Twenty
“I’M STILL looking around the farm, and I’m able to count all the chickens. Seems like there hasn’t been one chicken dinner, if you know what I mean. Chickens still going every which way, you keep hearing about how they get their heads chopped off and their bodies go running forward, but when I look around, I don’t even see any feathers. More and more chickens, nicer and nicer farm. Pastoral. People would say I was an evil character for dealing a few drugs, but look who gets blown away. Not my chickens. Way I look at it, we’re all still struttin’ around Maggie’s Farm. Bunch of chickens struttin’ their stuff in the sunshine. You pick up a newspaper and read about what happened at Three Mile Island, you try to tell me that my chickens are causing any trouble like that. Might be a little stoned, but they’re just struttin’ their stuff in the sunshine, and nobody’s catching them for nothing. Too many bad things pinned on drugs. No way that ten-year-old was high, according to you, and there he was, up in a tree, shooting down. No way drugs explain why this is a bad world. Chickens got all upset a while back there, thinking the sky was falling. Acid didn’t do that. The United States space program did that. Chickens ought to squawk. They fucking ought to claw the dirt about that one. Not that there’s any good it would do them. United States government doesn’t have to pay attention to a little bit of scratching in the dirt.”
Horton was stoned. He was trying to get a Morton’s chicken pot pie out of its foil baking dish and onto one of Nina’s plates. He liked to remove the top piece intact, but it was already in three pieces, and he hadn’t even tilted the pie onto the plate yet. He worked the fork around the edge again, tilted the pie. “Good a thing to eat as any other,” he said. “Cheap, too. Hey, I made a joke. Talking about chicken, and I said cheap.”
“I feel responsible,” she said. “I’ve talked to John about this every day for a week, and I still feel responsible.”
“Homewrecker? You feel like a bad lady homewrecker? People don’t want their house disturbed, they don’t go out looking to disturb it. He just wanted the lights burning all night in the chicken coop. Wanted more production. Willing to risk a tasteless egg or two to take on more.”
“Will you please stop talking about chickens?” Spangle said.
He was cutting his steak. No place Nina suggested for dinner had pleased them, and finally they had smoked up again and gone to the food store, and this was what they had come back with. One steak, one Morton’s chicken pie, and eight bags of Doritos.
“You told me these were great,” Spangle said, biting a Dorito. “Same old taco chips. I don’t see any difference.”
“This is really getting to me,” Nina said. “There’s a real crisis in my life, and I end up entertaining the Marx Brothers.”
“No way we’re the Marx Brothers,” Horton said. “Take a look. I’m black, he’s white. We might be half-brothers, if Mama was fooling around with the wrong rooster, but there is no way you can take in the two of us and say we’re brothers. Shit. We’re not even soul brothers. You know who’s a soul man now? Not Huey, not Eldridge. Fatso, on Saturday Night Live.” Horton bit into another Dorito. “You think brother Huey traded in his wicker throne for modular furniture? What do you bet me?”
“Come on,” Spangle said. “We go to Vermont and get some sort of jobs. We get out of all this. We can take Horton with us, and he can raise chickens. You like that plan, Horton?”
“The Grand Concourse is as close as I care to come to the country. Spent enough time in the country in my Bard College days. Makes me nervous just to look up above me and see greenery in people’s windows. Makes me nervous to see any plants but the necessary five-leaf kind. Unhealthy life in the country.”
“Spangle,” she said, “would you be saying this if I hadn’t told you about what happened in John’s family? You came here the other night with the intention of asking me to come back to you and move to Vermont?”
“I came back because I felt myself coming back. I haven’t gone back to New Haven because I can’t see myself walking into that apartment in New Haven again. The other night when I was sprawled out on your floor I got to thinking that cities make people crazy.”
“United States space program makes people crazy,” Horton said. “These chicken pies have really stood the test of time. Same chicken pies I remember from my childhood.”
“I can’t say yes or no right now. I’m all mixed up. I hadn’t even thought about you for so long, and now you’re back here and you want it to be like you never left. It didn’t work out the other time we tried it, remember? You were more eager for me to leave than I was.”
“But I was here a week later, wasn’t I?”
“Your dealer got shot. You came here to connect with Horton.”
“I’m reliable,” Horton said. “Never been shot. Never care to be.”
“But you’re going to think about it,” Spangle said.
“You’ve been with Cynthia for so many years. You’re just going to push that out of your mind?”
“I didn’t have any plans to be lobotomized. I just had an idea that the two of us could try again.”
“I want to be by myself,” Nina said.
“What I like,” Horton said, “is just the opposite. I like people around that I can talk to. I like to be able to have a thought and spill it out. You can’t tell what a thought will be till it’s spilled out, like dice. I’m not so crazy yet that I sit around and rap with myself.”
“Have you ever in your life been at a loss for something to say, Horton?” Spangle said. Horton thought. “I don’t believe so. I believe the good Lord gave me a tongue to talk. Pointless to have a tongue if you don’t talk. Like an anteater showing no interest in ants.”
“I think you’d like Vermont, Horton,” Spangle said. “I think it would inspire you.”
“I’ve got a bicycle chained to a tree if I get in the country mood. Go get my bicycle any day. Just waiting for me, chained to a tree.”
“Jesus,” Nina said. “I keep feeling like it’s my fault.”
“Don’t,” Spangle said. “If it hadn’t been you, it would have been somebody else.”
“That’s flattering,” she said. “Thank you.”
“I was trying to tear him down, not you. I want you, not him.”
“I don’t care,” she said. “That was an awful thing to say.”
“You just told me that it was random. That he happened to meet you when you were with some girlfriend, visiting her boyfriend, and in walked John, so you ended up having dinner that night.”
“That wasn’t what you meant. You meant that I was just somebody he happened to pick up.”
“Don’t fight,” Horton said. “It ruins my digestion.”
“Don’t keep joking,” she said to Horton. “This is my life.”
“I just joke to keep talking. Don’t think anything of it. Don’t have a serious thought in my head some days. Today seems to be one of those days. I feel like I’m in the barrel going over the waterfall — reach a certain point, and it’s just inevitable that you’re going to get going faster and faster. Did either of you hear anything about a danger at Niagara Falls? Something a while back that I missed, apparently.”
“Whatever it was, the news didn’t get to Madrid,” Spangle said.