KW09b:Chickens Read Free

that his unease at being there would show and that he wouldn’t make the sort of first impression he wanted to. He wanted to be seen as easy, regular, not nervous or uncomfortable or needy; like a guy who would fit right in and be a pal even with lunatics and nudists. He needed a little more time to feel that way and act that way.
    So he kept his lights low and he fed the chihuahua. Feeling slightly fugitive and a little disappointed in himself, he walked the dog in a tiny private area behind his cottage. He went to bed not long after dusk had faded.
     
    He used the first part of the night to get used to certain things—where the bedroom window was, the angle at which the gleam from a distant streetlight slanted in, where the little troughs and ridges in the mattress were. The dog lay at his feet, twitching or snorting now and then as it dreamed. Sometimes the old man slept and sometimes he didn’t.
    It was around three a.m. when the rooster started crowing from the far side of the compound fence. Bert couldn’t be sure if the crowing had woken him up or if he’d been awake to begin with, but he seemed to hear it before the dog did. A city person, Bert knew nothing about roosters except that their cry was generally described as cock-a-doodle-doo. This struck him now as totally inaccurate. True, the crowing came in five-note blasts, but there were no hard-sounding letters in it. It sounded like er, er-Er, er-Errrr.
    Bert listened to three or four repetitions of the cry and then the dog woke up. It didn’t wake up gradually. It woke up with a sudden spasmodic straightening of all four paws and a snapping-back of its neck as though it had been given an electric shock, and immediately it started howling.  The howling seemed designed to mimic the rooster or at least to imitate its cadence. It was high in pitch, improbably loud, and it seemed to be rasping the little dog’s throat. Bert felt bad about the dog’s anxiety and also about bothering the new neighbors on the very first night. He whispered, “ Piano, Nacho, it’s just a chicken.”
    The dog kept howling. Bert reached stiffly down across the twisted sheet to pet it, but he couldn’t quite reach so he sat up in bed and pulled the chihuahua onto his lap. It was quivering and when it wasn’t howling a tiny growl was rumbling deep down in its chest. Bert cradled it and stroked it but it wouldn’t calm down and then Bert realized that the dog was peeing on his leg. “Oh, for Chrissakes,” the old man said, getting to his feet as quickly as he could manage. He grabbed his worn red satin bathrobe, found the dog’s leash, and headed outside through the sliding glass door that gave onto the pool.
    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