| ZYGOTE IN MY COFFEE.COM |
| ***BIO*** KARL KOWESKI: I'm a 34 year old displaced Chicagoan, now living on top of a mountain in Alabama for reasons that involve a woman. I was the lead singer/banjo player of the now defunct country/punk/disco band The Screaming Shits. Now I just work in a machine shop and write articles for porno mags. |
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| The Biggest Fucking Chicken I Ever Saw |
| by Karl Koweski |
| Chico hit the brakes and almost lost control of his four wheeler, sliding his Kawasaki Prairie up to the point where the trail became mosquito-coated brush. I hadn’t been coming out to Red Hill very often, so I was unfamiliar enough with the trail to keep a safe distance between Chico and I. More importantly, the drunk bastards behind me were able to stop without the aid of collision.
Chico turned around in his seat. “Holy Shit! You guys see the size of that goddam chicken?” His bloodshot eyes screamed amazement. I scanned the ground for any sign of a gigantic rooster and didn’t see so much as chicken scratch in the dirt. “Chico, you done lost your mind.” “What’s the hold up?” Big Dog hollered from somewhere toward the rear of the phalanx. “Chico saw a big chicken.” “It was the biggest fucking chicken I ever saw.” The cat calls began immediately. Eight drunken good ole boys talking trash, each trying to outdo the other. “Drink some more firewater, Chico.” “You gonna fuck that chicken?” “Mexicans like to have their sex and dinner all in one convenient beast.” “I ain’t no goddam Mexican.” Chico had been denying his hispanic ancestry for as long as he’d been Mexican. He claimed his dark complexion came from Cherokee blood on his mom’s side. But I can’t think of any other bow-legged, borderline midget, bald injuns running around with a wire brush mustache and a strong thirst for the agave juice. “Mexican!” The chant began. “I’m telling you, dumb Polack,” he appealed to my Polska/yankee common sense, “that chicken was six feet tall if it was an inch!” “Six foot tall chicken…” That put the chicken a foot taller than Chico. Now I’d been hammered out of my gourd before. Probably more times than I’ve been nailed into my gourd. And during that time I’d swallowed some pretty obvious fabrications. The lady I picked up at the Grab-A-Granny who told me the postulating sore on her upper lip was merely an out-of-control pimple comes directly to mind. But I was no where near sideways enough to accept the existence of a six foot tall chicken. And I’d been drinking continuously for two days. “There it is! There it is now!” Chico waved his stubby arms at the line of vegetation curving along the trail thirty feet ahead of us. I squinted my eyes against the sun, mentally preparing another devastating quip aimed at Chico’s ancestry, sexuality and inability to jump up on the toilet seat without a running start. And then I saw it too. Peeking out from the brush, it looked like a Lovecraftian hybrid of a chicken, a giraffe and that demon from the end of Evil Dead 2. Stretch, riding his Yamaha Grizzly directly behind me, saw it too. Being well versed in cryptozoology. he made the call before I said something to embarrass myself. “That’s no chicken, you ignorant Mexican. That’s a goddam emu.” “Bullshit. Emu’s look like little horses,” Chico shot back. “That’s a gnu, dumb ass. Emus are fucked up ostrich-looking motherfuckers.” “Oh yeah.” “What the hell’s an emu doing at red hill?” I asked. Being not only a yankee, but a yankee of Polish heritage, I knew there were quirks and idiosyncrasies about Southern culture and practices I would likely never understand. The use of “plum” as an adjective for instance, or frying bologna for breakfast or cheering for a college football team of which you’re not an alumni. I was prepared to accept the appearance of this emu as just another southern mystery. Stretch eased his Yamaha up until we were almost side by side. “Bout ten years ago,” he said, “emus were gonna be the next big thing in meat consumption. Emu steaks. Big ass emu drumsticks. A cheaper alternative to swine and cattle. Better tasting than chicken and turkey. Farmers sunk their life savings into herds… of the birds.” “Then what happened?” “Then I reckoned someone finally plucked one of the motherfuckers and found out they’re mostly feathers. Market dropped out to the point you couldn’t give the sumbitches away. Lot of them got loose or set free. That’s probably second generation wild emu.” “I’ll be damned.” “Let’s lasso the cocksucker,” Chico said. I gotta admit, lassoing an emu didn’t hold much appeal until Big Dog pulled a bottle of Crown Royal from the gear strapped to the back of his piece-of-shit Honda Rancher. Coupled with the blunt Stretch produced, I got myself suitably deranged for the festivities. Five minutes later I was driving Chico’s Kawasaki Prairie, Chico riding bitch behind me, knotting up his lasso. We chased the emu to a pasture behind the red hill trail. From there the boys fanned out around the perimeter. After seeing the emu sprint wide open from one end of the field to the other, it was obvious Chico’s 750 ccs was our best chance of keeping pace with the fleet-footed motherfucker. On our first pass, I ran the Kawasaki up to third gear. It was all I could do to keep the four wheeler straight and my ass on the seat as we dipped and hopped. Pulling alongside the emu, Chico let the lasso fly. The emu dipped its head at the last moment and the rope swooped harmlessly over the bird. “Sonofabitch,” Chico hollered. “You’re swerving all over the place.” “Bullshit. Mexicans just don’t know how to cowboy.” I halted the Kawasaki and Chico gathered his lasso. He was madder than hell. Chico was one of those Mexicans pretending to be an indian pretending to be a cowboy. His pride knew no bounds. “I’m getting a goddam emu leg for dinner,” Chico spat. “Now drive right before I fucking have you replaced.” We made five more passes on the sprinting emu. Each time Chico threw the lasso. Each time the emu ducked its ugly head. Each time Chico cursed me for his inability to lasso a running bird. “This is your last chance, Chico. You don’t lasso it this time, I’m gonna take it down.” “Fuck you and drive straight, goddammit.” I swear to god on our last pass, the emu was practically grinning. Without a doubt it remains the only bird of its species ever to match wits with a carpet-bagging Polack and an ancestral-denying Mexican hooched up on keg beer and Crown Royal. And this instinctual knowledge seemed to spur the emu on to greater feats of recklessness. This time I almost side-swiped the emu. We were running about thirty miles per hour. The bird was so close I could have reached out and grabbed a dirty brown feather off its ass. “I’ve got this motherfucker now,” Chico said. “Is everybody watching?” Chico looped the lasso crossways. The emu dipped its head at the last second and the rope swooped harmlessly over. I launched myself from the four wheeler onto the emu’s back. I heard Chico holler “oh shit!” Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Chico drop the lasso and lunge for the handle bars. The poor Mexican bastard was too stubby, and it was too late. The Kawasaki hit the trail embankment, sending Chico on an abbreviated flight. The four wheeler went pinwheeling end over end onto the trail, coughing up all manner of survival great, both alcoholic and non. The overhanging branch of a maple tree arrested Chico’s ascent. Gravity did the rest. I couldn’t worry about Chico, however. With my 230 lbs suddenly added to the emu’s back, its scrawny legs collapsed. I sensed the emu tucking its head down with the intention of rolling me over its back. I jerked its neck to the left and the vertebrae snapped in my arms. The bird immediately went limp and we crashed to the ground, the emu cushioning the brunt of my impact, sending up a shower of feathers and a symphony of hollow bones popping and cracking. I laid there a moment on the carcass pillow wondering how the beast came to smell like cowshit. “You think we oughta save Chico an emu leg?” Big Dog asked. It was several hours later. The boys had plucked, disemboweled and roasted the bird over a campfire. Pictures had been snapped on cell phones and much keg beer consumed. Chico was med-evac’d to Huntsville Hospital not long before for treatment of a whole slew of what turned out to be non life-threatening injuries. “They end up wiring shut that broken jaw of his, he won’t be able to eat no meat, anyways,” Stretch said. “Still it’d be nice to keep him back something,” Big Dog said. We ignored the sentiment. We knew it was just the guilt talking, anyways. Guilt for not volunteering to accompany Chico on the ambulatory helicopter. Chico hadn’t even been stabilized before we picked his gear clean of food, dope and booze. “You see the way I took down that fucking emu?” I asked for the twentieth time. “Hell yeah, man. You killed that fucker good.” “Bad ass.” “Too bad about Chico, though. Bet now he wishes he never woulda saw that chicken.” |
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