Soon, it will be that holiday again. There will be orange and brown leaves on the ground. There will be a cold breeze as you exit your car, carrying a pie, likely pumpkin. You will enter a house with family and others and you will sit down to dinner. There might be a football game on TV or some sort of parade. But the moment is coming. The true meaning of the holiday. The essence of Thanksgiving will waft into the room, and there you will see a bird. There will be a browned turkey places on your kitchen table. It will not be a gobbling one. It will not be flapping its wings. It will be cooked and ready for consumption, and you will slice and tear at its flesh, eating all of its parts. Pieces of its neck and giblets might be in your stuffing. You will tear apart its bones and taste its sweet meat. You will cover it with its own liquid and savor every moment as it touches your tongue. You will have side dishes to accompany the baked or fried slaughter. Then maybe that pumpkin pie will come… and then after you will be a lazy ass, and sit somewhere. That’ll be pretty much it.

But more important than that turkey you will taste tenderly and devour, there is another Turkey. There is a turkey with feathers. A turkey with a strong beak. Be careful. He pecks. There is a turkey that runs around the woods and chases down school children at bus stops. There is a turkey that runs around in circles just because he can, and then he attacks a grandmother going out to get her mail at the mailbox. Some might say this Turkey is wild, and that would be correct. He is a wild turkey, and he doesn’t need no man, except Shoresy. But that turkey does turkey things too. He pecks at grain. He pecks at other turkeys who have odd looking feathers. He sometimes flirts with chickens if they tickle his fancy in the moment or he has had some grain or corn that has begun to ferment. He is a natural free range wild turkey with no antibiotics or steroids. He is a turkey with a purpose and that purpose is usually to just look pretty with his feathers, but also sometimes he murders, just sometimes. It’s a thing.

So, when you see him, standing up with his neck upright, a proud bird, you should not go to pet him unless you are certain he will be welcoming to it. Otherwise, he might takeout a fingernail or an eye. He also might take out other body parts that you hold dear if you aren’t careful. He is a nice bird generally, but he can be ornery. He has funny looking feet, but don’t make fun of him. He is very self-conscious and he can be a sad bird too. We don’t want the bird to be sad. No one wants the bird to be sad, and especially not around the time of his holiday.

For years, he has avoided capture while all of his turkey friends get murdered and shredded, with their bones bare and remnant flesh rotting in a garbage can, en masse.

DangerClose is that bird. He is a turkey. We all know this. We all see it. It is undeniable. He does turkey things. He makes turkey noises. He pecks at stuff. He doesn’t like Republicans. It’s the usual stuff for a turkey. He is thrice pardoned by the President. He is a turkey about town. He is a turkey of good breeding, and on this holiday, as we stuff, he is a turkey of good breading.

But now, I will tell you a story about this turkey, about his traumas and about his triumphs:

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There was the little turkey, many moons ago, walking on a farm near a cornfield. He didn’t have many feathers then. He didn’t have a big beak. He didn’t have much to him, except he had spirit. The turkey was walking around at night and he couldn’t sleep. He was a lil bird, and he was frightened easily. There was a dog barking in the distance, and he took off running out of fear. Dogs are not turkey’s friends. They hurt turkeys. They eat turkeys. They are disrespectful. So, the turkey ran and ran, but he ran into a chicken wire fence. He bounced off the fence and dizzy, he looked around. He saw a racoon.

He said, Hello, racoon. How are you racoon?”

The racoon looked at him and said, Hello, I am a racoon. Do you want some of this onion?” The turkey pecked at the onion, but it was bitter. The racoon then asked the turkey his name.

The turkey thought for a moment. He did not yet have a name. He said to his new racoon friend, that he didn’t have one yet. The racoon then said to him that his name was Randolf. Randolf Racoon. Randolf said the turkey would need a name. Randolf and the small turkey walked towards the farm house. They walked up to the porch and looked inside. There was some domestic violence going on inside between a young wife and a man with a few missing teeth. There were children crying. But on TV, they saw a movie in black and white. There were some mobsters there, and they were using Tommy guns. Then they looked around more, and as the husband’s blood splattered against the wall and the wife lowered her shotgun, with a fresh black eye, they watched as blood dripped down a cross on the wall. The bloody cross with a figure with stapled hands and feet confused the small turkey.

He asked to Randolf Racoon, “Who is that?”

Randolf told him, “That is Jesus. People get on their knees for him on Sunday.” They looked back towards the TV, and saw some men loading a body into the trunk, as the wife in the house they were looking in was dragging her husband’s feet.

The little turkey said, “I will be Jesus. JesusTheGangster.”

After that night, the police came to the house looking for the family, but everyone was gone. The battered wife had run away with the children, and it is uncertain what he had done with the body of her belated husband. The turkey roamed free with his friend Randolf, but there was no caretaker for the land. They found a hole in some chicken wire, and escaped. JesusTheGangster and Randolf made their way into the big city. They found some work at a cockfighting club in Chicago, but JesusTheGangster was not allowed to fight in matches. He would just help train the cocks. Randolf Racoon found them a nice home in an alleyway behind a dumpster. They were best of friends. They would play cards. They would smoke the ends of cigars they would find on the sidewalk. They would talk about their dreams. They learned to read together by finding newspapers on the street, and would read newspapers together each night by the glow of an alleyway light.

Overtime, they gathered coins on the street. At first, it started with pennies, then they would find nickels, dimes, quarters, half-dollars, and one day even a silver dollar. They saved every piece of change they could. Okay, well, maybe, once in a while, they would maybe buy a hotdog for a dime, but on the whole, they would save. So, finally, they had this rooster they were training named Rebel Rodney who was going to fight Philip the Fantastic. Philip was quite a shit cock at fighting, and Rodney wanted to get out of fighting all together. They convinced Rodney to throw that fight. Randolf put all their money down on Philip to win the fight. The odds were 50:1. Rodney took a fall in the third match and winked at Randolf. They had won. However, Rodney’s owner stepped on Rodney’s head in the ring with a crunch. Randolf and JesusTheGangster were sad, but they went to collect their winnings. They went out on the town. They bought a deep dish pizza. Randolf Racoon devoured half of the soppy pie, and JesusTheGangster pecked at the dripping mess. They were happy. They found a beer bottle half drunk, and drank some of it by the side of a garbage can in front of a local bar. Rodney’s owner was just coming out of the bar, wobbling into his car. Randolf was playing with one of the silver dollars they had won, but it began to roll into the street. Randolf chased after it, and as the drunk man’s headlight turned on and the engine roared. Randolf was flattened instantly.

JesusTheGangster walked over to Randolf’s corpse. He said, “Randolf?”

The eye of the racoon was dripping out, and the jaw was split. There was no motion the body, except for a thin and slow stream of blood. JesusTheGangster picked up the silver dollar. He looked toward the car of the driver who had killed his friend, still stopped just a car’s length away. He took down the license plate number with his beak and a pencil onto a matchbook cover.

Weeks went by, JesusTheGangster did not go out much. He plotted. He convinced a mouse to sneak into a police station to get the address of the person whose license plate number he had so carefully taken down. He paid the mouse with a box of crackers. One night, he strolled over to the home of the murderer of his friend Randolf. It was dark. There were no lights in the house. He saw there was a doggy door in the back of the house. He went through it. He saw there was a bloodhound sleeping on a mat by the refrigerator. He moved silently, his feathers moving without sound. He made it to the bedroom of the house. There were empty cans of beans throughout the house. It smelled of beans and cigarettes and of course whiskey.

JesusTheGangster looked over his snoring victim, a man in his early thirties. There was a photograph in a frame on the bedside table. A signature saying, Sally was on the lower left side of the photo. It was a woman, a young one, quite pretty. Adjacent was a postcard on the table, recently dated. He read it carefully. Sally was asking when she could come to the big city and move in with him. That she loved him. That she didn’t care what her family thought. That she would leave it all for him. She would buy a train ticket as soon as she heard from him.

The turkey walked onto the man’s bed, and he looked at the man’s neck. He saw a pulse. He could see the veins in the man’s neck, as he snored calmly. He eyed one vein very closely. He moved his beak closer, sharpened for the last few weeks against a metal bin in his alley he called a home. He dug his beak into the man’s neck, severing whatever he could. Blood sprayed all over. The man could not shriek. He could not speak. His lungs filled with his blood, and his eyes bulged in panic. JesusTheGangster stood closely, watching the violent raw death, as the man’s hot and alcoholic blood gushed and poured over his feathers and wings, leaving him dripping and red, but still in the darkness, black. He did this for Randolf. He did this for Rodney. He left a trail of blood, with is feet marks, like small crosses, on the wood floor as he left the house. His eyes wild, satiated. His heart beating at a slow pace, an infinitesimal thump in his chest. He was a calm bird. Sally would not be getting a reply to her postcard. The bloodhound never woke to his steps.

To Be Continued….