Guy Vanderhaeghe - Man Descending

“Now, Stanley,” I said, “relax, I’m just going to stroke you. I’m just going to stroke you. I’m just going to pet Stanley.”

No deal. He struck furiously again with a snake-like agility, and bounded in my hand, wings beating his poultry smell into my face. A real fighting cock at last. Maybe it was the weather. Perhaps his rooster pride and patience would suffer no more indignities.

The heat, the sultry menace of the gathering storm, made me feel prickly, edgy. I flicked my middle finger smartly against his tiny chicken skull, hard enough to rattle his pea-sized brain. “You like that, buster?” I asked, and snapped him another one for good measure. He struck back again, his comb red, crested, and rubbery with fury.

I was angry myself. I turned him upside down and left him dangling, his wings drumming against the legs of my jeans. Then I righted him abruptly; he looked dishevelled, seedy and dazed.

“Okay, Stanley,” I said, feeling the intoxication of power. “I’m boss here, and you behave.” There was a gleeful edge to my voice, which surprised me a little. I realized I was hoping this confrontation would escalate. Wishing that he would provoke me into something.

Strange images came into my head: the bruises on my aunt’s legs; Thompson’s face drained of life, lifted like an empty receptacle toward the ceiling, waiting to be filled, the tendons of his neck stark and rigid with anticipation.

I was filled with anxiety, the heat seemed to stretch me, to tug at my nerves and my skin. Two drops of sweat, as large and perfectly formed as tears, rolled out of my hairline and splashed onto the rubber toes of my runners.

“Easy, Stanley,” I breathed to him, “easy,” and my hand crept deliberately towards him. This time he pecked me in such a way, directly on the knuckle, that it actually hurt. I took up my stick and rapped him on the beak curtly, the prim admonishment of a schoolmarm. I didn’t hit him very hard, but it was hard enough to split the length of his beak with a narrow crack. The beak fissured like the nib of a fountain pen. Stanley squawked, opened and closed his beak spasmodically, bewildered by the pain. A bright jewel of blood bubbled out of the split and gathered to a trembling bead.

“There,” I said excitedly, “now you’ve done it. How are you going to eat with a broken beak? You can’t eat anything with a broken beak. You’ll starve, you stupid goddamn chicken.”

A wind that smelled of rain had sprung up. It ruffled his feathers until they moved with a barely discernible crackle.

“Poor Stanley,” I said, and at last, numbed by the pain, he allowed me to stroke the gloss of his lacquer feathers.

I wasn’t strong enough or practised enough to do a clean and efficient job of wringing his neck, but I succeeded in finishing him off after two clumsy attempts. Then, because I wanted to leave the impression that a skunk had made off with him, I punched a couple of holes in his breast with my jack knife and tried to dribble some blood on the ground. Poor Stanley produced only a few meagre spots; this corpse refused to bleed in the presence of its murderer. I scattered a handful of his feathers on the ground and buried him in the larger of the two manure piles beside the barn.

“I don’t think any skunk got that rooster,” my grandmother said suspiciously, nudging at a feather with the toe of her boot until, finally disturbed, it was wafted away by the breeze.

Something squeezed my heart. How did she know?

“Skunks hunt at night,” she said. “Must have been somebody’s barn cat.”

“You come along with me,” my grandmother said. She was standing in front of the full-length hall mirror, settling on her hat, a deadly-looking hat pin poised above her skull. “We’ll go into town and you can buy a comic book at the drugstore.”

It was Friday and Friday was shopping day. But Grandma didn’t wheel her battered De Soto to the curb in front of the Brite Spot Grocery, she parked it in front of Maynard & Pritchard, Barristers and Solicitors.

“What are we doing here?” I asked.

Grandma was fumbling nervously with her purse. Smalltown people don’t like to be seen going to the lawyer’s. “Come along with me. Hurry up.”

“Why do I have to come?”

“Because I don’t want you making a spectacle of yourself for the half-wits and loungers to gawk at,” she said. “Let’s not give them too much to wonder about.”

Maynard & Pritchard, Barristers and Solicitors, smelled of wax and varnish and probity. My grandmother was shown into an office with a frosted pane of glass in the door and neat gilt lettering that announced it was occupied by D.F. Maynard, Q.C. I was ordered to occupy a hard chair, which I did, battering my heels on the rungs briskly enough to annoy the secretary into telling me to stop it.

My grandmother wasn’t closeted long with her Queen’s Counsel before the door opened and he glided after her into the passageway. Lawyer Maynard was the neatest man I had ever seen in my life. His suit fit him like a glove.

“The best I can do,” he said, “is send him a registered letter telling him to remove himself from the premises, but it all comes to the same thing. If that doesn’t scare him off, you’ll have to have recourse to the police. That’s all there is to it. I told you that yesterday and you haven’t told me anything new today, Edith, that would make me change my mind. Just let him know you won’t put up with him any more.”

“No police,” she said. “I don’t want the police digging in my family’s business and Evelyn giving one of her grand performances for some baby-skinned constable straight out of the depot. All I need is to get her away from him for a little while, then I could tune her in. I could get through to her in no time at all.”

“Well,” said Maynard, shrugging, “we could try the letter, but I don’t think it would do any good. He has the status of a guest in your home; just tell him to go.”

My grandmother was showing signs of exasperation. “But he doesn’t go. That’s the point. I’ve told him and told him. But he won’t.”

“Mrs. Bradley,” said the lawyer emphatically, “Edith, as a friend, don’t waste your time. The police.”

“I’m through wasting my time,” she said.

Pulling away from the lawyer’s office, my grandmother began a spirited conversation with herself. A wisp of hair had escaped from under her hat, and the dye winked a metallic red light as it jiggled up and down in the hot sunshine.

“I’ve told him and told him. But he won’t listen. The goddamn freak thinks we’re involved in a christly debating society. He thinks I don’t mean business. But I mean business. I do. There’s more than one way to skin a cat or scratch a dog’s ass. We’ll take the wheels off his little red wagon and see how she pulls.”

“What about my comic book?” I said, as we drove past the Rexall.

“Shut up.”

Grandma drove the De Soto to the edge of town and stopped it at the Ogdens’ place. It was a service station, or rather had been until the B.A. company had taken out their pumps and yanked the franchise, or whatever you call it, on the two brothers. Since then everything had gone steadily downhill. Cracks in the windowpanes had been taped with masking tape, and the roof had been patched with flattened tin cans and old licence plates. The building itself was surrounded by an acre of wrecks, sulking hulks rotten with rust, the guts of their upholstery spilled and gnawed by rats and mice.

But the Ogden brothers still carried on a business after a fashion. They stripped their wrecks for parts and were reputed to be decent enough mechanics whenever they were sober enough to turn a wrench or thread a bolt. People brought work to them whenever they couldn’t avoid it, and the rest of the year gave them a wide berth.