KW09b:Chickens Read Free Page 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