Tastes Like Chicken

by Lolita Files

  Day two, and everything was par for the course. Her unscheduled schedule was on schedule. Because she’d gotten such an early start, the first day had taken her clear through Ohio and Indiana to Chicago. She’d spent the night at the Omni Hotel downtown, allowing herself a luxurious bath and room service.

  She’d thought of calling Grandma Tyler, but didn’t tempt herself. Her grandmother would know she was in town. Her spidey senses would kick in and she’d probe Reesy about her whereabouts. Reesy’d never been good at lying to her granny.

  She’d call her later, she decided, once she was farther down the road. She was sure that Tyrone and Tyrene had already told the old woman that she was in the Poconos. When Reesy called her, she’d make it seem like she’d taken a break from the resort and gone for a drive. That way, she thought, it wouldn’t be a lie if Grandma Tyler asked her if she was in the car.

  “That’ll work,” she’d said, settling in for a toasty sleep beneath the sumptuous covers.

  She had checked out by noon the next day. She gassed up, filled the cooler with more ice and Cocolas, and aimed for Interstate 80 again.

  South Florida, though beautiful and diverse, always seemed to Reesy like the lowest chamber of hell. It was an isolated gulag shut off from damn near everything except Cuba. Just getting out of her native state took five to seven hours, depending on one’s destination, and whenever she and her parents had taken a road trip, it had almost always been out of state.

  Because of those childhood trips, she’d mastered the art of the long-distance drive. She understood maps, highways, and interstates and knew how to pass the time with music and thought. She expected her mind to be flooded with thoughts of Dandre and the baby. Instead she was tormented with visions of Tyrone and Tyrene.

  “Out, out, damned spots,” she said to the air. “Before you fuck up my head any more than it is.”

  Stevie Wonder was singing about love being in need of love. She wasn’t in the mood for that sappy shit. She hit “random” on the CD player and heard discs shifting in the magazine. A few seconds later, out came the husky sounds of Biggie having a rapoff with Lil’ Kim.

  Reesy pumped the speakers and sang aloud with the music.

  “What do you do when your man is untrue? Do you cut the sucka off and find someone new?”

  Made sense to her.

  She spotted an exit ahead and a La Quinta Inn. She was still in Iowa, but figured it would be the perfect place to call it a night.

  When Reesy set out the next morning, there were just a few miles of Iowa left to conquer. She was relieved when she saw the Nebraska state line ahead, beckoning her forward from the dull jaws of the Corn State. The miles were going by like nothing. She was already more than halfway across the country.

  The second she entered Nebraska, it was as though someone had dropped her into the bowels of the world. It stank to high heaven. The entire state was one long stretch of roadkill.

  She wasn’t even a mile inside the state before she swerved to avoid her first…something. It was medium-sized with stiff hair. Too small to be a deer but bigger than a beaver.

  “What the fu—?”

  Black made a bloo-bloop sound as she ran over something

  else, before she could finish freaking out about the first lump of squashed hairy meat.

  “My car’s too small for this,” she said. “Black, we’re gonna have to pay attention, or these things are gonna fuck you up.”

  She didn’t drive a straight line for the next few hours. Black bobbed and weaved his way across the state, with Reesy navigating the roadkill like a complex game on a Sony PlayStation. Every time she avoided a carcass, she felt she’d advanced to another level.

  “Fuck Tomb Raider,” she said to Black. “I’m the Meat Faker.”

  It was bad, as though someone had loosed a safari upon the highway and the animals were playing a dangerous game of chicken. They were all losing. From what Reesy could see, it was Cars and Trucks: thousands, Animals: zip.

  Even though the huddles of cows must have known they too were destined to go, they mooed with what appeared to be indifference as they watched the road. Theirs would be a more expedient exit than the dreaded death-by-dumb-dash-and-mash they witnessed every day.

  There seemed to be more scattered meat than visible asphalt. Reesy pulled over twice to unload the contents of her offended stomach. The lurching began anew when she walked to her car and noticed crushed flesh embedded in Black’s new treads.

  The smell of pineapple inside the car was a distant memory. It couldn’t compete with Nebraska’s meals on wheels.

  By the time she hit Wyoming, she still wasn’t hungry.

  The pristine, clean, and expansive vistas were a literal breath of fresh air after the land of the slaughtered.

  She passed a rock fixture shaped like Lincoln.

  “Wow, look at that,” she said to the car.

  She needed someone to talk to because Black, for certain, could not talk back. She was glad he couldn’t. Odds were it would sound like Dandre’s voice.

  Her cell had been ringing nonstop since the day of the wedding with calls of supplication and apology from Dandre. She couldn’t bring herself to respond to his messages.

  In order to escape the sound, she had turned the phone to vibrate mode. The sensation was soothing against her leg, sometimes bringing her back to active thought.

  She needed the company of someone human.

  She figured now was a good time to give her granny a call.

  “You in the car, Tweety?”

  “Yup. I needed to clear my head.”

  It was the truth. After all the carnage she’d just seen on the road behind her, her head was due a good clearing or three.

  “So is your getaway working? Are you feeling better? You know, things ain’t always as bad as they seem.”

  “I don’t want to talk about that right now,” Reesy said. “I called to check on you, pretty lady. What you been up to? You been leaving all them old men in Chicago alone? They’ll give you worms, you know.”

  Grandma Tyler’s laugh was part cackle, part wheeze.

  “You always been crazy, Tweety. That’s one of the reasons I love you so.”

  “I love you too, Granny.”

  It was brick outside, but Reesy was warm inside the car. The sound of the old woman’s voice made her heart light and easy. As conversation dwindled, Grandma Tyler hummed an indecipherable tune. If Reesy hadn’t been driving, she would have closed her eyes and lost herself in the rhythm of the soothing melody.

  “Speakin’ of crazy,” Grandma Tyler said abruptly, “your mama and your daddy are two of the biggest nuts I ever done met.” The announcement put Reesy on edge.

  “I know,” she said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with them. I think what happened messed them up so much, they don’t know

  what to do. They’re used to yelling at me, but they can’t really do that right now because they think I’m fragile.”

  “You? Fragile? Not hardly,” the old woman said. “My Tweety’s a tough bird. Ain’t no foolishness gon’ break you down. You made-a the good stuff.”

  Grandma Tyler made a smacking sound with her lips. Reesy knew what that meant. The woman was bracing herself to spit out a mouthful, and she was warming up her trap so she could do it.

  “So what makes you say they’re crazy?” Reesy asked after a moment. “Did Tyrene say something?”

  “I say they crazy ’cause they are. I called over there to see if they had talked to you, and they bust out and hollered at each other through the line while I sat there in the middle like a squirrel at a tennis match.”

  Reesy laughed.

  “A squirrel, Granny?”

  “Hell yeah, a squirrel,” she said. “You know he sits out there on the court, thinking that’s a big ol’ nut being batted around. He just waits and waits, watching the nut go back and forth, figuring if he wait long enough, the nut’s gon’ drop.”

  Reesy gripped the wheel and
gazed at the road, trying to follow her grandmother’s visual.

  “But you see, in this case, the nut ain’t gon’ drop,” Grandma Tyler said.

  “Why is that?”

  “Because it’s two nuts—your mama and your daddy—and I’ll be damned if I’m gon’ sit there like a stupid squirrel while they bat some bullshit across my head.”

  “Shut up, old lady,” Reesy said, “before you make me crash.”

  “Your daddy said sela so many times, I thought he was Lionel Richie. I told him he can take his sela and stick it up his ass.”

  Reesy laughed so hard, she mashed the gas pedal by accident. Black sped forward and hit an ice slick in the road. The car threatened to spin. It frightened Reesy enough to make her pull over onto the shoulder.

  “Shit,” she said, her head resting on the wheel. “You’re gonna get me killed, lady.”

  “What you do, almost hit somebody?”

  “Just shut up talking. You ain’t got no sense.”

  “Neither does your mama and your daddy,” Grandma Tyler said.

  An hour later, they were still on the phone. Reesy told her about her new haircut.

  “Does Tyrene know you did it?” Grandma Tyler asked.

  “Heck no. That’d just be something else for her to fuss about.”

  “One-a these days, you gon’ learn from what I say. Don’t let them two bully you. I done told you before, they ain’t no saints. You a grown woman. It’s time you know that. Stop measuring your life against what they might or might not say. They didn’t let nobody do it to them, so don’t you let nobody do it to you.”

  Reesy was back on the road, headed toward Utah. She saw the reason for the absence of roadkill in Wyoming. Fencing separated the fields from the interstate. Nebraska, at least the part she saw, had been wide open and unfenced.

  “That explains everything,” Reesy said.

  “Right. They was some wild ones, those two,” said Grandma Tyler.

  “I’m sorry, Granny. I wasn’t talking to you.”

  “Well, who was you talkin’ to? Somebody in the car witcha? That’s a mighty long drive you been on,” she said. “We been on the phone for a long time. They ain’t gon’ shut it off, is they?”

  “No,” Reesy said with a laugh. “The phone’s okay. And I wasn’t talking to anybody. I was just looking at the road and talking to myself.”

  “Oh.”

  The old woman started humming again.

  “So, Granny, how wild were Tyrone and Tyrene? And what do you consider wild, because my definition might be different than yours.”

  Reesy knew Grandma Tyler might consider exotic dancing outré. There was no way her parents had her beat. Maybe they cursed a little too much back in the day, and Tyrone was back on his cigarette habit again. So what, she thought. She bet that showing her naked ass to men for fun and money was the height of edgy behavior for anyone in the Snowden clan.

  The old woman cleared her throat.

  “They was wild, baby. Back when they was Panthers, they was into all kinds of stuff.”

  “Like…”

  Reesy checked the road signs while she waited for her grandmother to deliver the shocking goods.

  “Like sharing partners.”

  “What do you mean, ‘sharing partners’? Sharing them how?”

  “I mean swappin’ each other off for sex. Tyrone used to be a big cocky so-and-so, and them Panther men liked to rule they women. A few of ’em went through your mama, and your daddy let ’em have her. It was all ‘for the cause.’ Meanwhile he was rakin’ his share of fat fannies ’cross the coals.”

  Reesy’s eyes were fixed on the broken white line down the middle of the road. She couldn’t imagine the things her granny was saying. Tyrone and Tyrene were much too prim and judgmental to get down like that.

  “Were they married then?” she asked, not sure she wanted to know the answer.

  “Married?” Grandma Tyler said with a cackle and a rasp.

  “Them two?” Reesy couldn’t tell if the old woman was laughing or coughing. “Them fools put the ‘common’ in common-law. It was your mama’s big secret, that’s why you ain’t never seen a wedding picture round the house. I don’t know why she kept it from you. They been together so long, what difference does it make that they ain’t have no real ceremony?”

  Reesy couldn’t find the wind in her lungs to form words.

  “Shit,” Grandma Tyler said in a small voice. “I wasn’t supposed to tell you that. I promised your mama I never would.”

  Reesy’s ears were ringing.

  “Well, you’re grown now, Tweety, and you was bound to find out one day. Better to hear it from me.” She cleared her throat. “That’s why Tyrene was so upset that you had everybody in white at your wedding. It was her first real chance to see it done right. She wanted you to do what she didn’t, but that’s too much pressure to put on somebody.”

  Reesy was on the shoulder of the road now. Black was low on gas, but she didn’t notice. The car idled while she leaned back against the headrest, her eyes closed.

  “I’m not saying nothing your mama won’t confirm. She knows she can’t lie ’bout it, but ain’t no way you’d know none of it if I didn’t tell you. It makes me sick to seem them hold you to standards they wouldn’t answer to themselves. It’s time to put a stop to it. I’d spin in my grave knowing I left this world without you ever knowing the truth.”

  “Stop talking like that,” Reesy said. Her eyes were still closed. She tried to picture Tyrone and Tyrene with people other than themselves. “I can’t wrap my brain around this,” she said with a whisper. “I feel like I’m in the Twilight Zone.”

  “I’m just sayin’, don’t let them make you question your life and your decisions,” said Grandma Tyler. “They was rapscallions then, and they rapscallions now. They just rich ones, that’s all. That’s why I get so hot when they get on you ’bout stuff, all judgmental and intolerant. If I had a dollar for the times I smelt weed on your mama back in the day, or hell, a quarter for every time I heard them talkin’ ’bout an orgy—”

  “Grandma, stop.”

  “I’m sorry, Tweety,” Grandma Tyler said. “I hope I’m not up setting you. I’m just fierce when it comes to my tugar. I done watched them try to run roughshod over you for years and I can’t take it no mo’. I done had my fill of this madness. My fill, I tell you.”

  “Right.”

  Reesy realized her theory about the ideal couple, well matched down to their near-identical names, was history. Gone in the twinkling of an old woman’s attempt to protect her from harm.

  Oh my God, she thought, my whole life is a fraud. She sat back up, leaning her head against the wheel.

  Reesy imagined she could feel the universe shifting. Her molecular structure was being realigned into the creature she was supposed to be, something leagues away from the being she thought she was. It was like the girl in Shrek: princess by day, ogre by night.

  She raised her head and stared at the highway.

  All this time she had felt like a princess. Now she learned she’d been raised by two ogres. Which made her an ogre. Which, she figured, was pretty fucked up.

  She stared at a FedEx truck that passed by. She focused on the back of the vehicle, her eyes fastening on the deepest color…purple.

  She started to cry. It was bad enough to learn that Pa ain’t Pa.

  Who the fuck was Ma, was what she wanted to know.

  Her hands were against the steering wheel. The ring twinkled through the kaleidoscope of her tears like a million stars in an open sky.

  I’ll Take Manhattan…Beach

  Although the rest of the drive was beautiful, it was unmemorable; a mere wrinkle in what Reesy considered a disastrous stretch of discoveries.

  The Great Salt Lake went by unnoticed, and she rolled through the neon heart of Vegas without as much as a blink.

  When the Los Angeles basin loomed ahead, Reesy was grateful to see the finish line, but blank about everyth
ing else. Grandma Tyler’s confession had stunned her into a driving stupor. The old woman had thrown her a tennis ball–sized nut that would take her days to digest. The nut sat churning in her empty belly.

  She had reached California with perfect timing. She needed to be far away from her farce of a former life. The damp streets of L.A. seemed as good a place as any for her to start over.

  She exited the 405 at Rosecrans.

  She took a right and hustled her way into the thick of traffic. She was just a couple of exits down from LAX. She knew that, wherever she settled, it had to be near the airport. Not so close that she was tortured by the perpetual sound of low-flying planes, but not so far that the thought of leaving town or picking up a guest was out of the question. She didn’t know where the hell Rosecrans was, but the signs around her indicated it ran through Hawthorne, Manhattan Beach, or El Segundo. She wasn’t sure which.

  She didn’t know anything about Hawthorne or Manhattan Beach, and the two things she knew about El Segundo were unnerving. The first was that when she used to watch Sanford and Son, El Segundo and Julio were always the brunt of Fred Sanford’s jokes. The other reference came from Q-Tip, along with his cohorts in the hip-hop group A Tribe Called Quest. Tip rapped about leaving his wallet in El Segundo. And he had to get it, had, had to get it. The mission to retrieve the wallet sounded like a dangerous thing. Just the thought of going back seemed to give them all pause.

  Well, Reesy thought, if this was El Segundo, it didn’t look like the hood. It was obvious Rosecrans was a main drag. She passed a sprawling parking lot for the Costco to end all Costcos, a big hub of concrete that looked like a place where smaller Costcos were hatched and disbursed. An army of cars circled and jockeyed for position, duking it out for parking spaces and their God-given right to supersized savings. She drove on.

  There was an Old Navy, a Barnes & Noble, a couple of gyms, a grocery store, a swell of fancy restaurants, more grocery stores, some eatery owned by Wolfgang Puck, a Bookstar, and a shitload of office buildings.