Show Chickens

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Henry lights my cigarette.

I don’t smoke.

I bought Henry a pack of cigarettes at the smoke shop near the corner of Second and Pike and he decided to share one with me. I cannot work Henry’s purple plastic lighter in the downtown Seattle wind. Henry, tall, bent, and quiet, takes the lighter and quickly makes a flame. He starts his cigarette first, then brings the fire to me. I puff away like a pre-teen girl while Henry takes long draws and scratches at his white-haired neck and ripped red sweatshirt.

We walk down Pike Street toward the Market as I pretend to smoke and Henry starts another cigarette. His second-hand boots shuffle on the sidewalk and his crippled fingers dangle at his side. Henry does not wander, though I’m not sure he knows where he is going.

When Henry walks through the Pike Place Market, he moves in a steady, straight line. His movements are slow and the hundreds of people that surround him seem to step aside when he slides by, as though they knew who he was. As though they knew he was important, or famous, or from another world altogether. With his stony drawl, Henry compliments women and greets distracted children. No one responds, but everyone smiles and ignores his ripped jeans, faded sweatshirt, long, yellow beard and the steady cloud of nicotine that drifts behind his curved spine.

“I’m heading down to Oregon,” I tell Henry as we reach the bakery at the corner of Pike and Pine Street.

“Hmmm, Oregon,” says Henry. “I know Portland. I smoked a good doobie in the park by the River once. That Ken Kesey is from Oregon, yeah. Him and his Jokers, yeah?”

“Pranksters, yeah. He’s from Oregon. He’s from Springfield. I’m going to Salem to live with my brother for a while.”

“I once saw Sometimes A Great Notion at a playhouse in San Francisco,” Henry says. “I sat in the front row with my feet up on the chair. Mama said that was no good, yeah yeah.” His words are slow and deep. Henry’s voice can be heard through walls, from around corners, and with no effort.

Henry is quiet, but honest.

I cannot say that Henry’s mind wanders, but I don’t know where it goes sometimes. I spent five years trying to figure that out.

“I have to head to work, Henry. If I don’t run into you before I take off, take care”

“Yeah, yeah. I’m heading back, too,” says Henry. “Mama still has the farm out in Odessa, with the show chickens and the old house. So, yeah, if I don’t get a chance to say good-bye, good-bye.”

Before I walk back toward Pike Street, I shake Henry’s hand. His fingertips are yellow and soft. Henry wanders toward Virginia Street in his unmistakable gait. He moves with purpose, like a rabbi or a professor on tenure. I can hear him mumble and I wonder what he knows about me and what he will remember about me if we never see each other again.

I

It is the fall of 2006.

I have just began my sophomore year at Seattle Pacific University.

I got this job through my friend Drew Kreeger. Every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, I sell olive oil and vinegar at Sotto Voce. It is a small, open-door shop owned by a young man named Randy. It stands near the corner of Pike Place and Pine Street, sandwiched between a cheesecake store and a bakery.

In the morning, I open the wide, green, metal door. I flip on lights, set out samples, sweep, sneak next door for coffee and a muffin, put on my apron and wait for folks to slowly wander in and ask me questions. On busy days, I joke with mothers looking for a good gift to take home and talk about BBQ’d chicken with easy-going fathers. On the slower mornings, I write short poems and irrelevant letters on receipt paper.

Those were my mornings. That was my job. That is where Henry found me.

I was restocking shelves in the small shop when a large shadow moved into my vision. It was a mountainous figure. I stood to find a man who might, one day long ago, stood at about 6 foot 5. He was now a few inches shorter, back-bent and smiling, but no less intimidating.

“Hey, you’re new” the figure said.

“Hello, there. Yeah. I started last week. My name is Michael,” I said.

He did not move or speak. His face was long and wrinkly. The white beard he wore looked tough as steal wire and as old as the brick on the street.  His fingers were sharp and dangled like candles on the string-skinny arms hidden below his sweatshirt. I had heard about a tall, schizophrenic man by the name of Henry from Drew, and I was almost positive this was him. I held out my hand for him to shake, but he stood like a statue.

Finally, just before I was about to run my hand through my hair to relieve the tension, the man reached out his hand to me. It was cold and the knuckles rolled beneath the skin like oddly-shaped stones. He could not squeeze my hand and I was afraid to squeeze his. We both stood in the early morning shadows and waited for the other to speak.

“I like your beard,” he said.

Then, he left.

He wandered back down the sidewalk toward the fishmongers and produce stands. He said this statement as though this was all that needed to be said. Or, it was as though he thought it was all my mind could carry at the moment. He seemed to know me. And each time I saw Henry after that, he would call at me from the sidewalk like we were old friends.

Like so many people I met while working at Sotto Voce, Henry became part of the Market. It seemed incomplete when he wasn’t there, like a television show missing an integral character from one week to the other. I was never bored at work. I would sit on the table next to the cash register, sipping coffee, dangling my feet above the tile floor and watch as bicycles, runners, mothers with children and men with girlfriends, wheelchair beggars and heart-broken junkies slowly moved past my open door. I could hear poor folks argue and good parents with good kids listen to country music out of open car windows. And out of the hum of pecking pigeons and rolling wheels, Henry would catch me, my mind wandering.

“Hello in there,” Henry would holler and he scraped past the open door. “Hey you in there. Work, work, work.”

“I’m on it, Henry,” I’d say, but not move. Henry just kept moving on and talking to someone who I could not see.

Now, in the nearing autumn, I can see Henry move across the street next to the green bins left by the maintenance workers before their break. He stands against the bin and smokes his cigarette. He seems relaxed now as he inhales deep and fast. It appears to me like a break, even though Henry doesn’t work in any industrial sense. I know he lives somewhere. Someone gives Henry new boots and jackets.  He has a place he stays and he never seem to go far. I know he doesn’t go far because the only time he is missing are the days it rains especially hard. He does not seem to be going much of anywhere.

But, I think Henry is planning.

He is working on something. And that work never ends.

He flicks the smoldering butt on the brick road and continues towards Pike Place Fish and the golden pig statue where he may accidentally sneak into a family’s vacation pictures. He lowers his head and places his hands behind his back. Back to work.

Henry always said he was a painter, but could never show me any of his art. “No, no, no,” he’d say when I asked to see one of his paintings.

“I do them and then my sister, she takes them to the galleries. I hardly get to see em. Yeah. I could do one for you, but it would be at least three-hundred dollars. Yeah. Sorry, Michael.”

“That’s okay, Henry,” I say.

“Well, I have London on the telephone and they want me to come out for a show,” Henry says. He leans in close and looks me in the eye. “They must have heard about my show in Paris, when I changed the color of the air in the Louvre. That one really got people talking.”

Henry knows the places he talks about. Henry talks about New York and Paris and Eugene and San Francisco like he had just recently returned from them. As though last week, when the rains moved in and the wind began to kick, Henry was riding on planes and speaking in auditoriums.

As I sit on the back table of Sotto Voce, I picture Henry walking through any other street besides Pike Place in Seattle. There he is, see him: Henry with a wool coat and leather boots walking through the streets of Paris. He is young and he is tall and he whistles and winks at women. Henry with a clear mind and a clear path that could change at any moment. And Henry is getting people talking. I see him never having to know what it means to be a meandering grey backdrop to the memories of everyone who fails to notice him.

As it is, I can almost see his cigarette smoke wafting over every parked car and storefront sign. You can almost see the path of his walking, two long strips of worn pavement starting at Virginia and moving toward Pike. And back again.

“Work, work, work,” says Henry. “You be good, you.”

II

Henry never trusted me around girls.

Every time he saw me talking to a female, he gave me the same look. Like I were up to no good. No good at all. It did not matter if this female was a customer, a co-worker, an old woman, a cute young lady, a stranger or a close friend. Each time Henry saw me talking to a girl, his face would light up, like he had just learned a secret.

“I know what you are up to, you wolf!” Henry would say as he passed.

Usually, the females would look at me confused. I could only laugh.

On a cold, fall day, Henry found me standing outside my shop. I was getting coffee from Amy, a girl with animal tattoos and blue hair who worked in the bakery next to Sotto Voce.

Henry stopped next to me and pointed like a curious father.

“Hey, Henry,” I said.

“Michael, what are you doing, you wolf, you?”

“Drinking coffee. Talking to Amy.”

He shook his head. “Oh, Michael. You and the girls, you.”

Soon after, I returned to my table in the back of the shop. That is when Henry caught me talking to a female customer.

“That’s it, you wolf!” Henry hollered as he strolled past. “I’m callin’ the cops. You have screwed your last chick.”

I threw my hands up, but Henry was already lumbering down the sidewalk, laughing, ready to rat me out to the first person in uniform he could find and there was not one thing I could do about it.

No matter how busy the shop became–especially during the busy summer months and near Christmas–Henry would always get my attention from his spot on the sidewalk. He learned my name (he called every other boy Chris and every girl Mary) and would make sure I heard it whenever he wandered past. Sometimes he would tell me to be good. Other times he would just tell me to work, work, work. On slow days, when he might catch me with my eyes blank in the sweet thought of nothing and everything, Henry would tell me about his work and his 32 sisters.

Our conversation were always short. Henry did not like to stand still.

In the evening, by the time I would leave work to catch the 17 bus on 4th and Viriginia, Henry was always gone, although I’m not sure where he went at night.

It was only once that I found Henry in the Market after six in the evening. He was standing on the corner, next to nothing. His hands were behind his back. His face looked like a pile of stones, like he had just read a terrible headline from a soggy newspaper. His eyes seemed to look nowhere and everywhere.

“What’s going on, Henry?”

“Oh, my. Hi, Michael,” Henry said and gathered himself. He swallowed deep and shifted his feet. “They keep telling me to shut up.”

“Who?”

“I have to go. Sorry. I have to go. If I don’t get a chance to say good-bye, good-bye,” he said to me.

“Where are you going, Henry?”

“I’m going, going, going back to the farm. My ranch out in Odessa. My sisters and mom, we have lots of property out there. We have show chickens.”

“Show chickens?”

“Show chickens.”

Henry scratched his forehead with his crippled hand and looked back at the sidewalk. “Oh my my,” Henry said. “I can’t get the white ones to just screw the white ones and the grey ones to just screw the grey ones.”

“Hmmm,” I said. “Maybe you could just build separate cages for them. Keep em apart that way.”

“Yeah, I could do that. I need to get out there soon. The ranch.”

Henry looked at me and saw that I could not do anything to understand his anxiety and his show chickens.

Henry laughed. He laughed not because anything was funny. He laughed to try to make things seem normal. Because that’s all he could do.

“Well, if I don’t get a chance to say good-bye, good-bye.”

“Good night, Henry.”

Henry did not go to his ranch. He was in the Market the next day and he asked me for cigarettes.

III

In the spring of 2007, I traveled to Germany and started hearing voices.

It came in a moment. The color of the air changed and every blade of grass and passing eye seemed to be against me. They were planning something. I did not sleep for weeks. I could barely eat. The blood in my head moved like gravel behind my eyes and every thought tortured me. I could not tell what came from me and what was something else.

I flew back to Seattle, but could not return to work at Sotto Voce for the summer. I spent that summer in Oregon, near my family, trying to sort out the new colors in the air, the way my heart moved like a freight engine whenever I woke up, the way my thoughts ran in circles and never wanted to be caught and controlled. I could not sit still and could not talk to anyone for more than five minutes at a time.

When I finally did return to work, Henry was one of the first to greet me. He called me Michael and told me I had been gone a long time.

“Where have you been?” asked Henry.

“I’ve been home. I’ve been sick,” I said.

“Sick?” asked Henry.

“Yeah. My head. I’ve been sad. I’ve been on pills,” I said.

“What pills?” he asked.

We discussed my medications for a longer time than we had discussed anything before. We talked about which of mine made me sleepy and which of his made him hungry. He did not laugh when he left to keep wandering down the sidewalk. He only shook my hand and looked me in the eye. I could feel Henry trying to grip my hand. But, of course, he could only try. I felt the misshapen bones rolling under his knuckles—those bones and the charged strips of tendon and fresh trying to put a solid grip on my hand.

Henry left me and moved down the sidewalk with his head lowered and his hands hidden behind his back. I stood by the door for a minute and smiled at the little kids who walked past and nodded and winked at the young women and the old women. Henry stood across the street. Through the slowly passing cars, I could see him standing above everyone. He wasn’t smoking. He stood still with a vague smirk while the pigeons pecked at the dust and feared for rain coming in the form of bruise-purple clouds over the green tin roofs of the Market. And the old Indian men limped past the girls in backpacks taking pictures of everything and families wondering what they might do next in a silent indecision. And it all, the whole scene, seemed to move in a strange unison, like every motion and word from every person and creature was in time, as though this scene were dreamt up by a crazy man with an invisible paintbrush, or by some desperate kid had written it out on ripped receipt paper.

Henry could be anywhere right now.

I haven’t seen him in months.

I got a job in Salem and have not returned the Market since I moved to Oregon to hang with the Pranksters and write a story or two, like dear old Uncle Kesey.

By this time, Henry could have taken off for New York and hopped a jet to London and a train under the Channel to Paris where he is shaking hands and winking at women and saying in a clear-throated honesty, “what a day, what fine fine day.” And after all his travels, Henry may have finally found his way to Odessa. Back to the farm and the cages of grey and white chickens. The dust is laying low below the slow-coming rain. Henry is moving exactly how he’d like to, standing where he likes and listening to the muttering silence of the world around him. He can hear everything and nothing else.

Henry stands straight and looks at the color of the sky. He sees it exactly how it is. And everything is exactly how it should be and nothing was ever taken from him.

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