COCK RESCUE

My sister-in-law invented her job as a literary pre-agent, which, of course, I find to be immoral. Her real name’s plain Frankie, but the “business” goes by The Francesca Deleon Pre-Literary Agency. Frankie’s given name isn’t even Frances, much less “Francesca.” My wife’s parents heard a song, or saw a movie, and named their first-born after it. Sometimes I think about calling the IRS.

“Frankie’s having some trouble,” my wife, Emma, said to me last month. She got named after a long novel by a French guy, after her parents joined some kind of “classic books” book club. If it weren’t for songs, movies, or novels, Emma and Frankie’s parents would’ve named their daughters Anonymous.

I said, “What kind of trouble?”

Emma said, “Well, she’s got a few stalkers, for one. And Frank’s been cheating on her, so she wants to leave him.”

Frankie’s husband’s name is Frank. Frank and Frankie. Together they sound like a backyard barbecue request, if you ask me.

I said, “Well.” I said, “How long?”

Emma—I should mention that my wife and her sister got brought up as Quakers, which will show up as relative later—said, “She thinks he’s been cheating on her for a year. She’s not quite sure. Out of nowhere, Frank says he has to go buy Saran Wrap, or Uncle Ben’s rice, and then he won’t return for two hours. They live within a mile of the closest grocery store.”

I shook my head. I said, “I don’t care about that. I mean, how long is she going to come stay with us?” I thought about the guest bedroom, which we mostly use to store Christmas decorations. And the dog when she rolls on something outside.

I like Frank more than poached eggs. He and I get along. We talk on the phone about once a week, even though we live two hundred-plus miles apart. Emma and I live in northwestern South Carolina, Frankie and Frank in southeastern Georgia. They live in Savannah. Frank and I get along so well, you’d think he’d come up with, “Hey, Doug, I been cheating on Frankie a bunch! You know that Lucky’s Market near where we live? I say I need to go get some Saltines, but really what I’m doing is driving all the way down to Tybee Island and meeting up with (insert mistress’s name here, probably one not named for a song or movie) and screwing her at the DeSoto Hotel, right there on the beach.” But he hasn’t.

No, when we talk it goes like this:

“Georgia’s going to beat shit out of South Carolina Saturday.”

“No they ain’t.

“Uh-huh. You want to make a bet?”

“If you give me sixty points, yeah.”

Or it goes like this:

“It got up to a hundred degrees here today.”

“Here, too.”

Sometimes Frank and I talk about fire ants, moles, the curious fluctuations of CD rates at credit unions, the best new hot sauces on the market, the pros and cons of using a pocket watch, and various joint ailments we both seem to accrue simultaneously. Not once has one of us said, “I can’t take your sister-in-law anymore,” though we have brought up their Quaker-influenced foibles, from whispering to do-goodership.

Anyway, Emma said, “I don’t know. As long as she needs to. She’s my sister, Doug. I can’t turn her away, you know. I wasn’t brought up like that. Maybe you were, but I wasn’t.”

First off, I didn’t have any siblings, so Emma’s little “analogy”—I think that’s the right word—didn’t track. I was an only child, not named for a song, movie, or book. I got named for a general who promised to return, one of my father’s favorite military commanders. From what I understand, he’d tried to talk my mother into Dwight, Stonewall, Ulysses, Robert E., Patton, and Westmoreland, before caving in to plain Douglas. It matters nothing to me. I’m a pacifist. I’m no Quaker, but I don’t believe in war.

I said, “Well.”

Emma said, “She won’t be a bother to us. You’re gone most of the day and night, and she needs to do her work from a computer mostly. It’ll be nothing. I bet we don’t even notice she’s here.”

I didn’t say, “Olive will notice she’s here,” Olive being the dog who liked to roll on carcasses, then come back inside, vanquished to the guest bedroom until I could wash her in tomato juice.

I didn’t have time to think enough to say, “I don’t want stalkers coming to our house,” or “Why don’t I go down to Savannah and hang out with Frank for a while, maybe see what he’s up to.” I said, “She’s not allowed to use the stove.”

Here’s the immoral “pre-agent” stuff: Evidently, real writers need an agent, and they’re hard to come by. Frankie—at the Francesca Deleon Pre-Literary Agency—takes in people’s manuscripts, supposedly reads them, charges $500 to $1000, then sends them off to actual literary agents, with a synopsis of the story. She promises nothing. She doesn’t have some kind of “If it gets taken by a real agent, and that agent sells it to a real publishing company, then I get ten percent of the advance and ten percent of the royalties,” or whatever. She flat-out goes, “I’ll read your book, write a synopsis, send it out to agents, and let you know if they say yea or nay.”

And fucking people buy into it! According to Frank, it’s like one a day. Multiply one times either 500 or 1000 per day, and then per year, and it comes out to anywhere between $182,500 and $365,000. Even if Frank and Frankie exaggerate, I’m thinking she grosses at least a hundred grand per year, which is more than I make as a “chef” at Periodic Farm-to-Table and Chairs, the café Emma and I run in the lower level of a former cotton mill turned condo-shops-and-café.

By “Emma and I,” I mean, really, me. Emma works as an unofficial hostess because, well, she’s good and nice and has that kind of face that makes people want to enter an eating establishment and order everything.

My specialty’s a vegetarian kimchi and farro recipe, though I douse it with canned Vienna sausage juice and don’t tell the diners. People come from two counties over for this bowl. There’s a fried egg I put on top, too—an organic egg, I know, seeing as it comes from my hens out behind our house.

I said to Emma, “Okay, sure, tell Frankie she can come live with us for a while, I need to go into the café and see if I left the gas burner on last night, I’ll catch up with y’all later,” like that.

She said, “I already told her so.” Actually, Emma whispered it. I don’t want to cast aspersions on good Quaker parents, but I have a feeling that they only converted from Presbyterian or Methodist so they could tell their kids to be quiet always, Shhhhhh. And then their kids become Kumbaya fiends, like Emma did, wishing to change the world. “Either late today or early tomorrow. She said she needs to read her horoscope.”

Here’s this:

We have the hens, sure. But Emma started some kind of nearly nonprofit thing to save the lives of roosters, seeing as urban chicken owners don’t want roosters. And because Emma’s slightly naïve—oh, her parents read books and went to movies, but they didn’t have a TV set—she didn’t think twice about sending things out on the social media platforms, you know, things I don’t understand since I’m too busy digging up fucking kimchi out in the backyard, things like “Cock Rescue!” I didn’t know about all this until too late. How could I have known? I don’t walk behind my wife nonstop, making sure that she doesn’t err. Me, I’m enthralled with things like white sauce and bouillabaisse. Like etouffée and gumbo. Like my compost heap.

I called up Frank from the kitchen of Periodic Farm-to-Table and Chairs. It didn’t go half a ring. He said, “Hey, Doug.”

I said, “Man, what the fuck?”

He said, “I told you. I told you Georgia was going to beat y’allses asses.”

I said, “They didn’t win by sixty, though. You owe me. How much was that bet we made?”

He said, “Same as always, right?”

My sous chef Hernando looked at me, holding a grip of fresh radishes. I shrugged. I said to him, “Bueno.” He went off to slice them thinly. To Frank I said, “What’s the story with Frankie showing up here?”

He said, “Goddamn I wish you liked the beach better. The waves are amazing today. I might go get a surfboard from Chu’s. They got to be three, four feet.”

In my mind I thought about how a three-foot wave wasn’t much for surfing. I held the receiver closer to my ear because the goddamn roosters that Emma rescued—we couldn’t keep them anywhere near our backyard, of course, what with the hens—cock-a-fucking-doodle-dooed nonstop in an enclosure I’d made behind the old cotton mill, complete with a chickenwire roof so hawks didn’t swoop down for a buffet. This happened to be the beginning of the “nonprofit,” by the way. My wife had rescued a half-dozen roosters, and, from what I understood, got online to ask who wanted a free rooster. The whole reason I can tell this story is because Emma came up with the notion to save roosters and her sister decided to leave the marriage all at the same time. It wasn’t that much different than when a hurricane came in from the coast and a high series of thunderstorms hit the Appalachians, boom!, big-ass flood somewhere about the middle of that one river, back right after the Civil War, or maybe the 1990s, I forget.

I said, “I hear you got some kind of girlfriend, man.”

He said, “What? What? I can’t hear you.”

I turned to Ramon and said, “Hey, turn down that Waring Big Stix Series Heavy-Duty Immersion Blender!” like that, even though Ramon needed to get a head start on our special pureed mashed potato/squash/cauliflower side dish. Then I held my palm up to Ramon and apologized. Normally I would just say “blender,” but Ramon needed to learn as many English words as possible.

I walked out the back door and said, “Sorry, man, I’m here again.”

Frank said, “Before you start cutting my ass, let me just say that it’s difficult to be married to a woman who makes a shit ton of money. You’d think I’d be happy! It’s not that way. I try not to be old-fashioned about it! But I’m not the man I want to be. For a long time I thought it was all right building cabinets and whatnot for all these historic homes down here! Now I see things in a different light.”

I didn’t say how his sentences went up and down with those exclamation marks. I couldn’t! He might’ve been my best friend, besides Hernando and Ramon.

“Frank isn’t cheating on you, Frankie,” I said when she arrived at our house, a regular house, a plain ranch-style with a half-basement, the morning after I learned of her runaway tendencies. “I talked to him. I flat-out asked him. He says you’re making this shit up.” I opened the door wider, for she carried a large file box with a fancy MacBook balanced on top. “Listen, he’d tell me if he was cheating on you.”

Emma happened to be in the shower. Frankie must’ve left her house at four in the morning. I hadn’t even put on my toque yet, ready to go buy fresh mussels driven up I-26 from the coast, or lamb chops I charged way too much money for only because I could plop them down in that cauliflower/potato/squash puree so that they looked like a replica of full-sailed Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria sailing off into the Atlantic.

Frankie wore normal blue jeans and a T-shirt with a photograph of a mule on it. Who wears such attire? I wondered if real agents up in New York dressed thusly, though with T-shirts emblazoned with Secretariat, or Mr. Ed. Frankie said, “Hello, Doug.” The way she said my name, it came out like a past tense verb.

I told her to come in, that her sister was in the shower, that we didn’t expect her so early. I said, “I like your new earrings.” She wore two hoops in a place that weren’t her lobes.

She sidled in and set the box on our kitchen table. Frankie said, “These aren’t earrings, Doug. They’re daith piercings, to stop migraines.”

Emma came out of the bathroom, wet-headed, wearing a terrycloth robe. She said, “Oh, Frankie,” in a way that sounded on par with “Oh I can’t believe someone died.”

“It’ll be temporary,” Frankie said. “I won’t be here long.” To me she said, “Hey, Doug, would you mind getting my suitcases and those two trunks out of the rental?” She said to my wife, “Listen, I don’t know if I’m going to Baltimore or Memphis, but I’m going somewhere where it’s best for a literary pre-agent.”

I’m not making this up. Don’t most people arrive at seven a.m and say, “I sure could use a cup of coffee”?

I said, “No.” I said, “Can’t do it. I’m on my way out the door to buy mussels and lamb chops. Don’t touch the stove while I’m gone.”

I thought to myself, Ha ha ha ha ha—setting some boundaries here.

Emma looked at me as if to say, Come on, Doug, be supportive of my hurting older sister. Frankie looked at me as if to say, You’re a jerk. Emma looked at her sister as if to say, I’m sorry he’s an asshole. Frankie looked at my wife as if to say, He’s like every other man on this planet, and that’s why I’m charging twice as much for men to be their pre-agents.

My wife screamed out, “You aren’t going to the market to buy tonight’s food—you’re having an affair with someone!”

By “screamed” I mean that she said it in a normal voice, what with her being Quaker. I shuddered.

I should mention that Frankie and Emma looked like twins, though my wife didn’t have the exact number of crow’s feet, nor the crease above her nose. Emma kept a natural brown hair color, as opposed to her sister’s jet-black dye job. My wife’s boobs hadn’t been rectified, but her posture didn’t slump as if two large birds perched on her shoulders. Emma’s eyes sparkled, whereas Frankie’s eyes could’ve been slotted into a shark’s head should said shark not own dead-enough irises. I’d seen Frankie’s bare feet once, and her next-to-big toe hung out a good inch past the big toe, whereas my wife’s feet dwindled down in a regular and traditional alignment.

I said, “Yeah, I’ll get your stuff out of the car.”

As I walked out the door I heard my sister-in-law say, “Can I just set up the kitchen table as my work space? I always do my work in the morning, so I need to get started.”

First off, let me say that it wasn’t a rental car outside. Frankie’d leased one of those utility vans from Penske. She had two trunks and a few suitcases, sure, but also her fine china, silverware, a low boy, chifforobe, some tin cut-out paintings of devils done by an Outsider artist named R.A. Miller, one rolled up Oriental rug, and a life-size porcelain Dalmatian.

It took a good hour to pull things into the house. I had to go find the hand trucks leaned against our storage shed out back, next to the chicken coop. By the time I got done and threw on my toque, Emma’d gone back into the bedroom to pluck her eyebrows and Frankie sat at our kitchen table, laptop open, two manuscripts spread all over the place. I looked over her shoulder on my way to make a thermos of bloody Marys, only to find Frankie taking some kind of online IQ test that involved identifying historical figures. She seemed to be stumped on side-by-side photos of Sojourner Truth and Eleanor Roosevelt, the question being, “Which one of these women was a first lady?”

Listen, I don’t condone people running around on their spouses, but I immediately underwent an image of Frank, there at the DeSoto Hotel in Tybee Island, with a woman who knew the difference between, say, Susan B. Anthony and Rosa Parks.

I yelled toward the back of the house, “Honey, I’ll call up. Are you coming in later?”

Frankie placed her palms to her ears. She said, “Shhhhh.” She said, “Come on, Doug, give it a break, buddy.”

I whispered to her, “I don’t know why Frank would ever stray.”

My worst competitor, Billy Dyson, from Billy D’s Meat and 3’s, got the last of the lamb chops on the day that my sister-in-law showed up to ruin our lives. Who the fuck has lamb as one of the meats? I thought. I mean, every Meat and Three I knew offered pork chops, chicken breasts, cube steak, maybe turkey. They offered hamburger steak, meatloaf, fried chicken, stew beef, chicken and dumplings, maybe one of the freshwater bottom-feeder fishes, like tilapia or catfish. And I’m no English major, but I know enough to know that “3’s” isn’t correct, that it should either be “3s” or “Threes.” “3’s” stands for “Three is.” I bet my pre-literary agent sister-in-law knows that rule.

I got my mussels, sure, fine, but there would be no lamb chops on the menu on this particular night. I got oysters, shrimp, mackerel, mussels, and some venison, but no lamb. I got crawdads. I got blood sausage, but no lamb.

The menu would feature a couscous dish, I figured. I didn’t want to go around spouting things like “We’re trying to change the palates of Woodruffians,” for it would sound like a communist plot to the locals. Sometimes I disguised the entrees. For instance, whenever Hernando, Ramon, and I concocted a beautiful pork belly and quince with black pudding and sage stuffing, I printed out on the chalkboard plain “Pig.” Bouillabaisse? Bream and Catfish Stew.

I might’ve been in the kitchen two hours, working hard, grab-assing with Hernando and Ramon, when Emma and Frankie sidled in, my wife smiling, my sister-in-law blowing hair out of her eyes and looking either distraught or bored or frustrated. What I’m saying is, she didn’t look happy. Emma might’ve said to me, “Frankie got finished with her work early, and I thought maybe she could help me roll silverware.”

I yelled out at everyone, “Hey, turn down the Hobart! Turn down the mixer! Someone turn the gas off the stove so I can hear Emma above the barely discernible hissing!”

Frankie blew her hair out of her eyes again. I said, “You got done with your work,” I pulled out my vintage Elgin railroad watch, “that fast? Do you know how much money you’re making per hour?” I looked at Emma and said, “Say all that again, honey. I couldn’t hear you.”

She said, “A man called about one of the roosters. He’s supposed to meet me here at eleven.” She looked at her own wristwatch, a regular wind-up Timex I didn’t think they even made anymore. I don’t want to say anything bad about Emma and Frankie’s parents, but I always felt as if they lived about one step away from a sundial.

Frankie said, “No, I didn’t finish my work, for your information. Your wife thinks I shouldn’t be left alone, Doug.” Again, she said my name as if it fell from her mouth and clunked onto the floor.

I told them to do what they had to do. I told Emma to see if maybe she could talk this guy into taking two or three free roosters, and to spread the word. I said, “Your do-goodership has paid off.”

She said, “I feel as though I finally found a reason to be on this planet. Cock Rescue was my calling, all along.”

And with that, someone knocked on the Employees Only/Deliveries kitchen back door. The knocker chose to employ that hackneyed Shave and a Haircut rap, waited a few beats, then hit Two Bits. I looked around to see no one absent or tardy from work. The UPS guy, Wesley, just let himself in, as did our other vendors, from beer to local herbalists or whatever.

The same knock occurred, followed by a man singsonging out, “Huh-lowwww.” Then either he, or one of the roosters, barked out a nice cock-a-doodle-doo.

Frankie happened to stand closest to the door and, without asking anyone, opened it.

I don’t know if the guy leaned full force or what. I’ve always thought this particular door should open out, for fire safety reasons, among other things—like Ramon once getting stunned a while back when he bent down to pick up a clove of garlic, the door opened, and the knob caught him right on the temple.

We could smell him before anything else. One of those colognes from the 1970s. Aramis, I’d bet. He must’ve spilled it on his lap while driving over. Afterwards came booze, what I imagined to be Jack Daniels. He wore a brand-new, red, Make America Great Again trucker’s cap, an untucked yellow golf shirt with an outline of America over his left breast and a flag plopped down in Georgia, green polyester pants, and tasseled penny loafers. He carried under one arm a box of Franzia white wine and held a twelve-pack of Bud Lite in the other.

This white guy was probably in his late twenties, early thirties, and sported a mustache two shades darker than his hair, an immaculately trimmed mustache.

He barged in, zipper down, penis out.

Because Periodic Farm-to-Table and Chairs’ back door faces the east, a glare came in with him, and—looking back—I imagine he thought a spotlight shone on us. His first words weren’t, “I’m the guy interested in rescuing a rooster,” of course.

I said to Emma and Frankie, “Y’all go in the dining area.” I said, “Now,” just like my brother-in-law Frank would’ve done.

“Goddamn it,” the idiot said. “Goddamn it, goddamn it, goddamn it. This one them shows catch a child molester?”

I said to Ramon, “Hand me one of those chicken deboners.”

The guy dropped his booze and ran, of course. He got in his big-ass truck, complete with NRA decals, a Confederate flag front license plate, three MAGA bumper stickers that advertised the Wall, Traditional Marriage, and the ability to say “Merry Christmas.” He had a gun rack he used to hold his umbrella. I memorized his back license plate and called the highway patrol, the sheriff’s department, 911, in that order. I gave descriptions of the driver, the truck, and the situation, knowing that if he should get caught and questioned that he’d deny everything, and it would just be one more useless He Said/Chef Said situation never to be tried in a court of law. Maybe they could get him on driving under the influence, though. Maybe it would teach him a lesson before trying, again, to rescue a supposed cock.

It took some time before I realized that the guy might’ve been looking for a young boy. Because of Emma’s quiet voice—and this would ruin our lovemaking scenarios for a couple months—she kind of sounded like a Little Leaguer pre-voice change.

Back in the dining room, thirty minutes before opening for the lunch crowd, I found my wife and sister-in-law unfurling linen tablecloths. I didn’t raise my voice, though I had to remind myself not to do so. I’m no nurse practitioner, but I’d guess my heart rate ran somewhere in the 140 to 160 beats a minute range. I said, “Emma. Tell me something.”

She said, “Frankie knows that Frank’s not cheating on her. She just feels as though she missed something over the years. And she feels as though she’s being taken for granted.”

I looked at Frankie. I said, “Well. Good. That’s good. Frank’s a stand-up guy. If I were a woman, I’d want to be married to someone like Frank. If I were a gay man, I’d want to be married to Frank, too, should he be gay.”

Frankie said, “Is Frank gay?”

I shook my head. I said, “Listen, honey, what exactly did you say to this fucker on the phone?”

“It was all done on the internet,” she said. “We connected via Instant Messenger.”

Frankie said, “I knew my stalkers would follow me everywhere. He was one of my stalkers, I bet!”

I said to Frankie, “Really? You just admitted that you didn’t think Frank cheated on you. I bet you don’t have any stalkers, either. Listen, you’re charging a thousand dollars for hopeless people? That doesn’t sound so Quaker to me. It sounds Baptist. Pentecostal. Pretty much all the others, but not Quaker, or Unitarian.”

She blew hair out of her eyes. In a previous life Emma’s sister must’ve been a Thalidomide baby. She said to me, “I tell you who should be writing a memoir. After seeing you in action just now? You, Doug.” This time “Doug” came out like a slow-moving ice floe. She said, “The way that door came flying open when that man crashed in, I might get PTSD.”

Emma kept going, saying, “That man wrote to me, ‘Do you rescue cocks?’ and I said, ‘No, I provide them for people to rescue.’ And he said, ‘I bet I know a cock that needs rescuing,’ and I wrote, ‘I hope so!’ and gave him this address. That was it. Did I do something wrong?”

In my mind I thought about how there were probably even more double-entendres that Emma didn’t grasp. I said, “You two will get PTSD. He probably had PTSTD.” It came to me, just like that. I’ve been thinking about having an Open Mic Comedy Night, maybe on Thursdays, and participating myself.

Frankie said, “If that guy ends up in jail, he’ll have time to write about his experiences. I wonder if he needs a pre-agent.”

I looked at her as if she might be spawned from one of Satan’s wives. I said, “You need to go back to Savannah. You’ve made an egregious error.”

Hernando opened the swinging door, stuck his head out of the kitchen, and said, “We’re out of grit.” I didn’t correct him. I pulled out my pocket watch and thought about how I might have to add something like a croque monsieur to the menu later, easy.

Frankie said, “Will you talk to Frank for me? I don’t know if he’ll take me back.”

I thought, a real agent would, if there was possible money in the conversation. I said, “Sure thing, Frankie.” I said, “Listen, why don’t y’all go back home. We got it covered here.” My two waitresses and one waiter showed up, all looking as if they snorted cocaine through a tequila bottle the night before.

Emma said, “I’m sorry, honey.”

I shook my head. “Good thing to learn early on. You might want to close down your website and change its name, and you can still find roosters a good home, hopefully far, far away from here.”

She pecked me on the cheek. So did her sister.

I thought, the world needs more of these people, naïve and well-meaning. I thought, if everyone was as naïve and well-meaning, then people like me wouldn’t have to exist on the planet. That might not be a bad thing.

I made a mental note that deputies might show up later to ask questions, that I needed to tell Hernando and Ramon to take the rest of the day off, or at least go back to my house and hide until I called in an All Clear. I found myself unknowingly sticking the deboner into my right thigh. Then I went out back behind the café, opened six cages, and told the roosters to strut onward, range wide.