Cheating for the Chicken Man (7 page)

A WEDGE

O
ur knowledge of biology helps us to understand how life on earth is connected,” Mr. Rutkowski was telling his new biology class. Kate was relieved her teacher didn't question the late pass. He handed her a textbook, then a syllabus, and nodded toward a vacant seat.

“This knowledge of how life is connected can be used in many ways,” her teacher continued.

Kate sat and placed the heavy textbook on her desk. A growling tiger stared back at her from the cover. Tigers were beautiful, even when they were angry. But they had a reason to be angry, Kate sympathized. All tigers were endangered. Out of nine subspecies of tigers, only six remained, and it was all because people not only destroyed their habitats but hunted them for pelts, meat, and body parts. She sighed and glanced at the open book on the boy's desk beside hers to try to figure out where they were. The boy smiled and pointed to the page number.

“Thanks,” Kate mouthed. She flipped to the right page and shifted uncomfortably. She hoped she'd done the right thing marching into the office and getting that form. It wasn't like her to be so bold. But she was angry—like that tiger on the book cover! Maybe that's what anger did to a person. It made
them do things they otherwise might never do. She thought of J.T. curling his fists in front of Curtis. And how she had called out “Who did this?”

“Advances in biology help us fight diseases,” Mr. Rutkowski went on. “Diseases like cystic fibrosis and cancer.”

Cancer
. Kate blinked hard and tried to close a curtain on the hallway incident and endangered tigers and now, hearing the word cancer. She needed to focus on her class.

“Your diet and the chemicals that you are exposed to can affect whether or not you get a particular form of cancer,” her teacher continued.

But there it was again. The word for the insidious disease that had taken away her father. Mr. Rutkowski had mentioned it twice already. Kate swallowed hard. She would never hear the word
cancer
again and not feel a punch to her stomach. From J.T.'s problems, to vanishing tigers, to cancer, to her father's death. Was she never going to have a normal day again? A normal
moment
?

Apparently, Mr. Rutkowski liked to walk while he talked. “For example,” he said, now from the back of the room, “smokers often get lung cancer, which is caused by tobacco. Now they say there is a link between CT scans in children and leukemia, which is a different kind of cancer where white blood cells displace normal blood.”

Kate stared at a spot beneath the front blackboard and thought back to early summer, just after J.T. had come home. The truck that delivered chicken feed to their farm was pumping it into the two large metal tanks on either side of the chicken houses; and the auger, the long, metal pipelike arm
that transferred the feed from the truck to the bin, had not aligned properly, allowing some of the feed to spill out onto the roof and into the air. J.T. stood watching with his hands on his hips and a deep scowl on his face.

“What's wrong?” Kate asked him.

“See all that dust flying around?” he asked.

Kate looked again. “Yeah. I see it.” She thought he was going to say that all that dust was a waste of money, but wouldn't that be the chicken company's loss? After all, they provided and paid for all the feed.

J.T.'s expression didn't change. “Could be what made Dad sick.”

His reply shocked Kate. “What are you talking about? Chicken feed gave Dad kidney disease? And then cancer?”

J.T. lifted his shoulders and then lowered them. He didn't look at Kate. “Maybe.”

Was he kidding? Why would he say that? Sometimes Kate had a really hard time figuring out her brother. “Well, I never saw him eat any of it!”

J.T. didn't think her reply was funny. “It's nothing he ever ate,” he said. “It's what he breathed in all those years. Before this big truck here, before we were even born, they used to drop off bags of feed that Dad cut open with his jackknife and dumped into feed carts. The carts ran on a steel track into the chicken house, where he'd scoop it out into the feeders for the chickens. There was a lot of dust. Dad said some farmers he knew even wore masks. But he said no one ever thought back then that it was going to make them sick. They never even questioned the stuff the company put in the feed.”

“What was in the feed that was so bad?”

“Chemicals.”

“Chemicals,” Kate repeated, holding her hands palm up. “What kind of chemicals?”

“You ever heard of arsenic?” J.T. asked her.

“Arsenic?” Kate's eyebrows shot up. “Sure! Arsenic is poison! But why would a chicken company put arsenic in the feed?”

J.T. smiled a little. A funny smile, though, like she couldn't possibly understand. “It's complicated,” he said.

Kate was put out by his attitude. It made her feel dumb or like a little kid. Plus she still found the whole conversation weird. It was something else her brother probably wouldn't talk about again. Another subject off limits and unspoken, another brick in the wall he was building between them.

But now Mr. Rutkowski had mentioned the word
cancer
, and Kate couldn't help but think of her father's diagnosis of kidney disease, then kidney cancer and his last days struggling to breathe. Could there actually be something to J.T.'s puzzling comment?
See all that dust
flying around?

She would never forget.
Never
. For nearly two years, Kate's father had gone to the clinic three times a week for kidney dialysis. During the summer, Kate often went with him to keep him company and help him in and out of the county van. Sometimes, when he was on the machine that cleaned his blood, she read to him from the newspaper because he liked to keep up with the news. If he'd already seen the paper, then she'd get an old
Nation
al Geographic
from the basket at the clinic to read to him. She always went for the animal stories first: saving koala bears from the modern-day threats of highways and dogs,
a beauty pageant for camels in Abu Dhabi, the zebras' epic migration as they followed the rains.

The dialysis took nearly four hours, so they also spent a chunk of time just sitting together. Kate always brought her journal. Writing in her journal that summer was when Kate discovered how suffering taught her to see the details . . .

I know it
hurts, but Dad lean
s his head back and
repeats Kerry's corn
y joke to Lisa, the
nurse. “Why do we ke
ep the refrigerator
door closed?” he ask
s as Lisa sticks a n
eedle into the gigan
tic, ropy vein calle
d a fistula on my da
d's arm. “I give up,
” Lisa says. Dad tel
ls her, “Because the
salad is dressing!”
Lisa smiles and the
n slips another need
le into Dad's arm. T
he needles are attac
hed to long tubes th
at carry Dad's blood
to the machine and
then return it witho
ut the bad stuff tha
t has been building
up because Dad's kid
neys don't work righ
t.

My dad never comp
lains. He never gets
impatient the way I
do. In my head, I c
an be somewhere else
when I'm writing. B
ut after I put the p
en away, I keep an e
ye on the clock and
get up to walk the c
linic hallways, avoi
ding the lines borde
ring the squares of
tile just for someth
ing to do.

After the
van brings us home,
my dad stretches ba
ck in his La-Z-Boy,
and I pull the afgha
n up over his knees.
“Thanks, Katie Bug,
” he says, and tries
to squeeze my hand.
No one except for m
y dad ever calls me
Katie Bug, and I fee
l like crying, but n
ot in front of him.
I wish he could have
a banana, because h
e loves bananas. But
he can't eat them a
nymore. They contain
a lot of potassium,
and that's bad for
people with kidney p
roblems. Still, I wo
nder how much harm o
ne single banana wou
ld do. When my eyes
mist up, I turn the
TV on to CNN and rus
h to the kitchen to
measure out a small
glass of orange
jui
ce instead.

“We don't have all the answers,” a doctor had once told Kate while he tried to explain the kidney cancer and why her father had only a couple months to live. “I'm so sorry. There's nothing more we can do.”

So
unfair
, people said.

Bad luck
, others concluded as the illness took its toll.

After her father passed away, some people from church said,
I
t was his time
. Others tried to comfort Kate's family by saying it was all part of
God's plan
. But Kate could not accept that explanation. Despite the kindness and all the meals and prayers, the cancer had driven a wedge into her beliefs.

*

“Kate! Over here!” Jess called out in the noisy cafeteria.

When Kate finally made it through the lunchtime crowd, she saw that Jess had saved her a seat next to Olivia and across from two other girls Kate knew from middle school. Samantha and Lindsey were on the junior varsity field hockey team, too. Both were on the forward line. Lindsey had an especially powerful drive. Everyone hoped she was going to score a lot of points this season. Sam and Lindsey hadn't been good friends with Jess and Kate back in eighth grade. They'd always been what Kate and Jess called “the popular girls.” But it was the second day of high school, and maybe everyone was just trying to find a place to fit in. They had field hockey in common. Maybe they'd be the field hockey group. Kate kind of liked the idea.

“Hi!” she greeted them.

Kate pulled out the chair and sat down. But before she even put her lunch bag on the table, the girls peppered her with
questions.

“So what was the deal with your brother this morning?” Sam asked.

“Yeah. What did the sign say?” Lindsey chimed in. “That J.T. is a jerk?”

“Or a dumb ass. I heard it called your brother a dumb ass,” Sam added as she peeled the wrapper around an ice-cream sandwich.

Surprised, Kate stopped scooting the chair up to the table and held the lunch bag on her lap. “The sign didn't have any cusswords in it,” she said.

“The sign said Chicken Man. ‘The Chicken Man Returns,'” Olivia noted matter-of-factly.

Jess met Kate's eyes. “It's so awful,” she said. “Is J.T. okay?”

But there was no time to respond to Jess, because Lindsey had leaned toward Kate from across the table and asked, “Is it true you yanked it off the wall and threw it at Curtis?”

“I heard you slapped him,” Sam added with a chuckle.

“No!” Kate told them. “I didn't throw it! I didn't slap anybody!”

“He is such a jerk, though,” Lindsey said. “He deserved it! J.T. should have punched him out.”

Olivia rolled her eyes. “It's just drama, you guys. That's all it is. There was a lot of drama like that in my old middle school.”

“No. It's more than drama,” Kate disagreed. “Curtis isn't going to leave my brother alone until someone stops him. I feel like the school needs to step in.”

Lindsey smiled like she was truly amused. “You know what my dad would say? It's life, and you got to get tough. If
someone's picking on you, let 'em have it. That's what he told my brother. Last year—my brother, who's a junior this year—he beat up this kid who was bugging him.”

Sam was nodding. “Yeah, my dad says all that anti-bully stuff is crap—”

“No!” Kate shook her head.

“It's not crap, Lindsey!” Jess interjected, backing up Kate.

Lindsey just shrugged. “Whatever.” She pulled open a bag of chips and started eating them.

“So do you think there's going to be a fight?” Sam asked around a mouthful of ice-cream sandwich. “Like after school or something?”

“Probably,” Lindsey said as she offered her chips to the group.

“A fight?” Kate's mouth fell open. She turned from Sam and Lindsey to Jess with a painful look.

“Guys, maybe Kate doesn't want to talk about this right now,” Jess said.

“It's just drama,” Olivia repeated as she dipped into the chip bag Lindsey offered.

But now Kate was worried that something terrible would happen to J.T. after school. He was planning to stay for a science club meeting. If he did, then he would be waiting on the bench outside school for their grandmother to pick them up. He would be a sitting duck for someone like Curtis. If he got into any kind of trouble, he'd be sent back to juvenile detention.

For a moment no one said anything. Lindsey munched her chips. Olivia sipped her strawberry milk. Sam redid her long ponytail. And Jess watched Kate. None of them really cared about what happened to J.T., did they? Maybe Jess did, Kate
thought, but not the others. They just wanted the gossip, the inside scoop to fuel “the drama.” That's all it was.

The paper bag with Kate's peanut butter sandwich suddenly felt heavy in her hand. Slowly, she nestled it down inside the backpack.

“I just realized I left my lunch in my locker,” Kate said.

Jess looked alarmed. “But—”

“It's okay. I'll be right back,” Kate said.

But she wouldn't return. She was on a mission now. She picked up her things and left.