The Chicken Dance Read online

  When I got to the top of the hill, I got back on my bike and took a left onto Armadillo Street. On the right side of the street were trailers, cars on cement blocks, and horse troughs. A girl in my class named Vickie Viceroy lived in one of the trailers there and she was chasing after a dog that had an apple tied to its head. She aimed at it with a slingshot and just before she was about to let go of what I guess was a rock, the apple fell off of the dog’s head. Vickie yelled at her brother, Vince, “I told you string wouldn’t work. Go get the tape.”

  I kept going down Armadillo Street and then turned right onto Main. There was a large sign on the boulevard in the shape of a chicken with some words above its head, like the ones they use in comic strips. The face of the white chicken was cut out so anyone could step behind and stick their head in it. The caption read, “Welcome to Horse Island. Home of the Best Chickens and Eggs in the World.”

  The stray dog and pig that usually ran around the school yard were looking up at the sign. No one knew where the stray dog and pig came from. As long as anyone could remember, they were in Horse Island running around together. They usually came to the school yard about four times a week and a group of kids chased after them trying to catch them. They were both black. The dog was about the size of a golden retriever, and the pig was a special breed called a potbellied pig and was about the size of a cocker spaniel. They watched me peddle past Horse Island Food and Furniture, Connie’s Cones, Candies, and Condiments stand, and then to the entrance of the fairgrounds.

  The chicken-judging contest was held on the fairground of the Dairy Festival, a big pasture with a few cow pens that the fair committee used for the cattle, sheep, and horse showing. Sometimes they had contests where people had to rope a calf and tie it up or try to catch a greased pig.

  When I got to the registration table for the chicken-judging contest, there was already a line of about fifteen people. I got behind them and while I was waiting, I heard this girl, Kelly Kramer, tell another girl that she thought Leon was going to win the contest because she’d heard that he could say the word chicken before he could say the word momma.

  I thought that was kind of cool and tried to think about what my first word was, but before I could, it was my turn at the registration table. My teacher, Mrs. Forest, was there, and she looked up at me and said, “Oh, Don, this is a surprise.”

  She was sitting between two other ladies and turned her head to each side and smiled and then said, “Well, Don, here’s your name tag and your ranking sheet. The contest will start at ten sharp. Until then, you can wait over there in that cow pen with the rest of the contestants.”

  The cow pen was like all cow pens. I mean it was square-shaped and surrounded by a wooden fence. To get in, I had to walk through a big swinging gate that Leon stood on top of while other kids swung him back and forth. Inside the pen were a bunch of other kids all waiting to compete in the eleven-to-thirteen–year-old chicken-judging contest. Before I got in, though, I heard Leon say, “What do we have here?”

  He jumped off of the gate and walked toward me and said, “It looks like the new kid, who keeps his chickens for ambience, is going to enter the contest,” and then some other kid said, “That’s funny, Leon. Give me a high five.”

  I walked into the middle of the pen and Leon gave the kid a high five, walked up to me, and said, “Do you really think you have a chance against me, new kid?”

  I had thought I did before Leon asked me, but after, I started wondering if I did have a chance of winning against someone who’d said the word chicken before the word momma.

  Since I didn’t know what to say I said, “My father made me do it. He thought maybe I could learn some things from you guys that we could use on our farm.”

  Leon picked up a stick from the ground and waved it around in the air like a baton and said, “Huh. That makes sense. I could school you a little on raising chickens,” and then a bull in the next pen made a pie and all the kids held their noses and Leon said, “Somebody had beans for breakfast,” and then everyone ran to the gate and left me alone in the middle of the cow pen.

  Right after that, Mrs. Forest came into the pen and said, “Excuse me, children, I have an announcement to make, so please be quiet.”

  After everyone stopped talking, she said, “Okay, listen, children. One of the supervisors of the contest, Mr. Bufford, is going to be a little late, so the contest won’t start until 10:45. So you’re free to walk around the fairgrounds, but be back here at 10:15 sharp or you will be disqualified.”

  I didn’t feel like waiting in the pen for the contest to start, so I walked around the fairgrounds. There were big tents, food booths, a roller coaster, and a Ferris wheel. On the edge of the fairgrounds, I found a small open-walled tent with a few machines. One of them would stamp your name on a penny for twenty-five cents, and another one would take your picture with backgrounds of waterfalls, flowers, or a giant chicken leaning over so it looked like it was pecking you on the head. In the corner of the tent was a machine with a glass box and inside there was a white chicken and a small piano. The chicken was real skinny and had lost most of her feathers and she was sitting in the box, staring out into space. She wasn’t moving at all, but even if she had wanted to, she couldn’t because the box was only about four feet wide and three feet long, kind of like a fish tank.

  The sign above the machine said, “Henrietta, the Piano Playing Hen.” I’d never seen a chicken play a piano before and it was only twenty-five cents, so I put a quarter in the coin slot. Lights started flashing and then Henrietta got up and went over to the little piano and started pecking on the keys. She played the first verse of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

  After she played, some chicken feed fell into the box from a small hole in the top of it. Henrietta ate the food real fast and then sat down again. It wasn’t healthy for a chicken to be in a glass box all day without being able to roll around in the dirt or be in the sunlight. I wanted to let her out of the box and take her home with me so she’d be able to dance around the chicken yard and maybe even fly a little.

  I put my hand on the glass and said, “Give me a high five.”

  She laid her body against it and it felt warm and I really liked it. I think I could have stayed there almost all day just looking at her and talking to her. But I had to go back to the contest. So I told her that I was going to come back and hear her play again and make sure she got some more food.

  When I got to the cow pen, Mr. Bufford was there and was ready to start the contest. The way it worked was that professional judges from nearby towns had judged fifteen chickens and ranked them on egg-production qualities and exhibition standards on scales from one to five. We were supposed to do the same, and the person who ranked the chickens closest to the judges would win.

  The fifteen chickens were in cages on top of tables inside the cow pen. Since there were so many kids in the contest, we went into the pen twenty-five at a time and had forty-five minutes to judge. The eleven-year-olds went in first and when we did, all the kids crowded around the first cage. I tried to see the chicken, but I couldn’t, so I decided to start at the last cage.

  It gave me a chance to look at the chicken, which I saw right away was a White Leghorn. I could tell by its size and shank color that it was a good egg producer. I wanted to look at it closer, though, so I asked one of the judges if I could take it out of the cage. He said, “Yes,” so I pulled the chicken out real slow, head first, so I wouldn’t damage any of its feathers. I checked the eye color and the head for defects and when I didn’t see any, I checked the comb quality and the beak color. This was when I noticed that the kids at the first cage were watching me. It made me a little nervous because I thought that I might be doing something wrong. But since the judge had given me permission to look at the chicken and no one was laughing at me, I went along with my ranking. I could still feel everyone looking at me, and I had to put the chicken back in the cage because it made me so uncomfortable and I was afraid Leon would make f
un of me and call me stupid.

  But no one said anything and so I kept judging the chicken and noticed that one of its toes was really short. Even though it was a small defect, it helped me to forget about the other kids and think about the chicken and look for other faults it might have. It turned out to have a lot of deformities that I hadn’t noticed at first. For example, its comb was red and waxy, which meant that it was a good egg layer, but it was so big that the comb fell into the chicken’s eyes, and that wasn’t a good exhibition standard.

  By the time I had ranked the chicken and given it a very low score for the exhibition standards, I had forgotten all about Leon and the other kids. When I moved to the next cage, though, I noticed that Leon pushed the other kids out of the way and pulled out the chicken from the first cage. Soon all the kids were pulling the chickens out of the cages and feeling them and shaking their heads up and down and saying, “Oh, that’s not good,” or “Uh-huh.”

  About halfway through, when I was writing down my scores and comments about a Rhode Island Red with one leg longer than the other, I heard someone say, “Huh.” I looked up and saw Mr. Bufford standing above me and looking at my ranking sheet. It made me wonder if I’d written something down wrong, so I looked at the chicken again just to make sure that I hadn’t missed anything. I hadn’t, but just to be careful, I studied it again and even made sure the scales on its legs weren’t too dry or waxy.

  After I judged all of the chickens and rechecked my answers, I turned in my ranking sheet and walked out of the cow pen. I don’t know why but I kind of wanted to run really fast. I had all this energy and I wanted to run and jump and I thought for a few seconds that if I ran fast enough and jumped high enough I’d take off and start flying. I ran a little, but there were so many people at the Dairy Festival I had to stop because I kept bumping into them.

  I felt great and I wanted to celebrate like the people on television celebrated when something good happened. On The Love Boat, they drank champagne when they celebrated, and on The Brady Bunch, they drank fruit juice. I decided to celebrate with a soda I bought from a food booth called “Pops, Pizza, and Pineapple.” But on TV, the people always celebrated with other people. There was no one at the festival that I wanted to celebrate with, though. And then I remembered Henrietta and decided that I could celebrate with her.

  The winners of the contest weren’t going to be announced for an hour, so I had a bunch of time to spend with her. I wanted to tell her all about the contest and how well I did. But when I got to the glass box with the piano, Henrietta wasn’t in it. There was a man standing in the tent watching all the people play the games and so I walked over to him. He was a tall, skinny man, wearing a white T-shirt with yellow sweat stains under the arms. I stared at him hoping that if I kept my eyes on him long enough, he’d talk to me and then I could talk back. My plan worked and he said, “What can I do you for, kid?”

  I looked down and said, “There was a chicken in that box this morning. Where is she?”

  Then the man pulled a packet of chewing tobacco out of his pocket and asked, “Why? You want to buy that chicken?”

  I hadn’t really thought about buying Henrietta, but after the man asked me, I realized that maybe I did and so I said, “Yes.”

  “That chicken was getting too ugly to be Henrietta, the Piano Playing Hen, anymore,” he told me. “But I tell you what, kid. If you want, I’ll sell her to you for five dollars.”

  Henrietta was too old for egg laying and also for meat. I didn’t want her for either, but I still knew that five dollars was way too much, and even if it wasn’t too much, I didn’t have five dollars. I told him that and he looked at me and then spit on the ground, missing my foot by only an inch.

  Then he asked, “How much you got?”

  I looked in my pocket and showed him that I had only one dollar and he said, “I tell you what, boy. Instead of you standing here wasting my time, why don’t you go and look for your parents and ask them for the money to buy that chicken? But you better do it by the end of the day ’cause that’s when I’m going to put her up for sale and ain’t nobody going to be buying that chicken for the eggs she’s going to lay. They gonna be buying that bird for voodoo rituals or alligator bait.”

  I walked to the bleachers where the judges of the chicken-judging contest were supposed to announce the winners. And then I went up to the last row and closed my eyes. People started sitting down in the bleachers and I started thinking about Henrietta and where I could get the money to buy her so she wouldn’t be killed. I knew I couldn’t ask my parents and I didn’t have time to earn it, either.

  While I was thinking about this, the judges came out of the cow pen and went onstage. One of them stepped up to a microphone and said, “Ladies and Gentlemen, we have the results of the chicken-judging contest for the eleven-to-thirteen age group.”

  I started thinking about Henrietta again and where I’d get the money to buy her. That’s when I saw Leon Leonard’s mom, Lucy, sitting in front of me. Next to her was her purse and it was open and inside I could see her wallet. I’d heard people say that the Leonards were rich because Lucy Leonard owned a beauty salon and Lyle Leonard, Leon’s dad, worked offshore on one of the oil rigs. I couldn’t ask Mrs. Leonard for the money, though, because I knew that she probably wouldn’t give it to me to buy an old chicken. But then I realized that I could reach down and grab her wallet without anyone seeing me because no one else was sitting on the last row and everyone was standing and watching the announcer.

  Before I could do anything, though, the announcer said, “Third place goes to Ray Reilly!”

  I had never stolen anything before and knew that it was wrong but thought that maybe it wasn’t that wrong because the Leonards could afford it and they owed me that money because Leon was so mean to me and it would help save Henrietta’s life. I thought about that skinny man from the game tent throwing Henrietta into a pond full of alligators and I felt like someone had punched me in the stomach.

  “Second place goes to Leon Leonard!”

  When I heard that, I felt like someone had punched me in the stomach again. I think it was the first time I ever hated someone and the first time I understood why those crazy women on daytime soap operas threw vases at people. Those women weren’t as crazy as I thought they were. They were just mad because someone had been mean to them, beat them in a chicken-judging contest, or something like that.

  That’s how I felt when I saw Leon get his ribbon. I wanted to throw a vase at him. But I didn’t have a vase so I decided that I was going to steal from his family to save a chicken’s life. That was kind of like throwing a vase but better, because this way, Henrietta would get to live.

  So when Mrs. Leonard stepped away from her purse to get a picture of Leon holding his ribbon, I took a deep breath and put my shoe by her purse. I bent down and pretended I was tying it and then grabbed the wallet.

  “Don Schmidt!”

  I let go of the wallet and stood up real fast. Someone had shouted my name and everyone in the bleachers was talking low. I started thinking of things to tell my parents when they found out that I was a thief. Then the announcer said, “Does anyone see him? Does anyone know where Don Schmidt is?”

  That’s when Ray Reilly said, “There he is!”

  “Well come down here, boy, and get your award,” the announcer said.

  I sat down on the bleachers because I didn’t understand what was going on. Then the announcer said, “Boy, you need to get down here and claim your blue ribbon or I might have to take it home myself.”

  Everyone in the bleachers laughed and then I realized that I had won first place. I walked down the bleachers thinking that I was dreaming and that I was going to wake up. But I didn’t. I made it to the stage and the announcer handed me my blue ribbon. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I put it against my face because it was so soft. It smelled like apple pie and I almost wanted to put it in my mouth to taste it.

  I looked up at the cro
wd and saw Mrs. Leonard walking down the bleachers. Her wallet was sticking out of her purse and it bounced around until it fell on the bleacher floor behind her. I could have waited until everyone left the bleachers and gone up and taken it, but I did something else instead. I ran from the crowd that was around me and straight up to Mrs. Leonard and said, “Mrs. Leonard! Your wallet!”

  I bent down and picked up her wallet and she said, “Oh, Lord. Thank you, Don. Thank you so much.”

  Then someone shouted from the crowd, “He knows how to judge chickens and he’s honest! He’s like Honest Abe!”

  The crowd cheered even more and Mrs. Leonard hugged me while photographers took our picture. I thought it was the best day of my life, but then things just got really weird.

  Six

  After everyone left the bleachers, I stood on the stage and stared at my blue ribbon until Mr. Bufford, one of the chicken-judging supervisors, walked up to me. He was about my parents’ age and was wearing a light blue suit, a white shirt with red, bucking horses on the collar, and a black cowboy hat. He smiled real big, which showed a gap between his front teeth.

  “Congratulations, boy,” he told me. “Your parents must be very proud of you. I have a daughter a year younger than you, and I hope that when she gets to compete in this contest she can do half as good as you do. Did? Do? No, did.”

  He smiled some more and nodded his head up and down when he was sure that the right word was did. Then he said, “I tell you, boy, I can’t keep up with all these new English rules going on, but I tell you what, I don’t think it really matters as long as you get your point across.”

  I had never met Mr. Bufford, but I knew he was the owner of Horse Island Food and Furniture. My mother and I went there every Saturday and he was always putting food out or helping a customer move a sofa into the back of his truck. Sometimes people gave him a couple of dollars for helping them, and that day at the Dairy Festival, Mr. Bufford gave me a dollar and I thought he might want me to move something. He didn’t, though. Instead he said, “Here you go, boy. I want to be the first person to get a couple dozen eggs from you.”