Hypnotizing Chickens Page 5

  “Yes,” Chrys said, though she wasn’t the kind of person who noticed things like crown molding. On a whim, she had dropped by an apartment complex near work which displayed a balloon-bedecked sign advertising an open house. As soon as she entered the main office, she had been set upon by the perky blonde who introduced herself as Katie and was young enough to be one of Chrys’s students. When Chrys had muttered that she might like to look at an apartment, Katie had smiled like she’d just won the lottery.

  The “apartment home,” as Katie insisted upon calling it, was fine—clean with a fresh coat of off-white paint and new tan carpet. There was a small living room with a sliding glass door leading to a balcony, a galley kitchen with a dining nook, and a bedroom and bathroom down the hall.

  “Now if you’d like to see something a little less cozy, I can show you one of our two- or three-bedroom models,” Katie said.

  “No, thanks. I’ll be living alone, though I might get a cat.” Chrys cringed, realizing that for Katie, she had just put herself in the Lonely Middle-Aged Lady With Cat demographic.

  “Pets are welcome,” Katie said, “though there is a two hundred dollar pet deposit. We also have some really neat activities here. Every Tuesday is pizza night at the clubhouse, and there’s a racquet club and the pool.”

  Chrys hadn’t heard the word “clubhouse” since childhood—she was having a hard time not imagining it as a rickety platform in a tree. “That’s nice. Thanks for the tour. I’ll think about it and get back to you.”

  Katie pasted on an even wider smile. “Well, shouldn’t we just go ahead and fill out the application? The first month’s rent free deal expires after Friday.”

  “Then I’ll get back to you on Friday if I’m interested.”

  On the way back to her car, a voice called, “Hey! Ms. Pickett!”

  Chrys turned around to see a buff, heavily tattooed student who had barely managed to scrape out a C in her English composition course last semester. “Hi, Brandon.”

  “So what are you doing here?” Brandon asked. He was dressed in a wifebeater and shorts, perhaps on his way to the “workout room” Katie had been so excited to tell her about.

  “Oh, just looking at an apartment,” Chrys said.

  “Hey, that would be awesome!” Brandon said, with a smile that reminded Chrys of a happily idiotic golden retriever. “We’d be neighbors! We could hang out, slam a few beers.”

  Back at Aaron’s, she poured herself a glass of red wine and settled in her customary spot on the couch. What would her life be like if she moved to Westview Manor Apartment Homes? She’d buy a couch and a bed, maybe adopt a cat from the Humane Society. But then what? She wasn’t teaching this summer, so the season yawned before her. She pictured long, empty days in the plain little box of an apartment, lying on the new couch or bed, aching with the loneliness of the rejected—a loneliness that might drive her to go to the clubhouse for Pizza Night or drink beer and play video games with her C student. The only possible advantage to the situation was that she’d be on her own couch in her own apartment instead of Aaron’s.

  She carried her wineglass into the bedroom so she could change out of her teacher drag. As she reached into the drawer for a T-shirt, she remembered the box. Her mom had given it to her when they met for lunch the other day, and Chrys had set it down in her room where it disappeared among the other dozen cardboard boxes holding books and belongings. The contents of the box were covered with a towel, and she hadn’t even bothered to look at them. Her mom usually gave her a boxload of stuff when she came to town, and it was never anything to get too excited about—clothes from yard sales, maybe a scented candle or a knickknack. Idly curious, she pulled back the box’s covering and found a note in her mom’s loopy handwriting:

  We was cleaning out some stuff at Nanny’s and found this box. Nanny thought you might like to have these things since you made them or made them with her help anyway. I know your going through a hard time right now and I’m sorry we couldn’t talk about it in front of Nanny. Call me if you need to talk. Love, Mom

  The first item in the box was a doll made out of a sweat sock. It was spectacularly ugly, with rainbow yarn hair, uneven button eyes, and a gash of red yarn for a mouth. If you hung it on somebody’s door without an explanation, it would scare the shit out of them. Then there was a pillow made of sloppily stitched fabric with—it took Chrys a minute to remember the name of the character—Holly Hobby on it, and there were Christmas tree ornaments made out of a variety of children’s arts and crafts media, dough and yarn and Popsicle sticks.

  At first Chrys didn’t realize she was sitting on the floor in tears, clutching a sock doll and a Holly Hobby pillow to her chest. If Aaron came home and found her like this, he’d have her committed. But crazy as she might look tearfully clutching items from her childhood, at least for the first time since D-Day she was crying about something other than Meredith.

  Chrys’s mom always had to work full-time. And so until she was school-age, she’d spent her days being looked after by Nanny. Even after she was in school, the yellow bus dropped her at Nanny’s, where she stayed until her mom picked her up at five thirty. In summer, she spent all day every day with Nanny, and Nanny always seemed happy to have her there.

  Summers with Nanny were always full of projects: planting and tending the garden, picking blackberries and making jam, doing various craft projects that Chrys dreamed up. When they weren’t working on something, they’d take turns reading to each other: Nanny would read from the newspaper, and Chrys would read from one of the library books she devoured. When the weather was so hot they felt extra lazy, they’d watch daytime TV, game shows or the soap operas that Nanny called “my stories.”

  Chrys cried not just because of the good care Nanny had given her, but because Nanny had no one to take care of her now that she needed it. How unfair that a woman who had spent the majority of her life caring for the people around her now had to depend on the likes of a girl who had no qualms about stealing an old lady’s pills and replacing them with Tic Tacs.

  Chrys set down the sweat sock and the Holly Hobby pillow that was now damp with her tears. She picked up the phone. For the first time since D-Day, she knew what she needed to do.

  Chapter Six

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” Aaron was sitting cross-legged on the bed while Chrys packed her suitcase.

  “I told myself I’d keep track of how many times you asked me that question,” Chrys said, grabbing a handful of panties and stuffing them in the overpacked case. “But I’ve officially lost count. Let’s just call the number infinity.”

  “I know I keep asking.” Aaron was petting Miss Celie as he talked. “It’s just that you don’t see me running back to Niota, Tennessee, do you?”

  “I’m only running back for the summer to take care of Nanny until we can find somebody responsible to take over. And I don’t know—I think it’ll be good for me to unplug for a while. I feel like I need to cut some ties here to get my life back together. I got rid of the expensive phone Meredith gave me and bought a little throwaway so just you and my folks will have the number. There’s no Internet connection at Nanny’s, so I’ll be free of email. Maybe out in the country I’ll be able to hear myself think, and make some sense of my life. I mean, what would I do if I stayed here all summer with no classes to teach? I’d just wallow in self-pity.”

  “That’s not true,” Aaron said. “You’d wallow in self-pity and come see me in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

  “I’ll still come see you in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s just two and a half hours from Piney Creek to Knoxville. And that road goes both ways, mister.” She tossed a purple lacy bra from her underwear drawer at Aaron. “You can always come visit me if you want a bucolic weekend.”

  “Funny, as somebody who grew up as the gay kid in the only black family in a wide-place-in-the-road small town, I don’t seem to crave bucolic weekends much.” He tossed the bra back at her.

  “I kno
w this is hard for you to understand, but I just feel like it’s the right thing for me to do. You should’ve heard Mom when I told her my idea. She was surprised and…touched, you know? She couldn’t stop crying.”

  “I’m absolutely convinced that what you’re doing is a nice person thing to do,” Aaron said. “However, I’m not absolutely convinced that it’s a sane person thing to do.”

  She had to admit he had her there. “I’m not either.”

  * * *

  It didn’t take long to get away from the city. Chrys was just a few minutes from Knoxville, and already the urban and suburban sprawl had been replaced by long stretches of nothing but trees and mountains. Parts of the road were framed by rock faces from back when the hills had been blasted apart to build the highway. The interstate exits were few and far between, but each one seemed to have a garishly advertised fireworks store.

  As she drew nearer to the Kentucky state line, she passed a huge corrugated aluminum building labeled Adult World and decorated with poorly rendered silhouettes of buxom women. On the lot adjacent to the store was a huge white cross, also made of aluminum, which had been erected by an evangelical church to protest the porn store’s presence. This pairing always struck Chrys as particularly Southern, the way sin and salvation sat right next door to each other with no middle ground in between. They seemed to offer passersby a choice: the Sign of the Cross or the Sign of the Crotch, take your pick.

  Given the number of 18-wheelers in the Adult World parking lot, today the crotch was winning.

  A sign marking the last exit before the Kentucky state line read Last Chance Cold Beer. But the sign seemed like another kind of warning: last chance to decide if her summer plan was a terrible idea and to turn the car around. She kept moving forward.

  To get to Piney Creek, you had to exit the interstate and get on a state highway for twenty minutes and then turn left onto a winding but paved country road. Around the first curve of this country road was the Piney Creek Church of God, where you turned so abruptly as to feel like you were dropping off the face of the earth, ending up on a gravel road which turned into a dirt road. The first time Chrys gave Meredith directions to her family’s home, she said, “You basically drive to nowhere and then keep turning left.”

  Chrys’s family’s house was nearly at the end of the holler. While small, the house had quite a bit of acreage with it, some of which was a nearby mountain. Chrys pulled into the long, curving, gravel driveway and heard the sound she most associated with visits home: the chorus of barks, from the soprano yipping of the Chihuahuas to the baritone baying of the hounds. Her parents never had fewer than six dogs, and right now it was looking more like eight as the Chihuahuas and hounds and a couple of unfortunate-looking Chihuahua-hound mixes ran alongside the wheels of the car, barking for all they were worth.

  The Chihuahua-hound mixes had resulted a couple of years earlier when Chrys’s mom had gotten a new Chihuahua around the same time Chrys’s dad got a new hunting dog. The Chihuahua was apparently quite the Latin lover, and he had gotten to the hound before Chrys’s parents had managed to have either dog fixed. The resulting litter had been an unappealing mash-up of Chihuahua and hound genetic traits, and as adults they were downright hideous. One resembled a flop-eared Chihuahua on stilts, while the other had the body of a hound but the pop eyes and bat ears of a Chihuahua. They looked like they’d been spliced together on the island of Dr. Moreau, and Chrys always called them the Chihoundhounds.

  The house looked the same degree of run-down as it had since she was a teenager, the white aluminum siding dirtied to a dingy gray, concrete blocks standing in for the porch steps that Daddy had torn out with the intention of replacing before he lost his arm. In the backyard sat the ugly cream and olive green trailer that housed Dustin and his family. Such backyard trailers were a common sight in the area. Some homes in the country were surrounded by three or four trailers, like sharecroppers’ shacks spread around the plantation house. But in this case the “sharecroppers” were the adult children of the homeowners.

  As soon as Chrys parked the car, the door of the house swung open. There wasn’t much chance of sneaking up unheard here. Mom ran out on the porch in one of the flowered muu-muus she favored for at-home wear in the summer. Her smile was wide. “There you are!” she said, meeting Chrys in a hug. “I can’t believe you’re doing this. You didn’t even come home for the summer when you was in college.”

  It was true. Once Chrys had tasted life outside the holler her freshman year of college, she couldn’t imagine going back. She had worked a part-time job and taken a class every summer so she could stay in the dorm. “Well, it’s good to be here,” she said, even if she wasn’t quite sure yet if this was true or not.

  “We got the extra room at Nanny’s all ready for you,” Mom said, “and I fixed us some dinner to have over there.”

  Chrys could tell it had been a long time since she’d been home because it took her a second to recalibrate to a setting where dinner meant lunch.

  “Sissy!” Dustin, dressed in a pair of faded Levi’s and nothing else, had appeared beside them. He had the same brown-as-a-berry tan he’d had as a little boy, though he was well muscled now and slight crow’s feet had appeared beside his blue eyes. His chestnut hair hung past his shoulders. He was, as he had been since high school, a hillbilly Adonis.

  “Hey, bro,” she said, leaning in for a hug. It was the first time in over twenty years she’d had her arms around a shirtless man. As soon as she pulled away, she was startled by a tug on her shirt, the source of which could’ve been a Chihoundhound. But when she looked down, it was her niece Peyton, wearing cutoffs, a pink bikini top and a rhinestone tiara that glistened atop her golden curls. “Wow, Peyton, look how big you’ve gotten!” She knew this statement was straight out of the book of aunt cliches, but she couldn’t help herself. The last time she’d seen Peyton, she’d been a little fireplug of a toddler. Now she was a little girl.

  “I’m four now,” Peyton announced.

  “Aunt Sissy knows you’re four,” Dustin said, as Peyton hugged his leg. “You remember that pretty book she sent you on your birthday?”

  “I spilled Mountain Dew on it, and it got all sticky,” Peyton said.

  Dustin grinned. “You wasn’t supposed to tell that part.”

  Chrys smiled at her niece. “That’s okay. I spill stuff on my books all the time. Coffee, usually.”

  Looking at Peyton, Chrys felt a flood of fondness for her, but also a flood of regret that she hadn’t spent more time with her. When Chrys and Meredith had traveled, Chrys had always made it a point to buy gifts for Peyton: a tiny “I love New York” T-shirt, a plush bear dressed as a Beefeater, a Mexican marionette. She had thought of these gifts as a way of opening up the world to a little girl living in an eastern Kentucky holler. But now as Chrys stood before Peyton, she just felt like the kind of aunt who sends things but never visits.

  “Well, you want to head up to Nanny’s?” Mom asked Chrys. “We can have a bite to eat and get you settled in.”

  “Sure,” Chrys said, “I’ll take my car so I can unload my luggage.”

  “I wanna ride in the car with Aunt Sissy!” Peyton pronounced aunt as aint. Before Chrys could say anything, Peyton had the car door open and was sitting in the front passenger seat.

  “Uh…shouldn’t she be in the back in a car seat or something?” Chrys said.

  Dustin laughed. “Shoot, Nanny’s is just one field over from here. How bad a wreck could you get in? You’ve always worried too much.”

  Chrys thought, And you’ve never worried enough.

  Nanny’s house was small and boxy, with concrete statues of a kissing Dutch boy and girl in the front yard. If Chrys had to swerve to avoid Chihoundhounds in her parents’ driveway, she had to swerve to avoid chickens here. Chrys didn’t know if Nanny was familiar with the term “free-range chicken,” but even if she didn’t know the meaning of the phrase, she was still putting it to use. The birds were all over the
yard, pecking and clucking and walking with that strange head-bobbing motion that reminded her of Mick Jagger dancing.

  “Nanny kilt her one of them chickens at Thanksgiving,” Peyton said.

  “I heard she made chicken and dumplings,” Chrys said, managing to park the car without flattening any fowl.

  “Yeah, she did,” Peyton said, “but first she had to kill her a chicken. I watched when she done it.”

  “Really?” As a child it hadn’t taken Chrys long to realize she was too soft-hearted and squeamish for farm life. “Did it make you sad?”

  “No,” Peyton said, like Chrys had said something ridiculous. “It was funny. She wrung his neck, like this.” She brought her hands together and simulated the twisting motion that had been the downfall of many a chicken. It was a strange move to see performed by a little girl wearing a tiara.

  As Chrys made her way up the little pebble path to the house, her dad burst out the front door and said, “There’s my baby girl!”

  Peyton ran up to him and threw her arms around him. “Hi, Papaw!”

  He smiled at Chrys, letting her know that Peyton hadn’t been the baby girl he was addressing. Dad was wearing his “uniform”: a green John Deere cap, old jeans, and a plain white Hanes T-shirt with one sleeve empty thanks to a logging accident years ago.

  Once Chrys made it onto the porch, he draped his one arm around her in a half-hug. “So you’re thinking you’ll stay the whole summer?” His words were a little slurred because however big an occasion Chrys’s homecoming was, it didn’t merit him putting in his dentures.

  “If you’ll have me,” Chrys said.

  “Hell, if it was up to me, I’d put a trailer in the back for you right next to Dustin’s. But I know that wouldn’t suit you. You always had more gumption than he did.”

  “Yeah, but he got all the charm.” Chrys watched Peyton chase a chicken across the yard. She hoped the little girl wasn’t planning on putting her neck-wringing skills to work.