Free Shoveling Smoke by Austin Davis

back and his elbows sticking out at a weird angle. I turned to get a better look and almost landed in a bar ditch. It was a big, ugly bird. fifty yards further was a sign announcing that I was passing the Triple-B Emu and Ostrich Farm. Next to the sign stood another bird that looked too shaggy and too stout to be an ostrich. That must be an emu. The bird stood completely still, poised as if expecting me to paint its picture.
    Ostriches had been a coming thing in Texas for some time, but this was the first ostrich ranch I had seen. Well, I thought, why not ostriches? Weren’t they the biggest birds in the world, and wasn’t this Texas, where big was an obsession? Maybe Texas farmers were breeding ostriches to take over as the state bird. I passed two other ostrich farms as I crisscrossed the countryside.
    The locusts were going full blast when I finally found a place that fit Stroud’s description, a little yellow house with lace curtains and bright lavender trim on the windows and eaves, the sort of place you knew at a glance would be crammed with country knickknacks. The house looked deserted, but when I knocked at the door a curtain moved, and a man’s voice asked me my name. I gave it, the door opened, and I walked in to meet Hardwick Chandler.
    “About fucking time,” he said.
    He was a short man, five-ten, maybe forty-five years old, and plump as a football, with a tremendous throat bound tightly by three gold chains. He had short, curly red hair and pinkish, freckled skin, much of which I could see because the woman’s silk kimono he was wearing was wholly inadequate to the task of covering his immense stomach. The only other thing he was wearing was a pair of handcuffs, which dangled from his left wrist.
    “Hardwick Chandler?” I asked.
    “In the flesh,” he replied. Snatching the hangers out of my hands, he tossed the kimono on the floor and began to dress with frantic speed, the handcuff flapping around him. Chandler was so obese that when he moved, different parts of him seemed to vibrate on their own separate frequencies. The effect was one of immense energy being let loose all over his body. The pink-speckled roll of fat around his middle rippled in counterpoint to the flab of his neck and his upper arms as he worked his trousers up one leg and then the next.
    “I had to break the damn bed,” he said, holding up the dangling handcuffs. “She’ll chew my ass good for that.” He told me he’d been in bed for four straight days with the woman who owned the house, whose name was Deirdre. The only time Deirdre would unlock him was when he had to go to the bathroom. They had had a fight that morning, and Deirdre had walked out, leaving him cuffed to the bed. I asked him what happened to the clothes he had been wearing when he arrived.
    “Maybe she took them with her, for spite,” he replied. Then he smiled. “Or maybe they just burned up. Things got pretty hot in here.”
    His wrist where the handcuff hung looked badly chafed and a little swollen.
    “Are you okay?” I asked him.
    “Love’s a hurtin’ thing,” he replied. He slid the handcuff into his shirtsleeve, followed it with his arm in a practiced motion that made me wonder if this sort of thing had happened to him before. When he was fully dressed, he stepped back into the front room to get a look at himself in a mirror, then offered me his unencumbered hand to shake.
    “Wick Chandler,” he said, as if the last three minutes had never happened. “It’s great to meet you, Clay.”
    After the introductions, our next order of business was to get the cuff off his wrist. He told me that he had turned the house upside down looking for the key, and sure enough, the place looked as if a pack of wild dogs had been set loose in it. So we went out into the backyard, where there was an anvil sitting on a couple of cinderblocks. Nearby on the ground was a big axe. Chandler laid his wrist on the anvil and invited me to strike the locked cuff with