Coq au Vin

Charlie pays for two every time he rides the bus. The bus driver once tried to stop him, insisting it wasn’t necessary for him to pay passage for his rooster. Charlie called her a racist and said Pico doesn’t want to be treated differently because of his condition.

 “If he weren’t so enraged,” he said, “he would have told you himself.”

Pico can’t talk. He never could and, without divine intervention, he never will. Charlie knows Pico is a rooster, but Charlie has convinced himself that this situation might be temporary.

            That being said, Pico is undoubtedly Charlie’s dearest friend. Likewise, never has a rooster loved a man in the way that Pico loves Charlie, at least as Charlie sees it. Every day since the day following his 64th birthday—when Charlie found Pico under the overpass at Bronx River Parkway—the two have bathed together and prepared meals together, rarely eating poultry, but sometimes indulging in some sliced turkey cold cuts from BuyMart.

They watch “The Price is Right” on Sundays, guessing at the values aloud as the contestants do. Pico, with his limited understanding of finance, is almost always dead wrong in his estimations. He’ll say, “cluck,” when the value is actually $450 or “b’caw,” when the answer is $59.50. As Charlie understands it, Pico’s inexplicable adoration of Drew Carey keeps the rooster interested, even so. Charlie misses Bob Barker.

            Most mornings, after a shared bowl of cholesterol-friendly corn cereal, they take the bus to the entrance of the Bronx Zoo and watch the ducks at the pond. Pico has and eye for one of the mallard ladies who frequents the place. Charlie knows he isn’t much of wingman and always compliments Pico on his bright green feathers and sparkling personality a little too loudly, which most often solicits worried looks from families passing by.

            Charlie is used to this sort of attention. Even when he was a younger man, people always seemed uncomfortable around him. He always muttered in school. When forced, he answered questions with single word responses, which is actually harder than one may think. “Which way are you headed, Charlie?” might be answered with “Southeast.” To “How did you feel about The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?” he’d respond with a simple, “superlative.” To "Why'd the chicken cross the road, Chuck?" he'd employ the occasional compound modifier, "other-side." 

Even the sweetest children would rarely speak with him after an initial attempt. Once, Charlie’s parents sent him to the school guidance counselor for what was supposed to be a one-hour session. After about thirty minutes in the same room, the counselor stopped asking questions altogether and started working on his taxes. He later told Charlie’s mother that he would not meet with Charlie again, saying, “Perhaps the boy is just a little slow.”

While the school bullies wreaked havoc on him early in his schooling, they all began to avoid him after he started calling them his “buddies.” Apparently it’s unsatisfying to give a kid a swirly if he’s smiling the whole damn time, just happy to have the attention.

After his mother died, even his father—who remarried about seven weeks later—stopped speaking to him altogether, and Charlie’s single-word responses slowly faded to silence.

That is, he remained mute until he heard Pico. Charlie had long since taken to poking around under the Parkway overpass—where he would take pull after pull of the flask he kept in his inner breast pocket and polish hood ornaments for Christmastime. On one such excursion, he came upon Pico, then a yellow chick peeking out from the inside of a Spaghettio’s can.  Without hesitation, Charlie scooped up the little bird in his cupped palm, covering him with his long jacket sleeve.

That morning, Charlie briefly considered taking the animal to a shelter but, perhaps thanks to a long suppressed paternal instinct, he decided to care for the creature himself just as the four o’clock bus to Fordham arrived. It was in that aisle seat, in the fifth row from the front, that he first heard Pico speak.

According to Charlie, Pico, with a charming South Brooklyn accent said, “you ought to tell the lady over there that she has a nice smile.”

Charlie, shocked, concerned he was losing his mind, turned to the chick peering out of his sleeve and then the lady, “Did you hear it?” he asked tentatively.

“What’s that, Hon?” asked the smiley thirty-something girl with a 50’s style getup, likely heading home from a shift at the Riverdale Diner down the road.

“What the bird said, about your smile?” he couldn’t remember the last time he had talked to a woman.

She pulled out dingy white earbuds, “You coming on to me, guy? You’re sweet, but I had a long day. Just not in the mood, ok?” she said as 

“He said your smile is nice!” Charlie told her, more assertively than he remembered ever saying anything.

“Mhm,” she turned her whole body to the window, dismissing Charlie, his bird, and everyone on the bus in one graceful gesture. She left at the next stop.

Behind him Charlie heard someone say, “creep.” And no one else said anything until Charlie’s stop.

When the two arrived at Charlie's apartment--if you could call it that--Charlie begged the bird to say something else. Other than a literal peep, the chick was taciturn until much later in the evening, when Charlie offered him a puff of his leftover cigar and a bite of his reclaimed bagel, to which Charlie heard, “you bet, thank you.”

Once the ice was broken, the two talked for hours about religion and politics. And every night since, as Charlie would recount, the two have smoked cigars together and complained about politics. By mutual agreement, they avoid matters of religion.  And even when it comes to politics, they avoid discussing specific candidates, as neither Charlie nor Pico wants to come across as judgmental.  After they have exhausted themselves, the two climb into Charlie’s twin bed and coo each other to sleep.

Without fail, following about 6 hours of sleep, Charlie wakes up earlier than Pico and loudly coughs up yellow-gray phlegm in the echoing bathroom. Pico finds this very irritating—especially with his vivid imagination—and punches his pillow until the mental image of Charlie’s mucous coating the porcelain sink is overcome by dreams of the lady mallard. That is, at least, what Charlie makes of his responses.

           

On one particularly cold fall morning, Charlie shook Pico awake and told him they must go to the corner store buy some toilet paper, which they have needed increasingly more frequently since Pico got into the prunes.

Charlie put on his frayed Hanes briefs, an almond toned tank top, a white collared shirt—the one his half-sister gave him ten years earlier when he insisted he had nothing to wear to her son’s Bar Mitzvah—a bright blue sport coat, gray pleated pants, and wide-brimmed straw hat. One more time, he tried to slip a jean jacket over Pico, but Pico shook it off this time too.

Charlie pushed him into his own jacketfront.

He stepped out into the street, where everything seemed unusually saturated with a yellow-greyish hue. They trudged slowly against the sharp, cold wind until they arrived at a Neon embroidered liquor store. In the covered entryway, a lumbering man in a yellow and green flannel shirt smiled sheepishly at Pico, who was now sticking his chest out farther than usual in an effort to look tough.  The man continued to stare. Charlie reached for the cold, aluminum handle of the convenience store’s door when the shifty man asked in a smooth, raspy voice, “How long has he had it?”

            “It?” Charlie asked.

            “The Bird Pox, man. Number one killer of roosters in North America, homie,” he sputtered as a crumb flew out of his mouth.  “It’s second in South America. I know it when I see it, man. I’m a vet,” he said, still chewing, occasionally swiping his teeth with a tongue of doughy residue.

“There’s no such thing,” Charlie said, certain that the man is toying with him like the bullies of his youth.

Another, much smaller man appeared from inside the store. He was holding a bottle wrapped in a paper bag, a little wider than the wine Charlie usually carries.

The first man continued, “Sure, if you put him in our care, bro. We have the vaccine, err, antidote to the chicken…rooster disease. Yeah, we can treat him up, bud.” 

Charlie, still panicked, struggled to light up his cigarillo.  He offered Pico a puff.   The bird took a deep draw, and exhaled a slow steady stream.  He caught the man’s eye with what looked to Charlie to be a threatening glare. 

Pico cleared his throat with a low b’cuck, then said simply, “No thanks, buddy. No thanks.” 

Charlie smiled, and looked up at the man.  “You heard him, asshole.”