One evening, not long after my attempted nocturnal lashing of G.W. the EVIL ROOSTER, I was thinking about some way to spice up my tipico meal of baleadas and platanos. I instantly thought of the rather cruel concoction that I smuggled into the country from Vermont, a very sinister chemistry experiment from some chile entrepreneur’s underground laboratory. It is called Dave’s Insanity Sauce and is so ridiculously spicy that even a tiny drop on your fingertip will cause a second-degree burn, not to mention what it does to your palate. My main reasons for bringing down a 12-ounce bottle of Dave’s were simple:
1. I had heard Honduran cuisine does not value picante in la comida, so I needed something strong that could last a while, in case no hot sauce could be found for the entire year.
2. Dave’s Insanity Sauce seemed like an ideal way to deflate the most swollen macho ego. I had visions of treating Jose Macho to a sample on top of his pupusa, then seeing him go into convulsions as his girlfriend stood by in helpless horror. The result: macho menos.
The moment I thought of Dave’s Insanity Sauce as a potential weapon against my hard-beaked adversary will be remembered as one of the true epiphanies of my life, to borrow James Joyce’s term from Dubliners. It was certainly up there with the moment when I was eleven and realized that, when planning a family trip that includes Kansas, it would be wise to skip the half-ton prairie dog exhibit outside Manhattan, or the time when I was in my early twenties and living in Ireland, and discovered that you could drink nine pints of Guinness and not wake up with a hangover (must be the widget).
What exactly would happen if G.W. were to chew on a piece of compost that was heavily laced with Dave’s Insanity Sauce? Would he suffer for a while in a fit of wheezy coughing? Would he spontaneously combust from this sudden input of intense heat? Would nothing at all happen to him? I really wanted to find out, and to contact some important person who would care, and tell him or her that I was the first person ever to serve this sauce to a cocky good-for-nothing slumber-wrecking chicken.
The next morning at five am, since I was grudgingly wide awake, I decided to make my move with the hot sauce. I stumbled into the kitchen and picked up a half-stale piece of bread off the counter, bread that I knew G.W. was fond of. The first rays of the sun arrived like a long overdue guest. I mosied out into the back and spotted G.W. pecking around for a snack at the bottom of the yard, half hidden behind what looked like the remains of a small shed. I walked over to a fairly recent compost pile and added the chemically altered piece of bread to it, then tiptoed back into the house. I stood there staring for like five minutes at the compost pile, from behind the screen door, and G.W. did not come. I yawned deeply. I thought that I should go lie down and possibly sleep, and wait for the inevitable shrieks to come.
About forty-five minutes later, I was awakened by my wife’s rustlings as she got out of our saggy bed, and realized that I had not been awoken by any maniacal shrieking that indicated the cruel but deserved torture of poultry. I practically jumped out of bed and took off for the back door. It was now quite bright, like the sunshine was a floodlight illuminating our yard, and I noticed that the chile sauce bread and quite a bit of the other compost had been consumed in a brief time. I could not see or hear G.W. right away. If he had indeed expired from eating the hot sauce (I had only wanted to torture him a bit!), then clearly he did not die at the side of the compost pile. I began to tour around the backyard and could not see or hear him anywhere. Was his grizzly corpse lying somewhere on the ground, somewhere not readily visible? Had I killed the bugger by mistake?
Suddenly, as if on cue, a deep-throated crowing emanated from the landlord’s property above, unmistakably the twisted falsetto of G.W. What does not kill chickens, evidently makes them stronger, and now I would have to admit the likelihood that this rooster cannot be fazed or bothered by anything on Earth.
To be continued…
To be continued…
