by John Scott Lucas
I was driving on Route 117 on the coldest night of the year when I saw a chicken crossing the road. All the commuters coming out of the Bedford Hills train station were swerving to avoid it, but nobody was slowing down. I knew this chicken could survive the cold, but I also knew if the cars didn’t kill it, a fox or raccoon certainly would, so I put on my hazards, pulled over, and went after her, trudging across the lawns of total strangers, breaking through a sugar-crystal crust of snow and feeling very self-conscious.
I caught up to the chicken and grabbed her on either side of her wings. She started clucking and kicking, but I stuck her head under my jacket and she immediately calmed down. After a few moments, it dawned on her that it's warm and cozy under there, so she settled in, making happy little chicken sounds.
I started going door to door, but most of the houses were dark. The one guy who did open up, a Pakistani man still in his suit pants and a button-down shirt, had not set aside time on his evening's agenda to talk to a crazy man holding a live chicken. In fact, I could tell from the blue glow emanating from his living room that there was a TV show he was eager to get back to. He told me he did not keep chickens himself, nor did he know of any neighbors who owned chickens. He seemed mildly offended that I should even ask such questions, as if I might have been making some sort of wise crack about him being from the Third World.
I called the ASPCA. I called the police. It was getting colder and darker, and I wan’t getting any help. As it so happens, I actually knew somebody who would be willing to take in a stray chicken. Only she was my ex girlfriend, Paige, and I wasn’t talking to her at that moment.
Paige and I had been in the process of breaking up for months. She was determined to move on, but she still wanted to stay friends. I wish I were a bigger man. I wish I had more control over my emotions. I wish Paige hadn’t been so ambivalent. But I couldn’t keep on cuddling with her on the couch, until cuddling progressed to making out, and making out progressed to heavy petting, and then Paige would shake off the spell and kick me out before she, "Did something she would regret." “Being friends” was killing me.
I had vowed I wasn't going to talk to Paige for at least three months, but here it was less than a week later and Fate had conspired to drive me back into the arms of my lover. Okay, really it was just a great excuse. Yes, I had a real live Rhode Island Red in the back seat of my car. Yes, Paige kept chickens. But that didn’t mean my only option was to call her. If I didn’t know her, I’m sure I could have kept the chicken in my bathroom until I figured something out. I didn’t have to call Paige, I just really wanted to.
I sent her a text, "Hey. I found a chicken crossing the road. Can't find owner. Do you want her?"
Paige texted back right away. "Only you."
She said she was in consultation with a patient, but as long as it was healthy, she’d take it.
As I drove to Fairfield, I found myself dwelling on the moment that I started to lose Paige. One night, we were having drinks with Paige’s friend and her friend’s boyfriend, Lenny Three Looks. Lenny was not mobbed up; rather, he was an investment banker blessed with the Midas touch but bereft of personal style. His sartorial repertoire consisted of just three outfits: 1) Blue blazer, corduroys, and a button-down shirt; 2) Jeans, penny loafers and a polo shirt; 3) Jogging suit and K Swiss tennis sneakers. Hence the nickname.
We met at on the veranda of the Whelk Restaurant in Westport. The very first thing Lenny ever asked me was, “So, what do you do?”
I told him I was between jobs at the moment, but I was working in retail until I could find something better. This lead to a barrage of openly hostile questions.
“You like working retail?”
“How’s the money?”
“I bet it sucks working weekends, huh?”
“What do you do when you’re not working retail?”
I really didn’t care if some rich asshole who didn’t know how to dress himself wanted to wave his platinum credit card under my nose. I just smiled and answered his questions as if we were having a civil conversation.
But Paige tapped Lenny on the shoulder and said, “Lenny, may I talk to you in private for a moment?”
They went to the far side of the porch, where Paige told Lenny to put his dick back in his trousers and behave himself. After they came back, we finished our drinks and made excuses and left.
That was very early in our relationship, but I think that’s the moment that Paige started to see me through the eyes of her affluent friends. And if it wasn’t that exact moment, I’m sure there were others like it.
Oddly enough, Paige says Lenny was crestfallen when she told him that we had broken up.
“But the two of you seemed so happy!” he said.
Paige was still with her patient when I got to her house, so I pulled my car around back. Before I put the chicken in the coop, I took it into the garage and put a scoop of feed on the floor for her. Chickens are mean to newcomers. I was worried that this might be the last chance she got to eat without being hassled for weeks. While she was feeding, I noticed a small cone made of galvanized steel hanging from the peg board. It was a killing cone, used to constrain chickens when you cut their throats.
Back when we were still together, Paige had ordered 15 chicks from an online poultry catalogue. They were supposed to be all hens, but after a few months, it became clear that five of the chicks were getting bigger and more aggressive than the others. Now, you can have as many chickens as you want in Fairfield, but there is a strict noise ordinance, and roosters crow all day and all night, so it wouldn’t be long before a neighbor complained.
It turns out it’s hard to give away a rooster. For one thing, they don’t lay eggs. For another, roosters are real assholes. If they are not hogging the feed or getting into fights, they are trying to hump anything that moves. This stresses out the hens, which causes egg production to drop sharply. We called up the company that sold us the chicks and asked if they would take the roosters back. They offered a refund of $2.90 per rooster, and suggested that we could just keep them for a few more weeks until they were big enough to eat. And that is how a Buddhist and an animal lover came to slaughter five roosters.
Paige is a General Practitioner. She loves procedures. I mean loves them. I've never seen anyone take such pleasure from removing a splinter or dressing a wound. She would glow with divine bliss when she shaved me. So, once she decided to kill the roosters, she set about preparing for it as she would for any new medical procedure. She hired a butcher from an ethical meat market to assist her. She assembled all the necessary tools. She watched instructional videos on YouTube of farmers cheerfully demonstrating the most effective way to "process" chickens. Unlike Paige and I, these folks didn't get angsty about killing farm animals.
When the big day came, the backyard looked like a scene from a slasher movie. There was plastic sheeting everywhere. There were two new plastic garbage cans lined with heavy duty leaf bags. There was a giant stock pot with hot water simmering on the charm-glow.
I went into the shed where the roosters had been separated from the flock and snatched the first one. I carried it outside, placed it head first into the killing cone, and pulled its neck through the small end. I held it's legs with my other hand. The bird was remarkably calm as the butcher cut its throat on one side. It should only take a minute for a chicken to exsanguinate, but after about four minutes, this one still had it's eyes open, and it was looking directly at Paige.
"This is taking too long," I said, as Paige dug her nails into my hand.
The butcher cut the other side of the rooster's neck and a gush of blood streamed out. Everybody said a collective, “Ah!” In about 30 seconds, the rooster began to kick with every last fiber of his being. I had to hold on tight to keep it in place. And then I felt all the energy drain out of it. I pulled the limp body out of the cone and placed it on the grass. Then I went into the shed to get the second rooster.
One of Paige’s freinds dropped by as we were plucking the birds. After marveling at the make-shift abattoir in the back yard, she declared, "You always plan such interesting activities!"
A few nights later, I could feel Paige crying. One of the things about having a psychic girlfriend is that after a while things start to work both ways. During some of the countless times Paige had helped herself to my private thoughts, she must have left a few cosmic threads behind — little trails of bread crumbs that lit up and lead me inside her head whenever she was thinking of me. I could tell that she was upset, and, sure enough, when she picked up the phone, she was crying.
“I feel so sorry for what I did,” Paige said. “I’m haunted by the one who stared at me while it was dying. Do you think I’ll go to hell for that?”
“I can’t tell if you are serious or not. I don’t think you go to Hell for killing chickens any more than cats go to Hell for killing mice. What about the twenty New Zealand muscles and the swordfish steak we ate at Terrain last weekend? At least this was a more honest way to consume an animal.”
“I already thought of that, but it’s not making me feel better! I’m so sorry! More sorry than I ever was for the hundreds of hamburgers I’ve eaten or the thousands of bugs I’ve squished. And I was somewhat serious, by the way, about going to Hell.”
“Okay. Sure, it’s bad karma to kill another living thing. Every time I pet my cats on the neck, I think about the roosters, and this arbitrary distinction we make between pets and food. But we talked about this, baby. You have to figure that for every hen you buy, there’s a rooster out there that’s going to get killed by somebody else for food. This time, you killed the roosters yourself. You were humane about it. You took responsibility for the karma you created.”
“Yes, I really did feel like I couldn’t leave it to somebody else. But that feels like a justification. I’m just sad and lonely and missing you a lot right now. I’ll be okay, eventually. I think it would worry me more if I wasn’t crying, but I also know that crying has it’s limits. You still love me, right?”
“Oh course I do.”
“Even though I made you an accomplice to murder?”
“Even still.”
I was thinking about all of this as the red hen finished her feed. I picked her up and put her inside the coop. The other chickens balked and clucked in protest. The Wyandotte, the alpha female of the flock and a total bitch, rushed over and pecked at her, but the little red puffed her chest out and fought back. Clearly, she could handle herself, so I went in the house.
I let myself in through the kitchen door and mixed a couple of drinks. I heard Paige showing her patient to the door, and a moment later, she walked into the kitchen, smiling at me with her whole body. I swear to God, I have never seen a more beautiful sight. She threw her arms around me and pressed herself against me.
“How are you” she asked?
“I’m fine,” I said.
“Would you tell me if you weren’t?” she asked.
“No,” I say.
We took our drinks into the den to watch “Orange is the New Black” on Net-flicks. We lay on the couch together and Paige wrapped herself into me, pulling my arm around her and placing my hand on her breast. When the show was over, she stood up and stretched, and then looked at me for a long time.
"Come fuck me," she said.
I followed her upstairs. We made love like it was our last day on earth. We tangled our arms and legs together, twisting and twining like figure eights. Like a caduceus, we could feel the energy surge and swirl between us until there was no energy left. We slept like babies.
The next morning, I got up while Paige was still sleeping. I put the kettle on and fed the cat. I walked around this house that was at once so comfortable, so much a part of my life, and yet was never really mine at all. The house, the garden, the chickens, the cast iron stove, the claw-foot bathtub, the glorious bed -- I couldn't afford any of it. It all belonged to Paige.
Paige woke up and beamed at me as I put a cup of jasmine tea on her nightstand. This was one of our favorite rituals -- me bringing her tea in bed. It was such a small gesture, but it always delighted her. We began to run through all our sweet morning rituals -- showering together, wrapping each other in towels, watching each other get dressed. It was a comforting routine we had refined over many mornings, but the joy was slowly replaced by the glum understanding that we would never be this intimate again.
Paige suddenly said, "Come with me to Costa Rica."
I'm not really sure how she expected me to respond. Maybe she said it in a burst of optimism. Or maybe she just wanted to hear me say "yes" one more time, to know that I would drop everything to be with her. Then again, maybe it was just a reflex reaction that caused her to blurt it out, and then she didn't know how to un-say it.
The truth is, I really wanted to go. I knew if I didn’t, I would spend the rest of my life second-guessing my decision. I had never loved anybody the way I had loved Paige, nor had I had I ever felt so loved. But we both knew that it was not working out, and one of us had to be brave enough to take the first step.
So, I kissed her goodbye three times, and left her sobbing in her bed.
I went to the coop and checked on the chickens. The little red had claimed the perch above the watering can and was defending it against all challengers. She was adjusting quite nicely to her new home. I stole a few eggs from the laying boxes and tucked them into my jacket pocket. A couple of them were freshly laid and still warm. Then I got into my car and pulled out of the driveway, heading west and away towards the faint outline of a crescent moon.