The following two snippets are excerpts from Jonathan Bell’s yet to be published novel, The Arizona Chicken Apocalypse, which tells the story of the young Bermudian Malcolm Bardo, his cousin Rowena, and their fight to stop the building of a mall in the small desert town of Biscuit, Arizona. Their methodology involves incest, ritual Robitussin abuse, and a form of time travel known as versioning, in which the practitioner is able to cross over into alternate chronologies.

The first bit is told from Rowena’s point of view after the death of Malcolm. In the second – narrated by Bardo’s mentor, Jonathan Columbus – we find Malc alive and well.

§  §  §

Eddie Pilot had been warning me all year to lay off the sauce. Every time he bought for me – and Eddie always bought me my tasty booze, religiously you might say – he’d tell me the same damn stuff.

“Brother,” he’d start – Eddie called everybody brother – “I can’t point any fingers. Everybody’s been down. Could be some folks get off lucky in life, and squeak through with nary a cloud. But if these lucky souls do exist, I never met any. Most people, regardless of who they are, will taste the sword.”

I met him on the day before I lost my head, in the Blue Moon Café, where Eddie was playing Scrabble with Toxic George Renfield. A copy of the Texas Observer magazine lay to one side. I can remember it all so well … my last day of sanity and I didn’t even know, but I look back on it now like an aquarium spectator, like I could touch them again but for the glass of the past.

“Hi, Edster,” I said, and I took a seat with some coffee and a nutty roll. “Glad you could help me out again.” I took a good look around – nobody to see this – and handed him a hundred bucks. Eddie took my cash with a pursed lip, and slipped it in his breast-pocket, next to the flower (a dandelion, that day).

“You’re a doll,” I told him, and that he sure was …

“I was hoping you’d had a chance to think about what I said,” said Eddie.

I just shrugged. Of course I remembered what he’d said. Eddie was always saying it, and I had no choice but to listen. I sold weed, and used the money to buy booze through Eddie. It’s a sick truth about America, that you can buy dope off the street a shitload easier than you can furnish yourself with proper liquor when you’re under 21. Perhaps it occurred to me, there in the Blue Moon with George Renfield nodding by the jukebox, that I am America. Maybe Gran was right; we’re all clichés. It was currently my unfortunate cliché to be … well … the drunken teenage widow of my dead Bermudian cousin. And by the way, you can all go to hell. Where was I? Buying my week’s trove off that Samaritan, Eddie Pilot. And awake in a nightmare that was getting too hard to endure. That’s where. Still, if I had to take a sermon before I got my medicine … was that really so bad? Imagine what people go through in real wars.

Eddie said: “You want to survive in this shitty world, you gotta be strong, brother, I tell you no jive. You want to see the face of reality, look at George here.”

Toxic George looked like hell, all right. A face like a pair of testicles. “Hey, George,” I said, and George just nodded. The only thing he cared about was Scrabble. “That’s reality,” Eddie told me.

§  §  §

The next day, after work, I walked home, thinking. A couple of blocks later I stopped by the liquor store. I came out with cheap wine, and a big snarling brute of a yellow dog ran up behind me and seized my foot in its teeth.I cried, “Get off me, fucker!” and tried to beat it away. My wine broke across the pavement. The dog tore the shoe clean off and ran. Hopping in outraged pursuit: “Hey! HEY!” A kid on a scooter chased after the dog shouting, “Mandy! Here, Mandy! Heel, Mandy, heel!” as it sprinted proudly into a field, flourishing my shoe and wagging its yellow tail. Then it ate my fucking shoe. “Bad omen, bad juju,” I decided, and continued walking. Fuck the wine. I made it down to the Golden Chicken diner, where I found Eddie Pilot playing chess with George Renfield. George pointed to my feet and said, “Whudda fuck’s up wid dat?”

“Had an altercation with a yellow dog.” I was still shaking. “It ate my shoe, man. It ate my fuckin’ shoe … size eleven.”
“Which shoe?” asked Eddie Pilot with interest. “Oh,” he said, his eyes widening, “the left. Hombre. Take it as a sign a’ luck!”

“I ain’t taking any such thing,” George announced. We all stared as George rose: “Thass wrong. Yeller bastard … history’s gonna remember this …” George went home, got his gun, took the truck, and set out looking for the yellow dog. I am now reconstructing from the police report. Whoever’s it was, George found himself a yellow dog, and shot it. Then he returned to the Chicken and declared: “Thass one dead fuggin yeller dog now. That is one still varmint.”

“George,” said Eddie, “what’d you just go and do there, brother?” George just grinned. George went and got a sausage-roll up at the counter, and a big teenage Mexican kid came in wearing a hair-net, adopting gang stance: “You’re the guy who just shot my animal,” he said, to which George replied: “How do you do!” – and the kid plunged a switchblade into the side of George’s head, then ran.

OPINION
Renfield Among the Immortals

Well, what can you say? He was a sick man, and undoubtedly he was a spiteful man too – but perhaps for these very reasons, George Renfield personified much of the spirit of the Biscuit community. He also contributed more than any other local I know to the eradication of this town’s serious feral chicken problem. If a few friendlies mistakenly got blasted, well, chalk it off to the price of tolerating any dangerous paranoid psychotic under the auspices of freedom.

Bardo came back to work the following Tuesday and said, “Well, I guess the yellow dog’s got to land on somebody … poor George!”