CHICKEN LITTLE AND THE BOYS HAVE SOME WORDS by George Looney
As the funeral home went up across the street, despite Laura’s threats to leave, Rick put his old Corvair, that hadn’t had an engine in it for years, tireless, up on blocks in the front yard.
It’s a goddamn cliché, Laura shouted from inside the screen door.
His hand on the dented hood, almost caressing it, he shouted back, It’s sympathetic magic.
He’d show her. Later, he’d dazzle her with talk of rituals and what they can do to the world. Any dead, he’d tell her, would be shamed by the presence of the rusting hulk of metal and fiberglass.
This will keep them off our property and out of our home, he told her, drying the dishes she had just washed.
Laura had not, it seemed to Rick, been properly awed by his talk of the tradition of sympathetic magic. Laura had just made a clucking sound as Rick spoke of the Aztecs and the lines they scored in the soil to form the images of various insects and animals, how they believed the images, drawn one way, would call the animals they represented and, in a different style, would shun them and keep them from consuming their crops.
That damn junk heap up on cement blocks makes us out to be rednecks, was all Laura wanted to make clear.
There’d been other times the distance between them was almost unbearable to Rick. The visitations of St. Francis of Assisi always, when he spoke to her of them, seemed to push Laura so far away it seemed she felt she had to yell to make herself heard.
Is it so strange, he said to her, calm, the last time, to be visited by figures of faith? Don’t you believe? he wanted to ask, but didn’t, afraid what her answer might have been.
He never had to question St. Francis. The monk would show up in a dream, along with thousands of birds of all kinds. His entourage, the monk liked to call them. St. Francis never waited for Rick, or the representation of him in his dream, to speak.
In the most recent visitation, the gentle monk spoke of Rick’s Corvair. It needs to sing, St. Francis said, holding out his left hand so Rick could look in and see what he held there. A toad, Rick told Laura the next morning. It was a toad and it was singing in the saint’s hand, singing something from Beethoven, I’m pretty sure, he told her.
Later, she cursed him under her breath, watching him dig for hours under the car. Until he brought the hose around from the back yard, Laura couldn’t figure what he was up to. When he started filling the hole under the car with water, she remembered his talk at breakfast, about that damn saint visiting him again in a dream and telling him to do something. Laura was convinced St. Francis was nothing more than a manifestation out of his unconscious. St. Francis was the form his resentment of her took in his dreams, was what Laura believed.
What the hell do you think you’re doing? Laura yelled through the screen.
Making a home for the toads, he yelled back. She opened the door just enough to poke her head out. There were clear bags strewn around Rick and things were moving in the bags and there was, Laura realized, water in them too.
What are those?
Tadpoles, he said, and picked up a bag and untied it and dumped it in the hole under the car he’d just filled using the hose. Soon, he said, in a week or two, a month tops, there’ll be music coming from under this car, and that music will help keep the dead over there across the street where they belong.
Laura, nothing to say, clucked at him a couple of times, shut the screen door and cursed him, the toads, the saint, all of it, and cursed herself for getting trapped here.
* * *
Rick was sure the dead would conspire to cross the street. It’s this damn funeral home, he told his friend Jerry over the phone, and the fact that just thirty yards or so behind it, Rick knew, though the home obstructed his sight of it, there was a gulley at least thirty feet down and running miles to the east and west of where those darn construction workers were placing a brick and concrete way station for lost souls.
The fog some mornings fills that gulley, and the dead, Rick says, they’ll soak in the damp air and sop it up and slip out the gulley and slap around on the dewed grass like frenzied, albino seals.
Jerry, Rick knows, thinks this is crazy talk. He knows because Jerry has said it again and again, over beers down at Ray’s.
The dead, Jerry has said, ain’t nothing like seals and you darn well know it.
Even if Jerry were sober, Rick wouldn’t try to explain metaphor to him. Jerry’s just not the sort to bother with such things.
Rick met Jerry one Easter, the one Sunday a year Jerry would give in and let his wife Sally drag him to church. Sally knew Laura from what Laura refers to as the salon, what Rick calls the Den of Iniquity and Slander, so the couples sat together and Jerry and Rick hit it off from the start by sharing jokes one or the other came up with off of things the minister said with all solemnity, the two of them struggling not to laugh out loud and ruin the service for their wives.
Rick tells Jerry most things, but not about St. Francis. It’s not, Rick tells himself, that he’s ashamed, exactly. More that he’s afraid. Afraid Jerry might make some joke at the monk’s expense. Rick can’t afford to lose Jerry. Jerry’s about all he’s got.
Last night, Rick told Laura in the morning, the tadpoles, already small toads, started up singing. She was in the shower and the steam was making it so he could write words on the mirror and see his face, a little blurry, in the letters. Laura kept soaping herself up and didn’t say a word. When she got out of the shower a few minutes later, the message on the mirror almost made her smile. It’s only music if you sing along. The letters had dripped some and with her bare hand she wiped the mirror clear of any attempt at language.
What is it, really? Laura asked him as he put his plate in the sink to soak. What’s going on with you? Rick looked across the small kitchen at her and was disturbed by the sudden thought that the woman standing framed in the doorway wearing nothing but a beige towel and shivering a little was someone he only vaguely remembered, as if they had met at a party months ago and now she was standing almost naked not ten feet away, close enough Rick could see the goose bumps risen along her crossed arms. Rick knew this was his wife but knowing isn’t always enough.
All I want, Rick said, is to keep my family safe.
Safe from what? The dead? The towel slipped as she made a clucking sound and Rick smiled at his wife’s breasts. What can the dead do to us? Laura pulled the towel back up and Rick stopped smiling. And what family? she said. Rick had heard that tone in her voice before and knew what she was saying without her having to say it. Laura had been after Rick about a baby for some time now. For at least a couple of months it had been like she was obsessed with the idea, this woman who, when Rick had married her, had looked at couples with howling babies and warned him not to get any ideas.
Where’s my wife? Rick had said a number of times recently, and who are you? he’d finish. But to ask a question in jest is one thing. To ask it expecting an answer is something Rick didn’t think he could handle.
All societies have their rituals to ward off the dead, he told this woman pretending to be his wife. Don’t you think there might be a reason for something being so universal? Rick couldn’t figure why it was this woman couldn’t see the obvious. Why she couldn’t realize that soon all the dead would have to do would be to cross a road, and one without a lot of traffic for that matter, to get into their yard and once they were in the yard the house would be a cinch. What Rick had done was just fix up some basic precautions, but to hear Laura go on about it you’d think what he’d done was pure evil.
Aren’t the toad songs beautiful? Rick figured best try a different tack. Focus on the aesthetics.
Rick, Laura said, I just don’t know you anymore. Holding the towel up with her arms Laura turned and headed for the bedroom where she closed the door for emphasis. Identity, Rick knew, is the most difficult trick to pull off.
* * *
Francis was alone this time, and naked. The scratches up and down his arms glared in sunlight, making it hard to look at them too long. Rick kept trying though, understanding that those scratches left by the blunt feet of hundreds of different birds formed a language on the monk’s arms. Rick remembered enough Latin to recognize enough words for a rough translation, he figured, if the glare would just let him read.
It came to him in pieces, the parable.
First, the river of dust, the awful drone of flies that won’t settle but hover, a gray, shifting cloud where water’s remembered.
Something about the sky next, how it shivers with regret. No, how the sky rubs the earth, a prayer bead, muttering psalms only the stars hear.
Rick spoke in the vision, asking Francis to keep his arms still enough to hold off the glare long enough for him to make out the Latin.
The sky, how it hums the arias of operas penned by long-dead composers.
Then, the man, a baker of bread and sweets, the only one in town, dragging behind him, with great effort, a bag that has the smell of a bakery walked by at five in the morning, when it’s still dark out and nothing is open yet but the baker’s been working in the back of his shop, the ovens beginning to release the breads and rolls and pastries for the day to come.
This bag, the baker intends to bury it where the river used to flow, so he lets go of the bag and kneels down and starts to dig with his floured hands into white sand, the ground-up memory of shells that housed things with pincers and feelers and the taste of salt in their sweet flesh. When he’s dug deep enough, the sky humming something from Mozart while sand cascades in arcs behind him, the baker places the bag, in which something might be wriggling, into the hole he’s dug. The baker hurls handfuls of white sand back into the hole, until there’s no sign of any disruption in the dead riverbed.
The sky, the scars say in Latin, hums a dirge as the baker heads away from the dead river and back to town and his shop with the bright lights out front, where women come to touch his bread and whisper rumors of infidelity and madness over his croissants, while, in back with the ovens, he works alone to the rhythms of jazz standards and Sinatra ballads.
Then, a woman, crying in a kitchen over what looks like it could once have been a loaf of Italian bread but is now misshapen and furred and obviously not edible.
Then another woman, and her son, placing into a trash can a dark lump of something that might once have been cinnamon rolls, the anguish on the young boy’s face enough to break any heart that can be broken.
Then figure after figure, men and women and boys and girls and even dogs used to being fed from the table, crying and whimpering and hunching their bodies into representations of grief over ruined bread or other baked goods.
A whole town brought to starving by the miraculous transformation of every loaf of bread and every sweet roll and every bun and every croissant into dark and moldy and pungent objects thickening the local air with flies.
Rick’s eyes, in the dream, were sore from the glare. All of this Latin in light up and down the monk’s arms made him want to close his eyes so everything would go dark. The only thing that kept Rick’s eyes open was he didn’t get it.
I don’t get it, he said to the naked monk covered with bird scratches who was kneeling and gazing up into the sky, his perfect hands, left unmarked by the birds, covering his chest where his heart would be, as if to take measure of himself through its beating. Rick could see the beating of the monk’s heart in the slight jerking of his unscarred hands. Then he saw it in the rhythm of the wind moving the leaves of the tree under which the monk kneeled. Then it was in the grass bending in the same wind at Rick’s feet. Rick’s own heart tuned itself to the rhythm of the heart of St. Francis just before the dream ended.
Rick was awake and remembered the parable and still he didn’t get it.
Rick had set the Corvair up on its ragged altar while the men in their monochromatic jump suits and hard hats were still at work finishing the construction of the funeral home. A preemptive strike, is how he thought of it. And the toads were breaking into song in the early evenings by the time the men across the street were putting up the signs with elegant lettering identifying the funeral home for what it was and finishing the inside with carpet and paint and all the necessary fixtures.
But it’s not till tonight the car up on blocks and the toads and their singing are put to the test. Rick watches the minivans and Toyotas pull into the parking lot across the street. He’s sure he can hear, though just barely, organ music. People in dark clothes get out of the cars and minivans and SUVs and walk slowly, whispering, it looks like from where Rick stands at one of the bay windows in his living room watching, none of them looking up at the evening sky where a few stars are already visible. The first service, and Rick’s yard is as ready as he could make it. Thinking about what’s going on across the road’s too much. Rick can’t take the wait.
Laura’s in the kitchen. Rick can hear her moving things around and then the water runs and he knows his wife is getting her usual glass before bed. He thinks of his wife’s dry throat, the water going down it. He thinks of her lying down in bed, naked and on top of the sheets. The temperature has yet to start going down though the sun’s been gone over an hour. Outside, from under the Corvair, the toads start up. It’s a music, Rick knows, meant to articulate longing, to beg for love. Listening to the toads and thinking about his wife lying upstairs in bed fills Rick with more desire than he’s known for a long time.
Rick is naked before he gets to the bedroom, and the music drifting up from downstairs is early Sinatra. The songs of the toads are lost under the Sinatra, but Rick knows they’re there, and that’s enough. Laura, despite the Sinatra, tries to act surprised. Maybe, Rick realizes, she is. It has been a long time, at least months, he thinks. But Laura doesn’t keep up the act for long, and the room that’s only dimly lit by the lights of the funeral home across the street is, for a time, a hushed tangling of limbs and a coming together of bodies, and the music of flesh moving over and into flesh joins the seductive baritone coming from the CD player downstairs and the bass thrum coming from under the Corvair outside and the barely audible sounds of the organ playing hymns across the street and the night is an orchestra of longing and loss and renewal.
You know, Laura whispers in the quiet their bodies have fallen into, the service across the street over for some time and the toads asleep and the Sinatra done, Chicken Little wasted a lot of time certain the sky was falling. In fact, Chicken Little was so shook up by the thought the sky was falling, he forgot what a chicken should really worry about and got lured right into the fox’s den.
Rick thinks about that, about Chicken Little going off half-cocked all because of an acorn dropping on his little feathered head. He thinks about all the other folks Chicken Little got all riled up and of how well the fox ate that day, the sky hanging overhead and having a laugh at Chicken Little’s expense. Rick wonders where St. Francis is, and if the monk knows the tale of the chicken who thought the sky was falling and who never got to warn the king.
Rick’s hand is caressing Laura’s little stomach that’s still damp, then his head is bent over it and he’s kissing the slight mound of flesh. Rick thinks of the Corvair and the pond of toads underneath it and starts to laugh. None of that is going to stop anything. Leave it to a monk, Rick thinks, to miss the obvious. Rick’s hand has slipped lower and his fingers are making Laura start to move her hips up off the bed and her little moans are just what he’s after.
Let’s make a baby, Rick whispers up to his wife’s face he can barely make out, his head resting on her stomach, his fingers inside her. Her ragged I love you is all the assent he needs. He doesn’t tell her what sort of sympathetic magic he’s at work on now. He figures it’s better she doesn’t know.
The dead over there, Rick thinks, they don’t stand a chance.
George Looney’s books include The Precarious Rhetoric of Angels (White Pine Press, 2005), Attendant Ghosts (Cleveland State University Press, 2000), Animals Housed in the Pleasure of Flesh (Bluestem Press, 1996), and the novella Hymn of Ash (Elixir Press, 2008). He is a frequent contributor to Alaska Quarterly Review.