Sightseeing by Rattawut Lapcharoensap

Author:Rattawut Lapcharoensap
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2005-08-24T04:00:00+00:00

COCKFIGHTER

I

Papa kept losing with his cocks. He’d bring them home every Sunday evening quivering inside their traveling coops in the Mazda flatbed, beady little eyes wild with chicken-terror, bold brilliant feathers wet with their own blood. Mama and I would pluck the dead ones. We’d blanch them. We’d bleed them for sausages, feed entrails to the strays. And then we’d roast them because, after all, as Papa would often tell me, a chicken was still a chicken no matter if it’s raised to lay eggs or crow at the sun or fight like a gladiator.

I knew it broke Papa’s heart to kill those chickens, though. The way he ate his dinner—picking each bone clean, licking his lips and fingers—you’d think he was trying to teach me something about indifference. I, too, tried to make a show of eating, put on my bravest face, for in those days we were nothing if not a family of brave, ridiculous faces. But I wasn’t a fool. I knew Papa loved those chickens. At night, I would often hear ululations coming from the ramshackle chicken house, Papa’s lantern casting erratic patterns across my bedroom wall. He’d be out there cooing to his chickens for hours. I didn’t know if he was praying or cursing or singing the chickens a lullaby, but for some reason I could never sleep until my father was inside the house, until that light moved from my window and there seemed nothing to the night but the strays howling among the rubber trees at the edge of our property.

Good night, chickens. Good night, Papa.

Then Papa started sleeping with his chickens. For my part, I began to learn how unbearable the night could be. I’d watch my bedroom wall for hours, the shifting shapes of the lantern’s glow filling me with dread. My terrors were no longer childish. I saw lewd, horrible men dancing on my walls with fangs, claws, raw red penises. I saw myself naked before them like a slab of meat quivering on a butcher’s block. I felt fingernails sinking into my breasts, rancid breath moistening my face, woolly hairs chafing my stomach. Exhaustion invariably took me, but sleep was hardly a relief. I dreamt of sex and I dreamt of decapitations and these dreams were often one and the same.

Mama and I would find Papa in the morning snoring in a bed of straw, a ring of cigarette butts scattered beside him, the cocks clucking for their morning feed. She’d nudge him with her foot. He’d open his eyes suddenly, as if he hadn’t been sleeping at all, and then silently go about his business—drizzling feed into the coops, changing water pans, stalking back to the house to take his morning bath—as if it was the most natural thing in the world for a grown man to be caught sleeping with his chickens.

People started to talk. They started to laugh. He’d become a bone for the rumormongers to gnaw. In town, the men would cluck at me,

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