The Chicken Dance

by Jacques Couvillon

  After I snuck back into my room, I lay in my bed thinking about all the stuff my father had said. I figured that my father had married my mother because of Dawn, and because they got married, he had to drop out of accounting school and my mother couldn’t go to Vegas to be a dancer. And I figured that I was the boy he was talking about. So then it made sense to me why my father was asking me questions about my chickens and school. It was because he was sorry because he thought he’d made me miserable.

  When I fell asleep, I dreamed that my father kicked down a hotel room door. My mother was in the room and she was wearing a sheet. She screamed and then some man ran into the bathroom. My father walked up to that door and started kicking, and right when it flew open, I woke up. I knew it was a dream, but I really wanted to know who was in that bathroom. I found out the next day.

  Twenty-Five

  The chicken-judging contest was at Louisiana State University on a Saturday, but a bus was going to take all the 4-H kids from the parking lot of Horse Island Elementary the Friday afternoon before. My mother drove me there and as soon as she parked, she got out and went to speak to some of the other parents who were dropping off kids.

  Leon and his dad were standing in front of the bus and Mr. Leonard told Leon, “I know you ain’t no genius, boy, but it would do me proud if you brought us home a trophy.”

  Leon didn’t say anything, but Mr. Leonard saw me and said, “Hey, Don. If you have some time, would you mind teaching Leon here a few things about history? I thought he only had a problem with adding and subtracting, but the boy didn’t even know that Abraham Lincoln was the first president of the United States.”

  I didn’t tell Mr. Leonard that George Washington was the first president of the United States because my mother had told me never to correct adults. I just put my head down and then Leon asked his dad, “Can I get on the bus now?”

  Mr. Leonard said, “You sure are in a hurry to get out of here.”

  “I just want to get a good seat. That’s all,” Leon told him.

  “Well, go ahead then,” Mr. Leonard said. “I’ll see you and your trophy on Sunday.”

  Leon got on the bus and walked to the back and didn’t look out until Mr. Leonard had walked away. My mother came over to me and asked me, “Now, you’re not going to be back until Sunday afternoon around five, right?”

  I said, “Yes, ma’am,” and then I heard, “Don’t come back unless you bring a first-place trophy with you, boy.”

  I looked up and saw Mr. Bufford smiling. My mother looked at him too and said, “Oh, Robert, you scared me.”

  He took off his black cowboy hat and bowed and said, “Well, I’m sorry. I would never scare a lady on purpose.”

  My mother slapped Mr. Bufford’s shoulder and said, “Oh, Robert. Stop acting so stupid.”

  Mr. Bufford laughed and said, “Now you make us proud, boy. I don’t want you coming back here with anything less than first place, you hear me?”

  “Yes, sir,” I told him, and then I got on the bus.

  When the bus was pulling out of the parking lot, I realized that my mother had called Mr. Bufford, “Robert.” His first name was Bobby, and everyone called him that or Mr. Bufford, and although I knew that Bobby was a nickname for Robert, it seemed weird to me that my mother had called him that.

  I began thinking that maybe everyone called him “Bobby” because if they called him “Robert,” the first letter of his first name wouldn’t be the same as the first letter of his last name like everyone else in the town. “Or maybe,” I thought, “Mr. Bufford thinks ‘Bobby Bufford’ sounds better than ‘Robert Bufford.’”

  I started saying “Robert Bufford” over and over again in my head trying to figure out if I liked it better than “Bobby Bufford.” Then I realized that Robert Bufford’s initials were R. B. and that the initials of the man who had sent my mother that love note were also R. B. and so that maybe Mr. Bufford was the guy who had sent my mother the love note! It explained why I saw him going to our house sometimes when I was going to school and why my mother’s face turned real red when she looked at him and why she got so mad that time in Horse Island Food and Furniture when the cashier told Mr. Bufford that his wife was on the phone.

  All during the two-hour bus trip, all I could think about was the two of them kissing. I thought about my father and I wondered if he knew that R. B. was Mr. Bufford. I wondered if he and my mother were going to get a divorce. I thought that if they did, I would have to live with my mother and Mr. Bufford and start working at the grocery store. Then I thought that I might have to leave my chickens with my father and I got scared.

  But then I remembered how happy my parents looked when they thought that they had found Dawn. And so I figured that if I brought her home, maybe my mother would stop having the affair with Mr. Bufford and my parents wouldn’t get a divorce and I wouldn’t have to work at the grocery store and I wouldn’t have to leave my chickens. So that’s when I knew that I really had to find Dawn or everything was going to change.

  I still didn’t know how I was going to find Dawn. I guess I just thought I could walk around Baton Rouge and see her somewhere. But when the school bus pulled onto this big bridge that crossed the Mississippi and I saw how big Baton Rouge was, I knew it wouldn’t be that easy. I knew that Baton Rouge was the state capital, but I didn’t know that it would be so big. It looked almost as big as New Orleans.

  Anyway, when the bus pulled onto the bridge, Leon bet this kid Braxton that he could spit out the window and hit this boat that was going down the river. When he spit, though, it hit the windshield of the car behind the bus. A bunch of kids laughed and then Mrs. Forest, one of the chaperones, yelled, “Leon Leonard, shut that window and sit down! I can see that the two of you want to cause trouble so you leave me no choice but to split you up. Do you agree, Mrs. Broussard and Nurse Nancy?”

  Mrs. Broussard, another chaperone, said, “That’s a good idea. Leon, tonight you’re going to share a room with Don, and Braxton, you’re going to share a room with Joey.”

  Leon stood up from his seat and said, “Ah, great. I won’t be able to get any sleep because the dancing machine is going to keep me up all night with his ballet.”

  Then Mrs. Broussard said, “Leon, do you want me to call your parents?”

  Leon sat down and said, “No, ma’am.”

  “Then shut it,” Mrs. Forest said.

  I couldn’t believe that I’d get to share a room with Leon. It was my chance to show him that I wasn’t a dancing geek, but that I was the same boy he used to ride his bike to school with. I got a little happy because of this and was starting to think about how I was going to find Dawn again when we pulled into the hotel parking lot.

  The 4-H club usually stayed in the dormitories on campus, but that year because of a fire, there weren’t enough dorm rooms for us. Nurse Nancy told me that they almost canceled the trip, but then the 4-H club was able to find a cheap hotel that had just reopened after being shut down by the health department and needed the business, so they gave the 4-H club a really big discount.

  As soon as we pulled into the parking lot, we saw a man and a woman having a fistfight. The bus driver jumped out of his seat and ran up to them, but by the time he got there, the woman had knocked the man to the ground and was kicking him. Mrs. Forest yelled at us, “Look the other way, children! I don’t want you seeing that!”

  None of us listened, though, and we all watched the woman spit on the man and then walk into the hotel.

  Mrs. Forest said, “Oh dear. What a nice hotel,” and then Mrs. Broussard said, “Yes. Very nice. Now, kids, before we go to our rooms, I want to make sure that none of you come outside without adult supervision. Do you all understand?”

  We all said, “Yes, ma’am,” and then Nurse Nancy said, “Well then, let’s get off this bus and go to our rooms.”

  When Leon and I got to our room, he threw his stuff on the bed closest to the door and went into the bathroom. I put my stuff on the bed by the w
indow and looked around. The walls were this kind of gray color that was the same color as the frozen food section at Horse Island Food and Furniture. My mother always said she thought that color made it look like a jail cell. I thought maybe I should tell that to Leon and see if he thought it was funny, but when he came out of the bathroom he asked me, “Where’s the remote?”

  I got up from my bed real fast and started looking all over the room. I looked under the bed, on the desk, behind the television, and finally in the drawer of the nightstand. As soon as I saw it, I yelled, “Here it is!”

  I held it up to Leon with a big smile on my face and he said, “What are you so excited about? It’s just a remote.”

  He walked over to me and grabbed it out of my hands. But before he could turn on the TV, Mrs. Forest knocked on our door and said, “Come on, children, it’s time to go to dinner.”

  Leon threw the remote on his bed and then walked out of the room. I was about to follow him, but I saw the open drawer of the nightstand and went to close it. This is when I saw the phone book and realized that it would be the best place to start looking for Dawn.

  So after dinner, when we got back in our rooms and Leon grabbed a pack of playing cards from his suitcase and left, I opened the drawer of the nightstand. There was a Bible, the yellow pages, the white pages, and a map of Baton Rouge. I pulled out the white pages and dropped it on the bed. It was so big that it bounced around. I opened it to the S’s to look for Dawn Schmidt, but there was nothing. I turned it to the P’s and looked for Liza Pinelli and again, there was nothing. Then I realized that if she’d just moved there, her name wouldn’t be in the phone book. And if her name was in the phone book, she’d probably have a different name because she didn’t remember what her name was because of the amnesia. There was no way I could call every person in the phone book and ask them if they had run away from Shreveport of if they were kidnapped and then got amnesia but remember running away from a crazy man at Bourbon’s Broadway in New Orleans.

  Then I noticed the Bible in the drawer and thought about praying because it seemed to work for people when they did it on television. But then I saw the yellow pages and pulled it out and dropped it on the bed to see if it would bounce like the white pages. It did and even bounced right off the bed. When I picked it up, I saw an advertisement for a movie theater. That’s when I remembered that the Hawaiian girl told me that Dawn used to work at Bill’s Broadway in Baton Rouge.

  So I pulled out the white pages and found Bill’s Broadway and called the number. It rang a bunch of times and then this man answered and said, “Thank you for calling Bill’s Broadway. It’s like the real Broadway, but you don’t have to get on a plane.”

  I was about to ask for Liza Pinelli or Dawn Schmidt, but then I realized again that Dawn might have changed her name and that she might get suspicious if someone called asking for a name she wasn’t going by anymore. She might think it was my father, or if she had really been kidnapped, the man who had done it. And then she might run away again and I’d never find her. So I hung up the phone and decided it was better if I went to Bill’s Broadway and looked for Dawn. Because if she saw me and found out who I was, she might not run.

  Then I pulled the map of Baton Rouge out of the drawer and found Tom Street, where Bill’s Broadway was. It didn’t seem like it was that far from the hotel, so I figured I could probably walk there. It was about nine o’clock when I found it on the map, though, and since the chicken-judging contest was the next morning, and I needed to study a little more and get some sleep if I was going to win, I decided to wait until the next night before I looked for Dawn.

  Twenty-Six

  All through the night I could hear people laughing and running up and down the hall of the hotel. I don’t even know what time Leon came back to the room, but he was in his bed when Nurse Nancy knocked on the door the next morning and told us to wake up.

  About twenty minutes later, all the kids were on the bus to go eat breakfast and then to head to the chicken-judging contest. It was on a Louisiana State University farm and they had tons and tons of land with barns and pens and fields. The barn that the contest was held in was bigger than any building I’d ever been in. The outside was white and made of tin and the inside had a dirt floor and big windows on the ceiling. There were all these tables in the middle of the barn and on top were cages with chickens. Along most of the walls, there were pens with either cows, sheep, or pigs.

  When we walked in Mrs. Forest brought us over to a section of the barn that had a bunch of folding chairs and told us, “Now sit down, children, and we’ll get this started.”

  There were about five hundred kids from all over southwest Louisiana who were in the age category of eleven to fifteen. Each school came at different times and judged different chickens. After the kids from my school sat down in the folding chairs, a man I’d never seen before came over to us. Mrs. Forest cleared her throat and said, “This is Mr. Andre, and he’s going to go over the contest rules with you.”

  Mr. Andre said, “Good morning, Ladies and Gentlemen.”

  Some of us said good morning back, and then he said, “You don’t seem too full of energy this morning. What’s going on?”

  “That’s because most of them were too busy running around the halls last night, but that’s not going to happen tonight, I can guarantee you,” Mrs. Forest told him.

  Mr. Andre looked at Mrs. Forest and then back at us and said, “Oh no, that’s not good. Well, anyway, I guess we should go ahead and get started.”

  He gave a stack of papers to one of the girls in my class, Andrea Apple, and asked, “Can you pass these around for me?”

  While she was handing out the papers, Mr. Andre went over the rules of the contest. It was a lot like the Horse Island chicken-judging contest, so when he asked, “Any questions?” no one asked anything.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s get started.”

  When I walked up to the first cage, I took a deep breath and then I forgot about everyone and everything around me. All I saw was the chicken. It was a Brown Leghorn, which are known to be good egg producers. They look like they have the basic black-breasted, red color pattern on the jungle fowl and some scientist people think that that’s where chickens come from. They think the first one in America was brought from Leghorn, Italy. I was a little excited because although we didn’t have any at my house, it was one of my favorite breeds—mostly because of its color. It was a brown color that was kind of the color of the bottom of a magnolia leaf. I had to give it a low score, though, because it was dirty and it had poor feather growth.

  The rest of the chickens were all different kinds of breeds, but I knew them all and I knew exactly what was wrong and right with each one. The best one out of the bunch was a Rhode Island Red. It was clean, had nice feather growth, and its comb wasn’t too big.

  When I finished judging all of the chickens and double-checked my work, I walked over to the table where I was supposed to hand in my ranking sheet. Nurse Nancy was standing there and asked, “How do you think you did, Don?”

  I told her, “Okay, but I’m not sure,” and she said, “Well, as long as you did your best. That’s all that matters.”

  I smiled and then she asked me, “Don, can you stand here for a minute? I have to go to the bathroom and I can’t find anyone to take my place. All you need to do is stand here and collect people’s ranking sheets.”

  I told her okay and then I went around to the back of the table. When she walked away I picked my paper back up to check my answers again. When I did this I saw Leon’s sheet sticking out of the stack of papers, and even though I knew that I shouldn’t look at it, I did anyway. I didn’t really agree with a lot of his answers, and I could tell from his sheet that he probably wasn’t going to place.

  I thought about what Leon’s dad had told him about not being a genius and I felt a little sad for him. I wondered if his dad would yell at him for not bringing home a trophy. This made me think about the time I’d gone to
his house for dinner and his dad made fun of him because he wasn’t doing too well in school, and about that day in the grocery store when his dad yelled at him because he couldn’t figure out the discounted price of paper towels. I remembered how each time Leon’s face got red and he looked like he was really mad and really sad.

  I didn’t want Leon to be mad and sad and I wanted him to win so his dad would stop teasing him. I thought about changing some of his answers, but I didn’t know if I’d have time, and I thought the different handwriting would be kind of obvious. Then I got another idea. I thought that I could write his name on my ranking sheet, and then write mine on his, and that way he’d have a better chance of winning. The only problem was that I wouldn’t have a chance of winning. I wouldn’t be able to go home with a trophy and I wouldn’t become popular again at school. Then I thought I could tell Leon that I switched our names and he might become friends with me again because of it, but then I thought he might get mad at me because he thought that I thought I was smarter than him.

  Since I couldn’t figure out a way to help Leon win and not make me lose, I asked Stanley, “What should I do? If I change the names, I’m going to lose, and I don’t want to lose, and Leon’s been so mean to me lately that I don’t know if I want to help him.”

  Stanley told me, “Would you help him if he hadn’t been mean to you?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I guess so.”

  “Then help him,” Stanley told me. “You have school smarts and chicken smarts. Leon doesn’t have either.”

  I thought about what Stanley had said and erased my name off of my ranking sheet and wrote Leon’s. Then I saw Nurse Nancy walking back toward the table. I had two papers with Leon’s name on them and I didn’t know which one to erase. I closed my eyes and Leon’s sad face popped in my mind. I didn’t want to see that face anymore so I erased his name off of his ranking sheet and wrote mine.