The Chicken Zoo, part I: The murder (a non-fiction novel)

[This story is based on my experiences as a reporter for The Delaware State News from 1990-93. Some names and dates have been changed. This was part of my unpublished novel, "The Chicken Zoo," that I wrote five years ago.]

I was never a big fan of covering cop stories.

I know, I know. If you’re a reporter, you should love death and destruction, right? Isn’t that every reporter’s dream, to be crack some big murder case, stand in the middle of the room and shout, “Aha! After weeks of great investigation, I have determined the identity of the killer!” I always feel like I’m sort of a buzzard that preys on people when they’re at their most vulnerable. It’s like this O.J. mentality where everybody obsesses over who-killed-who-and-left-blood-where [I barely watched that whole Simpson thing when it unfolded on television]. Then throw some sex and drugs into the whole thing, and watch the ratings go up even more, and the advertisement dollars reach six-figures. And then some opportunistic editor or television producer wants you to go victim’s parents’ house and chronicle their gut-wrenching grief. If they say nothing, that’s bad. Try again. If they express their grief without emotion, that’s OK. But keep going. If they cry, bullseye!

Screw that. I’d much rather meet up with Earl Jones at the farm and talk to him all afternoon about how the drought turned his corn stalks into brittle sticks. Or how about mayor who skims $100,000 from the town treasury and uses it to build a new porch on his house? That excites me.

Yeah, I know. Zzzzzz. That shit happens all the time. Believe me, I know what America likes and dislikes. I’ve lived my whole life like a human car wreck, and I see how people react when I tell them about all the stupid, reckless things I’ve done. I see their eyes bulge. I see them laugh. Then they tell 40 friends and I look like a universal idiot. But, hey, that shit excites people. That shit gets the blood flowing.

But it doesn’t mean that I have to like it.

So you could imagine my frustration when I got my first newspaper job out of college, and one of my first assignments was to cover a murder. Ugh. I mean, c’mon guys, the first day? I was half-awake for this, too – I had just moved into my apartment the night before. I didn’t have a lot to pack, but it took a while anyway – all day Saturday and then half the day Sunday. I didn’t leave until 7 p.m. I was told it would take two-and-half hours to drive from the Jersey Shore to Dover, Del. It took me four, largely because my mattress flew off my roof and landed in a puddle on the New Jersey Turnpike. The problem? I didn’t tie it tight enough. What can I say? Old habits die hard.

Monday morning, I threw on a set of clothes – a shirt with holes wearing through the elbows, and a pair of polyester pants that was so snug around the thighs, I had a hard time zipping my zippers. Hey, it was cheap shit. I had no job, no money. There was a recession going on. Reagan left office and left Bush and the rest of us to hold the bag. Besides, I was moving to Dover, Del., the trailer-park capital of the world, so I was told. Was there any need for Ralph Lauren? What, to impress women? Shit. I hadn’t gotten a real date since my girlfriend dumped me almost two years before.

At that point, I had no use for them, anyway. The last one I had left on some junior-year-abroad thing when I was a senior at Rutgers. She told me a thousand times, “I love you! I love you!” And then the minute she got off the plane in Israel, she met an Israeli soldier and I was history. Yeah, she loved me all right. Me? I was laying in bed all day, sick as a dog. Every couple of hours or so, I’d bend over the toilet, stick two fingers down my throat and puke my guts up. What can I say? It made me feel better. But then I lost 50 pounds in a month, and friends started calling me “Karen Carpenter.” The peer pressure and the ensuing embarrassment worked. So I stopped.
So I had no one to dress for, really. Not even for myself. Those polyester pants were wrapped so tightly, I sweated right through them. But, fuck it. I wore them anyway. I didn’t even really car that I was practically drenched as I drove in to the parking lot around 9 a.m. that Monday, ready to work.

I docked my car just beneath a small platform that carried a big, 10-by-11 sign. “The Delaware State News” it said. The sign was really too big. It’s not like people couldn’t figure out what this place is. It certainly wasn’t Times Square. Nothing surrounded it, except for a cornfield. There was no place to get a cup of coffee, no place to pick up a newspaper or even a corn muffin. No downtown, no Greenwich Village. Nothing. Just a cornfield. All my dreams I had of becoming a big-time journalist, and this was what I got. Thanks, God.

Whatever. I didn’t have time to think about it. Besides, as I walked toward the front door, a small, dark-haired woman with an unlit cigarette dangling in her lips came running, waving a cell phone at me. It was Jenny Cunningham, the editor. She wasn’t ready to give me a moment to breathe.

“Stop right there!” Jenny yelled.

“What?”

“I need to cover something,” she said. “There was a murder in Driftwood Beach. Here – I wrote out some directions for you. And take this cell phone – it doesn’t work too well, but it’ll do.”
“Who was involved?” I asked.

“I don’t know. You’ll have to figure that out,” she said. “I heard it over the scanner – some big dude was shot on the beach…”

“Shouldn’t I call first?”

“No time for that – just go!”

I grabbed the directions – they were written on a tiny stick note – and the telephone, hopped in my car and zipped out. Jenny stood at the curb, lit her cigarette and watched me – watched me good – until I slipped out of sight.

The directions were fabulous, even if they were hard to read. Maybe they were fabulous because the roads weren’t too hard to navigate. These roads were very flat, and very straight. No twists, no turns, no trees. They just ran through old dried up farmland that seemed endless. There was a lot of water – a lot of it that seemed to be running off the irrigation lines that cut through the green landscape, forming puddles on the roads and digging potholes in the asphalt. Occasionally, my car would hit one – BAM! – and shocked the frame so much that it vibrated.

But I didn’t slow up – I was too afraid to. Jenny called me every five minutes, giving me more and more questions to ask the cops. I tried to write them down as I was driving, but that didn’t work. So I had to stop, and I wrote them out on two pieces of paper I ripped out of my notebook:

“Who killed him?”

“What was he wearing?”

“Does he know the mayor of Dover?”

“Does he know the governor?”

“What was his favorite newspaper?”

“Was he black?”

“Was he gay?”

“Did he have any scars?”

When I got there, a bunch of kids saw me, and heard my tires make a crunching noise as they rolled on the gravel streets. They ran toward my car and surrounded it as I parked. Then they looked up at me as I threw open the car door and stood among them, carrying a new reporter’s pad in one hand, and a ballpoint pen in the other.

“Yeah?” I said to them.

They paused, before one of them yelled out: “A dead body’s out there!”
He was about 9, but pretty small for his age. He wore a Dale Earnhardt T-shirt and a pair of red shorts that ran past his knees.

"Hey," I said. "What's your name?"

"Evan," the boy said. “What’s yours?”

“Tom Davis,” I said. “I’m from The Delaware State News.”

“Wanna go see the body?”

Before I could answer, I looked down at the boy’s red hands. There was blood – sort of a darkish red color, like it was a few hours old. It was already crusting underneath his nails.

"My God, what is that?" I asked.

Evan laughed, and held up his hands in my face. "Got it from Mr. Cramner out on the beach. He's laying out there, all stiff and shit."

Christ, I thought. Where the hell am I? And why were all these kids all over the place? Wasn’t anybody supervising these children?

“Wanna go?” Evan asked.

“Where’s your parents?”

“Aw fuck ‘em,” he said.

“What?”

“Mom’s cooking dinner,” he said. “Besides, if she knew we wanted to go out there, she wouldn’t let us.”

I looked around. It was true. There wasn’t an adult anywhere. Not even a cop. But wait, why would the cops dispatch the call and not be here? I couldn’t make sense of any of this. But maybe I shouldn’t have tried.

“So you’re all I’ve got?”

“Yip.”
“Christ,” I said, “what the fuck should I do?”

“You could follow us, and get to see it,” Evan said. “Or you could wait for the cop, who’ll make you wait.”

“That’s wise,” I said. So I did.

We went, deflecting tree branches as we cut through a wooded area. There were a few trailers there, with clotheslines attached to the trees. We ran through quickly, but ducked occasionally to avoid the shirts, towels and underwear that dangled from the lines. Some 30 feet away, there were dogs – so big, they looked like pit bulls on steroids – who barked at the slightest crinkle of leaves.

“It’s okay baby!” Evan called out to the dogs. “It’s okay, baby! I know, big, nasty, mean people here.” But they just kept barking, loudly.

We made it to a clearing, and immediately spotted the body. Cramner was lying on his back, passed out on a layer of rocks and seaweed, turning green – it would appear – as the day grew old. He was covered with chest hair, sand, and blood, and his sideburns were bushy and dirty. What looked like burn marks covered his legs, and his smell was strong.

Evan laughed. "He's one hairy load, ain't he?" he said, grinning.

We walked closer, and the smell got worse. He smelled like old, stale cheese. I was sickened by it, and I had to take a few steps back. Evan? He started laughing again.

Evan then quickly turned around, and ran back toward town, laughing the whole time.

“Hey wait,” I yelled. “I’m not done here.”

But the boy kept running, and I followed. We ran toward a trailer, where Evan pulled up a cinder block to the window, stood on it and yelled through the sound of dishes clanking that came from the inside.

A woman came out, coughing, and carrying a cigarette that she was getting ready to light. Evan introduced her. “Ma, this guy’s from the newspaper,” he said.

She grabbed my hand and shook it, while I studied her face. I couldn’t believe it, but she so fit the stereotype. Her eyes were far apart, and a buck-toothed grin stretched across her face. Her cough and her voice gurgled in her throat.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m from The Delaware State News, and I’d like to ask you about this murder.”

“What about it?” she said. “What do you need to know?”

I had a list of questions, and I looked down to read them. But I got distracted by somebody who was pulling on my shirt. It was Evan.

“Where’s the T.V. camera?” Evan asked.

“I’m not from T.V,” I said.

“But I got somethin’ to say,” Evan said.

“What’s that?” I said.

"I think we should stick him on a pole,” Evan said. “We can call it the Driftwood Beach flag!"

I didn’t write down what he said. I just looked at him, and he smiled again and broke into laughter.

“OK, I’m trying to talk to your mother here,” I demanded.

Evan was distracted again, turning his head toward the beach. His smile grew wider as he spotted his friends. They saw us and were running over.

“It’s OK,” said Evan’s mother. She apparently detected the worried look on my face. “They won’t hurt you.”

They all had tiny stains of blood – mixed in with large patches of sweat – on their shirts. They were laughing and having the time of their lives, so it would appear. They joined us and stood behind me, giggling.

“Hey,” I said. “I’m trying to do my job here!”

“Kids, back off, please,” Evan’s mom said. “I’m sorry, Mr. Reporter man. But you know kids.”

“Actually,” I said. “I don’t.”

“See this is a big day,” she said. “Looks like they got one of Jones’ Boys again.”

“Jones’ boys?”

“Yeah, some guys who used to work at Dover Air Force Base. See, they got this morgue over there. A lot of guys got messed up working over there.”

“Morgue?”

“Yeah, they got this big morgue where all the Vietnam guys went through. I don’t know why – the Air Force picked us for some reason.”

I wrote that down. Until that point, my notebook was completely blank.

“Christ, that must be a bit unsettling, don’t you think?” I told her. “I mean, how many people died in Vietnam? They probably had planes in and out of here every day.”

“Yeah, but the big thing happened in ’78,” she said.

“What happened in ’78?”

“That was the Jim Jones thing, you know what I’m saying?” she said. She paused to light up her cigarette.

“I remember that,” I said. “I was pretty young at the time.”

“Yeah, well, this freak named Jim Jones had a cult. They were down in Central America – you know, one of those spick countries,” she said, sucking on her cigarette. “They went down to arrest him, and he was like, ‘Hell, no, I won’t go.’ So he and everybody Kool Aid with poison in it and killed themselves.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s what I heard.”

“Yeah, well, that’s what somebody told me, too,” she said. “Then the Army brought 900 men, women and children through there. They were all just a bunch of blue bodies and toe tags. A lot of guys got messed up, working on that shit.”

“Who worked there?”

“Well, Cramner was one of ’em,” she said.

“That guy out there?” I asked. “The one laying out on the beach? He works there.”

“Yeah, but he worked there, see what I mean. Like he doesn’t do it any more.”

“You mean, like, past tense?”

“Yeah, that’s it,” the mother said. “He was like a bunch of guys – once they got done out there, they came running to the woods. Then they never come out or anything.”

“That’s pretty crazy,” I said.

“I’ll tell you what’s crazy,” she said, sucking more on her cigarette. “One guy got so fucked up, he shot himself in the head. And guess what?…He lived?”

“Wow.”

“Yeah,” she said. “That was the last time something exciting happened out here.”
Generally, she said, this was a quiet place, far away from shopping centers, post offices and gas stations. And she liked that.

“See that out there?” she said, pointing toward a faded skyline to the north.

“Is that Wilmington?”

It was Delaware’s largest city, she said, the home of DuPont and its refineries that fill the air with smoke. It’s the state’ big employer, and as she called, “it’s intellectually center.” “But it might as well be China,” she added.

“It doesn’t seem so far away,” I noted.

“Yeah, well it is,” she said. “Here, the people are either unemployed or they tried to make some living out of fishing along the Delaware Bay …We don’t shop at the Gap ’round here.”

“What about farming?” I said. “I saw a lot of that on the way here.”

“Yeah, but they’re pretty useless now,” she said. “The crops are brittle and the grass is yellow.”
She talked about the long nights by the bay, listening to the water wash up and the sounds of boats and barges that pass by, some 10 or 20 miles out. She talked of hearing a piercing hiss of the boats almost nightly – usually around midnight that wakes people from their sleep.

When rain falls here, it falls hard, she said, usually causing the bay to swallow the beach, and forcing water to wash out the roads.

"It’s just too bad you people only come out there when something bad happens,” she said, smoking the last of her cigarette. “We're real people. We got real problems.”

She pulled out another smoke, and lit it up, exhaling into the foggy air. Her neighbors, she said, dread the strong smell of dead fish and rotting clams that comes from the bay. They hate the mischief that goes on at night – “all that drug dealing that goes on at the beach,” she said – and how the people wake up sometimes and finding toilet paper strung up in the branches, and on the clotheslines. They’re miles from the nearest police station, she said. But they’ve grown accustomed to it.

“I want no help from anybody, really,” she said. “I’ve taught my own children. I don’t send them to no Dover schools.”

“That can’t be good,” I said. I jotting some of this shit down, but I was doing more listening than anything. “You should send them to school.”

“You know what I like best about Driftwood Beach?" she said, ignoring me.

I picked up my pen. “What’s that?” I asked.

"No black people."

Ugh, I thought. I grimaced. But, dammit, wouldn’t you know that she read my face again.

"Now let me tell you something,'' the woman said, noticing my disgust. "I'm from Kentucky, and in Kentucky, they's everywhere. I know they here, but here they stay out of the way.”

It went on and one like for what seemed like hours. (it was only a half-hour). Yeah. A half-hour into this job, and I was already hating it. There’s nothing worse than having to give loathsome people a soapbox. But this was my job. Let’s give mediocre people a platform, and make them stars. Give them their fucking 15 seconds of fame. Christ. Is this what my life had come to?

Whatever happened to all that talk about me going to The New York Times? That’s what people said. I believed it. Did I earn a fucking diploma for this? I heard this mental midget go on and on, and my mind drifted. I wanted to know – who would really flatline the CAT scan? Would it be the dead guy on the beach. Or would it be the blithering idiot was living and breathing just inches from my nose?

I saw a cop car roll up, and I couldn’t help but laugh to myself. I’ve been here a half of a fucking hour, and I don’t see a cop? Weren’t they the ones who called over the dispatch? Christ. Talk about a disconnect. Jenny hears the dispatch call at 9 a.m. (or so I was told later). She tells me about it 9:30 a.m. It’s 10 a.m. Where were you?

“That’s unbelievable,” I said.

“What’s that?” Evan’s mother said.

“This is the first time I’ve ever seen the police arrive at a crime scene after the reporters,” I said.

“Well,” she said. “Maybe that’s why they call this ‘Lower Slower Delaware.’ ”

Two police officers got out of their cars – both uniformed, wearing those big trooper hats – and walked up, flashing their badges. Now Evan and his friends think I’m boring. They ditch me, see them, run up and jumped up and down, and wave their hands in front of cops’ faces. They gloated about their discovery. “We caught a whale!” they yelled.

Evan spoke up first, saying that right after they found some “big fat guy” they rolled him around in the sand like “cookie dough.” I listen to this, and cringe. Not out of disgust. I pity this kid. Can’t he think of a better adjective? I gotta write this shit, and I’ve got people using food metaphors for dead bodies. Is that all we are when we die? We’re just puffy, fatty, butterly cookie dough?

But it got worse. They said they put out their cigarettes in his chest hair, and “turned his blubber into an ash tray.” Ugh. OK, I can’t pity them anymore, I thought. Now it’s just deep-down, deep-seeded disgust I’ve got. They are just utterly repulsive. They just defy any sense of dignity. I didn’t grow up like this. No. Fuck it, I think to myself. I’m not writing this down. I’m not writing about IT. If the editors don’t like it, they can screw themselves. I’m trying to write a story here. Not a script for “Geraldo.”

The police didn’t have my luxury. They had to listen. Dammit, when you’re an hour late, you’d better. They pulled out notepads and jotted down some notes. Then, without showing a crack of a smile, or even a flinch of the eyebrows, they asked where the body was.

Evan back the way we came. Shit. We have to do this all over again? “I’ll take you there,” he said. “Let’s go.”

The police went. So did his friends. I waited. Fuck this. Why should I have do that again? Yeah, I know. Great color. Cops go to beach, and find a decaying man on the street. Perfect photograph, too. Only the photographer wasn’t there yet, so it was just me and my notebook..
“C’mon, Mr. Reporter man, let’s go!” Evan shouted.

I’d better go, I thought. So I did. And here we go again. The clothesline. The trees. The dog barking. I caught up. And there it was, still in the clearing. The body.

I caught up to everybody. But by the time I did, the cops shut us down. “OK, we’re good from here,” the cops said. “Back off now.”

We went back to the trees, and watched. The cops studied the naked carcass and jotted more notes. They were quiet, virtually emotionless. But I could tell this was affecting them. They’d show one little twitch of their mouth, their eye, their eyebrow. That said it all.

One cop finally stopped writing. He shoved his notebook in his back pocket, twitched his mustache and grabbed Cramner by the neck. He pulled his body up into a sit-up position, and placed his hands on his lap. He was like a big, ugly, rotting doll. The other cop just continued jotting.

We watched for about 20 minutes when the State News photographer arrived. He pulled up on a motorcycle, wearing a leather jacket and a big bushy mustache. He didn’t wear a helmet or anything. He looked like he was ready for danger.

“What do we got?” the photographer said.

“Well, you know what happened, right?” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, looking over at the cops. “But what are they doing?”

“I guess it’s part of the investigation,” I said.

The photographer pulled out his camera from his bag and stuck his lens through the bushes. Evan and the kids saw this, and rose out of their perched positions. They stood in front of his lens, jumped up and down and stuck their middle fingers up to the lens.

“C’mon, take my picture!” Evan yelled. “Take my picture!”

“What the fuck is with these idiots?” the photographer said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “They’ve been harassing me ever since I got here. I’ve learned how to shut them out.”

“Yeah, well, that doesn’t work for me,” the photographer said. “Please do something about them.”

Yeah, this camera guy was pretty bossy. I hate photographers who throw their weight around. They show up at these assignments, and they pretend that they’re your editor. Why? Because you’re intruding on their work, their art. They treat this like they’re painting the fucking Mona Lisa, when all they’re really doing is fitting a bunch of rednecks into a small frame. I’ve learned, however, that the best way to deal with them is to give into them. Otherwise, they can make big trouble for you.

“No problem,” I said to his request (or order). So I hushed them up.

“Shhhh!” I said. “You want the cops to throw us out of here?”

“Good thinking, Mr. Reporter man!”

After all this commotion, however, the cops were already through, sticking their notepads in their pockets and heading back to their cars. One got on a walkie-talker and dispatched an ambulance. The others just started walking back toward their cars. I rushed up to them to get a comment.

“Excuse me sir…” I said.

“If you want any information on this, you’re going to have to call Wilmington,” a cop told me.

“Wilmington?” I said. “Why not right here, right now?”

But they kept walking. They remained expressionless, except for the occasional eyebrow twitch. I persisted.

“Look, if you don’t talk, I’m going to have to say in my story that the Delaware State Police had no comment,” I said.

One cop kept walking. The other stopped, and turned to look at me. His eyebrow twitch went into a full spasm. His mouth was in a frown, and his eyes were burning.

“Get the fuck away from me!” he said.

Now what? There are times when I hate this job. And then there are times when I REALLY hate this job. I was hours into this new one, and inside, I was already crying for mommy. At least in New Jersey, the cops have enough of a vocabulary to politely tell you to get lost. Only now I was really lost. I looked around, and saw nobody who could help me. God, I hate that empty feeling. You’re out there in some God-forsaken place where there are no friendly people. You know no one. You like no one. And they don’t like you. They wouldn’t give you a penny if you asked them for a quarter.

I did see the photographer, and felt some comfort in that. At least there was somebody. But he was very busy, doing his job. And he was trying to do it by taming these little freaks that swarmed us like gnats from the moment we got there. He was lining up Evan’s family for pictures as a way to illustrate the scene.

“OK, act natural,” the photographer said.

I, his mother and the others then burst into a chuckle. Then they just started laughing.

“OK, ha, ha,” the photographer said. “Now let’s be serious.”

But they were still laughing. I glanced at my watch and saw that we had been there for more than an hour. Too long, I thought. So I rushed them along.

"Think about the death, the tragedy," he said, desperate to draw a tear or even a droopy mouth. Actually, even a stoic expression would have been enough. But the more I talked, the more they laughed.

The photographer tried, too. He urged them to cooperate. His words were so desperate that he sounded like he was begging. “Please?” he said. Please? Christ, they thought that was hilarious.

"How about a relative?" I asked. "Any relatives die lately?” Grandmothers? Uncles? Anybody you're sad about? C'mon guys!"

The photographer finally gave up, and so did I . He snapped the picture. “I’ll just airbrush it out of there,” he said.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” I said.

Freedom. Finally. I went to my car, ready to drive back. But, ah ah. Not so fast, I boy. The gnats followed me, followed my the 50 yards to my car. They followed me close, too, running right up to my heals and keeping up with my stride. They said nothing, too. All I heard were their footsteps as their feet hit the sandy soil.

I ignored them and got in the car. I was done with these freaks. I got what I needed. I was done. Get lost. But nooo. They waited as I turned the key and started the car. Then they smiled – each one of them, as if it was staged – and started giggling as they stared at me through my front windshield.

I stuck my head out the window, and yelled at them. “Get out of the way!”

They were carrying rocks in their hands. Where did they come from? I guess I should have paid better attention to them when they were pestering me. They moved so quick, though. How did I know that 8-year-old rednecks could multi-task?

"I'd think twice before you throw those," I said.

God, was I naïve. When was the last time a kid ever listened to a grown-up? Besides, if I was 8-years-old and holding a rock, I’d throw it, too. So I knew my threat would go nowhere. In fact, that logic compelled me to stick my head back inside the car, shut the window, hit the gas and go.

As I pulled away, the stones started to rain on the front and back windshields.

I then heard a voice. It was Evan. "What do you think of that, Mr. Reporter Man?" he yelled as he picked up some more rocks with his buddies, and pelted my car. Amazing, I thought. Here I was, ripping out of there and roaring the engine. How did I still hear him through the glass?

"Let's do a story about Mr. Reporter Man bleeding from the head. Maybe if we get 'em unconscious, then that would be a front-page story. Do you think so, Mr. Reporter Man? Can you interview me?"