Roasted Chicken (standard:travel stories, 1267 words)
Author: radiodenver	Added: Jul 23 2005	Views/Reads: 3387/2312	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
"...At her feet stood the yellow hound dog, scarred and bedraggled, his tongue hanging loosely across his slobbering jowl. In her hand she held a half plucked chicken..."

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"Shut up." My brother barked with a whisper. 

"What the hell's going on?" I whispered. 

My brother stopped the van and poked his head through the open window. 

"We're looking for a moto-cross track. Do you know where the moto-cross
track is around here?" He asked. 

The grizzled old codger stepped up to the van and held up his arm. At
the end of this arm was...nothing. He didn't have a hand. He had a 
stump. Not just a stump, but a stump covered with masking tape. Not 
fresh masking tape, but masking tape that looked as though it had been 
in place for several days. It was dirty and peeling, wrapped neatly 
around the stump on the end of his arm and protruding from the old grey 
jacket. 

Time froze. What probably lasted only 30 seconds felt like an eternity
as each of us gazed at the knurly stump armed man and his toothless 
wife and bedraggled yellow dog as they stood along side the road next 
to a burning tire, plucking a chicken. 

"The track is over that-a way about 2 miles." The old man said. 

"Thanks a lot." My brother replied, and with that he stomped his foot on
the accelerator and we sped away from the scene in the direction the 
old man had pointed. 

The old man was right. The moto-cross track was exactly where he had
pointed with his masking tape covered stumpy arm. We had a great day at 
the track that day. My brother won both the open and 250cc class races 
he entered. We joked about the scene from the roadside the whole day 
and found our way back to Kentucky with no effort afterwards. 

To this day, my brother and I both tell this story, though seldom
together. We live far apart now and have for many years so we do not 
get to see one another very often, but still, we have the same basic 
version of this story. 

These days, when I go to a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant or to the
grocery and see the roasted chickens, my mind will drift back to 
Southern Indiana and to the disheveled old couple standing by the 
roadside roasting a chicken over a burning tire and I wonder. 

I wonder if those folks were homeless and that was the only food they
had to eat. 

I wonder if those folks were often found roaming the country roads of
Southern Indiana. 

I wonder if the people that lived around there knew of these folks
strife and what if anything was ever done to help them. 

I wonder each of these things, but more often than not, I wonder if that
scruffy yellow dog got any of that chicken.


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