On the way home from work Jennings turned into the parking lot off of South Central Avenue and pulled his pickup into a spot under a thirty foot Robin made of re-bar, chicken wire and fiberglass. He hurried from the truck cab, got a grocery cart someone had left in the middle of the parking lot and pushed it past the plate glass doors and into the store. Inside, he hurried past the hunting and fishing aisles and turned into the garden aisle. After piling three rolls of 3 inch x 25 foot lengths of flexible drainage hose into his cart he moved to the far side of the Giant Robin and got a package of duct tape.
As he put the items onto the checkout conveyor belt Jennings became uneasy. All of this labor and money just to kill his neighbor’s rooster. The entire affair was depressing. He’d always had a soft temper, slow to anger, but Wyman had left him no choice. At first Jennings believed he could diplomatically solve the problem. Several times he and his girlfriend, Charlene, had gone next door to Wyman’s place and told him that the rooster was waking them at unreasonable hours. “You see,” said Jennings, “you’ve put the rooster along the property line, forty-five feet from our bedroom window. Maybe if you moved him to the backside of your acre it would help things.” When Wyman ignored the request Jennings gave the county code enforcement officer a call and discovered the damndest thing. Not a single noise ordinance stretched beyond city limits. A call to the local sheriff confirmed his findings. The sheriff said, “Sounds like it’s time to go rooster hunting.” “Really?” asked Jennings. After a short silence the sheriff said, “No, not really.” He told Jennings to keep to his own business and not to harass his neighbor and went on to say, “Are you listening to me?” “Yes, I hear you,” said Jennings.
The cashier got his attention. “That’ll be $75.19” she said.
Jennings blinked a few times. “Hang on there a sec.,” he said to the cashier and he leaned over the conveyor, pulled the latest Field & Stream from the magazine rack and handed it to her. “I guess you could add this onto the total.”
“Sure thing,” she said and she scanned the bar code on the front cover.
Jennings left the Big Robin and headed home. He drove past the newly painted Baptist church at the edge of town and made his way along roads lined with barbed wire fences. Beyond the fences grew tall yellow grass and oaks, thick with leaves flittering in the spring breeze. As he drove, Jennings chewed a toothpick. Hell, he told himself, that no good piece of white trash and his damn rooster deserve what’s coming to them. He recalled the time Wyman was in his driveway, talking to his mother who lived in a trailer between the edge of the street and the chicken coop. While Wyman stood talking with his mother, Jennings leaned over the hedge dividing their property and spoke his mind. “Sometimes I got to work swing shift and it’s hard to get some shut-eye when your rooster’s going at it all morning long.” Jennings had just started a new job – draining and cleaning residential and commercial septic pumps – and every forth day from 4pm to 8am he was on-call for troubleshooting. Wyman looked over his shoulder at Jennings and grinned, showing his false teeth. “Listen,” he said, “if you don’t want to hear no rooster then you go on and shut your window.” His belly moved with laughter. Jennings felt like cracking Wyman’s head with a baseball bat, but he remembered that the sheriff had advised him against making trouble.
Jennings drove over the small wooden bridge spanning the roadside irrigation ditch. Once on his street he abruptly slammed on his breaks as Grandma Wyman’s dog trotted out in front of his pickup and stood there barking at his left tire. Grandma Wyman was less than a quarter of a football field away. She wore a ragged Mother Hubbard over her over-blown body and sat there on her trailer step, smoking a brown papered cigarette, watching her barking dog and saying nothing about it. Jennings was forced to slowly move around the dog and carefully make his way down his gravel driveway. Through his windshield he saw Charlene on the front porch, smoking a cigarette, waiting for him. Her blond hair was gathered in a thick ponytail and she wore cut off jeans and red synthetic leather boots. A black spaghetti strap half shirt showed off her belly, tan and pregnant swollen. He had to hand it to her; she was now down to two smokes a day and making an effort to be healthy for the baby.
