The Coop

A short story

Author’s note: Here’s another story dug up from the past. Sometime in the Eighties. It was first published in a small literary magazine — Potpourri. Later nominated for a Pushcart Award. Literary ain’t my usual style, but I was young back then, Vietnam was still fresh. Took things more seriously, I suppose.

Petey hated his sister.

The recollection appeared as precise and clear as an October sun in Kansas. He could see the boy. He could hear him think.

He hated Marcie. Just once he’d like to catch her doing something bad so she’d get whopped. She never got whopped.

He heard that sound, too. Hand to butt — whop, whop — like bullets hitting the mud.

Petey picked a hand-sized dirt clod from his arsenal in the corn furrow and launched it in a high trajectory that carried it well into enemy held ground. It landed near the old elm stump next to the fence and exploded in a cloud of dust.

Shoomp!

He wiped the dirt on his hand onto the leg of his overalls and picked another clod.

He wished he could fix his sister, so she’d be sorry. He wished she’d get smacked well with a big clod. That would teach her not to tell their mother everything and get her mad. Took little to make their mother mad, since Evie died.

“Petey, Mom says for you to wash up for supper. You better not traipse in that dirt neither, or she’ll have your hide.”

The boy spun in his cross-legged sit and looked at Marcie. She stood ten feet away on the edge of the garden dressed in blue shorts and a pressed white cotton blouse. Her braided hair still glistening damp from its washing, and the clean sheen of summer perspiration on her face and arms made her look freshly polished. A smirk curled the corner of her mouth and narrowed her eyes as she looked at him.

Petey let fly his ordnance. The clod hit the girl above her left breast and disintegrated in a gray billow, leaving a chalky brown mark where it had struck.

It gushed purple. So much purple.

“Ow!” she said and grabbed at the spot, seeing then the damage to her supper clothes. “Why’d you do that, you little creep!” she screamed. “I’m gonna tell Momma!” She bent grabbing a scrabble of small clods and rocks to throw at Petey, then wheeled and ran crying to the house.

Once again he would feel the lash of the willow switch across the back of his thighs, but he felt no regrets.

“Peter Hoyt!” His mother stood at the back screen door, holding it half-open as he approached. First came the questions for which he had no answers: Why did he do such things? And what did he have to say for himself? And did he know what was going to happen to him if he kept on acting that way? Then she sighed and give him a hard look.

“Honestly, I don’t know what’s going to become of you,” she said.

That evening after supper, when they’d moved to the front porch, Marcie said to him, “Momma says we’ve got to help her more till Daddy gets back.”

It was a truce; a shaky one. He sat on the steps and winced. The lingering sting of the willow switching reminded him that differences remained unresolved between them.

“I could do some tractor work,” he said.

“Don’t be stupid. You can’t drive the tractor.”

“Can do. Daddy showed me.”

“Cannot, liar.”

“You shut up. I ain’t lyin’!” He doubled his fists and started across the porch for her.

“Peter Hoyt!” His mother’s voice shot from inside the dim house, like the report from a sniper’s rifle.

High in the trees, he could see the flash, then hear the “Crack!”

Their mother emerged onto the front porch carrying a bucket of green beans and an empty dutch oven. She sat in the metal porch glider, rocking it slowly.

“Tomorrow I want you both to gather the eggs again,” she said.

The boy felt the blood drain from his face. He connected eyes with his sister and knew for the moment their hostility had dissolved.

“But, Momma,” Marcie said. “Daddy told us to stay away from the coop.”

The out-building was a henhouse, a squat wooden structure longer than their house and nearly as wide. Inside, the acrid stench of chicken dung bit at the nostrils, and the air hung in oppressive gloom. To Petey and Marcie, it was the domain of the beast. Their father called it the coop, so that’s what they called it too. It seemed correct.

“Your father coddles you. He’s the one who wanted to move out here. I can’t do all the work myself.”

Petey watched his mother grab a handful of string beans and drop them onto her lap. She started snapping them with quick angry motions as if dismembering living things powerless in her grasp.

Crack! Like rifle fire from the trees.

She broke the bodies of the beans with machine-like swiftness.

“Avtomat Kalashnikov 1947,” their drill instructor had told them back at Benning.

“I’ve got all this canning to do, and there’s no reason you two can’t help.”

Snap!

“… AK-47. Another of Ivan’s copies from the Krauts…”

“If your father wants to live on this farm, then he’d better expect everybody to work.”

Snap! Crack!

“… But extremely effective…”

“A farm isn’t someplace to fritter away your time.”

Snap!

“… And deadly in Charlie’s hands.”

“You two can gather the eggs.”

Petey swallowed. “But, Ma, what about Ivan?”

“I don’t know why you two are so all-fired scared of that bird,” their mother said. She sighed and shook her head. The glider rocked and creaked, creaked and rocked… like a cradle.

Crack.

“Land sakes, you’d think he was some kind of monster or something.”

Snap.

“He’s just a dumb ol’ rooster.”

“I don’t think he’s so dumb,” Marcie said. She hugged herself as if suddenly cold in the July night. “I think he’s smart as the devil.”

“Nonsense. He may have the devil’s meanness, but he’s still just a chicken.”

Two meters from him, a screech of static swirled out of the radio’s handset held in the death-grip of the RTO.

The cicada sounds of the summer night filled the hole of silence left by the children. Petey rested his chin on his forearms and watched the signal of lightning bugs in the gathering gloom. An early bat flashed by in the dimness like fluttering velvet, then wheeled in a sudden turn and disappeared. He listened to the sounds of their mother snapping beans, and rhythmic metallic creak of the rocking glider.

“Ain’t he a dandy?” their father asked.

They watched the big leghorn strut around inside the wire cage. His curved yellow beak opened to reveal its spear-like tongue and a cockscomb red and demonic like an unholy crown, and his orange legs ended in spiked toes. Two dreadful spurs hooked from the back of each leg. The bird stopped its slow pacing to look at Petey, with blood-colored irises in wide, wild eyes.

Petey looked back at him, fascinated with fear. “Daddy, he’s terrible,” he said with a quaver.

His daddy laughed and picked the boy up swooping him high to sit on his shoulders. “Well, that’s what we’ll call him then,” he said. “Ivan the Terrible.”

Petey and Marcie steered clear of the fenced chicken yard since that day. Their father told them not to worry about gathering the eggs, which had been their chore before Ivan arrived.

But now, with their dad on the road…

Despite the early morning heat, the boy dressed in long pants. He pulled out his dad’s duck hunting black-hooded sweatshirt and donned it like a suit of mail.

Marcie came out the back door after breakfast and looked at Petey with disbelief. “You look stupid,” she said.

“I swear,” their mother said as she opened the back door and looked down at him, shaking her head, clucking. Petey pushed his lip out in defiance. Fear beat in his chest.

“Well, here’re your buckets. Don’t break any. And don’t dawdle. Now there’s no need to worry about Ivan. Just look out for each other, and you’ll be alright.”

The two children walked to the henhouse, whispering. Across the fenced chicken yard, intense scratching at the ground occupied Ivan. They planned to enter the side door of the coop undetected.

The hot stench of the coop’s inner air assaulted them when Petey and Marcie slipped through the windowless door.

The muck he lay in had a fecal reek, intensely so.

A few hens cackled at their entrance but settled again into their conversational clucking.

“You get that side and I’ll get this one,” Marcie whispered.

Petey nodded.

They both eyed the small door on the side of the coop which opened onto the chicken yard, its bright square shining white against the darker inner wall. They started down the rows of nests, easing the hens up gently from underneath to keep them quiet. Still, most protested. A complaining chatter began to rise amongst their gathering.

Petey, his eyes adjusting to the light, watched Marcie move along the wall opposite the small opening, getting farther and farther from the door. She looked back at him. He could see the fear in her eyes plainly enough, and the edges of panic. He remembered the same look in her eyes the day they stood next to the small casket perched over Evie’s grave.

Petey turned back to his work, sweat soaking through his clothing.

Marcie screamed. It came out short and weak as if she’d tried to hold it back. Petey spun. Ivan stood silhouetted in the small door with his head cocked, looking up at Marcie with one fierce, wide eye. He snapped his head in Petey’s direction, then back again at Marcie, his movements jerky, mechanical.

Frozen in fright, the children watched as Ivan raised his great dark wings in a slow flap, opened his yellow fang of a beak, and half-crowed his challenge.

Marcie screamed again. Petey dropped his bucket of eggs and bolted for the door.

“Petey!” Marcie yelled. The rooster had her cornered, cut off from escape. But the boy had fallen too far into a panic to help her. He threw himself against the door, banging on it. In his terrified frantic fumbling, he couldn’t work the bolt to open the door. Finally, he slid to the floor, curling in a ball. Neither could flee. They were trapped in the coop with Ivan.

… In the coop with Charlie… Avtomat K 47… yes, hear the beat. Someone’s in the coop with I-van… someone’s in… coop, I know-oh-oh…

The great bird seemed to consider Petey, then turned to his other quarry, and advanced slowly. He lowered his neck and spread his wings, flexing his talons with each step.

“Marcie?” Petey said almost inaudibly. He reached up and pulled the sweatshirt hood up over his head, keeping his eyes fixed on the rooster. The heat of the coop encircled and squeezed in on him like the grip of a giant hand. He shivered.

So hot, so much heat… freezing.

The rooster, now ten feet from Marcie, circled her. Marcie took a step backward and bumped into the wall. Petey watched, his worst nightmare holding him in its grasp. He heard an awful sound rising from his sister’s throat. Her eyes wide with the delirium of fear, Marcie charged the stalking bird, screaming blind, unknown obscenities, shouting in an incoherent rage.

The bird rose in a neck-stretched stance to meet Marcie’s charge. The girl’s foot and foreleg caught the birds flush, lifting him high above the henhouse floor in a raining arc of feathers. The kick carried Ivan into the back wall of the coop with a resounding thud.

Marcie reached into her bucket of eggs and began pelting the stunned rooster. The bird squawked and flapped its wings, but made no move to retaliate.

Her fear washed, her anger spent, Petey watched Marcie turn and walk to his bucket. She picked it up. She walked to the door where he still crouched and sat his bucket beside him. Lifting the latch, sliding the bolt back, and pushing the door fully open, she looked down at Petey for a few seconds, then walked toward the house.

The boy looked back at Ivan, who remained standing at the wall with a beak-open look of stupid poultry astonishment. And Petey left the coop.

When he entered the kitchen, he set his egg bucket on the table next to Marcie’s. Through the front screen door, he could see Marcie rocking in the porch glider. He peeled the big sweatshirt off his back and sat down heavily in one of the kitchen chairs, using the garment to towel the sweat from his face and head. His hands shook. Fear still pierced him like an arrow.

“What’s the matter?” his mother asked. She looked at him and out at Marcie. Studied Petey.

“Nothin’.” She hadn’t told, he decided. Marcie hadn’t told.

“That ol’ rooster chase you again?”

“Uh-huh,” Petey looked out at Marcie. His sister quickly looked away toward the soybean field across the dirt road that ran in front. He could see the taunt line of her lips, and the muddy streaks of the tears running down her cheeks.

Petey looked at his mother. Part of him wanted to tell her how he had broken and run, leaving his sister. He wished he could confess, sobbing until she at last held him to her breast, rocked him in her arms and said, “There, there,” soothing away his fear and pain. The words for all of it froze in his throat, though; the finding of them beyond his age and ability.

His mother returned his look for a moment and Petey saw anger, sorrow, weariness, Evie. He looked at the floor. He suddenly hoped what happened in the coop would silently stay there for the rest of his life.

“Daddy really did show me how to drive the tractor,” he finally said.

“Honest, I can do that.”

“Nonsense,” his mother said. She turned abruptly back to the sink of unwashed radishes.

“Timber Wolf two-six, what’s your position? Over.”

The voice crackled from the handset, but the RTO didn’t respond. Couldn’t.

Pete, his breathing shallow now, looked at the inquiring handset. He scanned the dark roof of smoke and rain above him but could find no chopper. Hanlon, Biggs, and that FNG whose name he couldn’t remember, all crazed with terror and panic, bolted in the fury and confusion of the ambush, leaving him and the RTO in the exploding mire of the rice paddy. He’d started to di-di too, but the boy they called Spanky had cried out to him in pain and terror. So he went back for him.

The purple gush from the half-inch hole above his left breast had almost stopped. And as the endorphin-induced murk began to raze his memory and mask his fatal pain, Pete once again saw his sister’s weeping face.

“Marcie?” he asked.

© 2021 by Phil Truman. All rights reserved

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