The Chicken Tax Incident

I owed Cherise a favor. A big one. She'd helped me haul my dental gear into the rental on Maple Court six months back, back when I was new to Willow Creek and didn't know a soul. She'd lifted the heavy end of the autoclave crate, and I hadn't properly met her until the meet-and-greet. She never once mentioned the favor. Until now.

Her text came Thursday. "Saturday. My garage. 8am. Wear clothes you hate. Bring the favor."

That was it. No explanation. I stared at my phone in the dentist's break room and felt a kind of dread I usually only get when the Novocain doesn't take.

So Saturday morning I drove my beat-up Corolla the four blocks to her place. All the houses in Willow Creek are the same pale blue, like the builder bought one bucket of paint in 2009 and refused to deviate. Cherise's garage door was already up. She was standing in the driveway, twenty-eight years old, hair tied up with a pencil, holding a meat cleaver in one hand and a plastic bag of dark red marinade in the other.

"Morning," she said. "You came."

"You texted 'bring the favor.' I figured showing up was step one."

"Good instinct." She held up the bag. "This is goat. Forty pounds of it, marinating overnight in garlic and something I found at the international market labeled only 'hot.'"

"Goat."

"Goat. For the potluck tonight. The HOA one. The one with the sign-up sheet you conveniently didn't sign."

I had not signed the sheet. I had hidden behind the folding chairs at the meet-and-greet instead. That was actually where we'd gotten to know each other, three months ago, when I backed into the punch table and drenched her shirt. She'd laughed instead of suing me, which in Willow Creek counts as love.

"Okay," I said. "So you need help cooking a goat. That's the favor? I can do that. I have a crockpot."

She pointed behind her, into the garage, and that's when I saw it.

The smoker.

Calling it a smoker is generous. It was a Frankenstein. A rusted barrel welded to what looked like half an oil drum, with pipes sticking out at angles pipes should not stick out at. One leg was a cinder block. Another leg was two cinder blocks and a car jack. There was a hand-lettered sign on the side that said BILLY'S BEST, mostly flaked off, and a Craigslist listing taped to the lid like it was a rescue animal.

"Forty dollars," Cherise said, proud.

"It looks like it exploded already and they just reassembled it wrong."

"It has character."

"It has tetanus."

She smacked my arm with the marinade bag. "You're a dental hygienist. You love cleaning things. Think of this as a big dirty tooth."

"That is not how teeth work and also I clean teeth with tiny instruments, not with my bare hands on rust."

"You owe me," she said, and grinned, and I remembered why I'd fallen for her in the first place. She has this grin like she knows she's winning and she wants you to watch her do it. We'd been dating two months now. She'd seen me floss. She'd earned the grin.

"Fine. What do you need."

"Fire. We need to get this thing up to temperature by noon, smoke the goat for six hours, rest it, slice it, and be at the green strip by six looking like heroes."

"That's a plan with zero flexibility in it."

"I'm a graphic designer. Deadlines are my whole personality."

We dragged the smoker out to her backyard. The grass back there has that subdivision look, chemically green, faintly afraid. The goat, already dead and bagged, thank God, was not the problem. The problem was propane. She'd bought a tank from the same Craigslist guy, Billy presumably, and it sat by the fence post with a length of hose that didn't quite reach the smoker's burner.

"There's a coupler in the garage," she said. "Green bin. Left of the snow shovels."

"Left of the snow shovels. Got it."

I went digging. The green bin had a coupler, a dead extension cord, four tennis balls, and a jar of screws that would fit nothing ever. I came back out with the coupler and found Cherise crouched by the burner, cleaver still in her hand for some reason, cranking the igniter. Click. Click. Click. Nothing.

"It won't light," she said.

"Maybe the igniter's dead. I saw a long lighter in your kitchen drawer. The one you use for candles."

"I use that for candles and nothing else, and you're gonna need to wash it after."

"Noted."

The lighter worked, sort of. The burner caught with a whump that I did not love, and a plume of orange flame rolled out of a gap I'm pretty sure was not a designed feature. Cherise fed the goat bag into the chamber and we stood back to admire our work.

"Now we wait," she said.

"Now we wait!"

We sat on her back step with coffees. It was a nice morning, actually. Cool. The kind of morning where the cul-de-sac is quiet and you can almost forget the HOA exists. Somewhere a sprinkler ticked. A neighbor I didn't know yet walked a small dog with a big opinion.

Then I noticed the flame was dying down.

"Is it supposed to do that?" I asked.

"Do what?"

"Shrink."

She got up. I got up. We went around to the burner and it was guttering, the hose doing its sad half-connected job. I decided, in a moment of genius I will regret forever, to just snug the coupler tighter with my foot.

You can see where this is going.

The tank tipped. I grabbed for it, missed, and it went over sideways with a clang that rang off every pale-blue mailbox on the street. The hose popped clean off the burner. Flame shot out in a fat orange cone about the length of my forearm and lit up the grass like a birthday candle with anger issues.

"CHET!" Cherise yelled.

"I KNOW!"

I rolled the tank upright, which somehow choked the flame down to a hiss, and we both stood there panting. That should've been the end of the crisis. It was not the end of the crisis, because in all the noise, the dead goat, which Cherise had apparently propped against the fence post to keep the bag drain hole aimed right, was gone. Not eaten. Gone. The bag had split. The rope she'd used to tie the bag shut had snagged on the post, snapped, and something had dragged the whole forty-pound marinated carcass off into the yard.

"Where's the goat," Cherise said flatly.

"Define goat."

"Chet."

We looked around. Then we looked down the driveway. Then we looked at the cul-de-sac.

A dog. The small dog with the big opinion. It had the bag in its teeth and it was hauling ass down the middle of the street, trailing garlic marinade behind it like a leaky oil tanker.

"Oh no," Cherise said.

"Oh yes," I said, and took off running.

The dog was faster than it looked. Everything in Willow Creek is faster than it looks. I went past house three, house four, nearly ate it on the curb at the corner where the green strip starts. Cherise was yelling behind me, cleaver still in hand, which I really hoped no one was filming, because everyone in this subdivision has a doorbell camera and I already know the HOA president has opinions about people running in the street.

"LEFT! It's going left!" Cherise hollered.

It was not going left. It was going toward the pond.

The dog cut left at the pond path, which saved the goat from a swim but doomed the flower beds of house eleven. I followed it straight through a bed of something expensive looking. Pots went everywhere. Dirt everywhere. A garden gnome went down like a soldier.

"Sorry!" I yelled at nobody. The curtains twitched.

The dog cut through the gap between houses eleven and twelve, and I had to turn sideways to fit through the gap. Chet Glover