We climbed up the tower attached to the blue building. There were some dust-coated milk crates we used as seats. I couldn’t see any gold glinting in the old rocks below. My brother locked a zoom lens on his camera and starting clicking away at the evergreens that dotted the hill rising beyond the pit. I halfheartedly sketched out a story idea, but mostly I sat there and tried to decide about my relationship with the woman back home or figure out if the decision had already been made for me. Every once in a while, a small bird would fly onto the railing, notice us, and flitter off again.
“It’s really peaceful up here, right?” Foster said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I see how someone could get used to this.”
12.
“How are you doing? In life and stuff?” I was saying. There were only seven other people in the sports bar.
“Pretty good, I guess.” Foster finished chewing his bite of burger. “You know, I feel like I’ll give myself a few years to see if the photography takes off. If not, maybe I’ll go to law school. I’ve been doing a little LSAT preparation already.”
We finished up, and I covered the tab. It seemed like the older brother thing to do.
Walking back to the car, I saw a dark blue Ford pickup with the bright yellow chicken costume leaning against the passenger-side window. It was just the body. There was a deep black hole where the head should have been.
“Holy shit, Foster,” I said, elbowing him.
We walked over and looked in through the window. The head was on the floor next to a large water bottle. It was made of bright yellow foam spray-painted with white and black for the eyes. Someone had drawn two phalluses on the dirt of the pickup’s back window.
“Do you think he was eating at the bar with us?”
We went back inside and ordered another round of beers. Suddenly there was excitement in the stale bar air. We looked around. Other than the family of four eating in the corner, there were three men at the bar. They were all looking at different sports games on the overhead TVs. There was a skinny guy in a flannel shirt watching baseball, a clean-shaven teenager glued to hockey, and a slightly overweight bearded man following a golf tournament.
“With how small this town is, everyone must know the guy as the chicken suit guy,” Foster whispered. “Imagine every person you pass knowing this horrible detail about you.”
“Must be hell to hit on girls,” I said. “Or men,” I added.
When one of the men looked our way, we quickly shifted our eyes to the TV screens.
“I bet it’s the beardo,” I said.
We watched him eat a hot wing with surprising daintiness. Afterwards, he carefully cleaned his fingers on a napkin. He had a small mountain of used napkins and sucked-bare bones in front of him.
“Let’s go say something.”
“I don’t know, it could be any of them,” Foster said. “Hard to tell in that suit.”
We kept watching them for a while, waiting for some sign, I guess. After about forty minutes, we went home.
13.
I guess I’ve been thinking about my brother’s trip a lot recently because I’m feeling a little lost myself. My girlfriend and I recently broke up for reasons I can’t really explain. Things just fizzled out without any discernable causes. It was as if we suddenly didn’t know who we were anymore, or maybe that we never realized who the other was until the end, and the realization made us simply tired instead of distraught or full of joy. We continued having sex for a few weeks, but even those close moments were spread further apart, until we went our separate ways.
Yesterday, a friend of mine — a good friend I have a hard time getting together with these days — sent out a mass e-mail announcing that he had spent the last month training to be a real estate agent. He had just that day passed his certification. Ever since I had known him, which was at least four years, he had been an aspiring actor. Now he was trading in his auditions for a burgundy blazer and not looking back. He must have mentioned this to me at some point or posted about it online, but somehow it hadn’t registered, or I hadn’t believed it until suddenly he was texting me to ask if I knew any couples looking for a large one-bedroom in the neighborhood next to mine.
I’m spending a lot of time alone these days. I’m trying to put my head down and get some work done. Finish up some projects and see if I can be one of the ones who pops out of the rut. Otherwise, I might have to make a right turn myself.
I’m not sure what my brother is doing right now. Last time we talked, he was still on the fence about law school. I haven’t talked to him in about two months though. No particular reason. I simply haven’t found the time.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE WEATHERVANE
So this clown Dave buys the house next door to me, and now he’s my neighbor. Okay.
It’s one thing that he’s a carpetbagger who thinks he can turn himself into some sort of old-fashioned, down-home country boy by wearing a cowboy hat and boots with plastic spurs. This is Virginia, mind you, not the goddamn Wild West. I don’t mind. I’m a tolerant guy. But what sticks in my craw is the weathervane.
Lord knows what airplane catalog he found it in. The thing looks like it was designed by someone who was abused by farmers all his life and now gets revenge by making ugly weathervanes. It’s gigantic and has some sort of southwestern theme. The rooster is painted fluorescent green with a pink beak, and it has metal ribbons that twist in the wind.
“Dave,” I tell him the first day I see it. “That is one ugly son-of-a-bitch rooster.”
Dave takes this as some sort of Southern joke and pats me on the back. “Looks marvelous, don’t it?” he says.
Now it gets pretty windy in this part of Virginia, and the first big storm that hits, the weathervane snaps right off his roof and stabs into my front yard. Imagine if I had a daughter and she had been playing out there in a sandbox or something? She might have been decapitated by a giant rooster! How is that supposed to make me feel?
So I do the only thing I can and go out and pick up the weathervane and toss it through Dave’s living room window.
Well, this Dave is a stubborn guy. I see him out there the next morning directing some Mexicans up a ladder to fix the weathervane.
“What the hell, Dave?” I say.
“Damn thing blew off and into my window in the storm,” he says. “Might have to put some crazy glue on it next time. Ha ha.”
Well, the next big storm that hits, what do you know? Snap, whoosh, crash. I stumble outside and pick up the rooster off the wet grass. While it technically landed in his yard this time, it’s close enough to mine to make me concerned. So I march over and toss it through the jerk’s dining room window.
Dave pretty much stops talking to me after that. But the weathervane goes back up, and then a few months later another big storm hits. Dave is out of town this time, and the weathervane doesn’t snap all the way, it’s still half-attached and flying around in the wind like a circus flea tied to a miniature trampoline. How am I supposed to sleep knowing that any second this giant weathervane could snap off completely, fly through my bedroom window, and murder me in my own bed? I pay my taxes like anyone else. So I grab my ladder, go over to his house, and wrench off the weathervane with my hands. Then, when Dave comes back a few days later, I grab the rooster, head over to his house, ring his doorbell, and when he answers, I try to toss the damn thing through his stupid asshole heart.
Dave’s a nimble fellow, and he leaps out of the way, and pretty soon I’m sitting in the county jail with a whole host of freaks and perverts. I pay my bail, return home, and what do I see as I pull in the driveway but Dave and the goddamn Mexicans reinstalling the goddamn weathervane!