A Girl Named Zippy Read Online Free Page A

where there was fowl of every variety. Going to Tink’s was good and bad: there were chicks and truly excellent things, and there was also our Driftwood trailer.
    The Driftwood was a little teardrop-shaped camper my parents had for many years. It was perfectly compact and nicely appointed; it slept six comfortably. In all the camping pictures, before and after I was born, the Driftwood is sitting there sweetly. My mom made little curtains for it, and my dad, in his relentless quest for organization, had it packed in such a way that we could have survived a nuclear winter without going hungry or running out of propane. My parents sold it for god knows what reason, and they sold it to Tinker Jones, who parked it in a turnaround in his driveway and never moved it again. It sat there for years and years, and eventually a tree fell on it and Tink never moved the tree, either, so it came to resemble a piece of found sculpture. Going to the Jones’s was like visiting one’s children in a loveless and ill-run orphanage.
    I figure heaven will be a scratch-and-sniff sort of place, and one of my first requests will be the Driftwood in its prime, while it was filled with our life. And later I will ask for the smell of my dad’s truck, which was a combination of basic truck (nearly universal), plus his cologne (Old Spice), unfiltered Lucky Strikes, and when I was very lucky, leaded gasoline. If I could have gotten my nose close enough I would have inhaled leaded gasoline until I was retarded. The tendency seemed to run in my family; as a boy my uncle Crandall had an ongoing relationship with a gas can he kept in the barn. Later he married and divorced the same woman four times, sometimes marrying other women in between, including one whose name was, honestly, Squirrelly.
    Later still I will ask for the smell of Tinker Jones’s backyard. He had a small pond, on which floated white ducks and mallards and geese, and a big barn where the chickens roosted. There were guinea hens and shy quail hiding in the bushes at the edge of the woods. The air was permeated with the smell of the birds. It was lovely.
    I made a deal with my dad—we were big on deals. I had promised that if he would let me have my own chicken I would take care of her promptly every day, and spend time with her, and never sigh when he reminded me to claim her eggs. In return he would build her a nice big cage, which he did, and a roosting box filled with fresh straw. My other part of the bargain, the tricky part, was that I had exactly the distance between Tinker’s house and our house, about eleven miles, to tame her.
    I could choose from any of the young chickens in the barn, but it wasn’t hard. I wasn’t swept away by the cute chicks, and I didn’t covet any of the elaborately colored or fluffy-legged ones. The minute I saw my chicken I knew.
    She was a young banty hen, a junior-sized chicken, and her feathers were black-and-white speckled. I named her Speckles. Tink put her in a box for me, and she and I climbed into the back of Dad’s truck, which had a camper shell on it at the time, and we headed for home.
    I opened her box with no chicken-taming technique at my disposal, just my utter good will. I don’t remember what actually transpired between us, but by the time we got home and Dad opened the tailgate, Speckles was sitting on my shoulder, and if I made kissing sounds at her she turned and pecked me lightly on the lips.
    I have noticed that otherwise sensitive and intelligent people will go to great lengths to decry the love between a person and a chicken, claiming that, of all things, chickens are not
smart enough
to love. Well, I’m here to tell you: I’ve seen women passionately devoted to men who couldn’t pile bricks, and whole families of slack-jawed nose pickers held together by “love,” not to mention all those people who curl up at night with dogs that have gunk running out of their eyes, dogs who earlier peed where they were about to walk