Never Use a Chicken and Other Stories (5 page)

Never Use a Chicken!

Lemme tell ya somethin’. If ya ever plan on doin’ a robbery, don’ never,
ever
plan on usin’ a chicken as the weapon. Ain’t worth the trouble, and that’s fer damn sure.

A month or so ago, I was sitting on the bench outside of my house and my friend Arky was there. His real name’s Arthur, but we always call him Arky. He somehow doesn’t fit “Arthur,” but he fits “Arky” just fine. Arky was drinking a beer, and I was sittin’ thinking. All of a sudden I got an idea. I jumped up and called back over my shoulder to Arky (He wasn’t the fastest man in the world to move, you know.) “C’mon, Arky, we’re going to town.”

On the way to get my old ’72 pick-up, I stopped by the chicken house and grabbed the first chicken I came to. When I got to the truck I stuffed the chicken into an old burlap sack lying on the floor, one I keep to wipe grease off my hands after I been working on the truck. The chicken din’t like being in the sack, but that was just too bad.

I handed the sack and the chicken to Arky. “Hang on to this,” I said, and we roared off down the road.

“Where’n hell are we goin’ to?” Arky yelled over the motor noise. “I hope whatever the greasy stuff is on this bag, it’s comin’ from the outside.”

“Yeah, yeah. Don’ worry about it. Town,” answerin’ his questions in reverse order and meaning that town was where we was heading. “To help that fancy pants Mr. Marshall spend some a his money.”

“Huh?”

“Marshall. That little guy with the dry goods store, or whatever they call it. Little guy always all dressed up with a jacket and a tie. Got white hair and real small hands and feet. Saw him the other day driving a brand new Caddie. Figure he must have a bunch of money if he can afford one of them. He could share some of it with us.”

“Can’t have much left if he spent it on a new Caddie.” Arky laughs like he just told a good one. Well, Arky. You know him. Not too swift.

“Never mind, Arky,” I says to him. “I got it all figured out. You’re going to be the get-away driver. You can drive this truck. I’m going to use the chicken in that sack there for a weapon.”

“Your gonna do
what
?”

“Just never mind. I got it figured. Imagine what kind of damage a scared chicken can do in a store like that! They’ll be glad to give me the money and they aren’t going to be looking at me much. They’ll be too damn busy looking out for the chicken when I let her loose.” I started to laugh just thinking about it. Fact is, I laughed all the way into town and clear up to where I parallel-parked the truck in front of the store. Someone had been kind enough to leave me a place by an empty parking meter with time on it. Had to be my lucky day.

“Shove over here, Arky,” I said, grabbing the chicken sack, and putting the gear shift in neutral. “Keep the motor running. I don’t plan on being long.”

When I walked through the door, I only saw a couple of old lady customers on the far side looking at stuff. Behind the counter alongside the cash register, a hefty woman—I mean really big and mean-looking—was standing. Reminded me of that ol’ Tennessee Ernie song, the one about “Sixteen Tons At the Company Store” or something. Anyway, she asked, “Can I help you?” but looking like she wanted to help me out the door.

I said, “Yeh. Ya can gimmie yer money,” and when I held the bag up high and started to bring out the chicken—now, you aren’t going to believe this, but I swear it’s all true. She reached down behind the counter and she came up with a shotgun, a big old double-barrel pump action, twelve-gauge, by the look of it. Well, when I saw her pump that shotgun, I started to yell at her to be careful, cause somebody could get hurt. That’s when the chicken screeched and surprised me so I let go of it and it started to fly up. The big woman wasn’t aiming that shotgun. It was sort of resting against her hip with her holding it by her finger on the trigger. When the chicken jumped, she got excited and her finger must’ve tightened so the first barrel went off with a hell of a bang. That chicken was right in the short-range shot pattern and it sort of dissolved in guts and feathers and bits and pieces that flew everywhere, includin’ all over me. Mostly all over me.

Not only that, but the blast knocked her right on her butt, legs flyin’ in the air. All I could see as I tried to get out of the way was one humungus pair of purple bikini panties.

Sure wish that would have been a time to laugh, but about that time, while she was falling the second barrel went off. That one broke about a dozen ceiling lights and knocked some tiles off the ceiling so there was more than just chicken feathers raining down. The old ladies on the far side of the store had hit the floor figuring it was some kind of bomb, I guess.

They was just starting to get up ’n peek over the counter when Mr. Marshall came out of his office at the back of the store and tripped on a couple of steps back there. He was yelling and when he hit the floor with another big crash, he slid right into some shelves of stuff and knocked everything on them onto the floor. The two old women hit the floor again. I heard later he broke his leg. He yelled even louder and for what he yelled he should have had his mouth washed with soap! If I’d a had to testify in court what he really yelled, all I could say was, “Who set off the damn bomb!” If I said anything close to the truth they’d charge me with blasphemy and profanity in a public place or something. Don’t know what the customers heard. If they remember, they’ll never set foot in such a heathen place again.

Never did find out why the big woman wearing the purple bikini panties had that shotgun, but she was just getting to her feet, still holding onto it, when the door flew open and a cop rushed in. He took one look at all the dust and chicken guts and broken ceiling tiles floating around and when he spotted the shotgun, he started yelling at her to put that gun down. He grabbed her arms and yanked them behind her back and had cuffs on her before you can say stop! He was starting to tell me he’d have me in the hospital in a few minutes. I guess he was looking at all the chicken blood and guts on my face, when she give him a couple of hard kicks in the shins and they both went down on the floor with another tremendous crash. The old ladies hit the floor again I reckon, and the cop must have got an eyeful of those purple bikini panties.

Right then I made a quick run for the door. A small crowd of people standing there looking in, they saw me coming out, and they moved aside like the River Jordan when God stopped it for the children of Israel to pass through. I jumped into the truck and yelled at Arky to floor it. He did, before I even had the door shut, and he pulled a uey right there in the middle of the main street so that I damn near fell out. He was headin’ back for home.

“What’d ya get?” he asks, meaning how much money.

“Chicken feathers,” I answered, and I meant exactly what I said.

I never laughed on the way home, and I haven’t been back to town since. But like I told you, if you ever plan a robbery, don’t use a chicken for a weapon. It isn’t worth the trouble.

Somebody of Some Importance

John Hamilton Rogers had not noticed anything strange about the man sitting on the park bench, so as he frequently did, he decided to sit down and rest a while also, and sat down beside him. Mr. Rogers had been following his regular morning route to nowhere when he came to the bench where the man sat, apparently resting.

To give him his full name, he was John Hamilton Rogers IV. The impressive name was the only legacy he had received from John Hamilton Rogers III, deceased. If life had been difficult for JHR III, it had been even more difficult for IV. He was a citizen with no job, no income, no wife, no children, no known relatives. He was, as he liked to think of himself, “completely independent.”

The fact that his park bench companion neither stirred nor seemed to take any notice of his arrival did not surprise John Hamilton Rogers IV. The man was no better dressed than he himself was, and that particular bench in that particular park frequently served as a resting place for other independent citizens of that city, citizens who for whatever reasons of their own, chose not to take notice of others. But after a few minutes when a park pigeon suddenly fluttered up onto the man’s knee, Mr. Rogers was surprised to see no reaction from his bench mate. He watched, waited, then shooed the bird away.

“Pesky things, those pigeons,” he remarked casually, watching his companion. There was no reply. John Hamilton Rogers IV leaned toward the man and peered at him from beneath bushy eyebrows furled in some puzzlement. He stretched out his hand and touched the man’s shoulder. There was no reaction. He rose and stood in front of the man, bending down to examine him more closely. Realization of the truth arrived at John Hamilton Rogers’ brain. The man was dead, no doubt about it. He sat there on the bench in the park facing straight ahead, apparently thinking, but the eyes were not focused on anything and there was no movement of the chest to indicate breathing. The fact that he did not fall over was due to the way he had balanced himself when he sat down. Now the man was dead, totally, completely and unexplainably dead.

Carefully, John Hamilton Rogers resumed his seat on the bench, but closer to the dead man. He looked around to see who was in the area and whether anyone might be looking. Nobody. The park was, at least that part of it, deserted. He could hear the voices of children from the distant playground and traffic noises from the city streets on the other side of the trees and hedges bordering the park, but nobody seemed to be within eyesight at that particular moment.

“Might as well have a look,” he muttered to himself, reaching with some care into the dead man’s jacket pocket. The jacket was an old windbreaker with a slash pocket on either side. The near pocket proved to be bottomless, the entire lining torn away. Mr. Rogers stood up again and facing the man, reached into the other pocket. “Easy now,” he muttered, again to himself. “You don’t want to knock him over.”

This pocket had a reward of some sort. His fingers touched a small rectangle of printed paper. John Hamilton Rogers drew it slowly out of the pocket with the practiced touch of the master scrounger, a man who had provided for his needs for many years by “finding things.” He straightened up, palming the ticket, or whatever it might turn out to be, and slipping his hand into his own pocket, turned slowly and strolled away. His gait quickened ever so slightly as he moved farther and farther from the bench. He carefully did not look back, just kept walking until the sidewalk turned a corner and the dead man on the park bench was completely hidden from his view.

At that point Mr. Rogers began to walk quite briskly until he came to the park’s public lavatory. He entered one of the stalls and locked the door. Then, and only then, did he look at the small piece of heavy paper. The lottery ticket, for that is what he had found, a lottery ticket, was one of those with six separate numbers generated by a computer and printed on one side. The date of the drawing was there also. Yesterday’s date.

“Whoo-eee,” breathed John Hamilton Rogers IV very softly. “Wouldn’t it be something now to be a winner.”

Slipping the lottery ticket back into his pocket, he left the building and walked slightly faster than his usual morning pace, out of the park and along the street to a group of small stores clustered in a plaza beside a busy intersection. One of them was a neighborhood convenience store, the kind in which lottery tickets form a good share of each day’s sales. John Hamilton Rogers IV stepped inside, nodded casually to the young woman slouched behind the counter reading at a magazine. Her eyes followed him indifferently as he looked around before moving toward the poster promoting the lottery. He could see the poster held a notation of the winning numbers from the latest draw. She turned back to her reading as he casually produced his ticket and began to compare the numbers. She couldn’t have noticed that his heart skipped a beat. The first two numbers were the same. His heart skipped two more beats when he compared the third and fourth numbers. They were also the same on both ticket and poster. Then, for a moment, his heart seemed to stop beating totally. He began to perspire heavily. He shook his head. All six numbers were the same. He had the winning number.

John Hamilton Rogers IV forced himself to remain calm for the next ten seconds. He compared the numbers once again. Then he looked at the date of the draw as printed on the ticket that he held in his hand and the date on the poster in front of him on the counter of the store. The numbers and the date were identical on both ticket and poster. Clearly, he did have a winner.

His eyes turned back to the poster, looking to see where one would take a winning ticket if in the great odds of the lottery one should discover that one did indeed have a winning ticket. The address was there. The office was located in that very city, several blocks from where he presently stood. As casually as he could make himself do so, John Hamilton Rogers IV turned toward the door of the store.

“No luck, huh?” asked the clerk, barely raising her eyes. “Too bad. Want to try again?”

John Hamilton Rogers IV, who rarely had sufficient funds to buy a lottery ticket and who at the moment had only twenty-five cents in cash to his impressive name, although he had assets worth three million dollars, merely shook his head, tripped over the doorsill and, catching his balance, stepped out onto the sidewalk. He stood absolutely still for nearly a minute. Then he turned and at his usual pace for that time in the morning, headed for the office of the lottery corporation.

“Please wait just a moment, sir,” said the clerk as she handed back his lottery ticket. “I will ask Mr. Richardson to speak with you.” She disappeared into an office nearby from which John Hamilton Rogers could hear a murmur of voices through the closed door. The murmur seemed to become a trifle louder and then the door opened, the clerk motioning him to enter the private office.

“Well, sir,” began the dapper young man who was standing behind the desk in the office. “It would appear that you have had some good fortune. Please sit down. May I have your name?”

“John Rogers,” said John Hamilton Rogers as he sat on the chair on the other side of the desk from Mr. Richardson. “John Hamilton Rogers IV. That means there were three others who have had that name: my father, my grandfather, and my great-grandfather.” He smiled at the young man across the desk.

“Uh, yes,” Mr. Richardson replied, also smiling, but rather thinly. He found himself looking at a graying, more than middle-aged man, slightly under six feet in height, wearing a totally disreputable jacket, a dreadful pair of old work pants made from some heavy material, a once-white shirt and Heaven only knew what kind of shoes. Mr. Richardson became aware of some quite real feelings of foreboding rising from his middle depths. The smile doggedly hung to his lips in spite of the foreboding.

“What is your address, Mr. Rogers?”

“I don’t really have an address. I sort of stay wherever I can for as long as I can stay there. Right now I am at the Civic Men’s Shelter.”

When John Hamilton Rogers IV mentioned the shelter, Mr. Richardson’s feelings of foreboding became infinitely stronger.

“Yes. Well. You probably realize, Mr. Rogers, that we do not exactly hand you three million dollars in cash. The, um, terms of the lottery are such that we deposit into your bank account the sum of three hundred thousand dollars each year for a period of ten years. Will you, uh, give me the name of your bank and the number of your account there so that we may begin the paperwork? And, oh yes, if you will let me have that winning ticket, I will give you an official receipt for it.”

“Well, now. That does present a problem.” John Hamilton Rogers handed over the ticket and watched Mr. Richardson begin to write the receipt. “I do not, ah, presently seem to have a bank account.”

He leaned back in his chair and looked at the lottery official. Mr. Richardson sat quietly for a moment, the picture of a man who was fighting a very strong battle against forebodings. Neither man spoke for several seconds. Then a slow smile began at the top of Mr. Richardson’s eyes and moved downward until it filled his entire face.

“I believe, Mr. Rogers, that we can solve the problem for you. Perhaps you would be in agreement with a plan whereby I call a bank manager I happen to know and arrange for him to open an account for you and then we can deposit the money into that account.”

And so the transaction was done. After what seemed to be an interminable time of waiting for papers to be drawn up, and signing his name in many places, John Hamilton Rogers IV, multimillionaire, left the offices of the lottery corporation and walked to the branch of the bank where his money was to be deposited. Once inside the bank, he approached the nearest clerk and stated his errand. Again there was a request to wait, and again he found himself sitting opposite a rather nervous young man in a quiet office. Again he went through the routine of giving his name and lack of permanent address.

“Do you have some suitable identification, Mr. Rogers?” asked the manager. This time the forebodings came from the nether regions of John Hamilton Rogers IV. “What kind of identification are you looking for?”

“Oh, a driver’s license, Social Insurance card, something like that will be fine.”

The forebodings became acutely strong. “No sir, I have nothing like that at all.”

“Well, surely you have something to prove who you are. We must have some kind of document to show that you are who you say you are before we can release the money to you.”

“You mean you won’t give me any money until I can prove who I am with some kind of paper that has my name on it? Some official paper?

“That’s correct, Mr. Rogers. I’m sorry but that is the only way we can do business.”

John Hamilton Rogers IV sat very still for several long moments. Then he did a totally uncharacteristic thing. He jumped from his chair, reached across the desk and with the palm of his hand, smacked the startled bank manager across the side of his face. The manager yelled, people came running, including a bank guard, and later a policeman. John Hamilton Rogers IV stood still and let it happen.

* * *

“Name?” asked the judge

“John Hamilton Rogers IV.
”

“How do you plead to this charge?
”

“Guilty, your honor.
”

“Thirty days.” Bang went the gavel. “Next case.
”

* * *

Thirty days later, John Hamilton Rogers IV walked into the bank again. He looked different enough in his clean clothes and fresh shave that the clerk did not recognize him until he told her his name. This time the manager came to him and carefully kept the counter between them. He waited for John Hamilton Rogers to speak first.

“I have brought you the identification that you need.” He offered an official-looking paper which stated that John Hamilton Rogers IV had served thirty days in the city jail upon conviction of the crime of common assault and was discharged with the record having been noted. The manager looked at the form for some time. Then he reached across the counter and shook hands with his client.

“That’s what I call doing things the hard way, Mr. Rogers. Now, what is your next step, and how may I help you without sending you back to jail?”

“Just let me have a thousand dollars. I’ve done a good deal of thinking during the last month. I need to get some clothes, a place to live and somebody to show me what to do with my money. Perhaps you would help. A man as careful as you about who you give money to ought to be able to help me look after it.”

The banker joined in the laughter of the man who had just served a jail term for assaulting him. After all, John Hamilton Rogers IV was somebody of some importance.