The Long Answer by Josh Canipe  

      I pulled that trigger on principle.  And that’s what I’ve been trying to tell everybody, but they don’t want to hear it.  Even Alyssa and Cynthia look at me with their eyebrows all arched, that heart-breaking look in their eyes, when I try to explain this.  Still, it’s true: sometimes a man has to fight to keep things from creeping into his life, from pecking at it until it’s nothing, even if those things are his neighbor’s chickens, which were trespassing on his property, and even if the cops show up twenty minutes later, guns drawn and bodies safely behind the doors of their cars, to confiscate his rifle.  That’s the image everyone in the world seems to have of me right now, thanks to Channel 6, Tabitha Adams reporting.  They see me as a man with a rifle, picking off chickens one by one out of fear.

So that’s the short answer to why I’m here, Room 207 at the Heritage Court Inn.  Right now, I’m watching the families below me parade their pale, hairy bodies around the edge of the motel pool, and I try to be friendly when they look up here, sometimes waving at them.

I’ve been coming out to this balcony for the past week, every evening, ever since Cynthia called the shooting “the last straw” and told me it might be best if I found my own place.  She didn’t say “for a little while,” but it was implied. Things have been edgy between us lately, even before the shooting, so she probably thinks we just need a little time to let things cool off.   

The problem is, right now everyone’s talking about this story.  Miss Adams brings it up every night on the six o’clock news, harping on it like it’s the biggest story in town, like people have nothing better to do than sit around and listen to her talk about me and those damn birds while they eat their dinner.  Hickory is a small town, sure, but I’m growing a little tired of being the nightly lead in to the weather, seeing either myself holding a briefcase in front of my face as I walk into the courthouse or Carl whining into a large square microphone.  The other night, she featured the last chicken that I aimed at, the one whose left wing I clipped as I heard the sirens make the turn onto my driveway.  She had it live on-air, and told everyone that she’d named it “Lucky,” which she had no right to do.  People remember chickens that get names. 

But it’s not so bad here, really.  I have a nice room that is cleaned every morning, and a mini-fridge full of beer and pudding cups.  Plus, those people below me right now are having a barbeque.  They’re enjoying slushies and listening to their country music.  From this height, they look content, happy to be on vacation.  Their house alarms are armed and their poodle, Kujo, is at the kennel.  I don’t know any of them, obviously, but sometimes it’s nice to think about those types of things.   Even if sometimes they begin to annoy me, their children yelling and running up and down the halls while I’m trying to take a nap. 

 From up here, I watch the kids dive into the pool and then eat their hotdogs with soggy hands, and it makes me think about Alyssa, who is supposed to call any minute now.  She’s fourteen and having a tough time with all of this, though she’s sounded better lately.  She won’t even bring it up anymore, preferring instead to talk about her algebra class or her soccer practice or how my day has gone.

I haven’t told her or Cynthia that I lost my job at the insurance office yet, so I have to make things up.  I tell her that I spend my days at the county office, writing life insurance policies for people, emphasizing how boring it is, even though my boss said that, in my line of work, no one would trust a man who just picked off a dozen birds with a high power, Winchester rifle loaded with .22 caliber bullets and a laser-guided scope.  I suppose he has a point, too, though I’m hoping that he’ll reconsider when all of this dies down. 

It’s all a misunderstanding, really, and that’s what I keep trying to tell people.  I won’t bring it up when Alyssa calls, but I’d like to—to tell her exactly what happened and why.  Because the truth is, it hurts that everyone just seems to take Carl’s side in all of this.  Even Cynthia, who will have been married to me eighteen years in March, is siding with the chicken-farming idiot.  The man who couldn’t keep his little birds off of my property.  This is the same guy, mind you, who walked up to our door right after he moved in and introduced himself as a poultry breeder.  He then proceeded to tell us that he ran a large operation, so if we ever saw a stray chicken or two in our yard, just to let him know.  That he’d take care of it. 

            When he left that first day, I kind of chuckled as I closed the door.  “Poultry Breeder?” I said to Cynthia.  “Who does this guy think he is?”

            My wife was smiling.  “I don’t know,” she said.  “I thought he was kind of strapping.  I wonder if he has a wife.” 

            Strapping? I thought. He had on a flannel shirt that smelled like manure, his arms poking through his rolled up sleeves like little kindling sticks. 

“I doubt it,” I said.

            Cynthia walked into the kitchen just then.  “I didn’t see a ring,” she said as she left.  “So you’re probably right.” 

            Her tone seemed strange to me right then, all gleeful and chipper.  Later, she said we should have him over dinner, said she thought maybe we should see if he’d like some company.  I thought about him standing on our front porch earlier, his face smooth except for a creative goatee, and I don’t know how to explain this, but I had a funny feeling about him, something not settling right in my gut.  

            Over the next couple of weeks, we invited Carl to dinner a few times, and I never felt any easier about him.  I took to calling him “Slick,” which he winced at each time.  But it was all meant in fun, and that just solidified my point: you can’t trust a man who can’t take a joke.  Plus, his chickens were already starting their migration toward my yard, and he hadn’t done a thing to stop it.  When I brought it up, he just kind of shrugged it off, told me he’d do what he could. 

            He never stopped coming over, though.    

In fact, I found him over there several times when I came home after work, or when I dropped by for lunch.  He and Cynthia would be in the kitchen eating sandwiches, or out in the yard looking at her trellises of tomatoes and cucumbers.  And he was always laughing about something, making Cynthia laugh with him, which isn’t like her. 

I didn’t say anything at first, just kind of kept that low, smoldering feeling in my gut to myself.  It wasn’t until later that I asked her what he was doing there so much, why he wasn’t at his place, running his “big operation.” Why he wasn’t figuring out some new system to keep his little birds on his own damn property, instead of bothering my wife at our home.  

He wasn’t a bother, Cynthia told me.  He was just lonely, she said, because he had lost his wife a couple of months before moving here to Hickory.  He needed someone to talk to.  And that’s just like Cynthia, looking out for the needs of others, even if it sounded like a poor excuse to me. 

            Cynthia has always been different from me, which is why we’ve worked for eighteen years.  Where I like to think of myself as “spontaneous,” she’s organized and orderly.  She keeps post it notes stuck to the dashboard of our Astrovan, little reminders to herself of errands and chores.  At the top of these lists, she uses a sharpie to write, Things That Must Be Done, in bold, commanding script.  Then, as she goes about her day, she crosses chores off with a pencil:  Alyssa’s soccer practice, pick up party invitations, buy peanut butter, things like that.  She made these lists at night, while we ate dinner, making sure to see if I needed her to do anything the next day, and I always appreciated that. 

            Of course, Cynthia has the Astrovan right now, and that’s fine.  The other day, the last time I talked to her, she told me she was keeping it, though I don’t know why she said that.  She mentioned it in passing, and for a minute I thought she knew about the loss of my company car.  But it doesn’t matter anyway.    

Besides, I can walk down the street to the little convenience store for anything I need.  The problem is, if you walk around the aisles of a small store like that, maybe looking for a can of ravioli or a bottle opener, you can tell who watches the evening news. 

You just have to pretend like the stares and the whispers don’t bother you.  Or else, sometimes, when it’s crowded enough, you have to act like maybe the cops didn’t confiscate that Winchester after all, like maybe it’s still sitting outside in the backseat of your car, fully loaded with the safety just a click away from ready. 

Looking at people like this doesn’t really help my reputation—but there’s that truth again:  Sometimes you have to draw a line, let people know you’ll stand up for yourself. 

The court appointed me an attorney that got me off with paying a fine, paying Carl for twelve dead birds, and keeping a few appointments with an anger-management counselor, Dr. Jameson. 

I told this Dr. Jameson about Carl coming over to our house all the time and, of course, how his birds wouldn’t stay on his property, how they kept wandering over to my yard, pecking at the grass seed I’d just thrown out and climbing onto my car.  I told him all about the tiny chicken tracks on the hood of my freshly waxed, company Buick.  Our managers inspect those cars, I told him, and they don’t like to see claw marks etched into the paint.

At first, Dr. Jameson tried to convince me that I was afraid of chickens. 

Alektorophobia, he called it, like I had used a long-range rifle because I was afraid to get near one of them.  

  At each session, as if I’m some sort of weirdo who might freak out at any minute, he spoke in slow, hushed tones.  He pointed out to me that chickens are harmless, and then he asked me if I’d had a bad experience in my childhood—at some distant uncle’s farm, or maybe at some petting zoo, right? 

Of course, I told the good doctor that, no, I had been to plenty of farms but never had a run-in with any scary chickens, and that I thought petting zoos specialized more in llamas and sheep. 

 I’ll admit, though, that I think they’re disturbing.  Chickens are vile, sneaky little creatures that cannot be trusted.  They have hawk-like talons and beaks that could shave metal.  And sometimes—believe this—they will run directly at you.  Say, for instance, if you’re spraying them with a water-hose in an attempt to get into your vehicle one morning. 

Dr. Jameson told me that this wasn’t the chicken’s fault that I was having “issues,” as if I thought it was some kind of conspiracy.  He told me that I had to take some responsibility for my actions.  But Dr. Jameson has never had his vehicle seized every morning before work.  He has never had to use a broom to chase chickens out of his yard.

I have to meet with Dr. Jameson a couple more times, but I don’t think we’re going to get anywhere.  I can see it in his eyes when I’m with him, that same unbelief.  Every time, while I’m sitting across from him on his noisy leather couch, sinking down into the cushions, he nods his head at me, tapping his pen on his watch.  And at those moments, I don’t need some fancy degree to tell me what he’s thinking. 

****

I guess this is the part where I need to explain myself. 

There was no “snap,” as Miss Adams implied on her first broadcast from Carl’s house.  And I know that she said this about me because Alyssa asked me about it the next day, just after I got home.  At the time of the broadcast, I was sitting in a small room at the police station, trying to explain myself to an officer who had a mustache and a gift for pretending to listen. 

When Alyssa asked me if I’d “lost it,” her words, I told her that the only thing I might have lost was my temper, but even if I had, it was long overdue.  This is the same thing I told the magistrate, too, when they took me into his chambers. 

“Buying a scope shows pre-meditation,” the magistrate told me, and I knew then that they had already talked to Cynthia. 

She had seen the purchase on our credit card, $497, and asked me about it.  I told her that maybe I’d take up deer hunting, or skeet shooting, some kind of hobby. 

“Most guys buy convertibles when they hit their mid-life crisis,” she’d said, but she left it alone. 

Honestly, I hate to feel like I was being sneaky with her, like I was almost lying to her, but—and maybe I shouldn’t say this—but even then, I didn’t know if I could trust her not to tell Carl. 

Carl, with his too-heavy aftershave and an unending supply of breath mints in his pockets.  I just don’t know why Alyssa and Cynthia found him so charming.  He always seemed dull to me, telling the same sad, rehearsed stories over and over about his former life in Virginia, his wife and their dreams of moving to the country. 

He had dinner with us constantly, telling us all about Plymouth Rock Cocks and blue quails, or how he got into chicken farming—poultry breeding—because the world was moving away from red meat, so there was a market.  He drank coffee after dinner was finished, going on and on about how chickens are raised in abhorrent conditions, stacked inside big warehouses with no room to move, their beaks cut back at birth to prevent injuries when fighting. 

Carl, however, he was more into humanitarian methods, free range chickens. 

“But you’re still going to kill them, right?” I asked one night as he sat there in his chair, staring into his coffee.

“Of course,” he said.  “But they live a good life first.”

“But you’re still going to kill them, yes? Boom—break their necks—goodbye, little chicky, am I right?”

“Stanley,” Cynthia said, as if I was saying something no one at the table already knew. 

“I’m just saying,” I continued, “those chickens that are free to roam wherever they please right now will one day be roaming the great chicken yard beyond.  There’s no need in hiding it.”

“Stop it,” Cynthia said.  “Now.”

So I just sat back in my chair, not wanting to cause any problems.

I never understood—and will never understand—my wife and daughter’s admiration for that kind of thinking.  Come to think of it, that’s the same night I jokingly suggested using leashes, just as a way to lighten the mood they all seemed to be in. 

“Here’s an idea” I told him.  “Maybe you should use some leashes.  String ‘em all up like you keep ole’ Zeus in your backyard.”

Carl, of course, took this serious, and then blabbered on about it in his interview with Miss Adams, the day everything happened. 

I heard that one myself.  I was watching.  She came to his house in a van that afternoon to tape the segment, looking all high and mighty in her black pantsuit.  I couldn’t hear them, but I watched as she walked up his driveway—seventy yards, maybe seventy-five, I guessed, downwind—and for a second, as I watched her knock on Carl’s front door, I remembered the release I felt when pulling that trigger, watching the small dots across the field pop into little puffs of feathers. 

Then I saw the camera lights flood his front porch as Carl opened his door.  Both of them, plus the cameraman, right there, right in front of me across the short, wide-open distance. 

It was in that interview that Carl defamed my character by telling everyone I had tried sicing a cat on the chickens, which is simply pure fabrication.  I have always been fond of cats, especially ones that stay outside, so you don’t have to worry about feeding them or cleaning their litter.  Besides, that thing whined so much that Alyssa wanted to let it inside.  She begged me to let it sleep in the bed with her at night.

 I try not to spoil Alyssa most of the time, try to keep her grounded, but she fed the thing so much tuna that it just laid there on the porch anyway.  So I let her name it—Hermione, or something like that, because she’s really into Harry Potter at the moment—and it pretty much stayed near her heels after that, never even curious about the annoying little beasts in my yard. 

            Those kids that are below me right now, they’re running barefoot on the wet cement around the pool, and their parents aren’t even watching.  Even though there are signs posted on every gate leading to pool area that say No Running!  The parents are too busy with their Fabio novels and their cozies of beer to even care, and that kind of annoys me.  I’m almost tempted to shout down at them, to let them know what it’s like to watch your kid have six stitches sewn into her chin.  I could tell them how the emergency room sounds much different when your kid’s next, how the cries that were once vague and muffled behind closed doors or curtains become terrible then, loud and terrifying. 

            But maybe I’m just thinking about this because Alyssa is supposed to call any minute.  She’s a little bit late, but maybe she had to get ready for church or finish some homework first.  It’s not like her just to blow somebody off—she’s like her mother in that way.  I’m probably at the top of her list, waiting to be penciled out. 

            Alyssa got those stitches from skateboarding four months ago, something I couldn’t teach her how to do.  I was there for the bike lessons, but the skateboard was up to her. 

It’s strange, the little things that make you proud, like how she got pretty good at riding that thing, practicing in our driveway, even after she’d fallen hard enough to crack her chin and chip a tooth on the concrete.  I never thought about that until just now, but I think it shows heart, some kind of thick skinned determination, which I believe I did have a hand in. 

            If I have a regret about anything that happened, though, it’s that Alyssa was home that afternoon when I began firing.  She came out on the front porch at some point—I didn’t see her there until after it was over, and I’m not sure how long she watched me.  But she was there when one of the cops forced me to the ground, shoved his knee into the small of my back, and jerked my arms behind me, and I wish she didn’t have to see it. 

I remember seeing her through the window of the police cruiser, holding a broom and looking confused.  But I didn’t see any tears in her eyes, which I take to be a good sign, like maybe she understood already, even if only in some small way. 

            Still, that’s my regret.  I rushed it.  My spontaneous nature again.

            And that’s what I think about sitting in my hotel room at night, how I could have just waited a day or so, made sure Cynthia was shopping and Alyssa was at school.  It happened on a Saturday, though, a heat of the moment type thing, an abrupt fire in my head.

            And the strange thing is, there weren’t even any chickens in the yard at the time.  Normally, there’s at least a few birds that have crossed the field that separates the back of Carl’s chicken barn from the boundary of our yard, but that day the yard was empty, everything was quiet.  Cynthia was gone to the store, and I assumed Alyssa was with her.

            When it was over, I told the cops exactly what happened, thinking they would see the problem and understand. 

I told them that walked out to the yard, looking for any strays that might be in the flower bed or roosting on the van, but there weren’t any, so I was in a good mood.  And since there weren’t any chickens in my way, I decided to clean out the Astrovan, a little token of kindness for Cynthia.  We hadn’t been on good terms recently, like I said, even before the incident, so I wanted to make an effort.  She said I’d been acting like a fool lately, paranoid and childish.  This kind of thing happens, I’ve learned, after eighteen years of marriage.   

When I climbed into the cab of the van, however, there was a note, the same post-it notes she used to make her lists.  Thanks for yesterday, it read, and I knew immediately that it wasn’t Cynthia’s handwriting.  It was printed in a sloppy, block style, not Cynthia’s graceful cursive. 

Right away, I thought about Carl, of course.  I wondered what he could possibly be thanking her for, what she could have done that deserved a personal note of appreciation. 

And it’s all kind of hazy now, because it happened so fast, but it just kind of triggered something.

            It was just one of those moments, bad timing, but as soon as I eased out of the cab with the note in my hand, one of those feathered little bastards squawked behind me.  I remember my heart throbbing forward in my chest as I jumped, hitting my head on the door frame.

The next thing I remember clearly is standing out behind the house, leaning on the split-rail fence, and calming my breaths:  Squeeze easy, aim true.  

            It’s not something I like to think about now, but at the time, it did feel like a release: those small white dots becoming large and detailed in my scope, their heads huge through the lens, and then the recoil of the rifle and the way it made things just disappear.  

            This is the part of the story that Miss Adams doesn’t have, the reasoning behind what she calls irrationality.  

            And it’s not the part I could explain fully either.  But I could try. 

            When Alyssa calls later, I could try to explain that feeling, and the purpose behind it.  I could tell her that it wasn’t some sort of “episode,” or “breakdown,” like everyone—Carl, Miss Adams, maybe even Cynthia—are saying.  I could tell her it was done on principle, even if poorly planned.  I could tell her that sometimes you just have to let people know you mean business.  And maybe, if I’m clear enough, she could tell Cynthia this, and Cynthia could tell Carl, and maybe then he would get the hint. 

Then they would know, and I wouldn’t be stuck here watching these people below me looking small and annoying, with their music cranked up and their kids screaming.  All of them with their little barbeques and slushies, just wasting the day away, not thirty feet below me.  And all those people at home in their living rooms, all of them eating their meals and chuckling at the images on the screen—they would all know too.  And Miss Adams might even stop with her incessant “reporting,” if that’s what she calls it.   Because they would all understand that I’m not a man who will let his life be taken over by anything.  That I am clear of head and heart, even if I have a temper.  That I’m not a man who’s afraid to pull the trigger.