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.
Jennings parked in the garage next to his bass boat and got out. Hurriedly he went to his driveway, reached down, grabbed a handful of gravel and threw it at the barking dog.
“Stay off my property you damn white trash mutt,” he yelled.
Charlene talked to him from the porch. She rubbed one hand over her belly and told him about the rooster. “Son of a bitch rooster’s been going all day long,” she said.
Suddenly the rooster began to crow. Cockadoodledoo!
She continued, “Baby, you got to make Wyman get rid of that thing before I lose my mind!”
“Just simmer down,” he said. “Things are under control.”
“How can things be under control when that damn rooster is alive and crowing?”
He’d met Charlene during hockey season, during one of his Wednesday night games. She was new behind the rink grill and when Jennings went for an after game burger they hit it off right away. At that time she was still a little thick in the middle from having her first kid, the one now living with her mother. But she was a looker all the same with blond hair and eyes pale blue. When she got pregnant neither of them had any doubts about her move to his place, it was only when their neighbor bought a rooster that problems kicked in. “Why’d you get that rooster, anyway?” Jennings asked Wyman at the start of it all. “I like fertilized eggs,” he had said. “Jesus, you mean to eat? You mean to tell me that you eat sperm eggs?”
For a good half year there was no time of extended quiet during morning, noon and early evening. Cockadoodledoo, cockadoodledoo! The rooster crowed continuously throughout the day. Finally things came to a head. The rooster was crowing away one morning when Charlene turned on the lamp alongside of the bed and pushed the quilt comforter from her body. It was very dark outside. Convince me that you’re my man, she told Jennings in a raised voice. Convince me! Right then and there he knew he needed to solve the problem once and for all, nip it in the bud. But how to handle the problem? The solution came to him on a Sunday afternoon while watching a TV documentary about Death Row within San Quentin.
On the porch, Charlene stomped her booted foot hard against the oak planks. “Go on and tell me,” she yelled. “How are things under control? Nothing has changed! Nothing is ever going to change!”
“Look, everything changes sometime,” he said in a lowered voice and he crossed the driveway and went behind her and put his arms around her swollen waist. Earlier he’d decided not to explain his idea to gas the rooster with carbon monoxide. He didn’t want to worry her, didn’t want to disturb the baby. He wanted a smooth birth without unnecessary worrying.
They stood talking in the kitchen as Charlene fixed white bread and bacon sandwiches and pork-n-beans. Jennings waved his beer can around in front of him as he talked. Charlene had suggested moving to the coast, somewhere around Eureka, to a nice apartment overlooking the Pacific. If they moved to the coast there would be no rooster problem.
“My work is here,” he said pointing his beer can toward Charlene, “not on the coast.”
“Well you’re a jack of all trades; can’t you just get a different job?”
“Jesus, Char,” he said, “how can you say that when work is finally going well. Besides, we both know the house would be on the market for a good year before it sold.” Jennings knew this to be true. Somehow he’d gotten himself into a situation where he couldn’t afford to move.
Charlene coated two slices of bread with mayonnaise and sandwiched the bacon. “Here,” she said then she leaned back against the counter and used her hands to cup her belly. “When’s the last time you’ve seen yourself in the mirror, huh?” she asked. “Bags and dark circles under your eyes. You’re not even thirty-five but you’ve got the bags of a sixty year old. You never had bags when I first met you.”
“It’s on account of the new job…” Jennings began.
Charlene interrupted. “What’s the matter with you, huh? It’s that rooster. Being constantly bombarded by that white trash rooster isn’t healthy; it isn’t healthy for the three of us.”
Outside, along the property line, forty-five feet from their bedroom window the rooster crowed and crowed and crowed. Cockadoodledoo!
Charlene quietly finished her sandwich and went to the living room with her beadwork kit and turned on the radio. Jennings joined her, sitting himself down on a sofa pushed against the wall and beneath a window overlooking the backyard and the bordering apple orchard and the distant mountains, still capped with spring snow. He put a toothpick between his teeth and opened Field & Stream. It was a warm evening and the window was open to let in the slight breeze coming down from the north. When the rooster began to crow Jennings got up and shut the window. Still the sound came through the glass. Cockadoodledoo!
“Good Christ,” mumbled Jennings as he picked up his magazine and leaned back into the cowhide sofa cushions.
The sun went down and the air stayed warm and crickets came out, filling the night with soft chirping. Charlene held up a coin purse and admired her beaded handiwork, a repeating pattern of red and turquoise diamonds.
“What do you think?” she asked Jennings.
“Looks Native American,” he said.
“Supposed to look that way.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a coin purse I’m going to use for Baby’s teeth.”
Charlene stared at the beaded design and Jennings had the idea she was lost in thought about her daughter and how the court had decided guardianship in favor of her mother. Someday, he thought, he would help her win back custody, but he needed to move up in his job before that happened, he needed to get off the shoestring he was dangling from.
Charlene closed her beadwork kit and told Jennings she was tired, that it was past her bedtime and that he should go to bed too. She said, “You need your sleep, baby, so don’t stay up too late.”
Jennings told her that he was going to the garage for a while. He wanted to tie a few fishing flies because the trout were biting on a cicada patterned fly and he didn’t have any of those.
In the garage he flipped on the overhead fluorescents, opened all four windows and got a beer from the fridge next to the sink. He was thirsty and the beer tasted good and put something in his blood that made him get down to nitty-gritty. He got the three rolls of hose from his pickup, tore away the plastic packaging and connected the lengths with duct tape, creating a flexible pipeline seventy-five feet long. Then he got aluminum foil from the cabinet over his workbench and lined the inside of the hose intended for the exhaust pipe because he didn’t want to deal with scraping away melted plastic later on. Carefully he fitted the hose over the tailpipe of his truck and sleeved the joint with layers of foil. That should keep the carbon monoxide from seeping into the garage, he thought.
After taking a few swallows of beer, he turned off the overhead fluorescents, opened the side door, picked up the hose and uncoiled it from the garage to the hedge at the property line, head lowered and eyes sharp as he walked the distance. The crickets became silent and to Jennings the night suddenly seemed different, a place to be avoided. He was normally in bed sleeping at this hour but now he was outside, squatting, knees nearly touching chin, pushing a drainage hose through leaves and branches. When the end of the hose butted against the wire rooster pen he drew a deep breath and held it for a moment, listening. In the nearby trailer Grandma Wyman’s dog began to bark. This wasn’t unusual. The dog barked every night. Ten yards away the chickens became restless in their coop and began to cluck. He knew he was doing a bad thing and felt less of a man for doing it and so reminded himself of his conversations with the county office and the sheriff. What the hell was it with these people? How could they ignore something so obviously wrong?
Jennings went back to the garage. Inside it was dark and he was forced to feel his way around stacks of Charlene’s unpacked boxes before finding his truck. Quickly but carefully he checked the hose-tail pipe connection, making sure he hadn’t inadvertently jarred things loose. Then he got into the cab and started up the motor. To hell with Wyman, he thought, and he went over to the workbench and got his can of beer but the can was empty so he got another can from the fridge and went outside to the wooden bench next to a pit where they had once buried a pig and cooked him Hawaiian-style. He sat in the darkness, listening. The crickets had begun to chirp again, though they had moved further down the hedge where the air was much fresher, and beyond the crickets a small pack of coyotes yelped as they made their way through the apple orchard to the creek where they hunted muskrat and rabbits. Jennings leaned back on the bench and drank his beer feeling happy that the sound of his truck motor could not be heard.
After a good hour Jennings went to his garage. Right away his eyes became sore and watery and it was difficult for him to hold back a fit of coughing because of the carbon monoxide. He took a deep breath and hurriedly turned off the truck motor and opened the garage door to let in the warm breeze and the air around him became clean enough to go to the exhaust pipe where he detached the hose. Back outside at the hedge he withdrew the hose from Wyman’s side yard and tried to see the rooster but it was too dark. He rattled the bush a little. Still there were no sounds of movement. He returned to the garage and put the hose in the attic, closed the garage door, shut the windows and entered his house.
Charlene was sleeping and when he kissed her cheek she stirred a little. It was late and Jennings should have been tired but exhilaration made him wide awake. He went to the kitchen and got himself a bowl of Captain Crunch and took it to the TV room where he plopped down on the sofa and thought about the baby. The doctor had told them that the baby would be boy. Jennings smiled, a boy, he thought. Whoopee! Then he went back to his cereal.
The next morning Jennings awoke, sat upright and looked at the bedside clock – 6:35. He’d slept nearly two and a half hours longer than he would have on any given day. He felt rested, the most rested he’d felt in nearly six months. Charlene was right; he didn’t know how much the rooster had impacted his life until it was gone. Now the world which had seemed so very far away came back to him and he was glad he did what he did and he didn’t care if that lousy white trash Wyman got another rooster so long as there were a few days of silence.
He got dressed for work and found Charlene in the kitchen, bending over the stove, making eggs-in-a-hole. She wore her favorite yellow bathrobe now stretched out of shape around her belly. When Jennings came into the room she was working the spatula under a corner of the bread and peeking at its underside.
“Must be something wrong with that white trash rooster,” she said.
Jennings smiled. “I’m going out to get the paper.”
Outside he walked the length of his gravel driveway to the edge of his property and the post mounted mailbox. Across the street several neighbors were gathered around Turner in Turner’s driveway. Turner waved to Jennings and shouted. “Old lady Wyman,” he said with an uneasy voice, “she died last night.”
Jennings looked beyond his property line to Grandma Wyman’s trailer. The door was open and Wyman stood on the wooden steps leading to the opening. He had formed a cradle with his arms and grandma Wyman’s mutt lay draped over his shirtsleeves. As he talked to the two police officers Wyman’s face remained emotionless, as blank as cut stone.
Jennings went back into his house and rushed into the bathroom. He was splashing water from the sink tap onto his face when the doorbell rang. A few moments later Charlene came into the bathroom and told Jennings that the police were at the door. “They want to have a word with you,” she said.
Jennings looked at his hands hanging limp at his sides and he wondered if Charlene would now move to the coast. Then he looked up at the ceiling and saw the blue painter’s tape stuck over the vent fan, put there to mask the rooster’s crowing which had found its way down the pipe sticking out from the rooftop. Jennings balanced himself as he stepped onto the toilet seat. He reached one hand up to the ceiling and peeled the tape away from the fan.
“There,” he said to Charlene. “Finally we can use the ventilation fan whenever the shower is going.” Still standing on the toilet seat he took his toothpick container from his shirt pocket and put a tooth pick between his teeth. Then he looked down at his girlfriend, at her swollen belly, and he knew the memory of her misshapen robe would forever be with him.
*END*