Femme Fatale and other stories

extra blanket on the bed. Keep the door shut.”
    “And the chickens?”
    He had grown tired of the conversation, or tired of us. He bent down and pulled the guitar out from under the bed. We were kids then, all adults were old to us, but Chicken George, as we would come to call him, was especially confounding. You could have told us he was fifty, not that much older than Tim is now, or you could have told us ninety, and we wouldn’t have argued. He was
old,
someone who had seen a lot and knew a lot.
    He began to play the guitar and sing. His voice was awful and he didn’t know the words to whatever song he was trying to play, so there were a lot of uh-huhs and moans. If Mick Jagger had been standing there, he probably would have been in ecstasy at this raw display of old-fashioned blues playing and singing, but we were callow kids. We listened to Billy Joel. Some of us still do, even if we don’t admit it.
    “It is customary,” he said when he finished, “to reward a man if you like his song.”
    He held out his palm, which was amazingly pink, pink as the pads on a newborn kitten’s feet. It was creased and craggy, a hard-working hand, yet rosy pink. We stared at his hand, not gleaning what he wanted. Sean, at last, put a quarter in it, and the man actually bit the coin. But then he smiled, letting us know he was in on the joke, that he knew biting a coin was something people did with gold pieces in a movie, not with a quarter from Sean’s pocket.
    “Well, I guess you weren’t expecting a show, so that’s okay that you don’t have more,” he said. “Tell me your names.”
    Mickey took the lead.
    “I’m Leia,” she said.
    “Han,” said Sean, always quick.
    “Luke,” said Tim.
    “Carrie,” said Gwen, who couldn’t think of another girl’s name from
Star Wars,
clearly begrudging Mickey’s decision to crown herself as the princess.
    “Go-Go,” said Go-Go, not getting it. Even if he had, he probably would have said R2-D2 or Obi-Wan. It was funny about Go-Go. He lied. He lied a lot, trying to avoid punishment for his various misdeeds. But he was bad at it. He couldn’t tell a lie to save his life. And his honesty often came out at just the wrong time.
    “Where y’all live?”
    “Franklintown Road,” Mickey said. There probably weren’t four or five houses along Franklintown, but it was nearby and a credible place for us to be from. If we mentioned Dickeyville, we would give ourselves away. Should the man ever come up that way, determined to find the five children who had come into his house and tried to take his guitar—not that we would have taken it, but that’s probably what he thought—he would find us all too easily. All he would have to say is: blond girl, brunette girl, three boys with their hair cut way short, and everyone would say, Oh, the Halloran boys, fat Gwen, and that dark-haired girl they play with.
    “And you came all the way down here. Huh. You going to come visit me again?”
    It sounded more like a request than a question. Why would we come here again? What was the point of visiting this strange old man, who smelled bad and couldn’t sing?
    “Sure,” said Sean, our spokesman.
    “I need some canned goods,” he said. “Beans, soup. And I wouldn’t mind some new shirts. I like them flannel shirts, but I need T-shirts, too.”
    “Sure.”
    Why not agree? We were never going to return here. It was a far walk, something to do on a summer’s day when you had all the time in the world. Come Labor Day and school, we wouldn’t have the time. What was the harm in promising that Leia, Han, Luke, Carrie, and Go-Go would return?
    We were back within the week, with all the things he requested.
    We called him Chicken George, after the character in
Roots,
which had aired the previous year. He never seemed to remember our names, nor notice when we slipped and used our real ones. He asked almost nothing of us, beyond the canned goods and old shirts we pulled from our parents’ homes, and each visit was the same: he would play his guitar, singing in his caterwauling style, and Go-Go would dance his dance, flinging his body around as only he could. It shouldn’t have been fun and yet it was, if only because it was a secret among the five of us. There was no one else in Chicken George’s life, no one else who knew of him or cared about him. He was ours, a new toy.
    And, in time, we treated him as all children treat their toys—with increasing carelessness and