KW09b:Chickens Read Free Page B

hear bugs crawling under leaves.
    Holding aside a n encroaching branch of oleander, Ted looked back and asked Bert how he was doing.
    “Dandy, ” the old man said. “Just dandy. How much farther?”
    Ted shrugged, his soft middle jiggling slightly with the rise and fall of his shoulders . There was a thin dashed line of blood on his side where something had scratched him. They pressed on. Thorns pricked at the red satin of Bert’s bathrobe, lifting loops of thread. The dog inhaled something nasty and gave a single wracking sneeze.
    Finally they broke through to a tiny clearing, maybe three feet on a side, where a spongy mat of decaying vegetation was smothering new growth.  In a corner of the clearing stood the rooster. Ted shined the flashlight at it and for just a heartbeat it froze stock-still like a spotlit actor in a stage tableau, throwing a crisp and oversized and menacing shadow. The rooster’s head was black, its eyes a glassy crimson, its comb a liverish pink. There was both white and red on its chest and its feet were a preposterous and pebbly yellow. After a stunned moment it started puffing up the feathers on its neck and strutting inches forward, inches back, with a herky-jerky cadence. Then it started crowing its head off, either in fear or defiance or because it imagined that the flashlight beam was some abrupt new form of sunrise. Er, er-Er, er-ER! Er, er-Er, er-ERRR! Er, er-Er, er ERRRRR! There were no pauses for breath between the cries and each one was higher in pitch than the one before.
    The dog had hunkered low and was pawing at the mat of leaves, but scuffling backwards as it did so. Bert swayed in his slippers, trying to keep his balance on the yielding and uncertain patch of ground. Then Ted raised the flashlight like a spear, took a half-step forward and started screaming at the rooster.
    He wasn’t screaming words but he wasn’t just making animal noises either. It was somewhere in between ; nonsense syllables but definitely human. The screaming at first shocked Bert but then it seemed to be contagious and the old man found that he was hollering too, as loud as he could, filling and emptying his lungs in a way he hadn’t done for years. The more he screamed the more he wanted to, aches and demons seeming to fly out with his breath, the burn of life seeming to waft back in with every inhalation. The men’s screams bounced off the close fences of the alleyway and came back blurred and blended. The dog joined in, yipping and growling, now straining toward the rooster, quailing no more. Ted bellowed, Bert yelled, and the rooster, backing till it could back no farther, began to flap its clumsy wings. Dust rose from the ground, feathers scratched and clattered, and the bird lifted haltingly, gracelessly, wobbling like a small plane on a windy runway, until it finally struggled up above the level of the fence, threaded and bashed its way through the web of overhanging foliage, and was gone.
    Ted gave one last shout, a kind of punctuation. Bert worked at getting his breath back, his ribcage stretching and contracting inside the robe that was now warm and damp from the excitement. When he was able, he bent down and lifted the dog, brushed filaments of cobweb from its whiskers and its muzzle. “You did it, Nacho,” he said to the creature. “You chased him away. You were very brave, weren’t you?”
    The chihuahua licked Bert’s face.
    Then the rooster crowed as lustily as ever from someplace not very far away, a backyard or a different alley.
    Ted tilted his head to gauge the direction from which the cry had come. He shrugged and it could be seen that there were bits of leaf and twig clinging to his jockey shorts and mixed in with his chest hair. Resignedly he said, “ We didn’t scare him far. He’ll probably come back sometime. Just a question of when.”
    Surprised by his own bravado, Bert said, “And we’ll be ready for him when he does.”
    “Yup, we will,” said Ted, and he led