By Dorotea Mendoza
An uncle spreads the fowl’s wing on a wooden block. Another uncle seizes the head. A third clasps the feet. In another world, another time, back in the remote villages in the Philippines, one uncle would be enough to restrain the animal. Here, behind a two-level wood-framed house in Queens, New York, it takes three men. The uncle with the chicken head holds a thin, two-foot-long stick over the body. He mumbles some prayer or chant, or maybe, an apology. He raises the stick at shoulder level. He brings the stick down, hits the inside of the wing with enough force to break veins, but gentle enough to keep the wing bone and skin intact. He works from the tip of the wing in. The other two uncles join the mumbling, soft and slow.
Nine-year-old Dalisay, the youngest in the household and the only one born in the United States, is sitting away from the uncles, imitating their squat and mumbling. Only she is not mumbling a prayer, but a plea, her voice breaking from a courageous attempt at holding back an all-out sobbing. She creeps closer and closer toward the three men. She keeps her hands balled up under her chin, afraid to make a noise, to break the trance lest their onslaught descend upon her instead. “Uncle,” she finally snivels.
“I told you to go inside.” The uncle is firm.
The uncle with the stick calls out for Dalisay’s father, his youngest brother. “Oy! Come get your daughter.” When the father doesn’t come, he lets go of the stick and the chicken head, stands up, and yanks Dalisay to her feet. He drags her to the house, continuing to call out for the father, who appears at the door as Dalisay stumbles. The uncle shoves Dalisay’s wrist in his hand.
Before the father can protest the handling of his daughter, and before the uncle can justify his temper, Dalisay says, “Gilda...”
“What’s that, ubing?” The father bends down to Dalisay’s level.
“Gilda...Gilda Flip.”
“You let her name the chicken? I told you not to let her play with it.” The uncle marches back to the ceremony and resumes his place.
Inside the kitchen, Dalisay’s mother, aunts, and cousins chop sayote , boil water, stir pork-fat flavored seafood chowder. A simmering pot belches a thick odor of ginger and lime.
“We talked about this,” the father says to Dalisay. “It’s for your great-grandfather.”
“What’s going on?” The mother pauses her chopping.
“Nothing, dear. I’ll take care of it.”
“It’s that chicken, isn’t it?”
“Ha! We’re having Dalisay’s pet for dinner,” the oldest cousin, the stick-uncle’s first-born, chimes in.
“You’re not helping.” Dalisay’s aunt shushes the cousin, swatting his words away with a dishtowel.
The father ignores the exchange, concerned only with his daughter. “C’mon, ubing, let’s watch TV.”
Dalisay shakes her head. She leads her father to the window, to the one corner with no activity. She climbs on a high stool and settles herself. “Can I stay here, dad?” she whispers.
“Okay.” He kisses the top of her head. “I’ll get you something to eat, yes?”
“Okay.”
The father gives Dalisay a bowl of dinuguan , pork blood stew. “Your favorite,” he says.
He had made the stew the previous day for a potluck end-of-term luncheon at her school. No one had dared touch the dish. Dalisay too had stayed away from it after her classmates wrinkled their noses, made gagging gestures at the platter. Dalisay and three classmates took a small cup of the stew and tried to give it to the class pets. The two Guinea Pigs squirmed inside their cage. The dinuguan spilled. A teacher rushed over and reminded them, “Girls, what did we learn this year? We take care of Rhonda and Rae. Be kind to animals, remember? Let’s clean them up.”
“I have to go and help lolo get ready,” the father says after Dalisay has taken three spoonfuls of the stew. “You’ll be okay here?”
“Yes, dad.”
Alone, Dalisay does not take another bite. She leaves her spoon to drown in the deep bowl of dark brown gravy. She watches, hidden from view now, the ritual outside, the uncles’ work with the bird. It’s great-grandfather’s 100th birthday. The family is cooking, for the first time outside their native land, the special pinikpikan chicken dish. Not exactly great-grandfather’s favorite delicacy, but one that most reminded him and the others of life in the northern mountains of their hometown. Preparation is the key. The bird must be kept alive throughout the beating, its heart continuing to pump blood that seep through broken veins and into its flesh. That and the burning of still-attached feathers make the most tender and flavorful smoky chicken dark meat. Back home, though, it isn’t just about the taste. Back home a village priest handles the bird, calls on ancestors for help in ensuring someone’s safe passage into the next life. Here, great-grandfather has to settle for three relatives who may or may not remember the associated prayers.
As for the bird, which back home must always be a native barn chicken, the family has to make do with a commercial hybrid, a cross between White Plymouth Rock and White Cornish. The family got the chicken two weeks earlier. They patched the backyard fence and let the creature roam free. They fed it what they would feed their chickens back home: watermelon rinds, sunflower seeds, banana leaves, cassava, root vegetables. Dalisay begged her father to let her feed the chicken. He did, despite warnings from the others. And Dalisay was enthusiastic. She named it after her favorite Gilda Flip, a bespectacled, spunky, prankster-in-training from The Electric Company children’s show. “Here, Gilda, Gilda,” she called to it.
Now, by the kitchen window, Dalisay hears Gilda, though her muted squawks cannot possibly be audible from under uncle’s grip, the same one that thrust her inside just moments ago. He finishes with one wing and switches to the other. The bird cries out in pain. Dalisay watches despite herself; she cannot look away.
Dalisay hops off the stool and leaves the kitchen. Out of sight, she grabs her mother’s cellphone from a hall table, and runs up the carpeted stairs, short, lean legs wanting but unable to leap two steps at a time. Brown boxes and stacks of Filipino-American tabloids on each tread narrow the stairwell. She heads to the bathroom, the only room where she can have privacy in this four-bedroom house shared by four generations. She locks the door. Standing on the toilet bowl, she opens the sliding window and screen. From here, Dalisay can see the full length of the splayed-out Gilda. She sees the strength it takes for the uncles to hold down the little thing, the raised veins and tightened muscles in their skinny forearms, sweat wetting the underarms and backs and collars of their T-shirts.
Dalisay knows she must do the right thing. There is only one right thing. Before she can hesitate, she calls emergency service, reports animal cruelty. “Please hurry,” she says. She gives the address and the cross streets and quickly disconnects the call. She thinks she heard someone outside the bathroom door. But, no, the noise must have come from below, where the hustle and bustle continue, voices instructing, voices acknowledging instructions, laughter, knives hitting chopping boards, pots being dragged from musty bottom cabinets, water running.
The squatting uncles are about done battering the insides of the chicken’s wings. A cousin starts a fire in an open-faced charcoal grill. The uncles’ lips are still moving. They keep their heads bowed. The din from cars along Roosevelt Avenue, some rushing to Shea Stadium for an afternoon baseball game, the sound of a basketball bouncing on pavement, hitting metal backboard and rim, the merry yells of young men playing soccer in one of the empty lots—all of these do not drown Gilda’s sounds.
Dalisay hears sirens, but they’re moving away, responding to some other urgent call. A Flushing-bound seven train moans along the tracks, enters the Jackson Heights station, screeches to a stop. Another round of sirens. This time they’re moving closer. The uncles are still at it, now working on the chicken’s breast, still mumbling foreign words. Dalisay sticks her head out farther to listen to where the sirens are coming from, how far away they are. Directly below, Dalisay’s father escorts the great-grandfather to a bench in front of the fire. They sit together, and share a plate of sour mango dipped in anchovy sauce. Father chews slices of the fruit. Great-grandfather, feeble but happy, face half-hidden under a cap, rim bent and frayed, sucks the dip and the fruit’s juice. Briny and tart. Saliva forms under Dalisay’s tongue.
Dalisay’s father leaves great-grandfather on the bench and joins the uncles.
The sirens are much closer. Between the low rooftops, the flashing lights, now under the elevated subway tracks, across the boulevard.
The father takes the stick from the uncle. Squatting over Gilda, he takes over the beating.
Dalisay, a sudden lightness in her head and belly, bolts out of the bathroom. The police have been dispatched. Too late to call them back. She runs down the stairs. Grabbing the end of the banister, she turns into the hallway, leaps over a bag of groceries, and lands half an inch from the white box with great grandfather’s birthday cake. A pot is knocked over. Someone screams. Dalisay is panting. She knows what to do. She zooms into the backyard, toward her uncles, her father, toward Gilda, the heat of the fire.
Dorotea Mendoza was born in the Philippines and grew up in New York City. Her fiction has appeared in Flash: International Short-Short Story Magazine, Contrary Magazine, Literary Orphan, Cecile’s Writers Magazine, Ginger Magazine, and Podium Literary Journal. In 2016, Mendoza was selected to read her fiction in PBS/WNET’s Open Mic Night. In 2015, her novel in progress, When Fish Drown, was shortlisted for the University of East Anglia David T.K. Wong Fellowship.