One Flew Over the Chicken Coop
The world is slam dancing on the edge of the mosh pit of mass insanity, my friends. Maybe Iran is an inferno of burning oil fields. Maybe Israel is a smoking crater. Who the fuck knows, and who can you trust to tell you?
I can say with certainty that this country is being led by the campiest group of inept ’66 Batman villains ever to knot a tie… around a twelve-year old’s wrists. At the risk of sounding melodramatic, it seems we’re one or two more batshit crazy decisions away from dressing out in feathers, leathers and mohawks and fighting each other out in the wastelands over a couple gallons of guzzoline.
And on top of this mounting pile of horrific absurdities, Moby’s decided he’s had it with The Kinks and the supposedly transphobic lyrics of a forty-year-old song. It’s like Jake Lloyd berating Weird Al Yankovic for creating a song that could be construed as dismissive toward the quasi-mystical, semi-religious order of the Jedi in “Yoda.” Where does the madness stop?
With all this chaos in play, my wife decides now is the time to start raising chickens. Right now. Immediately. NO further delay. Her poultry-crazed eyes regard me from behind the smoldering cherry of her Virginia Slim ultra-light menthol.
There’s been a dramatic uptick to her nicotine intake since she announced she was quitting the habit a month ago.
“Well, if we wanna raise chickens, we’re gonna need a chicken coop,” I figured. “Any idea where we can get one of those?”
“Yeah, you gotta fucking build it.”
“Ah, hell… I don’t know.”
“What do you mean ‘you don’t know’?”
I hoped I wouldn’t have to say the obvious out loud, but she just glared at me with those Irish green eyes.
“All right, fine. Remember that tree house I tried to build for the kids back in’03? Remember how that turned out? The damn thing collapsed on top of that neighbor kid. The Reynolds’ boy. Remember that? I had to bury him in the Holley’s cow pasture. The Reynolds still think their boy got stolen by a Satanic ring of pedophilic democrats.”
“I’m still not so sure that boy was dead…”
“He was dead enough! At the very least unconscious. Anyway, its all for the best. We’d have never been able to afford another civil lawsuit.”
“I’m not saying you made the wrong choice. I’m saying that was over two decades ago. You gotta let it go. It’s time to pick up the hammer and nails and get back at it. A chicken coop is basically a tree house that’s not fighting gravity so hard, anyway. I know you can do it. But so help me God, one of those 2x4s falls down and so much as grazes one of those hens, that Reynolds boy is going to have some company out there in the cold meadow.”
These are indeed hard times I find myself living in. A lot of pressure to lay across a man as prodigiously lazy as myself, building a sturdy home for wayward birds. Fortunately, living in Northern Alabama, you can’t chuck a purloined catalytic converter without hitting some nervous hillbilly preparing for the impending cataclysm by erecting an empire of egg-laying hens.
In this instance, I sought the help of my ex-chrome shop partner, Austin. He’d been in the game long enough to be known around the Union Grove area as a first-rate chicken fucker, which I suppose meant he kept those chicken eggs coming at a pretty good clip. I began my research with a visit to his compound.
Austin has several things going in his favor should society succumb to the final iteration of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Number one, and it’s something you’d notice immediately upon meeting him is the mighty beard hanging off his face, thick as a Persian rug and twice as malodorous. You’ll also soon discover he keeps a massive arsenal of pistols, rifles, shotguns, and machine guns, which is honestly surprising given his past felony convictions. I’m sure I don’t have to remind you of the importance of keeping a well-stocked armory should polite society fail. I, myself, am never more than five feet away from a firearm. That confidence you see radiating from me as I maneuver through my day is often attributed to my comprehensive knowledge of the kung fu, but I assure you, it goes well beyond that. As much as I admire administering a well-placed judo chop to the throat of an adversary, a bullet to the thigh leaves a much deeper impression. My permissive attitude toward gunplay, sadly, is what keeps me at arm’s length from my leftist brothers and sisters despite my all-consuming hatred for Trump and his band of hooligans and my abiding enthusiasm for abortions.
Anyway, Austin has three neighbors within a two-mile radius of his place. He’s been involved in Mexican stand-offs with each neighbor at least twice. There’s always some drama that requires the brandishing of pistols. Music too loud. Pickup truck barrels down the gravel road fast enough to disrupt the roadside chickens. Someone drunkenly pisses off their back porch in full view of someone else’s kids. All adequate reasons for the threat of lead. Staring down blue steel gun barrels is what passes for idle chatter in Union Grove.
What I’m there to see is the third wonder of Austin’s existence. Chicken World, Alabama.
Austin greets me from his porch. He wears a gimme shirt from the local BBQ joint inscribed with their motto: TOO MUCH PORK FOR JUST ONE FORK. The mid-morning sun glints off the silver finish of the Kimber .45 he grips in his hand.
“Polish Hammer!” He says, “for a second I thought you might be that son of a bitch, Glasper, next door, looking for trouble.”
“No. No trouble here. I just came by to take a look at your chicken set-up. The wife wants to get into chickenanery. And bee hives for honey. And intensive gardening for salads. Maybe one or two pigs. A few heads of cattle. And a couple horses for transportation when the shit really hits the fan.”
“It pays to be prepared,” Austin agrees, “especially if the Democrats don’t get with the program and start acting like they want this country to survive another two hundred and fifty years.”
“Yeah, damn Demon Rats,” I huff. “Anyway, I could talk politics all day long. Let’s look at some chickens.”
Austin leads me into his backyard, the entirety of which has been completely given over to chicken coops. They’re obviously knocked together with materials gleaned from whatever he could grab from the scrap piles at work.
“The largest run is where we keep our chickens. We got about twenty hens and a Rhode Island Red rooster. Most of the chickens are Orpingtons with some Wyandottes thrown in. Those are going to be about the friendliest chickens you can muster. They ain’t so quick to peck at your ankles if you ain’t fast with the feed. How many chickens you looking to start off with?”
“As many as the wife forces on me, I reckon.”
“Six is a good start. You want about ten square feet per chicken so they don’t get bored being all cooped up and start pecking each other to death. Over here is where we keep the quail for those pickled eggs you like so much.”
“I do love those pickled quail eggs. Just wish they were bigger.”
“Well, they’re a small bird, Polish Hammer. And over here is where we keep the turkeys.”
“Holy Christ! What the fuck’s wrong with that bird?”
There are four turkeys in the coop. One of the turkeys, its head hangs limply alongside its breast, its flaccid turkey neck unable or unwilling to support the weight of its head.
“Ole Leroy, there, caught himself a case of the limberneck. He must’ve got into something rotten or something, ate some maggots, maybe. It messed him right up. I been meaning to kill him, but the wife’s partial to him and wants him to keep suffering.”
“Wives are like that.”
We continue the tour onto his front porch where a lot of good rocking chair real estate is taken up by several large wooden crates. Several lights beam down on a passel of medium-sized chicks.
“Looks like they’re under interrogation.”
“It’s to keep them warm. They haven’t got their full feathers yet.”
I’m starting to realize there’s going to be a pretty fucking steep learning curve I’m going have to overcome if I want to survive the Apocalypse on a diet of hardboiled eggs.
“I gotta say… It ain’t nothing like training fighting cocks, is it?”
Austin shrugs. “You’d be surprised,” he says, mysteriously.
Inside his house dominating the living room is a large terrarium teeming with baby chickens. On several surfaces sit incubators ringed with fertilized chicken eggs.
I’m thinking I don’t have the room for this shit in my house. Not unless I want to sacrifice some of my bookcases and all those glorious books I’m going to read once society collapses and I’ve got the time to relax. I don’t know… It’s going to have to be a pretty fucking severe Apocalypse to convince me to give up my books.
“Check this out.”
Austin pulls an egg from the incubator and holds it up to my ear. I can hear the baby chicken inside bawking and steadily pecking at the egg shell imprisoning it.
“Incredible,” I say. “But why don’t you help that chicken out and crack that egg shell for him.”
“Yeah, that’s not how it works. You definitely gotta be patient if you want to be a successful chicken farmer.”
“I just want the wife to be happy and quit stressing over the end of the world. So how much would a set-up like this run me? The coop, the incubators, starter chickens, the whole lot?”
He tells me a number I’m not entirely comfortable with hearing. It’s an amount of money that would significantly cut into my signed first edition collecting budget. Which sucks, cause it’s definitely a buyer’s market right now with the economy taking a turn for the horrific.
“That’s… exorbitant. Uhm… How much you charge for a dozen eggs, anyway?”
“Three dollars a dozen.”
“Are those apocalypse prices?”
“Three dollars or that amount in trade, I reckon.”
I give him six dollars from my wad of stripper singles. “I’ll take two dozen, and keep them coming.” I figure if two dozen eggs a week can’t appease the wife’s egg lust, there ain’t no helping us. “So, what do you know about bee hives, buddy?”
Karl Koweski is a displaced Region Rat now living in rural Alabama. He writes when his pen allows it. He’s a husband to a lovely wife and father to some fantastic kids. He collects pop culture ephemera. On most days he prefers Flash Gordon to Luke Skywalker and Neil Diamond to Elvis Presley.
THE POLISH HAMMER POETRY CORNER is a weekly column, posted each Tuesday morning.
