In the hot, fetid dark the air was full of down and small feathers drifting in the windless air and they stuck to the sweaty skin of the catchers and in their hair and eyelashes and in the white fluorescence the catchers took on a look curiously alien, like vaguely sinister folk lightly furred.
Winer’s arms grew weary. He was used to working and he knew to pace himself but even so six thousand chickens is a lot of chickens and the pace they had to keep was numbing.
Motormouth fared far worse. He grew hot and sweaty, his face so infused with blood he looked flayed. When he stood with his chickens aloft waiting for the packer to accept them his thin arms trembled spasmodically and he had a panicky look in his eyes as if he worked always a few degrees past the limits of his endurance.
“What the hell’s Hodges doin with those chickens?” Buttcut Chessor asked Winer. Buttcut was a friend from school who had been an athletic hero on a scale almost mythic and he had never quite gotten over it.
“Beats the hell out of me,” Winer said. “With Motormouth you never know. He may have another truck parked around there.”
Every few loads Motormouth would make a sidetrip to the window he’d rigged and dump his armload of chickens unceremoniously into the night. They lit in his homemade cage with soft, quarrelsome mutters, their chicken dignity affronted, their tickets punched for someplace they’d never been.
The only thing that kept him going was the boots. He’d about decided on the boots. They had cunning silverlooking chains draped about the ankles that had a Mexican look and when he’d hoist up the chickens he’d think of the musical clinking the chains would make as he strode into the poolroom.
At last they were through. The driver booming down the coops while Weiss passed among the stunnedlooking catchers with his thin sheaf of dollar bills.
Motormouth shoved his carelessly into a shirt pocket and went to watch the truckdriver, giving him unwanted advice and meaningless handsignals. “Pull up, back a little now. Cut ye wheels hard to the right.” At last the driver rolled down the glass and called, “Fella, would you kinda get the fuck out of the way so I can turn this damn thing? I ain’t got all night.”
“Turn the motherfucker over then for all of me,” Hodges said, but the driver wasn’t paying any mind. “Uppity up north nigger,” Hodges told the rolled glass, the racing motor, the big wheels crushing sumac.
He went and hunted Winer. “You want to go over to Hardin’s and get a sixpack?”
“Not me. I got to get up again tomorrow morning. Tomorrow’s old workday.”
“Well, it ain’t for me. I aim to get me a sixpack and ride around awhile.”
“If you're set on riding around you can drive me home. I've got to take a bath and get to bed.”
“We’ll do her.”
“Before you get the sixpack.”
Motormouth drove back up to the Mormon Springs road and turned left to Weiss’s place and parked in a sideroad below the house. He opened a bottle of beer and listened to the wall of night sounds start up again around the silent car. Through the trees he could see no light from Weiss’s windows. He turned the radio on and listened by its warm yellow glow to the halffamiliar jocularity of disc jockeys and to plaintive music and then after a while to a seemingly demented preacher ranting and raving and pleading for money. “Send me that foldin money,” he cried. “The Lord’s work don’t get done with them old clackin’ nickels and dimes. The Lord likes that quiet money.” Listening, Motormouth pondered what sort of radioland congregation of mad insomniacs this postmidnight preacher might have and as he ranted the preacher began to make spitting noises into the microphone, so choked with emotion was he. Motormouth began to wonder could this spit possibly short out his radio when this preacher calmed himself and began to tell Motormouth of a wonderful cloth he could have for a ten-dollar donation. It was a prayer cloth and spread over any afflicted area it did wondrous things. It had cured cancer, made whole an exploded appendix, repaired ruptures. Crutches and trusses thrown away hundredfold by folk cured by this miracle fabric.
“Reckon it would make my dick grow an inch or two?” Motormouth asked the preacher.
He drank beer and waited. he knew he should be at home and he guessed his wife wondered where he was but he wasn’t even sure of that so he sat and cradled the bottle and listened to the incessant crying of whippoorwills. He knew that it was not just the chickens that kept him here and he knew subconsciously that some vague hunger for doom drove him, kept him tightrope-walking the edge, and he knew he was consumed by some fatal curiosity as to what nature of beast lurked beyond the abyss. Some affinity for ill luck that fed the grocery money nickel by nickel down the mechanical throats of pinball machines and drew and bet to inside straights.
Faint thunder came from somewhere behind him and turning he saw lightning bloom above the western horizon and flicker there bright and soundless and after a moment thunder came again. He got out and unlocked the trunk and took out the burlap bags he’d been hauling around for this occasion and climbed down the embankment and went up a concrete tiling higher than he was tall, his feet echoing strangely on the subterranean floor. He came out through a clump of blackberry briars ascending toward the head of the hollow. It was very dark save when the lightning came. He increased his pace, an anticipatory exhilaration seized him. He could smell the leather of the new boots, feel the crinkly tissue they came in.
He’d decided to bag all the chickens and move them into the woods to safety and then carry them down to the car two bags at a time. He only had two bags filled with the querulous chickens when the light hit him. He leapt up glaring wildly toward the source of the light but all he could see was the white glare and he stood for a moment frozen as if the light had seared him to his tracks. In that moment various excuses crossed his mind but none seemed adequate. Found them where they lost them off the truck. That nigger stole them and I took them away from him and brought them back.
“I’m armed,” Weiss called. “Don’t make a move.”
But by the time the voice came he had a series of them. He threw one bag across his shoulder and sprang into the sumac dragging the other. The chickens began to squawk angrily and brush and brambles tried to wrest the bags from him. A report came and a bright blossom of fire and short rattled off in the trees like hail falling. Bits of chopped leaves drifted unseen. He released the bag he was dragging and increased his pace, running blindly into the dark while intermittent lightning showed him stumps to dodge and deadfalls to leap. The sack bounced madly on his back and he ran constantly through an outraged din of protestation. Lightning bloomed and died and in the inkblack pause of thunder he ran fulltilt into the bole of a tree and went tumbling into the hollow in a riot of squawks and curses.
He sat stunned for a moment clutching his spinning heart. The sack had opened and chickens were running into the night. He held his breath and listened for Weiss. All he could hear was an angry muttering from the pullets. He arose and took up the empty sack and began to stalk the chickens, trying to lure them back into the sack. They wouldn’t come. Then he began to run after them one at a time but they fluttered away, cackling and flapping their wings, and finally he threw the sack away and began to curse them. He went shambling on down toward the mouth of the hollow and all about him chickens were taking to the trees like pale spirits rising.
3
Over the years Hardin had taken on the lineaments of evil. You would sometimes see him on a Saturday streetcorner, the center of a group of men itemizing the faults of the world. When he spoke men listened. He seldom laughed but when he did the rest of the men laughed too in sporadic bursts of mirthless noise. No one wanted to be in his disfavor, it had come to seem that being in his disfavor was tantamount to being homeless.