FIVE THINGS ABOUT CHICKENS, by Drew Perry

“Radio,” says Frank Larkin, and the radio comes on. It’s the all-classical music station the salesman had used to demonstrate the car’s voice recognition option. Frank is driving a brand-new high-end German luxury sedan. Four doors, leather, the midnight blue finish that looks blue in the sunlight and black in the shade. It’s next year’s model. He pre-ordered it months ago. He is among the first people in the country to own it. Certainly he’s among the first in the Southeast. It’s a Mercedes or a BMW or another make. It doesn’t matter which one. The sound system is fantastic.
Frank does not know which composer the chamber orchestra on the radio is playing. He knows there are violins and cellos and violas. He has heard of Yo-Yo Ma, knows Yo-Yo Ma is probably Chinese or Korean. Frank does not much care for classical music overall. But it’s one of the things he knows five things about, enough to get him through an incidental conversation at the gym or over drinks or on the way to a meeting. He knows the names of Stravinski and John Cage and Mozart and Bach, but everyone knows Mozart and Bach. He knows the London Philharmonic is not as good an orchestra as the name makes them sound. He knows to name another orchestra, a somewhat more obscure one like the one in Kansas City or Pittsburgh, if the need should arise to name one. He knows classical music is the preferred way to demonstrate a sound system in a car as expensive as this one.
“Change frequencies,” Frank says.
“What frequency,” says the car. It is not a question. The car’s voice has only been programmed for declarative sentences.
“One-oh-three-point-one,” Frank says, separating each sound, just like the salesman taught him to do.
“One-oh-three-point-one,” the car says. There is a pause, and then the all-talk news station comes on. The topic: West Nile Virus in Louisiana and Arkansas. Or kidnappings in California. Callers yell and the host yells back at them. It’s not a comforting rhythm, really, but it’s a rhythm.
The car moves down the road like it’s on rails. That’s what the salesman had said, and it’s true. Frank is coming back into Atlanta from the north on either I-85 or I-75, coming back from the glistening out-of-town factory with its small attached glass and granite showroom. The factory is not located in Atlanta for semi-complicated tax break reasons that Frank understands fairly well. Which of the interstates he’s actually on doesn’t matter. One comes in from Greenville, South Carolina, and the other from Chattanooga, Tennessee. Either town would push hard for a beautiful new German automobile plant. Either mayor would gladhand the blinking automobile executives. Each drive is filled with long stretches of nothing followed by a growing frequency of road signs and then furniture warehouse stores and recreational equipment warehouse stores once you start getting closer to Atlanta. In the summer both roads look the same. Six lanes of shimmering heat and just up off the horizon in front of you, the oiled smog and haze of the huge and bizarre network of roads that passes for a city.
The steering wheel is covered in leather. So is the dash. The appointments are in burled wood and brushed titanium. Appointments are things like radio knobs and the emergency brake lever and the top of the shifter. So says the salesman. The car is so quiet Frank has to keep looking at the tachometer to reassure himself that the engine is still running. Everything is perfectly quiet, perfectly fitted together. Nothing rattles. There is a separate booklet in the trunk which details the quadruple layer of sound insulation between him and the road. There are other booklets. There is a large boxish binder filled with booklets that detail the many, many things the car will do. The salesman has encouraged him to read all of this and call with any questions. The salesman gave Frank his work and home phone numbers.
On the highway in front of Frank’s new car a pickup swerves suddenly. It’s an older truck. The corners are square. Off the truck’s front bumper there is a small explosion of something white and then what looks like a reddish mist. Small pieces of it hit Frank’s windshield and glance off. An animal, Frank thinks. In the next instant Frank bumps over whatever it was. There is no time for him to swerve. The suspension in the car is so good that Frank is not sure he feels the bump.
He looks in the mirrors and sees nothing. The truck in front of him changes lanes, but doesn’t slam on the brakes or pull over or anything like that. Frank doesn’t know what it was, what he did or didn’t hit. Nothing else happens for a while, so Frank lets it go. He realizes he can’t hear the sounds of the seams in the road he’s been so used to in other cars. He feels like he should be impressed. It didn’t feel like he’d hit anything, didn’t feel like it did anything to the car. He’ll check at home. He’ll get home and pull it into the big turnaround driveway that fronts his gray stucco six-bedroom home and park almost in front of the front door. He gets the cracks in the driveway repaired once a year. He’ll look up under the wheelwells and he’ll look at the bumper. Maybe he’ll wipe the front down with the lambswool chamois that comes in a front pocket of one of the owner’s manual booklets. Wendy will come outside to look at the car. She’ll be excited. They’ll kiss and she’ll want to look at the trunk and at how the front seats fold down and at how much room there is in the back seat. She’ll want to look at the incorporated child’s seat that folds out of the back seat. The salesman couldn’t say enough about it, about the convenience. He kept running his hand over his head and then folding the seat up and back down again and again. It’s upholstered in a thick Egyptian cotton that zips off for easy cleaning. It doesn’t come standard. Wendy will talk about how much easier it will be to take Mason to preschool. To the grocery. The mall. His soccer league for 4-year-olds. Frank is not in favor of the soccer league. To him it’s just small children chasing each other around in little knots. Wendy thinks it’s cute, though, so he doesn’t say anything.
“Cruise control,” Frank says inside the cabin of the car.
The radio goes quiet. “What speed,” says the car. The salesman encouraged him to name the voice. Frank doesn’t much feel like naming the voice.
“Seventy. One,” Frank says, slowly, just like the salesman had taught him. There was a special three-hour training session after he’d bought the car. He was welcome to attend a week-long camp at the factory showroom if he wanted to. It’s scheduled for the fall. He’s hoping to avoid that.
“Seventy. One,” says the car, and the titanium accelerator drops from under his foot. Frank doesn’t know why the accelerator needs to be titanium. The car accelerates very slowly as Frank changes lanes. The radio comes back up to volume.
There are whitish lumps up ahead in the left emergency lane. Small. Two animals, two birds. Frank notes this as he flashes by but concentrates more heavily on the traffic around him than anything else. Two hands on the wheel. The inside of the car smells like bamboo. He was able to choose between cucumber, lavender and bamboo air freshener. He chose bamboo. There is a small spray vial in the glove compartment. The green overhead highway sign gives the numbers of miles to one or two suburbs, the number of miles to Atlanta itself. The car smells like a new car, but nicer.
The car allows for up to four Individual Seating Preference Settings. This was one of the main selling points for the salesman. Frank isn’t sure he cares one way or the other about this, but he supposes it is nice in a way. Before the car starts, it will ask, “Which driver.” Frank will say “Frank,” and the seat will adjust in height, tilt, and proximity to the wheel. His presets will come up on the radio. The A/C will adjust to the temperature he presets. The sunroof will actually adjust its tint. If he wants a special kind of lumbar support, that too can be programmed in. There is a full complement of instructions about how to set all of these by voice command in one of the manuals. Frank and Wendy are to set these when he gets home. Frank has no idea how the tint changes in the sunroof.
Wendy will love the new car. It’s big in the kind of way that will make people see it in traffic and at the store. She says she likes to feel safe when she’s on the road.
It has not rained – really rained, a good soaking rain – in weeks. Everything along the sides of the highway looks brownish and brittle. The grasses are dying and the trees are dropping their leaves. The radio breaks for local news and the drought is the lead story. There are mandatory water restrictions. Lawn sprinklers have been outlawed for two weeks. Frank and Wendy have received a warning about watering their lawn illegally. The city will fine them up to $500 upon the next offense. One of the lakes outside the city which serves as water supply is down 76 inches. Frank checks this number every day in the morning paper. It doesn’t really mean anything to him – he doesn’t know what the lake being down that number of inches really means in terms of anything scientific or in terms of how much water comes out of his tap – but he likes to know the number. It’s a way to talk about the drought. There are two excellent ways to talk about the drought. Lake levels is one, and how much money you will have wasted by redoing your lawn this past spring is the other. Wendy had the lawn resodded in May. It is dying.
Frank is not a lawyer or doctor. Frank works in client relations for a major firm in his industry. He speaks with clients, markets to clients, writes reassuring letters to clients about markets and market share. He flies to places like Albuquerque and Detroit and San Diego and Research Triangle to have expensive dinners with clients who like to be reassured in person. Frank is Vice President for Corporate Client Relations and he has a large office with a water feature. Frank knows five things about the supposed relaxing qualities of water features and overall office design. He knows five things about Indy Car racing. He knows five things about adolescent orthodontia. He knows five things about the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright and he knows five things about the current league standings in baseball, football and basketball, depending on the season. Frank’s firm’s clients spend a great deal of money on Frank’s firm’s products. They like to be reassured. They like to talk about things having nothing to do with Frank’s firm once they’re happy. Frank flies out to meet with them, calls them on the phone, adopts the tone of voice required for the situation, talks about what they’d like to talk about.
The firm pays up to 50% of the cost of new cars for Vice Presidents. Frank will drive local and visiting clients to lunch and dinner in the car. He will use the voice-activated GPS system to make sure the directions are correct. He will do it when clients are in the car. It will give them something to discuss.
The markets are down a significant percentage. The firm’s sales are off accordingly. Frank’s clients, however, continue to buy from him at their regular pace. Frank is able to do something to make people feel comfortable with him in sales situations. He knows this but doesn’t think about it all that much. It confuses him. He feels he has something between luck and a gift. It’s nothing he’d ever write a business bestseller about. The company is very happy with his work. The company has helped him to purchase this new car, which has no model name. Instead, the name of the car is a combination of numbers and capital letters. When Frank was coming up through the company he had a Cutlass. He thinks he likes actual names better.
The car ahead of him abruptly slows and changes lanes. At 71 miles an hour on cruise control, the lane in front of him opens up to reveal a bird – a biggish bird, a chicken, Frank realizes – which he hits almost dead on. There is no time to swerve or to hit the brakes. Even through the soundproofing Frank hears the thud. The chicken spins off the left side of the midnight blue bumper.
“Chicken,” says Frank.
The radio goes quiet. The cruise control goes off. The car says, “Please repeat.”
Frank says “Chicken” again without really thinking about it. He changes lanes, slowing, moving right.
“Command not recognized,” says the car. “Please say ‘Options.’”
“Options,” says Frank. He sees another dead chicken in the median. Then a smear of white and red and what might have been feet in the lane next to him. There are a couple of feathers lodged in his windshield wiper housing.
“Electronics options,” says the car. “Cassette. CD changer. Radio. Driving operations options. Cruise Control. Headlamps. Suspension. Wipers. Passenger comfort options. Climate Control. Sunroof.” The car keeps talking but Frank has stopped listening. “Please choose from the following options,” the car says, and starts again.
“Wipers,” Frank says.
“Speed,” says the computer.
Frank doesn’t know how to ask it to make the wipers go just once. “On,” he says.
“Please repeat,” says the car.
“Wipers on,” tries Frank.
“Speed,” says the car.
Frank gives up. One feather gets dislodged just from wind. There is a school bus a few car lengths ahead with kids pressing their faces into the windows. One is pointing at something. Frank looks, too. It’s not a chicken. The kid is just pointing.
“Please choose from the following options,” says the car.
Frank hits another chicken. He was looking at where the kid was pointing at nothing. This time he sees the whole thing happen a little more clearly, can make out the chicken’s face, the beak, the red and yellow markings on its head. In the car it sounds as if he’s knocked into a small board. The back wheel bumps over the chicken.
“Jesus Christ,” says Frank.
“Please repeat,” says the car.
Frank downshifts to fifth gear. The car has a huge engine and six forward speeds. It’s a manual transmission but there’s no clutch. He’s still struggling to get used to that. Frank’s left foot reaches for the pedal that isn’t there. The clutchless system has some name that Frank can’t remember. It’s in the manual. Wendy has never been able to drive stick shift, and Frank believes this system will appeal to her. Wendy is four years younger than he is, pretty and smart. Their son, Mason, will be five in October. Even Mason has asked why it doesn’t rain anymore. Wendy tells him that it does rain, just not right now.
The traffic is heavy. Frank decides not to pull over. If there’s any damage, there’s nothing he can do about it out here.
Frank doesn’t know what to say to his son. Mason is something of a mystery, all arms and legs and chin fat and questions and macaroni and cheese. Mason likes to ride in the car. Frank takes him with him to the golf course sometimes when he’s just going to the driving range. He bought Mason a small putter for Christmas. Mason putts while Frank hits a couple of buckets of five-irons. Frank learned to play golf because the CFO of a major client in Portland played golf. Frank has a 19 handicap. He tries to be proud of that.
Last week Mason said “shithell.” Wendy said he must have picked it up from the maid. Frank doesn’t like to curse.
“Please choose from the following options,” says the car. Again. Its voice isn’t the sort of computer voice you get when you get an automated phone system, but it still doesn’t sound real to Frank. He realizes he doesn’t know how to turn the voice off. He says “Radio” to make it stop talking. The classical music station comes back on just as the car ahead of him hits another chicken. The bird separates into two or three pieces. No one seems to be slowing down as much as Frank expects them to.
It is blazing hot outside the car. The digital thermometer says it’s 67 degrees in the passenger cabin and 96 degrees outside. Actually it says “External Temperature.” The system will also give wind chill, relative humidity and heat index, but Frank doesn’t know how to use those functions yet.
There is a live chicken on the shoulder of the road. It is a very bright white and headed toward the road. Frank looks in the rearview to see what happens, but whatever does happen is obscured by a large truck carrying bottles of water, which is taking up most of Frank’s field of vision.
Wendy used to substitute teach for the local school system, but she stopped when Mason was born. She’s heavier than she used to be. Frank thinks it makes her face look better, fuller. He wishes her legs still looked the same, but he knows that people change as they get older. His chest is starting to go slack, after all. He is 42. He has gray in his eyebrows and his beard and his chest hair, but nowhere else. He wears slightly corrective contacts that are tinted to make the natural color of his eyes a bit fuller.
The next chicken tries to fly before Frank hits it. It gets about a foot off the ground, enough to catch a different part of the bumper and roll up and over the windshield. There is blood. Frank swerves and almost hits a landscaping van. The van sounds its horn.
“Collision warning front quadrant,” says the car, a full beat or two after the chicken is behind him.
Outside it’s clouding over in the kind of thin haze that guarantees it won’t rain. He’s almost into the city now. Frank is in a work zone, concrete barriers between him and several large pieces of machinery rebuilding the road. A wind picks up a red dust and whirls it around inside the barriers. Traffic slows. Frank tries something. “Wipers on,” he says.
“What speed.”
“Cleaning.” He thinks he remembers correctly from this morning.
Four jets shoot the cleaning solution up onto the windshield and the wipers go back and forth a few times. The little bit of blood and feathers and what might be a piece of a chicken smears across the glass and then comes off.
“Wipers off,” says Frank. Two dead chickens are on the lane stripes. It must be a truck, he thinks. A chicken truck must have broken a cage, or a door. He wonders what hitting a chicken does to the finish of the new car.
Frank knows maybe five things about chickens. He knows that chicken processing is a fairly vile business, or he at least knows that he’s supposed to think that but still eat chicken anyway. He knows that in a certain company one should try to order free-range chicken. He knows that Wendy believes she can make a good Chicken Marsala, but that it’s actually a little bit plain and rubbery. He asks her to make lamb or roast when clients are at the house for dinner. He knows that not all roosters crow at sunrise. He knows enough about fighting cocks to frown appropriately when and if that topic should come up.
Frank starts reading billboards. Café Risqué. The Gentleman’s Suite. ReMax. Hot tubs for $999. Tail lights come on about a half-mile in front of him. He taps his own brakes but still can’t see much.
Frank says, “Gas mileage.”
The car says, “Please choose from the following options. Actual. Average.”
“Actual,” Frank says.
“Twenty. Six. Point. Four. Miles per gallon.”
Not bad, Frank thinks. He runs over what used to be a chicken and the traffic slows even more, to about 45 miles an hour. The lanes are skinnier in the work zone and rush hour is coming up and the highway is also just crowded.
Frank wonders if the heat on the road is enough to cook the chickens. It’s the kind of question Mason will be asking when he’s older. Frank is sure of it. Wendy is Frank’s second wife. Frank’s first wife was an alcoholic. Always had been. Frank isn’t sure if he believed he could change her or not. Frank drinks heavily enough himself. Always a drink or two with clients, always a scotch and water when he gets home from work. Mason knows the word “cocktails.” A few weekends back Mason came up to him in the afternoon and said, “Daddy, is it time for cocktails?” Frank made them both a glass of orange juice. He and Wendy had sex that night. She told him it was sweet what he’d done for Mason. She had to remind him what it was. He’d forgotten.
Frank sometimes wonders why, precisely, he’s married again. He’s 42. He knows he’s supposed to have a family. He has a family. Wendy is kind to him. She’s a reader. Non-fiction. Books about gardening, about living in the city. They live in a suburb at least an hour north of downtown. Mason will always attend private school. He’ll have a good life. He’ll like his friends and his soccer teams. Wendy wants to send him to a summer camp next year.
Two or three more dead chickens are sort of half-piled up in the median up against a construction barrier. As he passes, Frank looks at their feet. Up ahead traffic is suddenly at a standstill, and the warning system works better this time.
“Collision warning, front quadrant,” says the car, and Frank looks up in time to stand on the brake pedal. The car stops almost instantly without any skidding whatsoever, and the antilock brakes don’t chatter. They pulse. They’re part of the Automated Safety System. The car just smoothly, perfectly stops. The engine purrs. Frank is sweating. The car has front and side airbags. Even if he’d hit the car in front of him, a green station wagon, he’d probably have been fine. Traffic is completely stopped. He watches cars behind him stop in time. Now six or ten cars up someone has gotten out and is chasing something into the grass of the shoulder – it’s another chicken. Out of the haze and the heat shimmering up off the road Frank can make out two, three, five chickens, and then there are chickens sort of everywhere all at once, running, bumping into each other, bumping into cars. Someone honks. Under an overpass a few hundred yards ahead is a truck, pulled over to the side of the road, with what looks from where Frank is to be chickens not so much pouring as dripping out the back of it. There are not thousands. There are just enough chickens for there to be one or two anywhere he looks.
Frank sits and watches for a few minutes. Chickens. Then Frank gets out of the car. He’s not sure why he does it. He hates to sit in traffic, but he’s not usually the kind of person who gets out to see if he can help. The heat presses down on him. He loosens his tie. Other people are still sitting in their cars. The woman in the SUV one lane over shrugs her shoulders at him. He pulls his sunglasses from his pocket and puts them on. The new car gleams and the cooling fan kicks to life underneath the hood. Frank starts walking, slowly at first, in between the rows of cars toward the truck.
“What’s going on up there?” someone asks him on his way by.
“Chickens,” says Frank, and keeps walking.
They’ve been going to church recently. Frank and Wendy aren’t religious, or at least they aren’t anymore. Weren’t. Wendy believes Mason should go to Sunday school, mainly because all of the other kids at his Montessori go to Sunday school. Wendy believes Mason should have the right to make some sort of religious choice when he’s older, but for now she thinks it’s good for him to go to church and Sunday school and cut out pictures of Noah and people like that. Frank doesn’t want to put a tie on one more day a week, but he does it because he thinks Wendy is probably right. Wendy has joined the choir and sings every Sunday. She’ll have a solo in the Messiah this Christmas and everyone is very excited about that. Frank likes to listen to the music well enough. She has choir practice on Thursday nights and she sings in the late service on Sundays and Frank likes to hear her warming up in the bathroom while she does her hair.
Frank walks toward the truck. The driver is out and chasing birds around. Some other people are out of their cars and helping. A car comes by in the emergency lane trying to beat the traffic and hits a chicken, almost hits the person trying to catch it. There is yelling and horn-blaring.
Mason told the story of Abraham and Isaac a few weeks ago after Sunday school, on the way home in the old car. Mason said Abraham had to stab Isaac so he could have dinner but then God gave him dinner anyway. Frank and Wendy didn’t correct him. Mason had three pictures of the event to color in for homework. Frank and Wendy hung them up on the new frostless side-by-side refrigerator/freezer. Isaac looks less scared in the pictures than Frank thinks he should, but Frank hasn’t said anything about it. Mason colored Abraham green in two pictures and orange in the third.
Wendy says Frank should have more hobbies. Frank likes to watch the sports news on television. He also likes to watch National Geographic specials about those people who go in search of shipwrecks and find them with robot submarines.
A chicken runs past Frank and heads back into the stopped traffic. Frank has reached the truck. One of the locking bars for the cages has come loose and one side of the truck is open. Frank had never really thought about how chicken trucks worked before. It’s simpler than it seemed. Just a bar going into a metal cylinder. He looks up at the truck. The chickens are packed so tightly into their cages that some are upside down. Some are clearly dead, others are dying. The truck seems twenty feet high, but Frank knows it can’t be that tall. There are pieces of chickens caught between the bars of some of the cages. Feet and heads. There is a terrible noise and a worse smell. More and more chickens are escaping from whatever cages happen to be open, and jumping and flapping their way down onto the roadbed. Those that are still trapped peck at each other to get out, too. The chickens’ eyes look dull, like unpolished stone. Nothing like he thought they’d look like. All the chickens look dead already. The truck is a wash of feathers and feet and blood and shit and red and white and brown chickens. Mostly white.
One chicken runs right into Frank’s leg. It is hurt. Badly. The chicken’s head hangs off to one side. It backs up and tries to go around him, but it loses its balance and runs into his leg again. Then it sits in the road. The heat is unbearable. He can taste it. Cars driving by on the other side of the median push a hot, exhaust-fumed wind up underneath the bridge. The chicken at Frank’s feet breathes through an open mouth, tries to flap its wings. Frank reaches down and picks it up. It feels much heavier than he thought it would. It is bleeding from where Frank thinks its ear might be. It is filthy, covered in blood and chicken shit. It must be dying. He’s not sure what to do now. What to do next. Frank looks around for the driver, but can’t find him. He looks behind him at the people in the stopped cars on the freeway. Off in the emergency lane cars are sliding by and around the truck. He looks up at the rusting iron girders of the overpass, hears and feels cars passing overhead. The bridge pulses with the life of the traffic. He sees the nests of pigeons or whatever other birds live up under the bridge. He takes a long, ragged, heated breath, and gets a firm grip on the ruined chicken in his hands. Then Frank breaks the chicken’s neck.
Wendy is in charge of burials at home. Mason has had bad luck with hamsters. Each time there has to be a funeral, and Wendy says a few words. Frank gets up from his television show and comes out to the backyard to stand with them. Then Wendy and Mason dig a small hole in the garden and lower the hamster into the ground in a small box with a ribbon tied around it. Then they clean the cage and go to the pet store. Frank isn’t sure how he feels about any hamsters in the new car. Maybe in the trunk.
Frank stands there for a while, sweating in the middle of the interstate. He has killed a bird with his hands. It’s so still. He puts the soft body down in the road and picks up another chicken. He expects it to peck at him, to shit his hands, to squawk, to do something. He expects it to fight. Instead it looks directly at him. Frank smoothes the feathers on top of its head with his left hand, grabs the neck with that same hand, thumb down towards the body of the chicken, tightens his right hand grip, and twists. This one doesn’t go quite as smoothly and the chicken spasms. Legs kick and the bowels let go. Frank twists further and the task is complete. He takes a step toward the truck and picks up another bird. A woman behind him yells from a car, but he can’t hear what she says.
He has never done this before. Frank did not grow up on a farm. He has never raised animals for milk, eggs, or food. Frank really doesn’t even shop at the grocery any more. That’s become Wendy’s territory. Mason likes to go and so they make a day of it. Frank never went to a summer camp where he would have learned to kill anything. He went to a sailing camp. He’s seen chickens killed on television, either with an axe or by twisting the necks, and it turns out to work basically as it looks like it should. It’s not simple, and it’s not easy. There is some resistance. But Frank’s hands are far stronger than any bone in the chickens’ bodies, and he begins to make quick work of things, moving from bird to bird. Soon enough he’s killed ten or twelve. The process is becoming, if not easier, at least smoother. He’s got it down to just a few motions now. The lady in traffic has stopped yelling.
He looks up to see a man standing in front of him. The man is wearing a brown shirt embroidered with the logo of the chicken company. It’s one of the larger brand names. Frank takes him to be the truck driver. Frank is holding a live bird. The two men look at each other. The truck driver is a large man, more than six feet tall and maybe 250 pounds. He has the look of a former athlete. His shirt fits him tightly across the biceps.
The heat is unrelenting. The driver is bald and sweating. Frank is sweating large circles into his tailored, starched shirt. The driver takes the chicken from him.
“Thanks,” says the driver.
“OK,” says Frank.
“I’ll lose my job,” says the driver.
Frank nods.
The driver takes the chicken by the feet, turns, and swings it against the back of the truck. Frank can hear the skull crack against the metal.
“Let’s keep going,” the driver says. “They’ll all die out here anyway.”
Frank stands still. Somehow the death is different when the driver does it. The man kills another and the sound of the chicken against the truck startles Frank back into action. The driver is right. All the birds will die anyway. Frank’s helping. He must be.
They are both killing chickens now. Frank sticks with his method, breaking necks. His work is punctuated by the bang of chicken heads on the back of the truck. Frank tells himself again and again that this is the merciful thing to do. He doesn’t feel badly about it, but the work is unpleasant. His hands start to hurt. He thinks of the perfect black car sitting a few hundred feet behind him back down the highway, of the perfectly controlled air conditioning and the way the seat feels against his back and legs. He thinks of the voice recognition system and how much Mason will love to talk to the car.
Frank was promoted seven years ago, just after he landed a huge client out in San Francisco, a firm that makes semiconductors. The firm bills more than ten million a year on that account alone. Frank will never make it onto the board of directors. He’s not the right type for it. He doesn’t really want to be there anyway. This is the last job he’ll ever have; the promotion to senior VP was the last real promotion he’ll ever get. The firm may give him new titles, meaningless titles, but this is what he’ll do for the rest of his life. There’s nowhere else to put him. He was then and is now the youngest senior VP. He’ll get bonuses and perks, but he’ll never make another significant move. They may move him laterally, send him North or West to set up a satellite office. He’ll need new challenges eventually. He will continue to do his job well. He is 42 years old and makes far more money than he can spend. He is wearing a handmade suit and standing on the highway killing escaped chickens.
Wendy has been saying that Frank should think about getting his vasectomy reversed. She wants another child, maybe a girl. He can’t imagine doing all the shopping again, the ordering cribs and bassinets and clothing through catalogs and going out to malls and stores to look at wallpapers and carpet samples. He couldn’t find the right way to tell Wendy that she could do all of it herself the last time, with Mason. He was afraid she’d take it to mean that he didn’t want to be part of it.
He kills chicken after chicken. He’s past twenty now. He wonders why no one has come up to help them, why no one has come up to stop them. Overhead the bridge shakes and bounces on its rivets. Behind him the car sits still, waiting for its next command. At home Wendy is waiting in the kitchen with Mason, the two of them making dinner and watching puppets talk about spelling. Soon the police will arrive. Animal Control will arrive. The Department of Transportation will arrive in its yellow trucks. Frank will go back to the car and wait for traffic to clear. Later he’ll pull into the driveway in the new car, park it in front of the house, and his wife and son will come out of the garage to see the huge sleek machine. He’ll step out dirtied in feathers and blood and stink and he’ll find a way to tell them what happened, a way to tell the story. Mason will have question after question and he’ll ask each one. Wendy will not ask until later. Frank will be downstairs, after a shower, after dinner, watching a ball game and drinking scotch. Mason will be asleep in his room upstairs and the chickens will have been removed from the highway by some DOT garbage truck. The story will make the news. Wendy will come downstairs after she does the dishes and sit next to him.
“Who’s winning?” she’ll ask.
Frank will give the name of some city.
She’ll tell him his clothes are in the laundry. He’ll thank her.
“Was it awful?” she’ll ask.
“Not really,” he’ll say. “A little.”
“What was it like?” she’ll ask.
“I don’t know,” he’ll say. “It was like anything else.”
They’ll sit a while on the overstuffed sofa.
“What made you stop?” she’ll ask. At first he won’t know what she means, which she means, and then he’ll have no answer for her.

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Drew Perry has recent stories in Black Warrior Review, The South Carolina Review, River City, and The Nebraska Review.