Mrs. Andersen was the Marndog family’s closest neighbor. She lived a few miles down the road in an old farmhouse that the tourists were always taking pictures of because it was so very darn picturesque. She raised chickens there and watched a lot of television.

She was almost a hundred years old and fat, but that didn’t slow her down much. Her clothes made her look like a rogue sofa humping around in search of some cozy living room to occupy. Her face had the spongy, caved-in appearance of a jack-o’-lantern that had been left out in the sun too long. She was Pine Bluff’s oldest resident and beloved by just about everyone.

The years had taken their toll on Mrs. Andersen’s mind, however. It would have shocked her in her sixties to find out how lush and perverse her imagination would become in her nineties. Almost the entire history of Pine Bluff was mixed up in there with her own personal history and a whole lifetime of secret grudges and fantasies.

Feeding the chickens, Mrs. Andersen thought back to the day when frogs rained from the skies above Pine Bluff’s Main Street. That had been Captain Nitt-Witt’s doing. He was old now, almost her age. When was the last time she’d seen him? Ten years ago? Twenty? He was out in front of Old Camozzi’s Saloon wearing nothing but a ratty old red bathrobe. She remembered seeing his penis—a chubby white worm drooping from the tangled bird’s nest of his crotch. He was shaking it at the tourists—jostling the normal scheme of things.

She was surprised God didn’t squash him like a bug. Why America put up with rebels like Captain Nitt-Witt, she didn’t understand. At least you never saw that kind of horseplay on Wheel of Fortune. Shameless money-grubbing and the right to own patio furniture—that was what made America strong.

Shaking her gray head in disapproval, Mrs. Andersen thought of the many women who’d offered their bodies to the Captain up at Nitt-Witt Ridge. She didn’t believe that ugly talk about a Catholic nun dying from ecstasy under the pounding of his love. But she had talked to some of the others—women in their forties who should have known better. They said he had the stamina of a racehorse, even though he was well into his seventies by then. She especially pitied the younger women, the thrill-seekers up from the universities. She wondered if the Captain somehow juiced their youth—if his seed made them old before their time.

A chicken pecked Mrs. Andersen on her leg, shocking her out of her reveries. Ouch! Her chickens were her pets. They’d never shown her any hostility before. And something else was odd. The chickens weren’t going after their feed.

First Oswald, her owl, gets plugged up—and now this.

She decided to call the Marndog boy. He had more sass than any teenager she’d ever run across, but he seemed to have a way with animals.

•     •     •     •     •     •     •     •     •

Philo was riding his beloved clanking, clattering black and chrome motorcycle around in tight circles on the dirt driveway in front of his house, dreaming of the day when he would turn sixteen. He would get his license then and be able to ride out on the open highway, straight into the sun. He would also be of legal age to wreck school buses, just like his father.

He could hardly wait.

Calliope appeared on the porch with a cordless telephone pressed to her ear. “Philo!” she called out, waving to him. He pulled up beside her and let the motorcycle idle. “Mrs. Andersen’s on the phone. Her owl’s constipated.”

“Tell her to feed it some prunes.”

“She wants to know if you can come take a look at it.”

“I’m a psychopharmacologist. My job description doesn’t say anything about poking a flashlight up some dumb bird’s butt.”

“She also thinks her chickens might be turning into sociopaths.”

“Aw, Ma!”

“C’mon, Philo… do it for me.” Calliope pulled down on the hem of her dress and got a sad clown look on her face. “If you spent some more time around chickens, maybe you could figure out how to get your father down out of the trees.”

Philo revved the Vincent Black Shadow’s engine. “This sucks, mom.”

“I know, honey….” There was that sad clown look again.

Philo thought his mother might be making fun of him, but he wasn’t sure. He gunned the Vincent, did an ungraceful wheelie, and then he roared off down the driveway in a heroic cloud of dust. If he had to go all the way to Mrs. Andersen’s house, there was no way in hell he was walking.

•     •     •     •     •     •     •     •     •

“I don’t know what’s wrong…” Mrs. Andersen said when Philo got there. She was wringing her flabby hands as she led him to the henhouse. “They’re off their feed and they seem downright mean.”

Philo looked through the henhouse door onto a sea of haughty chickens. He went inside and climbed up on a low, crusty rail to peer into a hen’s nest. “They look healthy enough,” Philo said. “Not constipated, are they?”

“No. Just the opposite.”

Philo slipped off the rail and landed thigh-deep in an enormous feathered mound of chicken shit. It had an awful ammonia smell. He had an impulse to plunge his hand deep into the green-and-white slime, as a tactile experiment, but then he thought better of it.

“Do you want some cookies?” Mrs. Andersen asked him.

“Yeah, right…. I’m up to my ass in chicken shit here, Mrs. Andersen. You got a beer?”

“Philo! You’re too young to drink.”

Philo made a face like a scolding old woman. He could take all the Zebra Thorazine or bovine anti-depressants that he wanted, but he still couldn’t get a beer. Not even a warm Budweiser. All adults were raving, hysterical hypocrites.

Oh well… what could he do about it? Nothing. Philo climbed back up on the rail and peered into another hen’s nest. Much to his chagrin, he found a bloody dead bulldog in there sprinkled with hen feathers.

“Oh, man! They’ve got a dead dog up here.”

Mrs. Andersen perked right up. “Ernest? Is that Ernest?”

“What’s left of him….”

“I thought he ran away.”

Philo shook his head. “Nope. These goddamn chickens are meat-eaters.” He reached up to investigate the nest above him, a rounded thatch of straw that could have been home to several large buzzards. As he tipped the nest’s edge, a board squeaked, and then a half-eaten bear carcass toppled out onto his face.

Philo lost his cool and shrieked just like a girl. “A bear! They killed a frickin’ bear!”

The chickens clucked furiously.

“Oh my…” Mrs. Andersen said.