze.

Something squeezed my heart. How did she know?

“Skunks hunt at night,” she said. “Must have been somebody’s barn cat.”

“You come along with me,” my grandmother said. She was standing in front of the full-length hall mirror, settling on her hat, a deadly-looking hat pin poised above her skull. “We’ll go into town and you can buy a comic book at the drugstore.”

It was Friday and Friday was shopping day. But Grandma didn’t wheel her battered De Soto to the curb in front of the Brite Spot Grocery, she parked it in front of Maynard & Pritchard, Barristers and Solicitors.

“What are we doing here?” I asked.

Grandma was fumbling nervously with her purse. Smalltown people don’t like to be seen going to the lawyer’s. “Come along with me. Hurry up.”

“Why do I have to come?”

“Because I don’t want you making a spectacle of yourself for the half-wits and loungers to gawk at,” she said. “Let’s not give them too much to wonder about.”

Maynard & Pritchard, Barristers and Solicitors, smelled of wax and varnish and probity. My grandmother was shown into an office with a frosted pane of glass in the door and neat gilt lettering that announced it was occupied by D.F. Maynard, Q.C. I was ordered to occupy a hard chair, which I did, battering my heels on the rungs briskly enough to annoy the secretary into telling me to stop it.

My grandmother wasn’t closeted long with her Queen’s Counsel before the door opened and he glided after her into the passageway. Lawyer Maynard was the neatest man I had ever seen in my life. His suit fit him like a glove.

“The best I can do,” he said, “is send him a registered letter telling him to remove himself from the premises, but it all comes to the same thing. If that doesn’t scare him off, you’ll have to have recourse to the police. That’s all there is to it. I told you that yesterday and you haven’t told me anything new today, Edith, that would make me change my mind. Just let him know you won’t put up with him any more.”

“No police,” she said. “I don’t want the police digging in my family’s business and Evelyn giving one of her grand performances for some baby-skinned constable straight out of the depot. All I need is to get her away from him for a little while, then I could tune her in. I could get through to her in no time at all.”

“Well,” said Maynard, shrugging, “we could try the letter, but I don’t think it would do any good. He has the status of a guest in your home; just tell him to go.”

My grandmother was showing signs of exasperation. “But he
doesn’t
go. That’s the point. I’ve told him and told him. But he
won’t.”

“Mrs. Bradley,” said the lawyer emphatically, “Edith, as a friend, don’t waste your time. The police.”

“I’m through wasting my time,” she said.

Pulling away from the lawyer’s office, my grandmother began a spirited conversation with herself. A wisp of hair had escaped from under her hat, and the dye winked a metallic red light as it jiggled up and down in the hot sunshine.

“I’ve told him and told him. But he won’t listen. The goddamn freak thinks we’re involved in a christly debating society. He thinks I don’t mean business. But I mean business. I do. There’s more than one way to skin a cat or scratch a dog’s ass. We’ll take the wheels off his little red wagon and see how she pulls.”

“What about my comic book?” I said, as we drove past the Rexall.

“Shut up.”

Grandma drove the De Soto to the edge of town and stopped it at the Ogdens’ place. It was a service station, or rather had been until the B.A. company had taken out their pumps and yanked the franchise, or whatever you call it, on the two brothers. Since then everything had gone steadily downhill. Cracks in the windowpanes had been taped with masking tape, and the roof had been patched with flattened tin cans and old licence plates. The building itself was surrounded by an acre of wrecks, sulking hulks rotten with rust, the guts of their upholstery spilled and gnawed by rats and mice.

But the Ogden brothers still carried on a business after a fashion. They stripped their wrecks for parts and were reputed to be decent enough mechanics whenever they were sober enough to turn a wrench or thread a bolt. People brought work to them whenever they couldn’t avoid it, and the rest of the year gave them a wide berth.

The Ogdens were famous for two things: their meanness and their profligacy as breeders. The place was always as warm with kids who never seemed to wear pants except in the most severe weather, and tottered about the premises, their legs smeared with grease, shit, or various combinations of both.

“Wait here,” my grandmother said, slamming the car door loudly enough to bring the two brothers out of their shop. Through the open door I saw a motor suspended on an intricate system of chains and pulleys.

The Ogdens stood with their hands in the pockets of their bib overalls while my grandmother talked to them. They were quite a sight. They didn’t have a dozen teeth in their heads between them, even though the oldest brother couldn’t have been more than forty. They just stood there, one sucking on a cigarette, the other on a Coke. Neither one moved or changed his expression, except once, when a tow-headed youngster piddled too close to Grandma. He was lazily and casually slapped on the side of the head by the nearest brother and ran away screaming, his stream cavorting wildly in front of him.

At last, their business concluded, the boys walked my grandmother back to the car.

“You’ll get to that soon?” she said, sliding behind the wheel.

“Tomorrow all right?” said one. His words sounded all slack and chewed, issuing from his shrunken, old man’s mouth.

“The sooner the better. I want that seen to, Bert.”

“What seen to?” I asked.

“Bert and his brother Elwood are going to fix that rattle that’s been plaguing me.”

“Sure thing,” said Elwood. “Nothing but clear sailing.”

“What rattle?” I said.

“What rattle? What rattle? The one in the glove compartment,” she said, banging it with the heel of her hand. “That rattle. You hear it?”

Thompson could get very edgy some days. “I should be working on my dissertation,” he said, coiled in the big chair. “I shouldn’t be wasting my time in this shit-hole. I should be working!”

“So why aren’t you?” said Evelyn. She was spool knitting. That and reading movie magazines were the only things she ever did.

“How the christ do I work without a library? You see a goddamn library within a hundred miles of this place?”

“Why do you need a library?” she said calmly. “Can’t you write?”

“Write,” he said, looking at the ceiling. “Write, she says. What the hell do you know about it? What the hell do you know about it?”

“I can’t see why you can’t write.”

“Before you write, you research. That’s what you do, you
research.”

“So bite my head off. It wasn’t my idea to come here.”

“It wasn’t me that lost my goddamn job. How the hell were we supposed to pay the rent?”

“You could have got a job.”

“I’m a student. Anyway, I told you, if I get a job my wife gets her hooks into me for support. I’ll starve to death before I support that bitch.”

“We could go back.”

“How many times does it have to be explained to you? I don’t get my scholarship cheque until the first of September. We happen to be broke. Absolutely. In fact, you’re going to have to hit the old lady up for gas and eating money to get back to the coast. We’re stuck here. Get that into your empty fucking head. The Lord Buddha might have been able to subsist on a single bean a day; I can’t.”

My grandmother came into the room. The conversation stopped.

“Do you think,” she said to Thompson, “I could ask you to do me a favour?”

“Why, Mrs. Bradley,” he said, smiling, “whatever do you mean?”

“I was wondering whether you could take my car into town to Ogdens’ to get it fixed.”

“Oh,” said Thompson. “I don’t know where it is. I don’t think I’m your man.”

“Ask anyone where it is. They can tell you. It isn’t hard to find.”

“Why would you ask me to do you a favour, Mrs. Bradley?” inquired Thompson complacently. Hearing his voice was like listening to someone drag their nails down a blackboard.

“Well, you can be goddamn sure I wouldn’t,” said Grandma, trying to keep a hold on herself, “except that I’m right in the middle of doing my pickling and canning. I thought you might be willing to move your lazy carcass to do something around here. Every time I turn around I seem to be falling over those legs of yours.” She looked at the limbs in question as if she would like to dock them somewhere in the vicinity of the knee.