Man Descending Read Online Free PDF Page B

surprised me a little. I realized I was hoping this confrontation would escalate. Wishing that he would provoke me into something.
    Strange images came into my head: the bruises on my aunt’s legs; Thompson’s face drained of life, lifted like an empty receptacle toward the ceiling, waiting to be filled, the tendons of his neck stark and rigid with anticipation.
    I was filled with anxiety, the heat seemed to stretch me, to tug at my nerves and my skin. Two drops of sweat, as large and perfectly formed as tears, rolled out of my hairline and splashed onto the rubber toes of my runners.
    “Easy, Stanley,” I breathed to him, “easy,” and my hand crept deliberately towards him. This time he pecked me in such a way, directly on the knuckle, that it actually hurt. I took up my stick and rapped him on the beak curtly, the prim admonishment of a schoolmarm. I didn’t hit him very hard, but it was hard enough to split the length of his beak with a narrow crack. The beak fissured like the nib of a fountain pen. Stanley squawked, opened and closed his beak spasmodically, bewildered by the pain. A bright jewel of blood bubbled out of the split and gathered to a trembling bead.
    “There,” I said excitedly, “now you’ve done it. How are you going to eat with a broken beak? You can’t eat anything with a broken beak. You’ll starve, you stupid goddamn chicken.”
    A wind that smelled of rain had sprung up. It ruffled his feathers until they moved with a barely discernible crackle.
    “Poor Stanley,” I said, and at last, numbed by the pain, he allowed me to stroke the gloss of his lacquer feathers.
    I wasn’t strong enough or practised enough to do a clean and efficient job of wringing his neck, but I succeeded in finishing him off after two clumsy attempts. Then, because I wanted to leave the impression that a skunk had made off with him, I punched a couple of holes in his breast with my jack knife and tried to dribble some blood on the ground. Poor Stanley produced only a few meagre spots; this corpse refused to bleed in the presence of its murderer. I scattered a handful of his feathers on the ground and buried him in the larger of the two manure piles beside the barn.
    “I don’t think any skunk got that rooster,” my grandmother said suspiciously, nudging at a feather with the toe of her boot until, finally disturbed, it was wafted away by the breeze.
    Something squeezed my heart. How did she know?
    “Skunks hunt at night,” she said. “Must have been somebody’s barn cat.”
    “You come along with me,” my grandmother said. She was standing in front of the full-length hall mirror, settling on her hat, a deadly-looking hat pin poised above her skull. “We’ll go into town and you can buy a comic book at the drugstore.”
    It was Friday and Friday was shopping day. But Grandma didn’t wheel her battered De Soto to the curb in front of the Brite Spot Grocery, she parked it in front of Maynard & Pritchard, Barristers and Solicitors.
    “What are we doing here?” I asked.
    Grandma was fumbling nervously with her purse. Smalltown people don’t like to be seen going to the lawyer’s. “Come along with me. Hurry up.”
    “Why do I have to come?”
    “Because I don’t want you making a spectacle of yourself for the half-wits and loungers to gawk at,” she said. “Let’s not give them too much to wonder about.”
    Maynard & Pritchard, Barristers and Solicitors, smelled of wax and varnish and probity. My grandmother was shown into an office with a frosted pane of glass in the door and neat gilt lettering that announced it was occupied by D.F. Maynard, Q.C. I was ordered to occupy a hard chair, which I did, battering my heels on the rungs briskly enough to annoy the secretary into telling me to stop it.
    My grandmother wasn’t closeted long with her Queen’s Counsel before the door opened and he glided after her into the passageway. Lawyer Maynard was the neatest man I had ever seen in my life. His suit