“Playing Chicken,” by Scott Gould (Fiction ’06)
2006 fiction alum Scott Gould was recently featured in Pangyrus. Read an excerpt of “Playing Chicken” below:
(Photo by Eli Warren)
Playing Chicken
I am a home health nurse for Williamsburg County. My present occupation has not caused me to be shot at, molested, or otherwise screwed with because I am six feet, four inches tall and weigh two hundred and sixty-five pounds and have an attitude that repels ridicule like the back side of a magnet. The last time someone attempted humor in regard to me being a male nurse, I broke his nose. Then, I set it for him. I am a nurse because it required very little money and effort to get into tech school classes when I took leave of Parris Island, a garden spot where I lost both of my big toenails and sixteen pounds while I learned to be a war machine.
That is all to say that between then and now, I have put many a mile on my Plymouth Valiant, negotiating the swampy two-ruts of this county where people have more concern for the lotto numbers than their health. I have calculated the blood pressure of people who exist two ticks from a heart attack. I have listened to the sloshing lungs of those who smell like the insides of an ashtray. And I have wedged medicine spoons between the brown teeth of children who squirm like eels on hot sand. Through it all, I have come to believe that the human body is nothing more than a private trash heap that some of us fill to capacity faster than others.
Yet I do not come to preach. I come today with a message, and it is this: Folks you wouldn’t normally put together are winding up under the same roof. And they are getting along.
Not only are they getting along, they are growing intimately familiar and consequently having babies, crisscrossing boundaries like smugglers with a bag of dope and a bad sense of direction. It is perhaps a health situation to monitor.
Think about this:
Some months ago, I pulled the Valiant onto a road that paralleled a set of railroad tracks. Behind me, the tracks ran toward a pair of hills, where they disappeared into a curve of green trees growing so close to the tracks, the limbs were shaved and bare on one side from the constant scrape of freight cars. In front of me, the tracks eventually pulled up behind the Victoria Chicken Plant, where the slogan is right there, in big letters across the front of the building: We Are Why The Chickens Cross The Road.
During shift changes, groups of Hispanic men, wearing black hip boots and long white coats, walk between the plant and any number of trailer parks tucked in the trees along the tracks. I have an EMT buddy who gets summoned to the chicken plant once or twice a month when a line worker loses a finger to a bone saw or slips and hits his head and nearly drowns in the chicken goop on the floor. He says walking into the chicken plant is like strolling straight through the gates of hell. He told me once there isn’t enough money in the world to make him spend a shift in the chicken plant, and I told him he hadn’t been poor enough yet. I would work there before I’d starve. I just wouldn’t eat chicken tenders anymore. I would adapt.
Read this story in its entirety here: https://www.pangyrus.com/fiction/playing-chicken/
