The Chicken Dance

  That was the first time I saw Dawn in real life and I felt like I was seeing a superhero, or one of the Partridge Family. Dawn even looked kind of like a superhero because she was wearing this red sequined shirt and a big puffy pink and red skirt, and red high heel shoes that were all shiny. I don’t know which superhero she looked like because I don’t remember any of them wearing high heels, but Wonder Woman had shiny red boots and Dawn kind of reminded me of her, except that instead of a rope, Dawn had a baton.

  Dawn was dancing the same dance that had won her the trophy. I knew this because I’d seen my mother do the dance for so many years. Only my mother never took off her clothes when she did it and Dawn was. First she took off her shirt and danced around in a red, shiny tank top and then she took off the big puffy skirt and spun it around in the air, and then threw it, and the bartender caught it. I put my hand over my eyes because I didn’t want to see my sister’s butt. I wanted to watch her dance, though, so I lifted my eyes up and only looked at the top of her. She did a couple of flips, and I saw that she was wearing red, shiny shorts that matched her red, shiny tank top.

  When the song was almost over, Dawn held up her left leg with her left hand and twirled the baton with her right hand and then threw it up in the air, cut a split, and held her arms up and caught the baton in her mouth. My mother never did that part when she danced, but she always explained it and told me it was one of the most amazing things in the world and that if you asked people what was more amazing, the Grand Canyon or Dawn catching that baton in her mouth, they’d definitely say Dawn, unless they were crazy or on drugs.

  My mother was right. The dance was amazing and all the men in the theater stood up and clapped really hard. There were only like ten or so people in the place but it sounded like there were at least fifteen. The place didn’t look like a theater to me, though. It didn’t have rows and rows of seats like at the movie theater. It looked more like some of the bars I’d seen on TV. It had tables and chairs and a bar where you could get drinks.

  I didn’t have long to look at it, though, because I felt someone tap me on my shoulder a couple of seconds after Dawn’s dance was over. I turned and saw a woman in a red and white striped dress. Then I remembered that she was the woman who had taken a picture with a candy cane in her mouth.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  Before I could answer her, Dawn walked through the curtains and ran right into me and I fell down the stairs on the ground and landed on my butt.

  I looked up at Dawn and she said, “Oh my god! Are you okay?”

  Her voice was scratchy and deep, and didn’t sound anything like my mother’s.

  “Candy, is he yours?” Dawn asked.

  “No,” Candy said. “I don’t know who he is. He was looking through the curtains at you, so I thought he was yours.”

  Dawn folded her arms and said, “No, the little pervert isn’t mine.”

  “Well, you figure it out, because I have a number to perform,” and then Candy stepped over me and walked onstage.

  Dawn walked down the stairs, put one of her shoes on my shoulders, pushed me to the ground, and said, “Who are you, kid? Does your mom or dad work here or something?”

  I didn’t know what to say or do and part of me thought about spraying her with the Mace so she’d get her shoe off of me. But then I realized that I’d dropped it when I’d fallen, and so I thought about talking to her. I didn’t know what to say to her, though, and usually when I didn’t know what to say to people, I told them that I liked their shirt and they always smiled.

  So I said, “I like your red, shiny tank top.”

  She didn’t smile though. Instead she pushed a little harder and said, “Who are you?”

  “You’re hurting me,” I told her. “Can you take your shoe off of my shoulder?”

  “Not until you tell me what you’re doing here,” she said.

  “I’m your brother,” I told her.

  She took her shoe off of me and scrunched her face up and said, “I don’t have a brother.”

  I sat up and touched the part of my shoulder that she’d hurt with her shoe and I said, “Yes,” but it came out like a whisper, so I cleared my throat and tried again and said, “Yes. Yes, you do.”

  “No. No, I don’t,” she said.

  I pushed myself away from her because I was scared she’d hold me down with her shoe again, and I said, “Yes, you do. I was born after you were kidnapped or ran away. I’m Don Schmidt. My real name is Stanley, but Mother and Father changed it to Don because they said Stanley was an uncle who gambled and drank a lot. But anyway, Father tried to find you in New Orleans, but you ran away, and I guess it’s because you didn’t recognize him because maybe you had amnesia or didn’t want to see him. Were you kidnapped, or did you run away?”

  Dawn closed her eyes a little, and then opened them wider, and then closed them a little again and asked, “How do you know my last name?”

  “Because I’m your brother,” I told her. “Your real name is Dawn, and Janice and Dick Schmidt are our parents.”

  Dawn’s eyes got bigger and bigger this time, and she asked me real slow, “How old are you?”

  “Twelve,” I said, and then she asked me real quick, “When’s your birthday?”

  I told her “April nineteenth,” and then her body started shaking. She walked back and forth in front of me, and then grabbed her face and said, “Oh my god,” over and over again.

  Then she sat down on the steps that led up to the stage and put her head between her legs and started breathing really, really hard.

  “Are you okay?” I asked her.

  She looked up at me and her face was all red and her eyes were real puffy. She looked like my mother did when she had to feed the chickens or when “the Curse” was in town. Since I didn’t see any chickens for Dawn to feed, I figured that she was all red because of “The Curse.”

  So I asked her, “Are you at that time in your menstrual cycle?”

  But she didn’t answer me. She looked at me and blinked her eyes a couple of times and then stood up from the steps and pointed and asked, “Who is he?”

  I turned and saw Leon walking toward us.

  “Wow,” he said. “Is she your sister, Don?”

  “That’s Leon,” I told Dawn. “He’s my friend.”

  Then a guy walked into the room and said, “Curly, what’s going on back here? You can’t have these kids in here.”

  Dawn looked at him and started crying and the guy said, “I don’t know why you’re crying, but I don’t care. You need to get these kids out of here right now.”

  She screamed at him, “All right! I’ll bring them in the dressing room!” and the man said, “No! I want them off of the property now!”

  Dawn took a deep breath and said, “All right, I’ll bring them out the back,” and then she walked to the door that went into the dressing room and said, “Come on, Don. We need to get out of here.”

  I got up from the floor, and Leon and I followed her. When we got to the dressing room, Dawn put on some jeans and a T-shirt and said, “Let’s go outside.”

  When we got outside, we all stood in front of the back door in the grass. The moon had come out so it wasn’t as dark as it had been before. At first it was hard to see her face and all I could see was the outline of her body. She looked like she was about the same size as my mother, which was taller than me, and if I had to guess, I’d say was about five feet and a few inches.

  Dawn lit a cigarette and then looked around.

  Then she asked, “Are Mom and Dad here?”

  “No,” I told her.

  Dawn looked at me right in the eyes and asked, “What are you doing here?”

  “I want you to come home,” I told her.

  She started crying again and Leon asked me, “Why is she crying?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess she’s sad because she has amnesia.”

  Dawn looked at me and stopped crying. She scrunched up her forehead
like she was thinking and bent down beside me and asked, “So Mom and Dad told you about your older sister, huh?”

  I said, “Yeah, but only last month. They told me you were dead at first, but then Mr. Munson saw you in New Orleans, so they told me you’d been kidnapped.”

  Dawn asked, “Mr. Munson?”

  “Yeah,” I told her. “He’s a detective they hired to find you.”

  Dawn took another puff on her cigarette and asked, “They’ve been looking for me for twelve years?”

  “Yeah, I guess,” I said. “I think they had stopped looking for a while, but then Mr. Munson saw you by accident at Bourbon’s Broadway.”

  Dawn stood up and said, “So that’s how Dad knew where I was.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But if you knew it was Father, why did you run away? And were you really kidnapped when you were in Texarkana, or did you run away then too?”

  Dawn put her hand on her hip and then looked up at the sky. I looked up too, but I didn’t see anything, so I asked, “You weren’t kidnapped, were you?”

  Dawn didn’t say anything, but she shook her head no.

  “Why did you run away when you were in Texarkana visiting Grandmother?” I asked.

  She stopped looking up at the sky and looked at me and said, “I’m afraid you probably wouldn’t understand.”

  There were a bunch of things that I didn’t understand, like why my mother and father had told me that Dawn had been kidnapped or why my parents had changed my name or how Dawn could catch that baton in her mouth without breaking any teeth. But I figured that I’d understand those things when I got older. So I told Dawn, “I want to know anyway.”

  Dawn looked up at the sky again and said, “I ran away because I was tired of dancing.”

  Then Leon asked, “What do you mean? You’re still dancing.”

  Both Dawn and I looked at him. He shrugged his shoulders and said, “Well, she is.”

  Dawn threw her cigarette on the ground and said, “He’s right. But at least now I’m not doing it for her.”

  I didn’t say anything because I knew “her” was my mother. It was weird because I’d always thought that Dawn was the luckiest person in the world, I mean except for having scarlet fever. I didn’t think she was lucky for that, but I thought she was lucky because she could dance so well, and my mother talked about her all the time like she was a movie star or something. I thought Dawn loved dancing, but when she said at least she wasn’t dancing for my mother, I knew that I was wrong, and Dawn wasn’t as lucky as I’d thought.

  “Are you going home with Don?” Leon asked.

  “No,” she said. “I’m not. Listen, Don, please don’t tell them where I am. They can’t make me come back because I’m twenty-seven years old. But I don’t want them to start following me. I can’t take them right now.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I really wanted her to come with me, so I decided to tell her my plan and hope she might change her mind.

  “But if you come home we can travel to parish fairs together and I can win chicken-judging contests and you can win dance contests and we can become famous like Donny and Marie!”

  “Well,” Leon said. “Not as famous as Donny and Marie.”

  Dawn looked at me like she didn’t understand what language I was speaking. Then she smiled and shook her head from side to side. I knew then that she wasn’t going to come home with me and there was nothing I could do. I decided that I wouldn’t tell my mother and father about her, because I wanted to help her, because she was my sister and was nice to me.

  “I won’t tell them where you are,” I told her. “I promise. But how can I find you again?”

  Dawn walked over to me and grabbed my hand and said, “I tell you what. If I move, I’ll let you know.”

  “But you don’t know my phone number or address,” I told her.

  Dawn bent down so our heads were the same height and she asked, “Are you guys still at the same house in Shreveport?”

  I told her, “No, we moved to Uncle Sam’s farmhouse in Horse Island because father got fired from his job because he missed a lot of work to look for you and so we didn’t have a place to live until Uncle Sam died and left us the house in his will.”

  Dawn scrunched up her face and then asked, “Uncle Sam? Was he the one who lived on that chicken farm?”

  Leon said, “Yeah,” and then Dawn rubbed my shoulders for a few seconds and said, “Listen, I’ll find you if I move.”

  She tilted her head to the side and then asked, “Don, how did you get here? Are you in Baton Rouge with Mom and Dad?”

  I shook my head and said, “No, I came to Baton Rouge with the 4-H Club to go to a chicken-judging contest.”

  “How did you know where to find me?” she asked.

  I told her, “Because when we were in New Orleans, I met Stephanie, and she told me that you had come to Baton Rouge and that you used to work at Bill’s Broadway.”

  Dawn said, “Stephanie. Stephanie? You mean the Oriental girl I used to work with?”

  “Yeah,” I told her. “But she’s from Hawaii, and she told me that food and rugs are Oriental, not people.”

  Dawn stood up and then asked, “Where are you staying while you’re here?”

  “We’re staying in a hotel on Lobdell Boulevard, and Leon and I walked here from there,” I told her.

  Dawn lit up another cigarette and asked, “You walked all the way over here at night?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But don’t worry ’cause Leon has a knife.”

  Dawn took a step back and said, “Oh. Well, let me give you guys a ride in my car.”

  I said, “Okay,” and then Dawn said, “Let me just get my keys,” and then she walked back into the building.

  I gave Leon the flashlight because I was tired of holding it and I didn’t think we needed it anymore. While he was putting it in his backpack I started to wonder if Dawn was going to run away. I grabbed Leon by the arm and said, “Come on. Let’s go to the front and make sure that she’s not running away.”

  We ran to the front, but we didn’t see her, so I told Leon, “I’m going to go to the back, and you stay here, and if she comes out, yell to me.”

  Before I could walk to the back, I felt a hand on my shoulder. Both Leon and I turned around and saw the guy that I had sprayed with the Mace. He grabbed both our arms and we screamed and he said, “You little creeps are going to pay.”

  I didn’t have the Mace anymore to spray him, so I tried to hit him, but he kicked my legs out from under me and I fell. Then he did the same thing to Leon. He bent down and put one of his knees on my chest, and the other one on Leon. He must have weighed like six thousand pounds because he was so heavy, and I thought he was going to crush me.

  I really thought I was going to die, so I closed my eyes and told my chickens, “Good-bye. I’ll miss you.”

  Then I heard Dawn scream, “What the hell are you doing?”

  The man yelled back, “Mind your own business,” and then I opened my eyes and saw Dawn hit him in the face with her fist. The man jumped up and swung at Dawn, but she ducked and then kicked him in the privates and the man fell on the ground.

  Dawn grabbed Leon’s and my arms, and pulled us up and said, “Come on, let’s go!”

  Then we ran to a blue car in the parking lot of Bill’s Broadway and all jumped in. Dawn started it and backed out and drove toward the road. The man she’d kicked had gotten up and was running after us. He slapped the back of the car just as Dawn pulled it out on the road. I didn’t look back to see if he was following us because, if he was, it would have scared me. So I just closed my eyes and pretended like he turned around and just walked in the other direction. I opened my eyes back up, though, when Dawn started crying.

  “Who the hell was that?” she screamed.

  “Some guy that tried to take our money,” Leon said. “We don’t know who he is.”

  Dawn hit the steering wheel with her hand and screamed, “Geezum Pete!”

 
Nobody said anything until we got to the traffic light at Lobdell Boulevard. That’s when Dawn asked, “Which way is your hotel?”

  I pointed left and she turned and then asked, “Are you guys okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “You have to promise me that you’ll never go out alone at night again,” she told us. “There are a bunch of crazy people out there, and you never know what they’re going to do.”

  I told her, “Okay” and then Leon said, “You were like one of Charlie’s Angels when you kicked that guy.”

  Dawn didn’t say anything for a few seconds. Then she asked, “Where is your hotel?” and Leon pointed and said, “There on the right.”

  Dawn turned into the parking lot, shut off the car, and then we all got out and walked to the front of the hotel. She bent down and hugged me and kissed me on the forehead and said, “Be careful.”

  Dawn kissed me again, and turned back and walked to her car, got in, and started driving away. I was really sad to see her leave because I thought she was real nice, and a good dancer, and I thought it was real cool that she’d kicked that man in the privates for me. I was praying that she’d come back and then all of a sudden, her car stopped, and then backed up to the front of the hotel again. Dawn got out and said, “I love you.”

  “I love you too,” I told her.

  She smiled and hugged me really tight and said, “I’m glad you found me.”

  Then she let go and got back in her car and drove away. I prayed again that she’d come back, but she didn’t, and when I couldn’t see her car anymore, I knew she wouldn’t.

  Thirty-Two

  I could barely sleep the night Leon and I found Dawn. I guess it wasn’t really the night, though, because we got back to the hotel after midnight, so I guess it was really the morning of the next day. Anyway, at first I couldn’t fall asleep at all and thought about everything from the chicken-judging contest to the dance to the man that I had sprayed with Mace to Dawn. When I did fall asleep, I dreamed about everything that had happened. I think I was dreaming about Dawn’s foot on my shoulder when Nurse Nancy knocked on our door and told us to get up because we had to go to breakfast and then to the awards ceremony.