Cluck

by Lenore Rowntree

  The first news story is about the $10,000 raised at the Reunion Hall in the Stars for Children show. Then there’s a report of an armed robbery at the Wells Fargo in Wallace. He doesn’t know where Wallace is either, though now he knows by the Wells Fargo it’s somewhere in the United States. It isn’t until the weathercaster comes on talking about a ridge of high pressure bringing in expansive Idaho skies that he understands the station is coming all the way from the Midwest. He likes listening to the weather — it’s something immediate, something he knows for sure all the people who live in the area have experienced that day.

  He sits with his hands in his lap and watches the numbers on his clock flip from 7:03 to 7:04. Jamie Lee’s show will start any second now. He’s eager to have some fun. Work has been tough, what with Elaine’s behaviour, and Chief coming into his office that morning to tell him all over again he’s leaving the next day for Hawaii and retiring in the spring, and that Henry is welcome to apply for his job but he won’t get it. It’s as if Chief thinks he’s too stupid to remember being told the first time. And after that discussion he didn’t have the energy to ask about the Swift Farms file, although his ears are still burning over that too. Then suddenly, Jamie Lee is purring inside his car.

  Hey there, it’s the cowgirl inside the radio coming at you. Sure hope you get to soak up this country evening with someone you love. And if you don’t have anyone to spend it with, stay right where y’are and we’ll spend it together. It’s 7:05 KLUK time, Jamie Lee Savitch inside the radio bringin’ you one of Wilf Carter’s night hurtin’ songs. Just in case that’s the way yer feelin’ tonight. Hurtin’ that is.

  Henry starts. Yes, Jamie Lee, I am hurting. How do you know?

  He feels better already just by asking her out loud. Somebody out there cares about his day, cares about his hurting. He’s going to enjoy this. After Wilf is finished, Jamie Lee is back on with her sultry voice.

  That makes it all feel better doesn’t it, just knowin’ somebody else out there is havin’ a hard time too. If you’re feelin’ lonely and blue, here’s one of my all time favourites, named by her grandpa after a mosquito, ’cause she had so darn much energy, Miss Skeeter Davis singing “Think of Me”.

  He can hardly sit through the song, what with the importance of the connections it’s making. He so doubted Alice when she said Skeeter recorded the tune, but now his body twitches while she sings about feeling lonely and blue, and again at the chord change with the words for I’ll be thinking of you. He can hear Alice’s voice warbling over top of Skeeter’s, her inexpert ukulele keeping time, and his body fills with compassion and love for everybody, Skeeter, his mother, and this magic woman Jamie Lee who put it all together for him. Part of him wants the song to go on forever and part of him can hardly wait to hear what Jamie Lee has to say next.

  Out of nowhere a phone interview with a parson in England who’s grown a giant squash cuts into the bridge of the song. Henry knows it’s interference from CBC, but still he jabs impatiently at the preset, trying to make the radio dial back to KLUK.

  Ack, he says. Help me. Ack. Ack. Ack.

  Precious minutes of Jamie Lee’s show are draining away, but still the parson keeps yakking on about his troubles with bacterial wilt. He waits for the heavens to settle but eventually the preacher’s sonorous voice makes him sleepy, and he has to give up.

  During the next weeks, he’s only able to dial in Jamie Lee’s show intermittently. He tries several different locations in the trailer park and even drives all the way up Cypress Mountain for clearer skies. But to little avail. Still it’s worth the effort — she has the hurtinest voice in all of country radio — and when he does manage to fill his car with her voice, she sounds so pretty. One evening, Jamie Lee tells her listeners about a radio ranch promo package available just for the asking. She’s about to give the details on how to get it and he is poised pen in hand ready to take it down, when CBC breaks in with a story about a woman in Lillooet who’s shot her fourteenth cougar in as many years. He can feel hot tears of frustration build as he jabs at the radio. Why does nothing ever work out? When he finally gets the station back, it’s too late to hear where to send for the package.

  Next morning at work, he looks through the federal government directory trying to locate the department that deals with radio signals, only to discover that all of the numbers he dials are routed back to CBC. In desperation he calls Environment Canada and asks to speak to a meteorologist, someone he figures who might know about radio signals. The fellow he gets on the phone sounds too young to know much, but he listens patiently to his problem. He says he’s sorry Henry is having trouble, how it’s curious that Henry gets the station at all, but that something similar happens to him when he heads up to Whistler, how he loses CFOX every time he rounds the bend at Porteau Cove, and it’s always right in the middle of a super funny bit by Larry and Willy, or a rockin’ good tune by Aerosmith, how his problem is one of land mass where Henry’s might be more one of heavy winter crystals, and now that it’s getting late into October the signals are only going to get worse.

  And for that I don’t have a good solution, the fellow says.

  Wow, you actually know a lot. But it’s disappointing it’s going to get worse, Henry says.

  Hey. Why don’t you call down to the Chamber of Commerce in Silverton? They’ll know how to contact KLUK.

  Brilliant. Great talking with you.

  After a half hour with the maps in the office library and the help of an operator, Henry locates a Chamber of Commerce in Kellogg, Idaho. He uses his thumb and forefinger to calculate that Kellogg is about ten miles down the road from Silverton. Close enough, he decides. He dials and a female voice answers.

  Kellogg Chamber of Commerce, home of the Gold Diggers Auction, how may I help you?

  What time do you close? he asks.

  Five o’clock Gold Diggers time.

  Darn, he says. I was hoping to call you from home. I don’t want to charge up a long distance bill here at work. So I’ll be quick. Do you know Jamie Lee Savitch at KLUK radio?

  Sure, everybody in these parts knows her. Great show.

  Here’s the thing. I want to send away for the radio ranch promo package, but I don’t have the station’s address.

  Oh, I don’t either, but I can find it for you. Let me put you on hold.

  No, don’t do that. Maybe I’ll give you my address and you can ask them to post the package to me.

  While the Gold Digger gal talks away, taking down his address, saying she’ll pass along a package from the station, it dawns on him he should have just asked the long distance operator to locate the station phone number. Why does he always do exactly what other people tell him to do? Why did he listen to that meteorologist? By the time she has moved on to the upcoming fall highlights that Henry might like to take in, Chief, newly tanned, is walking back and forth in front of his office door, and Henry has to pretend he’s setting up an inspection. He ends the call with, Thanks for your time, I’ll be at the farm by 10:30 tomorrow. He can hear the Gold Digger gal say, What? as he hangs up on her.

  What inspection are you on tomorrow? Chief asks.

  Just a recheck at Swift Farms.

  Didn’t know they needed one. Got a new heater file for you.

  Henry barely listens to the tale of soft eggs out in Surrey; half his mind is preoccupied with the bizarre end to the call, whether it will mean the Gold Digger gal will not get the package or bother to pass his address on; the other half is on thoughts of why Chief didn’t react to his saying Swift Farms, didn’t catch him and say, But Elaine’s in charge of that file now. Then before he has a chance to say anything about it Chief is up and out of his office. How could something so simple become so complicated?

  A week later a large envelope from the Kellogg Chamber of Commerce waits below the mail slot at his front door. Three red, white and blue Old Glory stamps are stuck to the top right hand corner of the envelope and inside is a handwritten note Come on down and visit
one day, Denise♥. Friendly, he thinks, but he’s more interested in what else is in the package. He can see a KLUK bumper sticker and 8x10 glossies of the disc jockeys. He shuffles through the pictures. He doesn’t like the look of the morning man with his satin western shirt and greasy smile, and the out-of-focus photo of Goodtimes Charley is so bad it makes him think about using the camera he bought for poultry inspections to take his own shots, but when he gets to the picture of Jamie Lee, she just looks pure pretty. Her blonde hair is tousled, and a hint of breast pokes out the top of her blouse. And even though she’s what his mother would call a cheap piece, he doesn’t care. Jamie Lee understands things about men like him, understands they don’t want to be alone, didn’t ask to be virgins, understands it’s just that some things hurt so much they cripple. All a man like Henry really wants to do is to fly.

  He puts the package down and walks with the KLUK sticker out to his chariot, the Subaru, and whistles a song he heard on Jamie Lee’s show while he peels the tape from the back. He starts to think about flying down in his chariot to see her as he affixes the adhesive to the bumper. There’s strength flowing from the sticker into the car’s engine, into the radio and into the front seat where he will sit when he does take that trip. Other people vacation in Idaho, why not him? The sticker has a mother hen and baby chicks in cowboy boots and hats. Chas comes out to the curb to stand beside him.

  Pretty funky.

  Yeah. I like it.

  What is KLUK?

  A radio station.

  Kind of funny you work with chickens and you listen to a station called KLUK.

  Yup.

  Say . . . we’re going to be late with the rent again.

  Ah.

  Sorry. Jim and I have to get it together. It’s just that work has been uneven at the grain elevators ever since, you know, his latest detox. And my chair at the new place isn’t working out that well. Being the new guy, I’m stuck in the corner, never get any of the walk-ins.

  Normally, news of late rent would upset Henry but he’s determined not to let anything disturb his mood. He says bye to Chas and floats back inside the house to pick up the glossy of Jamie Lee again. He traces his finger around the edge of her breast, circles in on where the nipple would be. He lies on his bed and takes down his jeans. Briefly, baby chicks and mother hens are in his mind, but they’re quickly supplanted by breasts poking out of a blouse, nipples hard against a silky shirt, tousled blonde hair. Then a thump thump crash from downstairs, and a shriek from Chas that is so loud he can hear it through the floorboards. At first the commotion excites him, images of Chas at Kits Beach intermingle with imaginings of Chas having sex with Elaine, Chas having sex with Jamie Lee, then all of them having sex together, and somehow he is getting harder, so firm he feels the semen move up, it’s going to be terrific, it’s mounting, he’s ready to fly, until he hears Chas screaming out on the front lawn. Ejaculate spills, but it is hardly what he could call a satisfying event. A stream of warm semen flows down the shaft, the force behind it so minimal none of it makes it past the base where a disappointing puddle forms in his pubic hair. He messes with the pool and he thinks about using it as a lubricant to start over, but he can still hear Chas outside and he knows it’s going to be a wasted effort.

  No flying for Little Ducky today, he says as he stands and walks to the window. He pulls the drape back enough to see Chas in his wine-coloured dressing gown, bent over broken pieces of a hair dryer scattered on the front lawn.

  I was only trying to make my hair look good for you, Chas yells back toward the suite.

  Henry looks down at his dangling apparatus. How could such a small flap of skin be so temperamental? He’s seen hens and roosters have an easier time of it in the barnyard. And his useless equipment has gone numb again, the tip is freezing cold, as if merely taking it out of his pants with any thought of it going inside someone else, anyone else — and what the hell was that thinking about Chas in the middle of it all anyway? — has killed it. As he stands there he realizes more than just his dong has gone numb, his fingers have too. He’s beginning to terrify himself with this confusion. Oh my God, he thinks, this can’t be normal. Partly to make himself stop thinking about sex, he pulls on his underwear and walks into the living room.

  He finds his mother’s Rand McNally Road Atlas on the bottom shelf of the bookcase, flips to the State of Idaho and traces the green line of Interstate-90 with a shaking forefinger to the edge of the Bitterroot Mountains and the black dot that is Silverton. It would only take him twelve hours to get there, maybe fourteen if the twisty bit around Coeur d’Alene causes any trouble. Might be sort of a different thing to do, to travel down there, find out what the Gold Digging Days are all about, check out the local scene, practise taking a few photographs, landscape shots, and maybe even a portrait or two of interesting people like, say, Jamie Lee.

  He puts the Atlas back and turns to see the photo of his mother, still presiding over the house, preserved in the silver picture frame on the fireplace mantel — right where she left it. She wears a red sweater in the picture, and she and Henry, aged ten, stand in front of a Christmas tree festooned with decorations. Henry took the picture himself, setting up the new Kodak Instamatic Santa had given him with the self timer. His mother is trying to kiss him, but he’s averted his head enough to make the kiss swipe at his cheek instead of his lips. This causes a visible stiffness in his mother’s arm that he had not noticed until now. Every time before when he looked at the photo, he couldn’t get past how bad the mole on his left cheek looked. His mother used to call it his beauty mark and to this day he can’t stand how much the mole makes him feel like a girl. He puts the picture back on the mantel.

  He wakes at six the next morning, motionless on top of the covers, his mouth dry and his head full of the take-me, hurt-me sound bites of Jamie Lee Savitch. His mind starts working like a slide projector as he runs through a collection of his fantasy girlfriends. First up in the carousel is Debi of “Sister Golden Hair” fame with her swaying ponytail and luscious buttocks, then there’s Shannon-or-whatever-her-name-is in her taut T-shirt swatting at a fiery bubble and looking appealing despite his nearly setting them both on fire, then black-eyeliner girl in English twelve, the thought of her white lipstick still gets him, next is Kitty with her smoky sexy Winston smell, still one of the best, followed by Janine with her fermented haybreath and rabbit teeth, and finally Elaine with her orange hair and her mouth full of whipped cream. He’s about to go onto Jamie Lee when out of a foggy part of his mind there is a slight nudge from the Chas corner, enough to make his hand jerk and reach over to the night table to pluck up the glossy photo of Jamie Lee. He is holding the photo tight as if his life depends on it when he calculates there is enough time for his Subaru chariot to whisk him to Silverton for the start of Jamie’s Friday evening show. Things are slow at work anyway, he thinks, they won’t miss me. Besides who there really cares? Certainly not Elaine. He grabs his penis, yanks it hard and with thoughts of Jamie Lee achieves what just the evening before seemed impossible. He is tempted to fall back asleep with the relaxation of it all but knows that if he really is going to make the evening radio show he must leave immediately.

  He quickly packs a small bag of toiletries and underwear, his camera, and the Rand McNally Road Atlas. He leaves a hurried message on the machine at work, saying he’s ill, and puts on an extra sweatshirt before he heads out the door.

  Even though it’s just past Halloween, there’s frost on the windows of the Subaru at 6:30 in the morning. He uses the bear-paw scraper the dealer gave him, moving around the car’s windows, making as straight a swath as he can under the circumstances. When he’s almost done, on window number seven, he begins to wonder if he needs his birth certificate to cross the border. He rushes back inside to rummage in the drawer of the desk in the living room. On the way out of the room, he turns the picture of his mother face down on the mantel.

  South of Bellingham, he has to make a decision. He’s been speeding to
this point, so he takes a moment at the Sedro Woolley exit to thumb through the Atlas. He can either take the red, single-lane highway from where he is, or he can drive a hundred miles farther south in the wrong direction but be on the green, triple-lane I-90.

  He rolls down the window. The sun is up, the air still cool. The car shakes when a transport rumbles by. There could be snow in the higher elevations, and though he trusts his four-wheel drive anything can happen in a mountain pass. He’s seen it himself on the news — the tanker on the mountain road tipped into a snow bank crushing a small Japanese car, a tiny import skidding off the edge of a cliff. Why has he bought a foreign car and not a heavy-duty Ford truck? The thought gives him a nervous stomach. He decides to drive to the Nuff ’n Such he can see at the gas station just down the shoulder to try one of their fifty-seven varieties of homestyle donuts. He needs to think this through.

  Three crullers and a donut hole later, he still hasn’t made up his mind, but he knows he has to get going. Two truckers are ahead of him at the till and he spins a rack of sunglasses while he waits. The fat trucker is capping his coffee when a pair of reflecting aviators whirls past. Henry pulls them from the stand, faces the mirror at the top, and puts the wires around his ears.

  Not bad, the checkout girl says.

  You think so? Henry answers.

  Yeah, like Jack Nicholson.

  He buys the sunglasses and wears them out of the shop. When he gets back to the car, he checks his reflection in the window. He does look okay. He checks again in the rear-view mirror. Then, when he starts driving, he begins to wonder how Jack might decide which route to take. Jack would take the most direct route, no fooling around — so Henry points his wagon toward the red, single-lane highway into the mountains.