Tastes Like Chicken Read online

  “You’re not thinking of doing something stupid.”

  It wasn’t a question. It wasn’t a statement. It was a judgment. If Misty was thinking it, she realized, she wouldn’t dare share the thought.

  “I won’t let you do it,” said Reesy. “I’ll tell Rick first. I won’t let you do this to your baby.”

  “I’m not thinking of doing anything,” Misty said in anger,

  “and if I was, it’s not your call to get in my business.”

  “It is my call. I just lost a baby I wanted. I’m not going to watch you throw one away.”

  Misty’s eyes welled up.

  “You know I don’t believe in abortion,” she said. “How dare you fucking lecture me?”

  “Didn’t you guys talk about this kind of stuff before you got married?” Reesy asked. “Didn’t you come to some agreement about when you’d start a family? This is not the kind of secret you keep from your husband. What kind of foundation is that for you to build on?”

  Misty stared at the wall.

  “I’ve been working most of my life. It helps me define who I am. I thought I could be married, have a career, be a mother—all that shit—but on my terms. None of this was my call. Rick wants this baby, I don’t. We were being careful. I just don’t understand how this could happen.”

  “You better be careful what you say. Life has a funny way of hearing you.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean you keep talking about not wanting this baby. What if something happens all of a sudden that takes away your ability to have a baby at all? I’m sure that wouldn’t be on your terms either. You talked to me the other day about counting my blessings and shit, but you’re just another talking head as far as I’m concerned. You don’t even take your own advice.”

  Misty flung the afghan off and got up from the couch. She grabbed her coat and purse from the arm of the chair.

  “I’m outta here,” she said, and marched to the door. “Be careful. Drive safe. Make sure your broom is tuned up before you take off.” She refused to turn and look at her friend. “However the fuck you’re going, I hope you get there in one solid piece.”

  “I’m driving,” Reesy said, following her to the door.

  “Well, drive safe. See ya.”

  Reesy rushed up behind her, grabbing her arm before she could leave.

  “I didn’t mean to upset you, Miss Divine. Really,” she said. “I love you. You’re the only sister I’ve got.”

  “I love you too.” Misty stared out the open door, still not facing Reesy, the cold air embracing her skin.

  “Turn around and give me a real hug. Like I said, life is funny. We don’t want to say good-bye on these terms. I don’t want to have any regrets when I get on the road tomorrow.”

  Misty turned around and, still avoiding Reesy’s eyes, gave her a tight hug.

  “Look at me.”

  Misty was crying. Reesy’s eyes were wet too.

  “Promise me you won’t kill your baby.”

  Misty took a deep breath and walked out the door.

  PART 2

  Pluct

  Hit the Road, Black

  Reesy left Harlem at dawn the next morning, her trip laid out compliments of Mapquest.com.

  She was taking the northwestern route, I-95 to the Jersey Turnpike, across the Delaware Water Gap, through Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana, past Chicago, then Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada. She was giving herself four or five days to get to California, no rush.

  This was to be a trip of leisure, with eight-hour stopovers each night so she’d be well rested the next day. It was the thick of winter, but nothing on The Weather Channel indicated that she’d hit horrible driving conditions anywhere. If she needed snow chains, she figured she could stop in some city along the way and get them. Other than that, everything seemed copacetic.

  It was just going to be her and Black, her Porsche Boxster—a gift from Dandre the first night she played the lead in Black Barry’s Pie. The car was ready for the long trip ahead. He had been given a full inspection at the dealership the day before. He’d had an oil change, all the fluids were fresh, there were new spark plugs, belts, wipers, and tires. Black had been cleaned and was smelling quite spiffy, like pineapples, compliments of one of those ubiquitous car fresheners sold at the counters of gas sta tions and convenience stores. She’d stuck the scented tin under the driver’s seat. By the time she got to L.A., she knew she would be sick of pineapples and tired of sitting hostage in Black.

  She had a grip of CDs packed, her favorite stuff: Biggie, ’Pac, the Beatles, everything by Stevie Wonder, some Fleetwood Mac, Steely Dan, Jay-Z, Nas, Lauryn Hill’s Miseducation joint, some Erykah Badu. And Maxwell. He was her Moses, and it was his music she planned to have playing as he led her on her exodus from the wilderness of the city off to freedom in California, with miles of distance—2,814.32, to be exact—between her and Dandre.

  She had fried up a mess of chicken the night before and had it packed in a Tupperware container, along with a loaf of white bread and slices of Sara Lee pound cake. She had a small cooler stuffed with plastic bottles of Pepsi and tiny bottles of Cocola. All these things were more tradition than actual want. Whenever Tyrone and Tyrene took her on road trips as a child, this was what they had packed. The three of them would eat the cold chicken folded up in the light bread, wash it down with small bottles of Coke, then snack on Sara Lee. It was like an oil change—necessary for any drive that exceeded four hours.

  Mapquest said her trip was an estimated forty-five hours and thirty minutes. She planned to stop for fast food and a few sit-down meals along the way, but things wouldn’t feel right without the smell of cold cluck in the car. She needed all the accoutrements to bless the trip.

  She hadn’t told Tyrone and Tyrene about her plans. She’d deal with them once she was settled in L.A. To prevent them from calling her apartment and finding the number disconnected, she told them she was going away to a resort in the Poconos for a couple of weeks. They bought it, insisting she needed the peace of mind so that she could regroup.

  “I’ll have my cell with me,” she said, “but it’ll be off most of the time. If there’s an emergency, just leave me a message.”

  “That’s okay, baby girl,” said Tyrone. “You take your time, we won’t call and bother you. Do you need anything? Are you doing okay?”

  “I’m fine, Tyrone. Really. I’m looking forward to the mud baths and full-body massages.”

  Tyrene, listening on another extension, had a flash of herself laid out on the bed at the Parker Meridien getting a full-frontal treatment at the hands of Hill.

  “Well, good for you,” her mother said. “Has your father told you about his problem?”

  “Tyrene,” he interjected with a growl as subtle as a bear’s.

  “What, Tyrone, what?” she said. “Teresa, you know your father’s smoking again, don’t you? All that secondhand filth in the air around here. I swear, it’s like he’s a different man. He doesn’t give a shit about me.”

  “What the hell are you talking about, woman?” he said, his mouth away from the phone. “Why are you discussing this in front of Teresa?” He coughed and cleared his throat. “I wish I was going to the Poconos with you, daughter,” he said into the receiver. “Goodness knows I could use some R and R, some earplugs, some something. Sela.”

  “Then go, muthafucka,” Tyrene said. “There’s no one here forcing you to stay.”

  “What’s wrong with y’all? I’ve never heard the two of you act like this.”

  “It’s all that damn cigarette smoke. He’s sucking it in and blowing it out, and watch…I’ll be the one with black lung and emphysema.”

  “Those are two different things,” said Tyrone.

  “Well, it all spells death to me,” she shrieked.

  The three of them were silent, the echo of Tyrene’s hysteria lingering in the air. Each one held a receiver and stared at nothing, longing to be somewhere else.r />
  “I need Misty’s phone number,” Tyrene said.

  “What for?” asked Reesy, wondering if her mother would admit to their tiff.

  “She had some legal issues at work she wanted to ask me about,” Tyrene lied.

  “Then won’t she call you?” interjected Tyrone.

  Good one, Daddy, Reesy thought.

  Tyrene searched for a comeback, but Reesy gave her the number before she could think of something that seemed more convincing.

  “I gotta go,” Reesy said after giving her Misty’s info.

  “You’re not going away with that philandering bastard, are you?” her mother asked.

  “Tyrene,” said Tyrone.

  “Bye, y’all, I love you.”

  “And stop saying ‘y’all,’” Tyrene commanded. “It’s improper English.”

  “Oh,” said Reesy, “but ‘muthafucka’ and ‘philandering bastard’ are okay?”

  Tyrene gasped. Reesy clicked off before there was any further response. The last thing she wanted was another diatribe from her mother. No matter what they discussed, it would somehow weave its way to Dandre, and Reesy was not ready for that. It had required a herculean effort to shut him out of her head. She knew she hadn’t dealt with what had transpired between them and that it threatened to erupt if she didn’t, but there was time for that. The words of her favorite heroine from literature and film—Scarlett O’Hara—still held true: tomorrow was indeed another day. There was plenty of time to look into the belly of that beast.

  Tyrene’s rants were persecuting, a torture Reesy wouldn’t wish upon the most wretched of souls. She pitied her father, who seemed to be rearing up and taking umbrage—at long last—at the incessant hooting of his wife. Tyrone was opinionated and, at times, quick to interfere, but he was slow to anger.

  When he did blow, it was big, volcanic, and swallowed up everything in the vicinity. Reesy hadn’t seen him come undone in years, and that was only once, after a teacher who’d made the mistake of calling ten-year-old feisty Reesy a “bad little nigger.” Her father had threatened to dismember the woman, two limbs at a time: “I’ll pry her apart like the fucking Barbie whore she is!”

  According to Tyrone, people like Reesy’s teacher should be the first ones culled from society. To him, she had represented the oppressive establishment. Dismembering her would have been the clarion call of a real revolution.

  Reesy couldn’t imagine what it must be like for him with Tyrene right there in his ear. All day long at work. All night long beside him in bed. They’d seemed like such a perfect match, the kind of Frick and Frack relationship she sought with her own life partner, whoever he turned out to be. The hint at a possible chink in their collective armor was disturbing, a shifting of absolutes that would have repercussions too infinite for her to ponder. It made her remember that moment in the movie The Color Purple, and the line that always struck her the most: “Pa ain’t Pa.”

  Reesy needed Tyrone and Tyrene to be made for each other. How else, she thought, could she hope for the same for herself? They’d been so simpatico, even down to their names. She defined herself by their uncanny symmetry. If their duality wasn’t real, she wondered if her own personal truths would be next to fall away.

  She realized that she wasn’t leaving soon enough. She shook her head and fingered her hair. The glimmer of her ring caught her eye as it passed.

  Two weeks would give her an adequate break. She knew the next time she heard her mother’s voice she would be telling them she’d moved an entire coast away, and the ranting would begin anew.

  The thought of them made her head hurt. She took some Aleve to intercept the pain before she started on her way.

  She and Black had made it through Des Moines and were headed into Nebraska.

  It was late, almost eleven, and she figured she’d stop for the night.

  Day two, and everything was par for the course. Her unscheduled schedule was on schedule. Because she’d gotten such an early start, the first day had taken her clear through Ohio and Indiana to Chicago. She’d spent the night at the Omni Hotel downtown, allowing herself a luxurious bath and room service.

  She’d thought of calling Grandma Tyler, but didn’t tempt herself. Her grandmother would know she was in town. Her spidey senses would kick in and she’d probe Reesy about her whereabouts. Reesy’d never been good at lying to her granny.

  She’d call her later, she decided, once she was farther down the road. She was sure that Tyrone and Tyrene had already told the old woman that she was in the Poconos. When Reesy called her, she’d make it seem like she’d taken a break from the resort and gone for a drive. That way, she thought, it wouldn’t be a lie if Grandma Tyler asked her if she was in the car.

  “That’ll work,” she’d said, settling in for a toasty sleep beneath the sumptuous covers.

  She had checked out by noon the next day. She gassed up, filled the cooler with more ice and Cocolas, and aimed for Interstate 80 again.

  South Florida, though beautiful and diverse, always seemed to Reesy like the lowest chamber of hell. It was an isolated gulag shut off from damn near everything except Cuba. Just getting out of her native state took five to seven hours, depending on one’s destination, and whenever she and her parents had taken a road trip, it had almost always been out of state.

  Because of those childhood trips, she’d mastered the art of the long-distance drive. She understood maps, highways, and interstates and knew how to pass the time with music and thought. She expected her mind to be flooded with thoughts of Dandre and the baby. Instead she was tormented with visions of Tyrone and Tyrene.

  “Out, out, damned spots,” she said to the air. “Before you fuck up my head any more than it is.”

  Stevie Wonder was singing about love being in need of love. She wasn’t in the mood for that sappy shit. She hit “random” on the CD player and heard discs shifting in the magazine. A few seconds later, out came the husky sounds of Biggie having a rapoff with Lil’ Kim.

  Reesy pumped the speakers and sang aloud with the music.

  “What do you do when your man is untrue? Do you cut the sucka off and find someone new?”

  Made sense to her.

  She spotted an exit ahead and a La Quinta Inn. She was still in Iowa, but figured it would be the perfect place to call it a night.

  When Reesy set out the next morning, there were just a few miles of Iowa left to conquer. She was relieved when she saw the Nebraska state line ahead, beckoning her forward from the dull jaws of the Corn State. The miles were going by like nothing. She was already more than halfway across the country.

  The second she entered Nebraska, it was as though someone had dropped her into the bowels of the world. It stank to high heaven. The entire state was one long stretch of roadkill.

  She wasn’t even a mile inside the state before she swerved to avoid her first…something. It was medium-sized with stiff hair. Too small to be a deer but bigger than a beaver.

  “What the fu—?”

  Black made a bloo-bloop sound as she ran over something

  else, before she could finish freaking out about the first lump of squashed hairy meat.

  “My car’s too small for this,” she said. “Black, we’re gonna have to pay attention, or these things are gonna fuck you up.”

  She didn’t drive a straight line for the next few hours. Black bobbed and weaved his way across the state, with Reesy navigating the roadkill like a complex game on a Sony PlayStation. Every time she avoided a carcass, she felt she’d advanced to another level.

  “Fuck Tomb Raider,” she said to Black. “I’m the Meat Faker.”

  It was bad, as though someone had loosed a safari upon the highway and the animals were playing a dangerous game of chicken. They were all losing. From what Reesy could see, it was Cars and Trucks: thousands, Animals: zip.

  Even though the huddles of cows must have known they too were destined to go, they mooed with what appeared to be indifference as they watched the road. Thei
rs would be a more expedient exit than the dreaded death-by-dumb-dash-and-mash they witnessed every day.

  There seemed to be more scattered meat than visible asphalt. Reesy pulled over twice to unload the contents of her offended stomach. The lurching began anew when she walked to her car and noticed crushed flesh embedded in Black’s new treads.

  The smell of pineapple inside the car was a distant memory. It couldn’t compete with Nebraska’s meals on wheels.

  By the time she hit Wyoming, she still wasn’t hungry.

  The pristine, clean, and expansive vistas were a literal breath of fresh air after the land of the slaughtered.

  She passed a rock fixture shaped like Lincoln.

  “Wow, look at that,” she said to the car.

  She needed someone to talk to because Black, for certain, could not talk back. She was glad he couldn’t. Odds were it would sound like Dandre’s voice.

  Her cell had been ringing nonstop since the day of the wedding with calls of supplication and apology from Dandre. She couldn’t bring herself to respond to his messages.

  In order to escape the sound, she had turned the phone to vibrate mode. The sensation was soothing against her leg, sometimes bringing her back to active thought.

  She needed the company of someone human.

  She figured now was a good time to give her granny a call.

  “You in the car, Tweety?”

  “Yup. I needed to clear my head.”

  It was the truth. After all the carnage she’d just seen on the road behind her, her head was due a good clearing or three.

  “So is your getaway working? Are you feeling better? You know, things ain’t always as bad as they seem.”

  “I don’t want to talk about that right now,” Reesy said. “I called to check on you, pretty lady. What you been up to? You been leaving all them old men in Chicago alone? They’ll give you worms, you know.”

  Grandma Tyler’s laugh was part cackle, part wheeze.

  “You always been crazy, Tweety. That’s one of the reasons I love you so.”