Stan and I sit on fenceposts six feet apart. Chicken wire loops like sideways eyelashes between each six-foot section. Periodically, we flick boogers, spit ‘t-baca,' and bet on which chicken's going the furthest from the henhouse first. 

 

 

Fifteen years ago, when we were in seventh grade, both our mothers got dead on the way to picking us up from school, in the Rambler Rebel, leaving from Paradise Cove Tiki Bar & Grill, to go to paradise, instead of the carport at William Dixon Junior High, by way of telephone pole. Just like that. Two motherless boys. But as misery loves company, we became inseparable. We never held grudges, so even if Stan's mom drove, it didn't matter. It could have been my mom just the same. 

 

Back then, we adjusted our potential as students accordingly as our grades charted down like stocks on Black Monday (only our descent plummeted through the rest of the week, too). We found distraction in extracurricular activities, like shooting paint pellets at cars from the Breakneck Hill overpass. We smoked our first doobies together behind the Ina L. Ashton Auditorium. Had our first encounters with girls at Sarah Johnston's confirmation party, down in her basement. Jimmy, her older brother, drooled, giggled, and leered in the corner, thinking we wouldn't see him behind a threatening tower of silverfish-infested National Geographics bound in Christian crosses with twine. The stacks nearly reached the exposed rafters of the basement ceiling. We failed together here too, to get to first base. Failure and loss became our bond. 

 

It got so you couldn't tell the difference between us. We dressed alike, talked in the same rhythms, laughed at jokes only we got. We differed only in mental acuity. I devoured great literature when juvenile delinquency got tiresome, and Stan, well, he could hardly read. Had that dyslexia.

 

 

For our wager, Stan and I choose chickens. My chicken is bigger than the Aurora Leigh (Joseph Blackburn & Sons' river freighter, where I'd worked as an oil wiper), and self-righteous as a Flannery O'Connor barbed-wire evangelist. In attitude, she's akin to the old ladies I once saw shopping at the holiday discount table at Nordstrom Rack. Indiscriminately, they shoved the other old, sloppy ladies, the ones with dish-toweled, curlered heads, and pink sweatpants hanging on for dear life around their bloated waists, away from the table. Their hips swung like an E. A. Poe pendulum. They're able to clear their way with them like a Henke snowplow, as they're grabbing panties and nylon control-top hose, and maybe hitting a few of the other customers with their gym-bag-sized purses, or the 20% off sale sign, that one of them dislodged during the discount shopping day Normandy Beach invasion. Loo-Loo Belle (that's what I named my chicken) could do that with her bulk and always came out first, and went farthest, every time I watched her. That's why I made this bet.

 

Stan, on the other hand, has his money riding on Frieda. She's the speckled one with the cracked beak—gurgles like a less-than-robust water fountain when you push the button, and the water burbles out limp like a bent-over candle that's been sitting in the sun too long. Freida sounds like Edward G. Robinson with a cigar in his mouth when she's all aflutter, going after the feed at breakfast time. 

 

The coop and yard reek from weeks-old coyote piss, and its consistent reapplication. Those coyotes decimated the former flock, leaving Frieda, the only survivor. That's how she got the cracked beak. Tough as nails, that chicken. So, that Tuesday, two days after the first attack, I bought a new flock and got Clara, my Great Pyrenees (beautiful monster of a dog), so it wouldn't happen again. There's been a few more attempts by the coyotes since, but they don't get far. Clara's a sentry you don't mess with. She's only got one eye now, and her tail's not as glorious as it once was. But I love her like Bob Cratchet loved Tiny Tim.

 

 

"You're some kind of idjit," Stan says. "A hundred dollars on that fat sack of feathers! I got this in the bag." He spits a long stream of ‘t-baca', so it arcs like a rainbow, only it's brown, like jackrabbit pellets, and not pretty with colors. 

"We'll see," is all I say. We talk like this to each other, but it's all in love.

The sun just rose over the cow pasture, like a dead eyelid slipping back and away into a skull, to remain open and not the other way around, sliding down to shut. I had to lower my John Deere cap so I might cut down the glare. You could hear the chickens rustling inside the coop. Sounds like newspapers arguing in the wind. Stan gets off his fencepost and goes to the feed barrel. He opens the lid and takes out handfuls and flings feed across the yard. 

"A hundred bucks, ain't chicken scratch," he says, looking back at me, a sideways grin slashed across his face, exposing his ‘t-baca' stained teeth, some of which are chipped so they look like the ragged peaks of the Smokies after a wildfire incinerates all the red spruce and Fraser fir. 

"Shut up," I say. "And open the coop."

 

 

Well, at first, you couldn't tell what from which. They pile out in a sea of feathers, squawking so you go deaf from listening, because you can't hear anything else. Some, dazed by the sun, stop right at the threshold, while others shove them aside or strut right over their backsides to get out and start feeding. Anticipating this, we'd made the bet, and that's where the excitement begins. My heart lights itself on fire, then nearly jumps out of my chest, like those Triangle Shirtwaist Factory girls, poor souls. 

 

In all my extensive experience raising chickens, I have never seen an aggressive hen. Just hungry ones. It's the males, the roosters, the cocks, that's got the fight in them. So what happens next is, as they say, unprecedented, at least I've seen nothing like it before. 

 

At first, it looks as if Frieda will take the lead. She races forward, bats her sisters away, then barrels through them like a bowling ball heading for a strike. But then Loo-Loo Belle catches up and whacks Frieda with her wings and pecks at her feet and breast like she's some psychotic switchboard operator trying to find the proper connection, or one of those cocktail dippy-birds on hyperdrive. Frieda's fighting back. Her sharp talons etch a gory tic-tac-toe board into Loo-Loo's chest. I surely don't know what's gotten into these birds, but it's terrifying to watch—a bloodbath.

"Jesus!" Stan says, his face red and bug-eyed. "Control your girl!" 

"Control yours," I say. "Look what she's doing to Loo-Loo!"

We freeze, having jumped down from our fenceposts at the beginning of the fracas, and stare in dismay, feeling helpless, as if beavers gnawed our hearts. 

 

In the end, they kill each other. Blood, beaks, and feathers strewn across the yard, starting just a few feet from where the feed ends. So, Stan and I call it a draw, which is better in the long run, since neither of us has the money to begin with. Strange but familiar, this fictitious gamble brings us closer together. It was a speculative venture. A wager more spiritually bound than financially grounded. This bet was beyond money, like our friendship is beyond despair. We'd found brotherhood in mutual loss, again. Something meaningful in a parade of meaningless days that drag on like the belly of a pregnant cat, or a mother hen that lays endless eggs and wonders where her children went, like Stan and me. Only achingly, it's the other way around.