Chapter 32. Ferdy Chicken Gives Up
Ferdy Chicken dreamt that he was Wile E. Coyote. In the dream, he was falling from some impossibly high rock formation. Falling, falling, falling. Strangely, while he fell, he also observed himself falling. His second body stood atop that same formation, peering down. Down, down, down. He felt his cape fluttering around him, he watched it waving in the breeze of freefall.
Though in the dream he fell and fell and fell—he hadn’t yet hit ground—he already felt the pain of having hit. His head ached as if it were twice its normal size, which of course it wasn’t, which could only mean that he felt pain that was actually bigger than his body. His butt—the first point of impact—hurt so much that it was numb. The pain up and down his back promised a long, dreadful recovery. But still he fell.
Falling. Falling. Before he hit the ground, he pulled out a little white sign on a stick that said, “What just happened?” And then he put that sign away and pulled out another one that said, simply, “Boom.”
From his perspective on top of the rock formation, Ferdy could see the little cloud of desert dust that his body created as it hit.
“He faw down an’ go boom,” someone said in his dream. Boom, boom, boom. Falling, falling, falling.
The dream was a good sign, actually. It was a step up from the pure nonpresence of his previous unconscious state. But it hurt more.
Still, he fell. Down, down, down.
The sun was up for a good hour before Ferdy Chicken awoke to the day. “Oohhh,” he said. He hurt all over, and that was before he started moving. When he tried to move, he hurt even more. “Oohhhh….”
“Oohhhhh….”Eventually, Ferdy stopped saying “Oh.” But it was a difficult transition.
Some time after that, he sat up. Another difficult transition. Looking around him, Ferdy could see that the monsters of the lake were no longer at the park. One more missed opportunity in a life already overly full of missed opportunities. And, he could see that Moon Park’s single tree had been destroyed. Now, it was a central bare trunk surrounded by a circular collection of refuse: branches, twigs, and leaves. As he gazed up at the tree through bleary and pain-blurred eyes, he gave up every last bit of hope he had once carried. The very name of the town—Lone Tree—had been taken from that grand old oak, and now it was gone. He probably couldn’t catch the monsters now, but even if he did, the town would feel that he had betrayed them. The town’s population might forgive many trespasses, but they wouldn’t forgive this, and it was his fault.
It was his first time out as a superhero, and he had failed. Then, Ferdy saw the horse. It lay on its side, perhaps 50 yards away. Dead, if Ferdy’s guess was right. That old horse had sacrificed her life for him, for her town, for the hope that Lone Tree would survive this threat. Worse, in Ferdy Chicken’s clumsy hands, she had sacrificed herself for nothing. “Sorry, old girl,” he said. “I guess we gave it our best shot.”
Ferdy stood and tried to take a step toward the horse. But he couldn’t move. The rope was still tied around his middle, the grappling hook still secured quite solidly in the ground behind him. Ferdy Chicken took the rope in his hands, and, painfully, step by step, followed the length of it back to the anchor that had stopped him so suddenly. Two of its claws were sunk to the hilt into the lawn of the park. He grabbed onto a free claw and pried it out of the ground.
“I guess that wasn’t such a good idea,” he noted. “Land anchors!” Like so many things, land anchors had seemed like a good idea at the time. He felt the long line of bruise just under his rib cage. The grappling hook had stopped him, all right. Nearly cut him in two, was what it did.
And it wasn’t just his middle that hurt. His head hurt, his shoulders hurt, his arms hurt, his back hurt, his pelvis hurt, his legs hurt. The pain so crammed the phone lines of his nervous system that at first he couldn’t tell if his feet hurt or not. He stood there for a moment with his eyes closed and listened very intently to the messages his body was sending him. He didn’t have to listen for long before he received the call from his lowest extremities: yes, his feet hurt too.
Working the knot in the rope tied around his middle, he surveyed the wreckage. When he had worked it loose, he dropped the rope, hook and all, to the ground.
And, while he was at it, he pulled the cape over his head and dropped it to the ground as well. Then, he pushed the orange spandex tights off his hips, and rolled them down his legs. He was wearing running shorts underneath the spandex for just this reason: he figured that someday the time would come when he would have to leave behind his chicken costume in order to protect his identity. He hadn’t thought that it would happen in the face of failure, however. He sat, took off his boots, and removed the tights. Now, balled up, they looked like an orange Nerf football. He threw the football in no particular direction…just away.
He knew that it was time to give up on this Ferdy Chicken nonsense. He wasn’t fooling anyone. He couldn’t fool even himself any longer. No, he wasn’t a superhero, he was just a balding middle-aged man with no prospects. He was just a pizza delivery boy.
A failed pizza delivery boy, he amended. He had totaled the pizza delivery van in his attempts to chase down the monsters. Now how was he going to explain that to his boss? He’d have to come up with a pretty good story. Jobs weren’t easy to get in Lone Tree, but it looked like he might be in need of a new one.
And if that weren’t bad enough, there were still undelivered pizzas in the van. Ferdy let out the air in his lungs in a long exhalation of hopelessness. Totaling the van, he had thought, might cost him his job, but the truth was that at Petey’s, people regularly lost their jobs just because they failed to get a pizza to a customer. If they were late, if they couldn’t find the address, if they ran out of gas before they arrived, they often didn’t get a second chance. There were, what, 5 or 6 pizzas still in the van? That would surely add up to an axing, even if the van weren’t smashed to oblivion.
Almost surely, he’d have to get another job.
But…what? Every year or two, Fred Chickweed decided that he was worthy of some better job, but such thoughts only netted him enough energy to apply for a single position, or maybe two, before he’d give up. Too much rejection in the marketplace led him only to believe all the more forcefully that he had no hope for anything except the job he now held. And, if that were true, he’d better get to delivering those pizzas.
But that thought, too, sucked every bit of energy out of him. Sucked it right out of his feet and into the earth. He couldn’t face those people all these hours after they had ordered their pizzas. Their pizzas wouldn’t be fresh and piping hot like the commercial claimed. It wasn’t easy delivering a pizza ten minutes late, much less hours and hours late.
Still, there was nothing for it. It was time to drop this nonsense of the Chicken. And, if that was true, he better get back to being a Chickweed.
Ferdy looked again at the oak. His town’s lone tree. Now, it was nothing but a good solid trunk squatting against the horizon. With that icon gone, what other fundamental things would change? Last night, he had been a pizza delivery boy. Then, he had been a short-time superhero. This morning, he was once again a pizza delivery boy. Between those fleeting spaces of time, much had changed. One thinks that a single day of one’s life will follow much as the previous many days had, but that’s not true, is it? Things can change as fast as all get out. Ephemeral, that’s what life is. Ephemeral, sometimes catastrophic, and also full of long, boring hours when you think that nothing will ever change. Except then it does.
Ferdy picked up his chicken suit and his grappling hook. It wouldn’t do to leave these things just lying about. Someone would find them. Maybe, they’d be able to trace them back to him. He might find himself being blamed for the horse, for the tree, for the whole rotten mess.
He headed toward the east entrance of the park, toward the pizza delivery van. Toward his old life. Along the way, he stowed his tights, his cape, and his grappling hook under a largish juniper bush. He’d collect them later, he thought, and dispose of them more properly.