So Here’s The Thing

So Here’s The Thing
by Martin Mundt

© 2007 by Martin Mundt
All Rights Reserved.

Episode 7: The Chicken Killers

So here’s the thing—if El Pollo ever had a friend, then surely that friend was I. So, if I would not do what had to be done, then who would?

But first, before you answer that question, let me tell you of that terrible day when my village died, and my soul with it.

The Sun hammered the anvil of my skull as I stood in the street. Our tiny village held more killers even than dust that sad day. How can I describe this plague of murderers that had descended upon us? The vomit of Hell? The Devil’s own toilet overflowing? Or perhaps the floor of my chicken shop after the liquefying illness has passed through the greater intestines of my birds?

A plague. Vomit. A toilet. Illness. All these were not half the evil of the chicken killers, all come to avenge the Brothers, their foul comrades in murder. They took control of the village with ease, as we are not a violent people. All the men of the village over the age of ten had gone into the hills the day before for the annual Harvest of Thorns, for in those days we were the center of the worldwide Easter Crown of Thorns industry, but that was before what came next. And truly, I think the presence of the men would have made no difference, cowards and children that they were, other than that they would have died quickly, with their women, rather than slowly, day by day, in mourning, until they found new women.

I stood on the street with the killers. Nearest me slouched the Belgian with the eye-patch, he who picked his teeth with the sharpened femur of his first victim. He chewed gum with his mouth open, an unhygienic man, and he winked frequently at me as if we were great friends who shared a great secret, or he wished us to be.

Then there was the Icelander, blue-eyed and white-haired, afflicted with chronic gas so pungent it could be smelled even across the street. He draped himself in guns, and he no doubt had a bullet for a heart.

Next to him waited the deaf, dumb and blind, idiot-savant Yakuza from Japan, who, I had heard it said, saw everything he saw of the world through the hundreds of staring eyes tattooed from feet to forehead across his body, and who killed by spitting poisoned darts at his victims. And either he was as stoic as a samurai, or his nose too was defective, for the smell of his comrade seemed not to offend him.

Alone stood the Englishwoman, who concealed with her great pale beauty the absence of a heart. I had heard it said that she possessed a magnificent tiara made of the gilded testicles of her many victims, and also a very nice, delicate pair of earrings made of the freeze-dried ovaries of her former lover, who had sought to induce the Englishwoman’s jealousy by sleeping with a man, and who now repented of her mistake in an unmarked, ovary-less grave.

Behind her stood the Russian, whose teeth were all filed to points, and who, I had heard it said, always murdered only with a sledgehammer.

And, laughing as he fired his huge gun at this window and that bird for no reason whatsoever, strode the tall American, loud, obnoxious, arrogant, careless and vain, but who tipped as if he thought that money could buy hearts, which, God help us, all too often it could. I had heard it said that this American, every blond and tanned inch of him a Yankee gringo, took his wisdom from Hollywood, his desires from television commercials, and his morals from the adult entertainment industry.

And how do I know all these things that I had heard, you ask? I know because the killers themselves told me so. They sold a DVD documentary about themselves out of the trunk of the American’s impressively huge Hummer SUV, and yes, I bought one, for the price was reasonable, given the exchange rate, and I had been given a DVD machine for my birthday, for which no movies existed in all the village save for a bootleg copy of Grindhouse, which proved to be longer than the patience of my bladder could tolerate, and Deathproof was poorly written besides, in the humble opinion of an old man who sells chickens and does not write screenplays (at least none that have yet been produced.)

And then it seemed to me that these killers took some thought for how best to profane both men and God with their next act, and so they herded all the women and children of the village into our small but pious church, and then they ringed that holy place with explosives, gasoline, nitroglycerin left over from the abandoned sulfur mines that honeycombed the land beneath the village, and a small portion of napalm from a past war, and kegs of black powder from an even longer past war, and fireworks, dynamite, ball bearings, nails, containers of pesticides, boxes of used syringes, asbestos, thalidomide, pro-abortion pamphlets, knives and forks, homosexual propaganda, the gas tanks of old Pinto automobiles, videotapes of Sex and the City, tracts of the heretical Mormons, low-grade radioactive medical waste, textbooks on evolution, spiders and scorpions and rattlesnakes, used condoms, more thalidomide, and large, flat pans of Jell-O, which the Belgian insisted with a furious passion was poisonous, and with which opinion the others chose not to disagree. In fact, they surrounded the church with everything necessary to destroy the body and corrupt the soul.

Then they called loudly throughout the empty village, taunting, mocking, challenging El Pollo to appear, under threat of the destruction of the people, the village, the church, and everything else, including El Pollo’s honor.

I scoffed at them, telling them that a threat to honor would not draw El Pollo forth, and they tolerated my words, because I was nothing to them but an old man, and I danced like a crazy bear for their amusement when they fired their guns at my feet.

But they received nothing in reply to their challenge, which I deemed appropriate for an insult, though I held my tongue. They gathered outside the doors of the church, around their fuses and timers, and they jeered at the women and children locked inside, but I judged that they showed little enthusiasm for their mockery.

I, meanwhile, hatched mad plans to save the villagers and myself, but all my schemes involved either the use of large amounts of nerve gas, or godlike magical powers which I did not possess.

The Sun rang blows off my skull, and my plans grew more complex and irrational, until, after a time, I thought I saw heat shimmers in the street, mirages and dust devils, but I was wrong. I saw El Pollo, standing at full height, striding with calm, deliberate steps down the long street towards the church, head flicking this way and that with each noble step.

I said nothing, for I thought what I saw could surely be no more than my own desperate desire for unlikely rescue rising like a delusion from the many dents the Sun had pounded into my skull. Surely El Pollo could not actually have appeared.

The Brothers, yes, the Brothers had been defeated by El Pollo, but the Brothers had been insensible to pain and thought equally, and in addition they had been idiots, the walking corpses of fools. But these killers were many and clever, as happy to betray and kill as to eat and breathe.

And still I watched El Pollo stride down the street with measured steps, straight towards the killers.

The Russian saw El Pollo first, and his smile gleamed like the edges of two serrated blades.

And then they all saw, and they all smiled, for if El Pollo had answered their challenge openly, then surely they were already victorious. For how could a single chicken, no matter how gifted in the arts of violence, possibly prevail against so many, equally gifted?

They faced El Pollo, drawing their many and deadly weapons, awaiting the approach, but their confidence exceeded their skill.

Then El Pollo stepped forth from the feed store.

I blinked. Two El Pollos? The killers hesitated; their smiles began to fade.

Then El Pollo stepped forth also from the general store. And again from the saloon. And from the office of the sheriff, vacant these many years in our peaceful village.

Five El Pollos stood in the street, striding towards the killers. Then more, six, eight, twelve, twelve more. El Pollos, all identical, appeared from everywhere, and from nowhere. El Pollos flocked to the street, confounding the killers, who looked this way and that, but, no matter where they looked, they were unable to distinguish the real El Pollo from the rest.

I smiled in secret to see all the chickens from my shop freed to walk the village.

The killers huddled together, surrounded by El Pollos. Smiles had disappeared, replaced by consternation. Fingers twitched on weapons. As I had long known, the chickens, they bring out the nerves in some men.

Then all stopped, chickens and men. Silence crowded the street. And then the maddest plan of all raced into my old head.

“Peace!” I shouted, and they all looked, not, I think, at the power of my voice, but at the utterance of a word by which none of them had ever lived, as if I had shouted in a long-dead language. “We are all God’s creatures, and we would do well to live in harmony and love.” I dared to believe that my words found their mark in their hearts; I dared to see the promise of carnage broken; I dared to think they thought new, better thoughts than of Death. I spoke again, emboldened by my daring, and ruined all. “Peace, I say again! Are we not all Brothers?”

The American’s face wrenched itself into a look of hatred, and too late I realized I had uttered the one, the only word which would remind the killers of their slain comrades. The Brothers, they reached out even from their unmourned graves, grasping for blood and revenge and death.

And then how did the battle begin, you ask? I cannot say. The bloodshed began so fast that I could not hope to detail its intricacies, merely record its dire results.

Dozens of chickens died in the first instant, a foul butchery of bullets, knives, sledgehammers and poisoned darts. Weapons flew, thick enough to walk on, and, indeed, I saw El Pollo walk flapping from bullet to blade to reach the Russian, the first of the killers to regret his comradeship with the Brothers. I will not even attempt to describe the Russian’s wretched end. I will only say that I will never again see naked testicles squashed flat to the size of a tortilla without thinking of a sledgehammer, and a grown man screaming in horror with the voice of a thousand little girls. And wetting his pants. Yes, the Russian shamed himself with the wetting of his pants, God help him. But his shame lasted barely an instant, while his death lasted forever.

And the Belgian’s death? The Belgian came face to face with El Pollo, and he tried to hypnotize the bird, as he no doubt believed chickens were vulnerable to this sort of circus trick. Alas for him, however, he succumbed to hypnosis himself at El Pollo’s masterful hand. The Belgian thus ended his days by hanging himself from a noose wound of his own intestines, carved from his gut by the sharpened femur of his first victim. And so the victim was avenged.

Chickens died to the left, and killers died to the right.

The Icelander next ran afoul of El Pollo. How can I make you see the Icelander’s hideous death without first opening the uttermost depths of Hell to your eyes? No, I will not befoul your mind with such horrors. All I will say is this—the Icelander began the battle within reach of peace, but he ended it in unidentifiable pieces.

El Pollo next drove the Englishwoman and the Yakuza back with his impenetrably random exhibition of flying. I had seen this maneuver doom the Brothers, and I had no doubt it would doom these killers as well, befuddled as they were.

“Peace!” The word echoed along the street.

Everyone froze, and looked at me, but I had not spoken.

The American, he stood at the plunger connected to all the explosives in the world. He smiled with the glee of a maniac. His pistol smoked from over-use, and his handsome face was streaked with blood. His eyes shone with the fervor of a sex addict. “Peace!” he screamed again. And then he laughed in that way Americans laugh, too sudden, too loud, as if they know they have your testicles in safekeeping.

I shuddered in terror. I knew what would happen next, but El Pollo knew before me, and flew at the American.

“I lied!” shrieked the American, ramming the plunger down.

The village! Have I told you yet how it shimmered with greens and reds and golds during our three glorious days of bright springtime each year? Have I told you yet how our women flowered in beauty for the two days of their own virgin springtimes? Have I told you yet how we wove each Easter-thorn with the dust and heat and sorrow of our lives to celebrate the springtime of our spirit? Alas! Now these things are nothing more than a pale memory reflected in an old man’s words.

The village exploded in fire and blood and the flying bits and pieces of women and children raining down upon me like large, moist raindrops, an end I had always suspected American culture desired for us all, a suspicion which Grindhouse did nothing to alter.

And what remained, you ask? Surely, you say, something must have remained, and you are right. Something, but little.

I remained.

And El Pollo. But El Pollo had been broken, pierced beneath the left breast by a flying fork. I knelt by El Pollo’s side and saw quickly enough that there was nothing for me to do but mourn.

The gringos have a word. I had heard them use it often, but I had never before understood what it truly meant until that moment. The word was “desensitization.” I had seen too much death, too much destruction. I cared no more for the world. I no longer felt my own heart.

And then I heard the American laugh. I looked up from my sorrow and saw him, still blond and handsome, still loco, as he turned his big, shiny gun on me, intending to end my life, I think, simply because I was not an American.

Would I have killed him then?

I do not know. Even then, even after all that had happened, I do not know. But even if I had had the will, I had not the means.

I expected Death. So what, you may ask? You are an old man, and old men expect Death around every corner, and that, I must say with a nod of my old head, is a true thing. But here…here I saw Death’s cold breath hang in the still air despite the heat like…

…feathers!

The American fired.

And El Pollo, summoning the last measure of life, flew between me and the American’s large bullets. I saw a white sun of feathers explode in front of my eyes, and then blood and meat and claws struck my face, and I knew no more.

* * *

I awoke as the Sun touched the western horizon.

El Pollo lay next to me, body destroyed, but spirit indomitable.

The American, the Englishwoman, the Yakuza, they all had gone. Only El Pollo and I remained alive in the village, and only I would remain so beyond the setting of the Sun.

I gazed into El Pollo’s remaining eye.

“Why?” I said. “Why did you save me at the cost of your own life?”

But El Pollo did not answer, instead gazing up at me as if the question did not require an answer, gazing up at me until Death came.

But I have understood since. I have realized that a man cannot truly comprehend his own insignificance until his very life has been saved…by a chicken.

So I did the only thing I could do.

I fried the pieces of El Pollo until they were nicely golden-browned, until the meat almost fell off the bones, and I prepared a light, delicate, savory sauce on a cilantro base which my mother, God save her otherwise wicked soul, had taught me when I was a child, and then I made some beans and peas as a side dish, and then I ate well, my friends, as well as I had ever eaten. And perhaps even better, for did not my meal join El Pollo’s soul to mine?

And then, when I had eaten everything I could eat, I still found a hunger in myself for one more thing.

Revenge.

The American, the Englishwoman, and the Yakuza, they still lived. But I swore to hunt them down and kill them, for if I, El Pollo‘s only friend, would not do what had to be done, then who would?

And after that, you ask?

Do you kill chickens, my friends? Do you eat them, after letting others do your murder for you?

Then fear my vengeance, my friends, for I will come for you, driven by the spirit of El Pollo, and I will bring Hell with me.