by Steve Vernon
They kept watching.
“You bunch of chickens.”
I fell asleep with the chickens watching over me.
I dreamed of Colonel Sanders. The old southerner looked at me, all antebellum and sagacious in his dapper white suit coat, his carefully knotted string tie.
“There has to be a sacrifice,” He whispered.
He poked me with his gnarled black cane. There was a chicken claw on the head of it, clutching a great carved egg. The colonel pinched me like a cannibal testing a would-be feast. Maybe he was tenderizing me.
I awoke beneath the weight of a chicken. It looked like the original chicken from the restaurant but I couldn’t be certain. All chickens looked alike, even now. Was that some form of avian racism?
The chicken stared at me, its eyes like beads of red corn, hard and unblinking.
“Go for it,” I said. “Let’s play, chicken.”
I kept staring. It stared right back.
Minutes passed.
Sweat beaded and crawled across my forehead and brow.
“I’m not cracking,” I warned the chicken.
The chicken kept staring. Then it pecked a button from off of my shirt.
Ha. The damn bird was trying to break my concentration.
No way.
I kept staring.
The chicken pecked another button. A second bird landed upon my left arm. A third rested heavily upon my right. I kept on staring, determined to get the best of this chicken. I couldn’t let them beat me.
The chicken pecked another button. My shirt flopped open like a loosened wound. Two more chickens mounted my arms. I felt others on my legs. How many more, I couldn’t be certain.
I tried to move but I had sat still for too long. My limbs were number than rubber chicken wings. It didn’t matter. I kept on staring, determined to see this through.
The chicken pecked at my bellybutton.
“Damn!”
I snapped. I tried to rise up. The chicken pecked again.
More and more of them pecked at me. I struggled beneath the weight of all those chickens. They just kept pecking and pecking. There were chickens all over me. They jammed their beaks into me like a legion of dirty orange pincer hooks, tearing, ripping, tearing, pecking.
I screamed into a mouthful of beating dusty feathers.
The birds kept pecking.
I thrashed and flapped my arms. I tried to stand up.
The birds kept on pecking.
I looked down and saw a chicken with something long and wet and sausage-like in its beak.
Spaghetti?
The bird tugged. I felt a sharp pain moving inside me.
Damn.
The chicken stood there staring at me, the first coil of my intestine caught in its bright orange beak.
“There we have it.”
I looked up to see who was speaking, knowing who it was even before I saw him.
“There we have it for certain sure.”
It was the cook. He stood over me like a god or some kind of a living judgement.
He even did his little funky chicken strut for me. It struck me as a kind of victory jig. Then he squatted down beside me. He dug at me. I felt his fat sausage fingers rooting through my open wound. They felt cold as if his hands were made of ice yet I knew that the cold wasn’t the cook’s fault.
He caught hold of my exposed gut and began to unravel the viscera like a long wet skein of yarn, twisting, long soft rubbery wet sausage spools, dumping it link by link into a small iron cauldron, whistling softly through his teeth.
“There we have it,” He repeated.
“Have what?” My voice was a husk, empty and dry.
“The end of your tale.”
He pulled the last few curls of gut rope from out of my gaping stomach. Then he pinched out a lump of something hard.
He showed it to me.
For a minute it looked a little like a moon. It looked like a tiny golden moon but it was an egg. A solid golden egg.
“There it is. Rent for the next year.”
He smiled. His teeth, all fine and even like kernels of fine white corn.
All I could do was stare. I should be dead. Shouldn’t I?
How long did it take to die?
I had to say something.
“What’s it all about?” I asked.
“Shh,” the cook soothed. “Don’t waste your words.”
I opened my mouth and coughed out feathers.
I tried to speak.
Nothing. Not a sound.
The cook hooked the cauldron onto the end of an old fashioned balance. He shifted weights and stones like an ancient checker player readying his match.
“Hmm,” he said. “Heavier than a heart, but lighter than soul meat.”
“What’s it all about?” I asked.
He looked down at me. He smiled, like a tall tree of a saint giving benediction to a dying child.
“You have to answer the questions,” He explained. “You have to pay for your eggs.”
He reached down with both of his hands. They were large and capable and merciful. I felt him cradles his palms about my temple as if he were about to deliver a long wet kiss.
Then he smiled, as soft as a lonely wet sunrise.
“What came first?” he whispered.
“I’m sorry,” I answered.
The cook squeezed his hands together.
The last sound I heard was the cracking of an egg.
Nail Gun Glissando
Bass shivered, seven floors above the construction sight, his arms and legs wrapped about a single cold girder. He looked up into the dark night sky shot full of twinkling holes. Aside from the sky and the girder his wristwatch was the only other object within eyeshot. He watched as the minute hand crawled around its tightly leashed orbit.
He heard her down below, working the guns.
…chuff/chuff/chuff…
Three hours. He’d hung here for three long hours. Glued like a slug to the bottom of the girder. He’d tried to clamber up a half a dozen times but fear bound him. He was stuck - stuck fast and soon to be stuck full.
Seven floors up. Seven floors straight down. Wasn’t seven supposed to be a lucky number? Like The Magnificent Seven?
Ha. Hadn’t they all died in that movie? He counted back in his memory. Bronson, Coburn, that sissy Vaughn, Brynner…, no wait, Brynner had lived.
He heard Mcqueen, looking cool and amused and dangerous, grinning out that famous line, “We deal in lead, friend.” That’s what Bass’s arms felt like. Cold lead, poured into skin. He ought to just let go.
…chuff/chuff/chuff…
He hung on tightly. He wished for a cigarette. Wasn’t every dying man entitled to one last smoke? One more coffin nail? That was a laugh. His mother had warned him time and again that these cancer sticks would kill him, just the same way they’d killed his father.
“They’ll nail you in the lungs,” She said. “Every one you smoke is just another nail in your casket.”
Bass closed his eyes to capture the memory. For an instant he saw his father lying there on the hospital bed, poked full of intravenous tubes and breathing pipes and rotten with lung cancer, clinging to the bars of the hospital bed, coughing out one last wet oily breath onto the tidy white blouse of an attending nurse.
…chuff/chuff/chuff…
Bass remembered staring at his father from beneath eyes lidded like tight gun slits. A part of him had hated the old man for leaving that way. Why hadn’t he stopped? Why hadn’t he quit? And why had Bass just stood there and stared while his father puffed his life away one smoke at a time?
That’s death for you. Sudden, no matter how long it takes. Death was the last big surprise party. Sorry to see you go. Here’s your hat and coat, you won’t be needing your wife and kids any longer will you? Death took you, like a migrating goose on the wing. One minute you’re rising into the heavens, north talking to the bump on your beak like an iron needle and then bang. Some fat jerk
in an Elmer Fudd suit jumps up out of a duck stand and lets you have it, a double barreled party popper. Surprise!
Shit! He startled awake one second too late as his feet slipped from the girder. The weight of his steel reinforced work boots dangled like a plumb bob. Christ. How long can he hold like this?
He tried to swing back up but it was worse than hanging. Every time he rocked back to try and gain a little momentum his fingers slipped that much closer to letting go. He tried to kick his boots off but succeeded only in bruising his ankles.
That hurt. Funny wasn’t it, how the little things hurt so much. A hangnail hurt way worse than a broken rib. It’s the sharp little pains that get you in the end. He hung there, trying to remain calm. He reminded himself that he’d been just a few seconds away from letting go completely.
It might not have been a bad idea to drop to the concrete below and end it quickly and cheat her of her revenge. Hell, if he fell while he was asleep he might not even wake up before hitting death’s no-return sales floor.
…chuff/chuff/chuff…
He welded his arms to the girder, squeezing through the cramps, refusing to let go.
He watched his breath making smoke in the cold night air. Funny, the things you remember when you’re just about to die. He remembered all of those cold winter mornings, rising up to deliver his morning paper route. Smoking his breath into October’s ice chest, imagining that he was smoking just like his father.
In the end he’d never started. By the time he was old enough to think about trying, his father was already breathing oxygen from a tank. After that, fear had kept his desire in check and he’d never felt the urge to light one up no matter how many guys on the job site puffed away.
The wind kissed his cheek. His feet were getting a little heavier. He knew feet weren’t real. Not the way most people thought of them as existing. What people stand on, the reality that kept them up, it didn’t have a thing to do with feet. Reality was based on things you couldn’t touch. Things like desire and fear. Fear kept you standing. Fear kept you hanging. Fear would never let you fall.
Was that what had happened? Had he fallen for her? It wasn’t love that he’d felt. Not any of them had felt anything like that.
He thought about her mouth. About the way the hammer looked going into it. It was a good hammer. Thirty two ounces of blued steel, arced for swinging. A cold comfort now, dangling from his tool belt. There’s a metal loop that holds his hammer to his belt. A hammer doesn’t need hands to hang on to. It never falls, unless he lets it. He ought to let it drop. It’s just one more weight dragging him down but he can’t reach the catch on his tool belt.
Everything is so heavy now. He laughs, thinking about how last year his doctor had warned him about losing weight. “You’re not getting any younger,” The old quack had said. “You don’t need that extra weight hanging on you.”
Ha. He’s not getting any younger, for sure. Not younger, not older.
…chuff/chuff/chuff…
There were seven of them down there. Seven lucky nail guns. She’s got them all up and running now. He can tell by the sound.
…chuff/chuff/chuff…
He always preferred his hammer over the nail gun. It swings itself if you use it right. It was just a matter of starting the right motor running. His arm and his hammer find a groove in the air, holding itself in a forever kind of arcing swing.
…chuff/chuff/chuff…
A fly, fat and slow and bloated drifted over his left hand. He felt its wings, flat and irritating against his numbed skin. What the hell was a fly doing up here at this time of year? It ought to be dead.
She ought to be dead.
The fly played about his knuckles. It’s been sleeping, dormant but the sound of her nail guns woke it up. It smelled the reek of dying meat. He wanted to swat the damn thing but he didn’t dare risk his hard fought balance.
…chuff/chuff/chuff…
He can hang on. The wind started to blow. It cooled him off. Fuck that. He didn’t need its help. He’s cold enough.
He felt his fingernails turn. Like small hard tombstones, worked into his flesh. He told himself to think of something pleasant. All he could remember was the feeling of her lips against his root, sliding and slapping against his balls and stomach. Her soft wet mouth, made softer by his hammer’s steel.
…chuff/chuff/chuff…
The wind blew. It was cold up here, like a lonely tower. Jesus stood in a tower, didn’t he? Didn’t the devil try to tempt him? That’s what did the three of them in Him, Lem and Willie.
Temptation.
He held the girder, refusing to allow his grip to slip. He could feel the cold of the metal and the night air working into his bones. Just that clearly he heard a voice inside his mind assuring him in a very cold and matter-of-fact kind of tone that he wasn’t going to make it.
He hung on tightly, ignoring the voice. He’d never learned to listen. He’d never been promoted to foreman, even though he’d worked with the crew pretty near forever. He always followed, or stood alone.
…chuff/chuff/chuff…
His arms ached like he’d hammered all day. That used to be a boast of his. That he could hammer all day. He never quit. He never stopped. In his memory he heard the sound of the nails he’d hammered into the meat of her hands.
“Hold still,” He’d said. “We need to nail you before we nail you.”
He’d thought he was being funny at the time. Ha. Some funny. Right now he wished someone would nail him to this girder.
Never mind. He could hold on.
Lem couldn’t. Lem’s down there now. Down there with her.
…chuff/chuff/chuff…
It was her fault. Her, walking by like she did, every day. It got like a song in his head that he couldn’t sing loose. It got like a dream he couldn’t forget. Haunting. That was the word. Like a song that haunted him night and day.
He thought about hammers. About the song of them. Tap, tap, bang. Three beats to a nail. A good carpenter averaged three beats to a nail. One to set it, one to tease and the last to sink it home. Tap, tap, bang. Tap, tap, bang. You could feel your balls echoing in the sound of the hammer blows, your bones shaking like aluminum conduit. It was even sweeter, with a group of men who know how to use their tools.
Tap, tap, bang.
It’s impossible to be angry when you’re hammering. There’s a cool sensation, cool like steel, that takes over your arm and your soul. Bang, bang, bang - it was a holy sound. Jesus was a carpenter. Remember that.
He thought about that hammer sound, letting it ring in his ears. He let it drown out the sound of the nail guns below him, the wet coughs of air against steel, galvanized pukes.
…chuff/chuff/chuff…
A hammer was better. It made a kind of music. Single notes. Clear and loud and individual. Not like nail guns, all those sounds jamming into each other like the notes of a piano running all together.
He’d seen a piano once, in a building he’d helped demolish. It had hammers. Hammers and wire to make the hammers swing. They’d taken it apart with a six pound sledge. The sound had rung on for damn near forever.
…chuff/chuff/chuff…
His grip loosened. He told himself he could still hang on. Like Jesus, high up on the cross. He’d liked to have been there. If he’d been there he’d have made sure the nails went in, straight and hard. On that hill, Golgotha. The word meant skulls. A preacher told him that once. Golgotha meant the hill of skulls. Bass wondered what that would sound like. A hill of skulls. Bones and teeth crunching beneath his boot heel.
Lem had used his boots on her. He’d kicked her more times than Bass could count. He’d broken up her ribs and her knee caps. She couldn’t stand, until Lem and Willie had propped her up against a leaning pallet and Bass had used his hammer.
Why the hell had he done it? It hadn’t felt good. It hadn’t felt as good as entering her. As kissing her.
If he’d only had the chance he could have loved her b
ut there was something in the way the moment came together for Bass and Lem and Willie; in the way their minds had come together and shouted for blood and meat.
It was her fault. Being out here, at that time of night. What was she was doing out here? Nobody comes out here. They’d worked her, the three of them at once, like a three man tag team. A death match. Wasn’t that something else, folks sometimes said? Three on a match? They worked her on the fresh laid planks of the floor, a fresh lay. Ha. Fresh caught and fresh laid.
…chuff/chuff/chuff…
Willie took her from behind. Bass had watched him, from over the top of her head. He’d tried to hold her mouth but she’d bit him. So he used his hammer on her mouth. He remembered watching the muscles work in Willy’s jaw. Chewing anger and fuck like a ball of tough meat. The knots of gristle played like a knot of snakes just beneath the leather of his sun beat skin. Hard and practical.
Willy was beautiful. Not in a fag kind of way. Not that kind of beautiful. Beautiful like a knife, sheathing and unsheathing, her long scream unwinding like a long drawn out violin.
Willy was down there too. Willie and Lem. Bass could see the two of them in the back of his mind. Willie, running like the wind for the open mouth of the door frame and her and those seven damned nail guns floating like a song note in the sky, her holding them soft like running smoke and then the nail guns sang out hard.
…chuff/chuff/chuff/chuff/chuff/chuff/chuff…
Willie, riddled, torn, hanging, the soft yellow smoke of her curling about the meat sack that was left.
She’s down there. Still down there. Waiting, whispering and working.
…chuff/chuff/chuff…
They’d put her in the foundation. Buried her under a yard of drainage gravel and then when the truck came that morning they’d chuted the cement down on top of her. Yet three weeks later she rose up like Jesus. Or was that Lazarus? Wasn’t he the one? Come out the tomb like he was getting out of bed?
Lem’s down there with her now. He’d gone down to beat his meat. Earlier that night. They knew it, Willie and him. Knew Lem was a horndog. He couldn’t keep it in his pants long enough to let the cum stains dry.
He’d gone down to mark her grave, one more fucking time.
