Chicken

by Lynn Crosbie

  “And what?” she says, and I choke, feel parts of my body light up like the prostrate fat man in Operation.

  “It’s hard to explain,” I say feebly, because it is, and it isn’t. “He abused — and abuses me. But just verbally. It was bad today. But he’s old, he doesn’t really mean anything by it.”

  “It doesn’t matter whether he does or not, he shouldn’t talk to you that way,” Annabel says. “Verbal abuse can do more harm, sometimes.”

  “More harm?” I think, feinting at images that stick me back.

  I stare at my lap and she says, “I’ll never hurt you,” and we run water in her little nun’s tub and squish into it together, shivering, blue, and safe.

  * * *

  After the straightest sex we have ever had, my girl and I talk, smoke, and drink a bottle of beer.

  “Tell me his number,” she says.

  “You’re not going to say anything,” I say, dazzled by the sight of her raw, naked skin and lambent eyes.

  “All right,” she says reluctantly.

  I assume I am finished, but Kray calls shortly and apologizes, stiffly. “Sid doesn’t need to be broken any more than he is,” he says. “Besides, he’ll always be my bitch.”

  He is laughing. I hang up and let his words turn into harmless fingerling potatoes that I lower into boiling water.

  * * *

  I report to the warehouse set in the morning and Kray is furious when he sees the bite marks on my neck; he snaps his fingers for a makeup girl.

  “Fix her,” he says, and she and I both sigh: it’s going to be a long, hard day.

  It is.

  I am beaten once more and again. My daughter is fired. “Thanks a lot, Dad!” is her parting salvo.

  My heart takes a stab at going out to her, before Kray orders me to walk on glass and hot coals.

  At lunch, we make a beeline to the taco truck.

  The old man silently hands out silver packets while a young girl with long, dark hair and a bubble butt, wearing a tight pink Taco Machine uniform and cap, flirts with Kray.

  “Gordita for you, gran hombre?” she says, and he becomes kittenish.

  “I’ll need an extra-grande, novia,” he says, and the girl smiles, turns her head, and spits.

  After lunch we are reshooting the hand scene: this time, Kray asks me to let the axe glance my skin.

  I have never seen the actor before, the big bald one with dead eyes who is holding the shining tool.

  Kray is leaning forward with anticipation as the other actors hold me down.

  The bald guy raises the axe and I hear Kray say, “Fuck, no!”

  Then he falls to the ground.

  Everyone swarms him.

  “Call an ambulance,” the lead showgirl says, and, after trying to revive him, I say, “Don’t bother.”

  Kray is dead as a doornail.

  We all start moving farcically toward the bathrooms, eliminating as we stagger, sick as hell.

  After a thorough purge, I stand by his body and tell one of the less-stellar actresses, who is dressed as a bawd, that Christopher Marlowe, Kray’s favorite playwright, also died swearing, in a tavern.

  “He did? Oh my God, that’s fascinating,” she says, and takes my hand. “This is so upsetting, right?”

  The medics have arrived and are zipping him into a cozy black bag.

  “I’m devastated,” I say.

  I am. I move to the corner and devise a text to Annabel: two hearts, pink and blue, swooping around our bound initials.

  * * *

  Filming is postponed indefinitely. Tributes to Kray fill the world.

  I am asked to speak about the one and a half films we made together while I am still violently ill.

  The nausea from what the police say is severe food poisoning has turned into a high fever, chills, and delirium.

  Annabel takes care of me: I sweat through the blankets as my temperature spikes and carries me to the barren lakes of the moon.

  “Kray’s genius,” I say to an NBC anchor or possibly

  Dr. Phil, “has a great deal to do with perspective. It lies in his ability to locate what is fearsome in the ordinary, then recast it, as Kubrick does with the notion of the average family in The Shining, as recessed or latent horror.”

  I am reading, badly, off one of the index cards that Annabel has written for me.

  “He had,” I say, tossing aside the cards, “a wonderfully current sense of style, though he himself was as repulsive as Voldemort.”

  Green auroras fill my eyes; my skin looks like a wet chicken carcass.

  Annabel waves at me to wrap it up, and I do.

  “I thought the sadistic bastard would never die,” I say, and there is a moment of audible silence before I am disconnected and falling back onto the pillows, envisioning two magpies, Annabel and me, squabbling over a diamond ring sparkling below a candlelit tree.

  “Make the branches,” I say to her, tearing off my soaked pajamas and lying back down limply.

  She understands somehow and, as unappealing as I am, she rolls below me and lets me pound her, slowly, until she calls my name and illustrates my back with the tree: its spindly limbs and flame-red leaves.

  She sighs and I fill her with at least three babies. I tell her so and she scowls.

  “I was spayed like a cat after an abortion a few years ago,” she says, pulling away from me.

  I know I should ask her what she is talking about, but I can’t. My remark was not at all hopeful.

  The fever spikes again, and she and I are pushing a carriage through Marrakesh inside the lush Majorelle Garden.

  When the police take her away in handcuffs, I call out, “And where hell is, must we ever be.”

  * * *

  She calls me from the county jail.

  “I have been arrested for killing Kray,” she says.

  “That’s preposterous,” I say, reaching for my clothes and steadying myself.

  I am still febrile and sweaty: now I am confused.

  “Baby,” she whispers. “Take out the trash. It’s filthy, just throw it away.”

  Right. This is code for the weapon is in the garbage, I surmise.

  “I’m waiting to be arraigned. Call my lawyer,” she says, and I refuse.

  “I will find you someone not working in a strip mall called Apollo,” I say, thinking of her former lawyer. I hang up as she starts to whimper.

  Drive to her place, toss the trash, and find a McDonald’s bag — a clue! — and open it, in spite of her coded request. I see a black wig, a Taco Machine uniform, foam padding, and a vial of something that fumes and bubbles when lifted.

  I call Jerry, who calls Robert Bernstein, who, after being forwarded a large sum, promises to visit Annabel tonight.

  I toss the evidence into a garbage can right outside of the police station, walk in, and ask to see her.

  “Your lawyer called. Nice guy. Gave us all bonuses,” says the stout, lantern-jawed cop, whom I recognize from a YouTube video in which he is kicking a homeless woman awake.

  “Love your work,” I say as he leads me to a sordid little room, then escorts Annabel in: she is grimy and abject; she cannot raise her head. Someone has cut MI PRETY into her hand: I kiss it.

  “Can you get me out?” she says.

  I tell her about Bernstein, who will get her an early hearing — he had better, given the variety of “incentive bonuses,” including bribes, he demanded.

  She is contrite.

  “I have money,” she says.

  “I know you do, but please allow me,” I say, knowing that she — basically broke as she cannot bear to part with the things she models — hasn’t got Bernstein money.

  Her clothes, half couture and half vintage finds, occupy a room in our home that other couples would have nervously earmarked as a baby’s
room.

  ‘These are my babies,” she said to me early on. “The kid can sleep in the dresser drawer in the bedroom, or with us unless you crush it with your fat ass.”

  “My fat ass,” I had said, eyeing her distinctly callipygian rear and, of course, flying at it —

  I see that even her jail-issue dress has been altered. The collar is cut into a daring vee, its sleeves are missing, and she has managed to sew sequins all over it. How, I cannot begin to imagine.

  “My cellmate is in love with me,” she says, rubbing her hand. “She’s pretty old, but tough. I’m scared.”

  My eyes fill with blackness, issuing, I am certain, stygian ejaculate.

  I whistle for the cop and have a short, urgent talk with him. He smacks his fist into his open palm as I fill his pockets with balled-up bills.

  “Hey, you. Yeah. You,” we hear in the distance as I coax Annabel onto my lap and whisper to her about the islands we will visit, about her body under a skin of warm, green water, about her face, which is all I ever see.

  She falls hungrily to sleep and I carry her to her now-empty cell and place her on her cot. I whistle for a mop and take care of the blood.

  She doesn’t need to see that.

  I don’t care. That part of me, my empathic connection to the world, is almost completely severed.

  It is only Annabel I care about, plus a few other supporting characters in this play, a decidedly Caroline story of vengeance and depraved love.

  “I’ll have you out in a day,” I say, and her eyes pop open.

  “Buzz,” she says. How rarely she calls me that now. “I wish we had a baby.”

  What a horrendous thought. I try to keep my gaze steady, composed.

  “I see him,” she says, grabbing my arm urgently. “He is chubby and perfect, with your eyes and my — ”

  She is nearly asleep. I turn away.

  “Buzz,” she says, and I turn back to her. “That is what I’ll call him,” she says, and smiles so brightly the room is lit with Holy Mother blue with Holy Mother gold.

  “Blessed are — ”

  “We,” Annabel murmurs, her arms cradling the little beastie, a crown cast in shadow above her serene mother’s face.

  * * *

  The judge is beguiled by Annabel, who is dressed in an acre of white organdy and holding a pink silk parasol.

  Bernstein irritates him, but His Honor is persuaded, after demanding a significant amount of bail, to let my jailbird fly — which she does, right into my arms, oof, I squeeze her and once more carry her, still frail and shaken, to the car, telling her over and over, “Never again,” as she promised me the day she rescued me.

  * * *

  “Did you mean to poison him?” I say when we are at my, at our home and she has showered until she is raw.

  “This is all a big misunderstanding,” she says, lying at the foot of the bed submissively. “The police say that a woman of my description was flirting with him just before, well — ”

  “But the day after I told you about how Kray treated me, he died. “

  “Do you think that I killed him?” Annabel says. We are sitting out the end of my poisoning in her bed, watching yet another tribute program that features a number of pictures of young, sexy me.

  “Turn it off,” I say, self-conscious, and she says, “Why? You’re still beautiful.”

  I rest in her lap and she pets me some more.

  My head hurts: I want her to be innocent again; I want to do the wet work in the family.

  I get up and pick up my car keys.

  I want her gone.

  Sensing this, she runs after me.

  “What are you afraid of?” she says, and I let the question pass by me like the feathery moth she was once —

  Not heavy with need and screaming unborn babies.

  * * *

  I spend the night at the Chateau Marmont and sleep dreamlessly, and well.

  Awaken and have a very late breakfast with young starlets who ask me if their mimosas taste “like spunk” and laugh and tell me how cute I am.

  Cute.

  My eyes tell them something else and they disperse quickly, as if I am a soap bubble and they are flakes of pepper.

  I call Annabel’s lawyer, who tells me that he is close to having the charges dropped.

  “It’s a travesty of hearsay and guesswork,” he says. “A civil-rights violation! Besides,” he says. “I have it on good authority that Kray wasn’t poisoned.”

  “He wasn’t? My stomach is still advertising for a spacious vomitorium.”

  “Nope. You didn’t hear it from me, though.”

  “What did it cost me, this chat?”

  Robert laughs. “More than you can afford.”

  I almost go home to tell Annabel the news, but I remember that Exterior is playing at the Egyptian.

  I kill some time shopping, softening enough to buy her an antique key that I attach to a bayadère necklace so she may escape any further prisons.

  I sit outside the theater watching the Hollywood hustlers and shudder, remembering the night I cleaned the empty star.

  And I contemplate the meaning of violence, as I have been asked to by too many interlocutors to count.

  Kray and I had decided to stick to a straight line: that the film was “darkly comic” and that I was surprised by the reaction, the fashion craze I started, the copycat rapes and murders.

  But I was not surprised.

  Having the strength, the power, and the nerve to take arms in a sea of troubles and end them is the correct answer, I think, as Hamlet, and know of myself.

  What would it be, to be noble?

  I would have to die, I think — and shake the thought loose.

  It is an early show. I manage to buy some pot from a kid outside. “This is the chronic,” he says. “Watch out.”

  He hands me a joint, having assumed, incorrectly, I would not know how to roll it myself.

  I smoke it in deep bursts, hacking and shouting, and halfway through, realize I have made an error.

  When you are young and stoned, you can go home and look at your face, your beautiful face; walk around your crummy flat and console yourself with the future, that glitterball — how it will light up the foyer of your joyous life.

  When you are old, my God.

  It is not only my bony, spotted hands that horrify me, but the realization I now have more in common with the evil chimp than the kindly horse he tortures.

  “I cannot breathe,” I say to Annabel. I am in the lobby, scarfing popcorn and weeping.

  “Come home,” she says. Home, she says, at last.

  I am so moved, I ask the concession-stand girl for more popcorn to take home, certain my girlfriend will understand what “These are the pearls that are your eyes” will mean. I get a box of Dots too.

  Ohmmmmygod they are so good.

  * * *

  That night, as we wait to hear from Bernstein, I am distracted by a call from Crispin Morricone, a famous haute-pulp director. He’s a fan of my films, especially those made during my fallow period: The Evil King of the Evil Empire is his favorite.

  He asks if he can come over and talk about his taking over Deadly Nightshade, and arrives with a bottle of Armagnac and a board game based on a short-lived TV show I appeared in called Murder, He Committed.

  Annabel meets him, dazzles him, and discreetly retires upstairs. She thinks he is here to discuss another project.

  We drink and talk, then play the game. I use my own figurine — me wearing a tan leisure suit, holding a scythe — and beat him two games out of three.

  He outlines his ideas: he is perfect for the job.

  “I heard that Kray was an asshole to you,” he says as we are winding up.

  I shake my head and don’t answer.

  “Well, that’s all
over,” he says, and I feel bubbles of happiness levitate from deep inside my belly.

  I know I am betraying Annabel, but I can’t stop myself.

  Still. I just want to be warm beside her, watching Netflix and eating the little pupusas she makes for me and serves with ice-cold beer.

  On the very good nights, she wears a scalloped apron and heels, rubs my back with her hands and elbows, and scratches BABY into my scalp.

  I want to be decent and true.

  Fear me, demons. I mean it: decent and true.

  * * *

  I am deeply relieved when Bernstein calls the next morning.

  “It’s official,” he tells me, exultant. “All charges against Annabel have been dropped. He had a stroke!”

  “But she — ”

  “Tried to poison him? I don’t think that’s true. Do you? And anyways, the cops obtained the information illegally, by threatening an extra. His testimony is sitting somewhere with, I’m guessing, a wig and a taco-truck dress.”

  I say nothing, but I understand. The win is everything to him.

  “Stroke?” I say.

  He laughs. “Can you believe it? I just read the report.”

  I thank him and frown. Mendacity, I think.

  Annabel is sleeping: I will wake her soon and tell her.

  Right now I want to remember what it was like.

  As I performed perfunctory CPR on Kray, I’d slid a barely visible obsidian scalpel into his pterion, the soft spot behind the temple, causing an epidural bleed — not unlike the ravages of a stroke.

  Bernstein has learned that “stroke” is what the creaky old coroner scrawled on his report. And when his young assistant queried the small cut, he said it occurred “in the fall” and, angry at her impertinence, added an exclamation point to the original Cause of Death box.

  “The son of a bitch has half a liver and an eight ball of cocaine crammed up his nose!” he said. “Food poisoning would barely have registered. And that little cut. He was probably shaving with a dull razor. Anyways, it’s all good.”

  Kray had opened his eyes and seen me. “And kiss his lips to death,” I said as I roughly faked mouth-to-mouth.