KW09b:Chickens Page 2

  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 an 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 wo
rked 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?”

  The chihuahua licked Bert’s face.

  Then the rooster crowed as lustily as ever from someplace not very far away, a backyard or a different alley.

  Ted tilted his head to gauge the direction from which the cry had come. He shrugged and it could be seen that there were bits of leaf and twig clinging to his jockey shorts and mixed in with his chest hair. Resignedly he said, “We didn’t scare him far. He’ll probably come back sometime. Just a question of when.”

  Surprised by his own bravado, Bert said, “And we’ll be ready for him when he does.”

  “Yup, we will,” said Ted, and he led the way back between the fences. The distance seemed much shorter now, the footing not so treacherous, the dimness not so blinding. In moments they were back on the driveway, then through the compound gate and onto the white gravel pathway that gleamed softly even in the dark, and Bert was headed back to the cottage that was already feeling a great deal more like home.

  About Laurence Shames

  Laurence Shames has been a New York City taxi driver, lounge singer, furniture mover, lifeguard, dishwasher, gym teacher, and shoe salesman. Having failed to distinguish himself in any of those professions, he turned to writing full-time in 1976 and has not done an honest day's work since.

  His basic laziness notwithstanding, Shames has published twenty books and hundreds of magazine articles and essays. Best known for his critically acclaimed series of Key West novels, he has also authored non-fiction and enjoyed considerable though largely secret success as a collaborator and ghostwriter. Shames has penned four New York Times bestsellers. These have appeared on four different lists, under four different names, none of them his own. This might be a record.

  Born in Newark, New Jersey in 1951, to chain-smoking parents of modest means but flamboyant emotions, Shames graduated summa cum laude from NYU in 1972 and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. His education has had no influence whatsoever on his later life or career.

  It was on an Italian beach in the summer of 1970 that Shames first heard the sacred call of the writer's vocation. Lonely and poor, hungry and thirsty, he'd wandered into a seaside trattoria, where he noticed a couple tucking into a big platter of fritto misto. The man was nothing much to look at but the woman was really beautiful. She was perfectly tan and had a very fine-gauge gold chain looped around her bare tummy. The couple was sharing a liter of white wine; condensation beaded the carafe. Eye contact was made; the couple turned out to be Americans. The man wiped olive oil from his rather sensual lips and introduced himself as a writer. Shames knew in that moment that he would be one too.

  He began writing stories and longer things he thought of as novels. He couldn't sell them.

  By 1979 he'd somehow become a journalist and was soon publishing in top-shelf magazines like Playboy, Outside, Saturday Review, and Vanity Fair. In 1982, Shames was named Ethics columnist of Esquire, and also made a contributing editor to that magazine.

  By 1986 he was writing non-fiction books whose critical if not commercial success first established Shames' credentials as a collaborator/ghostwriter. His 1991 national bestseller, BOSS OF BOSSES, written with two FBI agents, got him thinking about the Mafia. It also bought him a ticket out of New York and a sweet little house in Key West, where he finally got back to Plan A: writing fiction.

  Through the 1990s, he published eight Key West novels. In 2013, after a hiatus of a dozen years, he brought out his ninth, SHOT ON LOCATION.

  CHICKENS, featuring the beloved character Bert the Shirt, is the first in a projected series of stories set in the Southernmost City.

  Find out more about Laurence Shames at http://www.laurenceshames.com

  Works by Laurence Shames

  Fiction—

  Shot on Location

  The Naked Detective

  Welcome to Paradise

  Mangrove Squeeze

  Virgin Heat

  Tropical Depression

  Sunburn

  Scavenger Reef

  Florida Straits

  Nonfiction—

  Not Fade Away (with Peter Barton)

  The Hunger for More

  The Big Time