Chickens’ Revenge - Dennis McFadden

So six months ago Leona showed up at my place in a state of high flustration—her word, not mine—with Myles, her son. Her eyes were fluttering even more than usual and her face was deep crimson, her suntan gone terribly awry. Derek had found out about us. As in Derek, her husband. He was threatening to kill her, she had to move in with me. And Myles, too, which was a given. You don’t get one without the other. Myles has Down’s Syndrome, and Leona keeps him under her wing. They’re a package.

“Let’s think about this thing,” I said.

Her eyes fluttered, a habit that complements her blond hair and high cheekbones, not to mention her fluttering words. “Jerry, the man I live with has, has come unhinged, and we’re in physical danger. Is chivalry so, so dead you would hesitate to give us sanctuary?”

“I’m just thinking options ought to be explored. Police and Orders of Protection for example, the whole law enforcement thing. I seem to recall that if you leave him, you cut off your legal legs to stand on, not to mention all rights to that gorgeous house.”

“Jerry. He threw a knife at me.” I should have seen it coming. Derek, whom I’d never laid eyes on, had a drinking problem, which was getting worse. Leona’s theory: He drank more because he was becoming impotent, and he was becoming impotent because he drank more. A chicken and egg sort of thing.

Then there was the sign of the cat. Leona thought Myles should have a pet. So one day they went down to the shelter and picked out an orange tomcat. She wanted to start off small, maybe work her way up to a dog. Derek wouldn’t let the thing—she named him Theobold—into the house, but of course somebody’s always leaving a door open, and the cat, being a cat, tended to wander. One day he tended to wander into Derek’s study on the second floor while Derek happened to be in it. Leona and Myles were on the back porch drinking lemonade when Theobold came flying over the porch roof screaming like a scalded baby. He landed on all fours—being a cat—in the garden, but he was gone in a flash, never to be seen again.

“I suppose a battered wives’ shelter would be out of the question?”

“That’s insulting. A place like that would be demeaning, demoralizing and would not have any, any closet space to speak of at all.”

“Those are all good arguments,” I had to admit.

“We don’t have to live together as man and wife, Jerry. I realize you’ll never marry again. We can live together as man and woman. Or as some other kind of relationship. And Myles is great company to have around.”

“I don’t know. Nothing personal. But I don’t know.”

“It’s only natural to have cold feet.”

“This place really isn’t that big.” It’s a plain ranch. Though in truth there are two bedrooms and a bathroom and a half.

“Size doesn’t matter, Jerry. It’s not how big it is, it’s how you use it.”

That was the kicker. I knew she was talking about the house, because double entendres are not something Leona dabbles in. Maybe it could work. This damsel was definitely in distress. And I like Myles—I bought him a Walkman for his fourteenth birthday, and he never takes it off—and Myles likes me, too. He always gives me a big hug and a big grin when he sees me. He was sitting there on the sofa in his aqua Miami Dolphins jacket, watching television with his Walkman on, head bobbing up and down in time to the music. Maybe the three of us could live together as one big happy, if not family, grouping of some kind. Maybe Leona would do the dishes, which I have all kinds of trouble with, and which I regularly eat frozen dinners to avoid having to do.

“For how long?” I said.

“For, for as long as it takes, Jerry. Or a year.”

Next day when I got home, my closets were overflowing with clothes. Nice clothes. Leona’s a smart dresser, and she likes to put Myles’s best foot forward, too. Baggy jeans, hundred dollar sneakers, team paraphernalia—she thinks it helps him fit in at school. But all Myles really needs is his Walkman. He’s happy.

Leona came to work in my office a couple of years ago, when she decided to come back to work after twenty years because Derek had retired. And not because they needed the money, either. They lived in a big brick Tudor in Loudonville, so he must have made some good bucks—expensive clothes, high-priced habits, and Leona drove a new Mustang convertible, cherry red. Her first day on the job, I gave her a memo and asked her to make me ten copies. She brings me back the ten copies, and I said, “Where’s the original?”

“You didn’t give me the original,” she said.

We managed to hit it off anyhow. When we started going out to lunch together we usually ate at Ogden’s, a much classier place than the joints I frequent. We spent a lot of time talking, and letting one thing lead to another as one thing is prone to do. Turned out we had a lot in common. We both loved horseback riding, Caesar salads, swimming, oldies on the car radio, and the way she gives blow jobs.

She gave great tickles too, but unlike blow jobs, tickles are an acquired taste, which I didn’t acquire till after she moved in. Myles started it. He loved it. He took off his shirt and lay his chubby belly across her lap so she could tickle his back, sometimes for an hour. I kept watching, and after a few months I started thinking maybe there’s something to it. It seemed to hypnotize Myles, who looked like a frog with his belly being rubbed. So I tried it. Sure enough. There was something transcendental about reducing your whole consciousness to the level of a mesmerized frog. Sometimes she’d stand behind me when I was reading or watching television and tickle my ears. That was special.

One night last week, Leona was reading the obituaries—the only page of the paper she spends more than thirty seconds on—and Myles and his Walkman were watching television. World’s Wildest Police Chase Videos. They were on the couch, Myles had his socks off, his feet on her lap, cooing as she tickled them. I hadn’t worked up the nerve to try that yet. He’s been in the league a lot longer than me. We’d just had fried chicken livers and onions for dinner, and I was enjoying another glass of Chianti, while we tried to outwait one another on the dirty dishes. She hadn’t taken to it as enthusiastically as I’d hoped.

“I ran into Jim Pendleton today,” I said. “He was telling me about this guy we used to go school with, Lester Curtis. Seems ol’ Lester just kicked the bucket.”

Leona said, “We never went to school together, Jerry.”

“Not me and you. Me and Jim Pendleton.”

“I wonder, wonder if we should get a cat.”

“I wonder, wonder who wrote the book of love.”

“What do you mean by that?” She looked at me suspiciously. Myles was bopping and watching and cooing. On the police video, a little pickup ran a red light and a huge, black tractor trailer coming the other way squashed it like a bug. There was nothing left of it.

“Wow,” Myles said. “Mom—did you see that?”

“Myles, Jerry and I are trying to have an adult conversation.”

“This big truck creamed this little one like a Monster Truck. It was cool.”

“Cool is not, not a suitable description, Myles sweetie. Would you say I have to put on a jacket because it’s getting interesting outside?”

Myles went straight to the window, his feet flopping like flippers, and looked out.

“I probably haven’t seen Lester in thirty years,” I said. “He was your basic life-of-the-party kind of guy, loud, crude. I remember one party—somebody’s parents weren’t home—he climbs out on the porch roof and starts peeing over the side, yelling, ‘Don’t look—my quik-quak’s hanging out.’  A little of that goes a long way. Here’s the cool part—the interesting part. His dad raised chickens for a living, and Lester had to work on the old chicken farm, which he hated. He used to show off by taking a chicken, setting it on fire, and seeing how far he could punt it.”

“What’s so cool, cool about that?” Leona said. “That’s the sort of behavior that leads to the downfall of civilizations.”

“No, this is the cool part,” I said. “Seems ol’ Lester died of some kind of lung disease, Hypersensitivity Pneumonia-something—they call it Farmer’s Lung. It’s caused by breathing chicken manure fumes over a long period of time. He could barely breathe for the last ten years of his life.”

“Cool,” Leona said.

“Holy moly,” Myles said, still looking out the window. “What’s Daddy doing here?”

Leona was beside him before I could blink. They stared out the window, Myles’s head bobbing up and down. Then I heard Derek, outside. “Leona? Ready or not—Leona? You in there? Ollie, ollie in free.”

It wasn’t the voice of a dangerous man. It was the voice of a drunken man. Of course, I guess it could have been the voice of a dangerous man who was drunk. Something in my bowels did a little dance, so I thought the most sensible thing I could do would be finish my glass of Chianti. Which I did pretty much pronto.

“How, how did he find us?” Leona said. “Oh my God.” But I don’t know, she wasn’t fluttering all that much; she didn’t sound all that convinced. I went to the window.

First of all he was narrow-shouldered, nearly bald. Second, he was wearing a safari jacket. Third, he was throwing up. Right on my driveway. He couldn’t have stepped over three feet. “Hey,” I yelled.

I could hear tinny little music sounds coming out of Myles’s earphones. In the driveway, Derek lurched, then stumbled, off-balance, trying to right himself for about ten steps before he tumbled, rolling over in the yard.

“He tried to kill you?” I said.

“He threw a knife at me,” Leona said.

“It was a spoon, Mom,” Myles said. Spoooon, like a little howl.

“The weapon may have been dull, but the, the intentions were not,” Leona said.

The only light outside was a little bulb by the garage. If I hadn’t seen him fall, I wouldn’t have known where he was. He didn’t move. I didn’t either. I wanted to go back to my recliner. I didn’t want to have anything to do with this. I wanted to relax, watch television, have another glass of wine, get my back tickle, my blow job, and go to sleep. Maybe if we just got out of the window, he’d go away. Or maybe he was dead. Funny how life grabs you by the ear all the time and starts yanking you, ow, ow, ow, in some direction you don’t want to go.

But I went. I live just beyond the village of Schaghticoke, and there was a smell of fresh hay from the farms all around. There was a little moon, like a fat fingernail. Down across the fields through the trees you can catch a glimpse of the Hudson River, if you know where to look.

Derek was lying on his back in the grass. “Little help,” he said. “I may have exceeded my capacity. A wee teense.” His words were slurred, but his vocabulary was fine. He propped himself up on his arms, but that’s as far as he could get.

Leona and Myles followed me. “Derek, what, what are you doing here?” Leona said.

“Hi, Daddy,” Myles said.

It took him a while to focus on Leona. Myles he ignored. “I’m here to talk some sense into that obtuse blond head of yours. I’m here to battle blondness. Or bottle blandness.”

“You sweet-talker, you,” I said.

“You,” said Derek, his head bobbing in my general direction, “you would, of course, be the bastard.”

“You’re on my grass,” I said.

“Grass,” he said. “I’ll show you grass.”

“Myles, honey,” Leona said, “go inside. This could get ugly.”

“I like ugly.”

“What is that contraption thingie on your head?” Derek said.

“My Walkman,” said Myles. “Jerry gave it to me.”

“You,” Derek said, bobbing my way again. “You would be the bastard.”

“You know, you got a lot of nerve coming to my house, throwing up on my driveway and calling me dirty names.”

“Let me explain something to you, my fine-friended feather. It is you who are cuckolding me. It is I who are the aggrieved party. As ye reap, so shall ye sow. Or something to that effect. That is to say, what comes around goes around, my friend.”

“He was an English professor,” Leona said. “Did I ever tell you that?”

“Retired,” Derek said. “Now who will help me up?”

“Not me,” I said. “Not I.”

“Of course not. Bastard.”

What can I say? I was practically in awe. What could this old fart possibly be thinking? When Leona had mentioned his mean streak, I’d pictured someone with at least a little formidability. How could he sit there—pudgy, bald, too drunk to stand—trash-talking like a Mike Tyson with intelligence? I was pretty much baffled. I couldn’t see the logic behind the arrogance, so I wondered if it wasn’t a ploy of some kind, a trap, if he didn’t have something up his sleeve. Besides a flabby arm.

“He sometimes packs heat,” Leona said. “Did I ever tell you that?”

“Heat?” I said. “Weaponry?”

“Myles,” Derek shouted. “Front and center.” Derek grabbed his arm and tugged, but succeeded only in pulling Myles to the ground beside him. Myles crawled away on his hands and knees as though on a field of spiders, crying, “Grass stains.” Derek gave an anguished bellow. “Worthless—worthless. Why do these things happen to me?”

“I think you’d better leave,” I said. Wondering if Leona had any idea what packing heat meant.

“Leona,” Derek said, “Leona, my sweet. Where did our love go?”

“You left it at the Playmore Motel,” Leona said. “I’m sorry, Myles, sweetie, for you to have to hear such baseness, but a spade is a spade, and in flagrante is, I’m sorry to say, delicto.”

Derek’s head dropped to his chest. He launched an unintelligible mumble, except for dumb fucking blond, which came out pretty clear. He finally managed to stand, wobbling precariously at the top. In the dim light, I saw what might have been a tear on his cheek. Either that or puke. “Come home,” he said, palms out in a supplicating gesture.

“Go home,” I said.

“Mind your own beeswax,” Derek said.

“Just, just go,” Leona said, eyes fluttering.

“Come home,” Derek said, with a baby step toward her. “Or else.”

“Or else what?” I said.

Derek wobbled closer, staring at Leona, ignoring me. “You cunt,” he said.

Leona’s and Myles’s faces both froze, as though in a flashbulb. “Get out of here, now, or I’ll call the police,” I said.

“I shall be happy to. When I’ve accomplished my mission. As soon as I’ve come here to do what I’ve done. As soon as my bonny wife gets her bony ass into my car.”

Leona inched behind me, Myles inching behind her. “Call, call the police. Use the telephone.”

“He can’t protect you forever,” Derek said.

I’ve done a lot of things in my forty-five years, run across all kinds of people. I’m a fraud investigator for social services, I run my own tax business, and in the summer I have a little bait shop up on Lake George. Every day I deal with welfare cheats, tax auditors, shoplifters, and asshole drivers who shouldn’t be allowed on the road. I sometimes hang out in beer joints with unsavory clientele, and my ex-in-laws are the most obnoxious people anybody has ever had to break bread with. Yet I haven’t been in a fight since fifth grade. Since Jimmy Pendleton, who, not coincidentally is a lawyer now, stole my lunch money. I think it’s because I can’t seize the moment. My wonderful, God-given, fight or flight adrenaline had long since leaked away.

“Take Myles inside,” I told Leona.

Derek said, “When I was five, I had a little horsy. Made out of wood and hair. Whenever my parents had a cocktail party, I would take him around to all the guests and ask them if horsy could have a little drink of their sips. Of course, they’d say. I was so damned adorable. So damned adorable. Of course, I would have one as well. A sip for little horsy, a sip for little me.”

A truck groaned by up on the road—my house is down an embankment, on the long slope toward the river—gathering momentum out of the village. Somebody came walking down the driveway out of the dark.

I didn’t recognize him at first. His name was Fred Astaire, although he claimed to be no relation. This Fred Astaire was planted firmly on the ground, a grimy old man in a heavy wool coat that was patched and ragged and smelled like wood smoke from the stove in his shanty. He had a mouthful of teeth so bad you didn’t want to imagine what was going on in there. This Fred Astaire wandered the streets of Schaghticoke pushing his Price Chopper cart packed with all his filthy treasures, and the bottles and cans he collected for income. Mothers steered their children clear. Everybody gave him a wide berth. He always kept his bottle of Four Roses Whiskey stashed in the pocket of his smoky coat. The reason I didn’t recognize him at first was because he wasn’t pushing his cart.

“What do you want, Fred?” I said.

Ignoring me as well as the puddle of puke he was standing in, Fred examined the front of Derek’s new Bonneville. That’s when I noticed the ding beside the headlight.

“Whose car?” Fred said.

I nodded toward Derek. Derek raised his eyebrows, the better to look down his nose. “Join the party,” he said. “Why, you must be Jerry’s brother.”

“Son of a bitch like to kill me.” Fred looked at me. “Run me right off the road, wrecked my cart.”

“Oh?” I said. “And he didn’t stop?”

“Never so much as tapped a brake. Back up there by Crouse’s Corner.”

“That’s hit and run,” I said. “You could have him arrested.”

Derek’s head wobbled. “I hit a…I hit a pothole.”

Fred approached him. He was a head shorter than Derek, twice as wide. “What the hell you doing on the road’s what I want to know,” Fred said. “Drunker’n a shit-house rat. I hit somebody once, just once, and they took away my license for good.”

“Losing his license never, never bothered him,” Leona said.

“Apparently reparations are in order.” Derek’s slurring reached new heights. I imagined Fred’s breath was making him drunker. He patted his safari jacket, searching for his wallet. Fred eyed him suspiciously, saying nothing. Derek said, “Myles, please explain to this gentleman the word of the meaning reparations.” Then he laughed, a long, high-pitched howl, doubling over.

Fred watched in amazement. We all did. Finally spent, Derek said whew, taking a wad of bills from his wallet. “How much? Twenty dollars? Thirty? Here. Here’s a fifty. Go buy yourself a bottle of champagne. Or fifty bottles of your favorite whiskey. Or a little boy.”

Fred took the fifty with his left hand, walloped Derek with his right. Derek spun like a top, collapsing in a heap. Fred looked at the three of us in turn, pocketing the bill, daring anyone to challenge him. He turned, started to walk away, stopped. Returning, he scooped the other bills from Derek’s limp hand. Again he looked at us with the same daring glare, only quicker, more perfunctory, this time. Then he turned and trudged back up the driveway, into the dark he came out of.

Derek moaned. The three of us just stood there. Like when your dog makes a mess on the floor and everyone’s waiting for somebody else to clean it up. Derek waved a feeble fist, slurring toward the sky, “This isn’t over yet,” whether to Fred, me, Leona, or God, I don’t know. Then he started to snore.

“What, what are we going to do?” Leona said.

“He’ll catch cold,” said Myles.

“Pneumonia, with any luck,” I said.

“There’s an old saying,” Leona said, “but I can’t remember it. It won’t do to just go back into the house and go to bed. Sooner or later the chickens will come home to, to roost.”

“I suppose I could call the cops,” I said, unenthusiastically. There was a puddle of puke in my driveway, an obnoxious drunk out cold on my lawn, Chianti on my counter, and I couldn’t even think about all the questions and forms and procedures, not to mention court. It seemed pretty much like overkill.

Myles came up with the idea. “Let’s call the yellow bus to take him home.”

“Myles is right,” I said. “Let’s just drive him home and dump him.”

“But he knows where we live.”

“I’ll tell him I reported him. He won’t come back.”

“You don’t, don’t know Derek like I do. Of course, neither do I.”

Leona watched as Myles and I dragged him to his car, her arms crossed, fingers dancing. Derek’s eyes never opened, though he smacked his lips once and mumbled, “Postmodern.” In the passenger seat, he started snoring again. Leona came over to check, prodding him a couple of times, assuring herself he was dead to the world. Then she said she’d drive him, which suited me down to the ground. Derek’s big Bonneville was automatic, but my Honda was standard, which she couldn’t handle without a bunch of potentially damaging lurches and jerks. I didn’t much care for her driving my Honda.

“What if he wakes up?” I said.

“You’ll be right behind me. Won’t you?”

“Sure.”

“You don’t know Derek.” There was tightness in her voice, like something closing around her throat. I remembered the high, colorful scarves she always wore on her neck at work. The heavy make-up on her cheeks and eyes. “But does anybody really know anybody else?” She came around the Bonneville, hesitating at the door, as if having second thoughts. Or maybe first thoughts.

Myles started to get in. “No,” Leona said. “Myles, you ride, ride with Jerry.”

She pulled out. Since she wanted me right behind her, I figured she’d wait on the road. But she drove off. Leona being Leona, I figured she forgot. She’d stop when it dawned on her. It took me a couple of minutes to get the keys, put Myles in the backseat, help him with his seatbelt. I could hear the tinny Walkman tunes.

Sure enough, less than a mile from the house, Leona was stopped by the side of the road. The lights of the Bonneville were still on, but she was standing well behind it. I pulled over, told Myles to wait. Myles hardly noticed. He had his own things going on in his head.

We were beside a field of fresh hay, air thick with the smell of it. You could see it lying in row after row down to where moonlight was glinting off the Hudson. Leona was standing beside a pair of shoes, pointing in the same direction as the car, about a foot apart, the left one slightly ahead, as though someone had been plucked out of them. “I didn’t see him,” she said. Then I smelled the smoke. Down the embankment ten or fifteen feet was a shadow darker than the tall, moonlit weeds.

“I never saw him,” said Leona, flutterless. “I swear.”

I scrambled down the bank. Why, I’m not sure. Either because it was the right thing to do, or because I wanted to pretend to be doing the right thing to do. I never know which. I was there in an instant. What I hadn’t considered was what I would do when I got there. Which was pretty much recoil in revulsion like a sissy.

I couldn’t touch him, even to feel for a pulse, though I knew that was pretty much moot. He was too still, too twisted. His eye was open, glassy in the moonlight. The fifteen feet back up the bank was like a mountain.

Leona, a shadow by the Bonneville. I walked up wobbly, the smell of hay making me sick. Derek was out cold in the passenger seat. I said, “Fred is dead.”

“Fred, dead, schmed. This man threw a knife at Myles, Jerry.”

“Should we call the police?”

She barely spared me a glance. Around the car, she flashed through the headlights and opened the door, sliding the driver’s seat back. In the overhead light I saw something on the floor where the seat had been, something black and ugly. A handgun. My knees dipped.

Kneeling on the driver’s seat, she grabbed Derek’s shoulders and tried to pull him across. He was dead weight; his snoring hitched and stumbled, but his eyes never opened. She couldn’t budge him. She was sweating, blond hair plastered to her forehead, and she is not a woman born to sweat. She looked at me just standing there.

“Are you just going to stand there?”

I’ve always been a gentleman. Simple as that. The word accomplice never entered my mind. At the time. My knees buckled again, into the side of the passenger seat. We maneuvered him across. He was oddly compliant, as though accustomed to being helped through the bothers of inebriation. Like somebody dressing him for bed. When he was positioned in the driver’s seat to her satisfaction, she moved it back up, reclined it a bit, pushed the gun further back with her foot. Then she smoothed his jacket, pulling it up beneath his chin, tucking him in. His head nodded to the side, snoring louder than ever. Patting him on the shoulder, she eased the door shut. While it was happening it was like a memory, and now that it’s a memory, it’s like it never happened.

“When he was a toddler, Myles had such pretty blond, curly hair,” Leona said. “It was like angel hair, and I don’t mean pasta. Do you suppose Derek had hair like that?”

We walked past Fred Astaire’s shoes to the Honda. I turned it around on the road. Lifting an earphone, Myles said, “Where’s Daddy?”

Leona said, “He’s okay, Myles, honey. He, he insisted he was fine to drive, so we let him. He said he was fine to drive. Didn’t he, Jerry?”

Myles was satisfied. I could feel Leona looking at me. “Didn’t he, Jerry?” Then she leaned around toward Myles. “What did, what did daddy say, Myles honey?”

“He said he was fine to drive,” Myles said. “Didn’t he, Jerry?”

I almost laughed, but the nausea was back, and I shut my mouth in a big, fat hurry. Leona stared out the window. Myles went back to the sounds in his head.

Eternity at the kitchen table: Myles in front of the television, Leona clearing the dishes, and me just staring at the glass of Chianti she poured me, the dark red making me think of blood in the moonlight. I have no idea what we’re waiting for until it happens: the sound of sirens up on the road.

Myles can’t hear them through his Walkman. Leona tells him it’s bedtime. He gives me my goodnight hug, and waddles off, smiling and bopping and happy. Leona comes and stands behind me, the better to tickle my ears. “You should have seen him,” I say.

“I never saw him. Did I, Jerry?”

“I mean his body, not him walking along the road.”

“He must have been a sight for sore eyes.”

What can I say, even if my voice was willing to speak at this particular moment? She has me by the ears. I’m hoping she won’t notice how the hairs on the back of my neck are standing up, listening to the crickets screaming in the yard.

Originally published by Confrontation, A Literary Journal of Long Island University, 2010

Dennis McFadden, a retired project manager, lives and writes in a cedar-shingled cottage called Summerhill in the woods of upstate New York. His short story collection, "Jimtown Road," won the 2016 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction; another collection, "Lafferty, Looking for Love," is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press. His novel, "Old Grimes Is Dead," was given a starred review by Kirkus Reviews and selected by their editors as one of the Best Indie Books of 2022. His stories have appeared in dozens of publications, including The Missouri Review, New England Review, The Sewanee Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Best American Mystery Stories (3x) and in the inaugural edition of The Best Mystery Stories of the Year (2021).