The Boomerang Effect

by Gordon Jack

  “Lawrence!” Dawn cried from above. Hearing her frightened cry snapped me out of my panic like a slap in the face. I suddenly realized that I was about to take this rickety structure down. The note’s prophecy was coming true. This float wouldn’t make it to halftime. I was the bomb and this insane chicken was the fuse.

  This time when the chicken attacked, I leaped up instead of away. I grabbed ahold of the ladder leading to the top of the tower where Dawn stood and started climbing. I could hear the chicken’s angry clucks as I moved upward. Halfway up, I turned and saw the chicken flapping its wings and bouncing up to try to reach me. You’d think the avian would be content having the ring to itself. It had clearly bested me in the fight. It was time to take things down a notch and strut around the circumference of the ring in a kind of victory lap. But that chicken wasn’t going to be satisfied until it ejected me from the building.

  What I’m going to tell you next is going to stretch the credibility of this narrative. I’m aware of that. You can either believe me or not—that is your choice. I think the important thing to remember is that even if you don’t think this could happen in a million years, you must know that I thought it was happening. Maybe in my panicked state, my vision of reality became somewhat distorted. I don’t know. I won’t say I haven’t hallucinated things before. Regardless, this is what I saw while locked in my Viking mask, midway up a ladder in a moving tower.

  That chicken started to climb.

  After her attempts to reach me through flight failed, the chicken hopped onto the lowest rung of the ladder and perched there, somehow balancing its body amid the jostling structure. Then it hopped off the rung, flapped its wings, and fluttered to the next rung. After regaining its balance, it repeated the process, slowly inching its way toward me, all the time staring at me with its soulless, beady eyes. A few more rungs and it would be within striking distance. I saw it piercing my Achilles tendon, sending me plummeting to the floor, helpless to defend myself against the chicken’s final attack from above. The claws would reach me first and rake open my veins on my exposed wrists and forearms.

  My only option was to keep climbing upward. It didn’t take me long before my head butted against the trapdoor that would give me access to the tower’s roof. I looked down and saw the chicken making faster progress. Now she was leaping two rungs at a time. I had no choice but to push up and out of this death trap. I pounded my fist against the trapdoor above me and told Dawn to get out of the way.

  I met some resistance on my first attempt to escape. Dawn was clearly not eager to share the stage with me, but when I started heaving my shoulder into the door to push it open, Dawn had no other choice but to step aside. The door flew open, and I squeezed the Viking head out of the tower just as the chicken reached my heels. After scrambling outside, I slammed the door down on the chicken’s head, sending it back to what must seem like the tallest henhouse ever constructed.

  You know that phrase “Out of the frying pan and into the fire”? That’s never made much sense to me until the moment I escaped death by chicken only to face death by homecoming queen. The only thing that saved me from one of Dawn’s heels puncturing my lung was the fact that we were parading in front of the entire student body and there was no way to kill me without it being witnessed by hundreds of people. Plus, we were, like, twenty feet off the ground, which makes subduing a Viking attacker a bit more problematic.

  “Stay down,” Dawn seethed through clenched teeth. She continued to smile and wave to the crowd, while pinning me on the floor with her patent leather heels. I was happy to stay out of sight, but when the crowd in the stands saw the mascot’s head emerge from the tower, they cheered loudly. The fellow had gained a bit of a reputation through his acts of vandalism, and I suppose the students were happy to see him make such a public appearance. I realized as I listened to my peers cheer that the Viking was the only thing that had made homecoming interesting this year. He deserved to be celebrated more than any boring and predictable homecoming queen. Feeling the crowd’s support, I grabbed the metal hand bar that circled the tower and pulled myself up.

  The crowd went crazy. Everyone in the stands stood up and started chanting, “Viking. Viking. Viking.” Dawn had no other choice but to step aside. She grabbed my right hand, nearly crushing my bones, and raised both our hands in solidarity. I felt a bit sorry for Jerry standing below us, invisible to everyone in the stands, but then I remembered how little the guy figures into these stories. Snow White, Cinderella, The Princess and the Pea, The Little Mermaid—they’re all about the damsel in distress, never about the prince who rescues her. He’s as generic and flat a character as, well, as Jerry.

  For a moment, I forgot about all the trouble I had been in and was about to get in. It felt great to roll by crowds of people and have them cheer for you. This must be what trophies feel like, I realized, held aloft by winners to their adoring fans. I turned to Dawn and saw her struggling to maintain her smile. When we passed the stands, her grip on my hand loosened but she didn’t let go.

  “That was amazing,” I said.

  The tower shook and we released our hands to grip the handrail.

  “What the fuck is going on up there?” Jerry yelled. I peered down and saw him with his arms around the base of the structure. “Is there a chicken up there with you?”

  “Everything’s fine,” Dawn yelled down.

  “I’m going to tell this driver to speed things up,” Jerry said, bouncing off the truck bed. “I’ve got to get to the locker room before halftime ends.”

  The structure wobbled a bit as Jerry jumped off and ran up to the truck pulling us. Dawn and I gripped the railing and watched the remaining floats move slowly in front of the stands. The driver must have agreed to Jerry’s demands because we accelerated somewhat as we approached the curve of the track. We were about to pass between the goalposts and scoreboard.

  “Lawrence,” Dawn said, staring at her hands. “Do you think people like me?”

  “Of course they like you.”

  “I don’t think they do,” Dawn said. “I think they admire me, but I don’t think they like me. It wasn’t until you stood up that people started to cheer. To see the change in people’s faces, it was dramatic, you know? They were bored looking at me. I’m boring. I pretend to be perfect and all, you know for colleges, and I’m just boring.”

  “I don’t think you’re boring,” I said. “People just think you’re perfect. When they saw you holding hands with the Viking, I don’t know, it made you more like us. I think that’s what they were cheering for. Their homecoming queen was showing them she was a little weird.”

  I looked down. Jerry had returned to the float and was now facing off with the chicken. He must have let the bloodthirsty creature out, thinking he was doing it a favor. Now they looked like two wrestlers circling each other, trying to find the best limb to grab to execute a quick pin on the mat.

  “You don’t really want to go to homecoming with Jerry, do you?” I asked.

  “Not really,” Dawn said. “It’s expected, though.”

  “Don’t do what’s expected of you. Do something a little weird.”

  As if on cue, Eddie appeared, running behind us on the football field.

  “I know someone who would kill to take you to the dance,” I said.

  Dawn looked up with tears in her eyes. She put her arm around me and gave me a friendly squeeze. “Oh, Lawrence, that’s so sweet.”

  I saw that she had misunderstood me. Not only that, but she was about to “Let’s be friends” me and I didn’t need to hear that right now. “Not me,” I corrected. “Him.” I pointed down to the field, where Eddie was trailing us like a puppy chasing after his abusive master.

  “Carlos?” Dawn said, squinting her eyes.

  “Eddie,” I corrected.

  Eddie was waving his hands and shouting something, but with the marching band playing and us being a good twenty feet above him, he might as well have been one of those air traffic control
lers who direct the DC-10 aircraft into their slot with their glowing batons.

  Jerry was preoccupied chasing the chicken around the truck bed and was ignoring Eddie completely. Dawn cupped her ears and yelled, “What?” I hoped Eddie wasn’t about to ask her to homecoming. It would be a dramatic proposal, sure, but the timing was all wrong. He needed a Jumbotron screen to make himself understood. He kept pointing up at us, yelling something that sounded like “banter.”

  “Good one!” I shouted, congratulating him on his use of an SAT word to identify my conversation with Dawn.

  Eddie shook his head and pointed to the stretch of track just behind us. We turned around just in time to see it. A homecoming banner stretched out in front of us with the phrase, And they all lived happily ever after written in cursive script. It had been hung between the goalpost and scoreboard, I suppose, as a final farewell to the homecoming royalty riding on the floats, or as a final bit of irony because the message might be the last thing we saw before we fell to our doom. The banner was just low enough to catch the tower on which we were standing. Depending on the strength of the line, it would either break like runner’s tape or knock the already weakened tower down to the ground.

  We screamed to the driver to stop, but he was in deep conversation with his passenger. We tried to get Jerry’s attention, but he had just captured the chicken and was holding it up proudly for us to see. “This fucker is dinner!” he screamed in victory.

  The wire caught the tower and sent it teetering backward. Jerry, sensing the crash, tucked his chicken prize under his arm and leaped from the truck bed. Dawn and I both grabbed hold of the railing but the force of impact sent us flying backward. I heard wood creaking and then splintering and the tower tipped backward. We were hanging on to the railing like Leo and Kate did on the sinking Titanic, waiting to be taken down by our collapsing tower. Someone below us yelled, “Jump!” I turned and saw Eddie waiting with open arms below. Just to clarify things, he added, “Just like we do in practice, Dawn.”

  Dawn executed a brilliant dismount and fell into the waiting arms of her cheerleading compatriot, who caught her and eased her onto the ground. Dawn threw her arms around Eddie and hugged him tight. “My hero!” she squealed. Eddie, locked in a tight embrace, gave me the thumbs-up sign.

  “Uh, I could use a little help here,” I said, but it was too late. The tower was crashing to the ground. Eddie whisked Dawn up again and ran her out of the path of the falling debris. That left me with two options: I could go down with the ship or grab on to the banner and hope it held my weight. I chose the latter because given the choice between certain injury and potential injury, I think it’s wisest to hedge your bets. I grabbed the rope and held on as the structure beneath me toppled into a mass of lumber, cloth, and tissue paper.

  THIRTY

  I hung there for what felt like hours. As soon as the tower fell, the driver stopped the truck and got out of the vehicle. A crowd of people gathered underneath me. At first I thought they were there to break my fall, but when they started throwing things, I began to see that I was just an oversize piñata they wanted to bring down. One water bottle hit me in the side of the head, and I’m sure it would have hurt a ton if I didn’t have the Viking mask to protect me. I hoisted myself up and draped both arms over the banner. It was taut and secure enough for gymnasts to use. Unfortunately, I was no gymnast.

  Someone’s shoe hit me in the butt. I heard another person suggest bringing me down with one of the color guard’s flags. “Stop,” I heard a familiar voice in the crowd say. I looked down, and through one of the mask’s eyeholes, I saw Audrey push her way into the crowd. She was dressed in full battle gear and looked like a kickass maiden dreamed up by horny illustrators at Marvel Comics. Rather than make fun of her getup, the crowd murmured appreciatively.

  “Hi, Audrey.” I waved from above.

  “Lawrence,” she said. “You can drop. I’ll catch you.”

  “Let him fall!” someone shouted. It sounded like Chester McFarland. Audrey silenced the heckler with a swift blow to the guy’s nether regions. “Fuck off, you dicktard,” she said, unsheathing her sword. I’m not knocking Shakespearian insults, but when it comes to getting people’s attention in this day and age, you can’t go wrong with a modern classic like that. The crowd quieted and stepped back to give her some room.

  “You sure?” I said.

  “Hold on to the banner with your hands,” she said. “You’re only five feet from the ground.”

  The crowd of people surrounding me started to chant, “Drop. Drop. Drop.” I swear, I wouldn’t have been surprised if someone swung at me with a stick while blindfolded. When I finally let go, my free fall lasted half a second. I fell on the soft rubbery track, knees buckling at the sudden appearance of solid ground under my feet. Audrey helped me stand and then draped her arm around my shoulder to make sure I didn’t drop again. “Thank you,” I said. I wanted to kiss her right there and then but all I’d get was a mouthful of polyfoam.

  I thought for a moment of attempting an escape, but realized I wouldn’t get very far with this Viking head stuck to my body. Most likely, I’d trip over the toppled tower lying in the end zone and knock myself unconscious. When Stone pushed his way through the crowd and grabbed my shoulder, I accepted my fate.

  “Everyone back to the stands,” he barked to the crowd. He turned to the scattered members of the marching band and ordered them to play something. A few seconds later, the band members regrouped and began their less than faithful rendition of Rihanna’s “Rude Boy.”

  Stone whipped out a switchblade and held it to my neck. “I confiscated this today from a gang banger,” Stone explained to anyone wondering what a high school administrator was doing with a concealed weapon.

  He brought the dagger to my neck. This is it, I thought, Stone’s finally going to get his revenge by stabbing me in the jugular. It doesn’t even bother him that he’s surrounded by all these witnesses. He’s going to claim I’m some teenage Osama bin Laden and cut me down in front of everyone. Maybe he’ll complete the homecoming parade with my head on a stick.

  I felt the sharp stab of the dagger on my collarbone and then an upward thrust as Stone removed my head from my body. My Viking head, as it turned out. Stone tossed the battered mascot costume aside and looked at me in mock surprise. “Lawrence,” he said. “It’s you!”

  “I can explain,” I said, more to those surrounding me than Stone. “I was locked in the tower with a chicken.”

  You can safely assume your alibi is not believed if it’s met with a chorus of laughter. Even to me, my explanation sounded like the ravings of a madman.

  With my vision restored, I was able to scan the crowd. There, standing toward the back, was Crystal, smiling at me like a cat with a defenseless field mouse in its mouth. “It was her,” I said, pointing in Crystal’s direction. “And I can prove it.”

  I snatched the switchblade out of Stone’s hand and walked over to where Jerry was cradling the chicken. I know chickens don’t growl, but I swear the sound coming from the avian sounded more like the low rumblings of a rabid dog than any birdcall I’ve heard. I stopped a few feet away and handed Jerry the knife.

  “Jerry is going to cut this chicken in half and divide its body between the two people claiming ownership.” I remembered this trick from a childhood story about a very wise king. For some reason, my idea was met with revulsion and a chorus of boos.

  “You’re a sick fuck, Larry,” Jerry said, dropping the knife and snuggling the chicken closer to his chest.

  “Let’s go, Lawrence,” Stone said, reclaiming his weapon and using it to point me in the direction of his office. “You’re finished here.”

  Suddenly, Spencer emerged from the crowd. My little mentee raised his hand, as if he were trying to answer the teacher’s question in a rather boisterous class.

  “If I’m not mistaken, the breed of chicken Mr. Tortelli is holding is a Ga Noi, an extremely rare breed found mostly in Vietnamese communiti
es. It is extremely aggressive with other chickens. My guess is that Lawrence has some chicken feathers placed on him, of which he is unaware.”

  I dug around my person and sure enough found my back pockets stuffed with chicken feathers. I held them up as Exhibit A just as Jerry decided to release his hold on the angry, redheaded beast. Oh God. Please, no! was all I heard in my head as the Ga Noi conducted a swift backward kick of its talons and took off in my direction.

  The thing was bloodthirsty. I once saw a piranha attack on the Discovery Channel and it was nothing compared to what was steamrolling my way. The chicken’s dead eyes seemed to glow fire red as it charged in my direction; its beak, sharpened from years of pecking at rocks, stabbed the air like it was reenacting the Psycho shower attack. I tried to run away, but the crowd found my distress hilarious and blocked my exit with their bodies. I was trapped in this inner circle with the chicken rushing me and pecking at my ankles. When it started launching itself into the air, I screamed, ran behind Stone, and used his body to protect me.

  “Crystal’s family’s from Vietnam,” I screamed. “This must be her chicken.”

  “That’s so racist,” Crystal said.

  The chicken seemed to agree with her because it renewed its attack with fresh vigor. I dropped the chicken feathers at Stone’s feet and the Ga Noi went after his loafers.

  “Mr. Stone,” Spencer continued. “I believe if you look at the soles of Miss Nguyen’s shoes, you’ll find trace amounts of chicken manure, I can see a streak of it from where I’m standing, indicating that Miss Nguyen has a chicken coop at home. I’m sure if you call home, they will tell you that one of their chickens is missing.”