The Muddled Male

The Neck

By Bob Stevens, The Muddled Male

        Devils Slide, where I grew up, was a tiny village consisting of three short blocks bounded on one side by the Weber River and on the other side by double tracks of the Union Pacific Railroad.  Although there were only a few houses in the entire town, all the neighbors liked each other.  Well mostly.  There were a few disagreements, for example, because some in town were employed by the Cement Plant as foremen and some were employed as laborers.  Then there was the perceived privilege of living next to the river instead of the railroad tracks.  My dad was a foreman, which could have caused him to be considered privileged by the laborers, except that we lived next to the railroad tracks which had a tendency to nullify any animosity laborers might feel because he was a foreman.

        I admit that living next to the tracks caused me to lose a lot of sleep in my youth because the night schedule for the Union Pacific always included a fully loaded freight train roaring past our house sometime after midnight.  It was powered by three locomotives because of the number of heavy cars that were in the string, and the noise was especially high since the route was uphill and required all three locomotives to be pulling simultaneously at full power.  To top it off, the engineer always began blowing the train whistle right in front of our house to make certain that the intersection ahead was clear of vehicles when the train roared by.  Not only was the volume deafening, the vibration of the train passing by fed through the ground and made our little house rumble like a low frequency tuning fork.  I developed the ability to sleep through the night in spite of the noise and vibration partly due to youth and exhaustion, and partly because of my crush on Maxine.  Maxine was the daughter of the Union Pacific section gang foreman and I knew it wouldn’t help my chances with Maxine if her dad found out that the trains that paid his salary also drove me nuts and kept me awake nights.

        Well I managed to work my way through all that to get some sleep and impress Maxine, and then it happened.  Maxine’s dad had a heart attack and had to retire.  Maxine’s family also had to move since the house in which they had been living was reserved for use exclusively by the new section gang foreman.  Luckily they only moved a few miles away to Henefer where they had located an old house that they were able to rent for a reasonable price because it had been empty for several years and needed a lot of work.  Now I’m not one to take advantage of someone else’s bad situation, but I had a bike to get to Maxine’s, and an old reel mower that I could use to help clean up the yard.  So I tied the mower behind my bike and peddled up the narrow winding road to Henefer to mow the lawn at Maxine’s house.

        I may be a little old man now, but then I was young, healthy, and could mow a mean lawn.  Plus, since it was for Maxine, I worked my heart out on this particular project.  So much so that Maxine’s mom was impressed enough to invite me to stay for dinner, which I accepted quickly since it was her homemade specialty, pan fried chicken.  The problem was that this was the era before pre-packaged chicken parts.  The cook began with a whole chicken which had to be cut into pieces, breaded, and fried.  Since not everyone cut up a chicken the same way, and because all parts of the chicken were used in those days it was sometimes difficult to recognize which part of the chicken you were about to eat.  On top of that I assumed that I was being judged by Maxine’s parents and I was really nervous.  So much so that when the plate full of chicken was passed to me I was unable to tell one chicken part from another and so I just picked one that was large enough to convince Maxine’s mother that I liked it but not so large that I would look like a glutton.

        When I began to eat my selected piece I found that it was almost all bones with very little meat.  When Maxine’s mother said, “Oh Bob, you have the chicken neck, here take another piece to eat instead,” I responded with, “Oh, I love chicken neck.  I always eat it at home.”  And then I spent the rest of the meal gnawing, and gnawing but getting very little to eat.  I didn’t see much of Maxine after that.  Ann, my wife, said that it was probably because Maxine didn’t want anything to do with someone who didn’t know the difference between a chicken neck and a drumstick.  I think that it was because Maxine was older than me and preferred to go with someone who had a driver’s license and a car.  If she had just been patient my dad gave me his worn out 1939 Ford two years later, the same car I used to drive to Porterville to impress Ann.  And to make certain that I don’t make the chicken neck mistake again I no longer eat chicken.  I only eat French fries since there are only three kinds, regular, curly, and Mexi which are enough different to keep me from being confused even when I am nervous.