The two shoppers paused before the meatcase the better to consider this wonder. Perhaps warming to its audience the chicken began to dance, slowly at first, kicking out first one drumstick, then the other, a fey, loosejointed sort of shuffle to no audible music. Above the trays of hamburger meat and liver and the packages of its own dissected brothers it began a macabre country buck dance, its loose head whipping back and forth, its feet fairly flying on the chrome lip. A demented cackling sound issued from behind the meatcase. The two women stared at each other in awe or disgust when the chicken began a slow, lascivious bump and grind. They shook their heads and wheeled their buggies away.
Rapidly approaching footsteps across the waxed tile drew Winer’s attention. He turned away from the chicken to see old man Christian coming down the aisle, taking off his apron as he came. His face was flushed and angry.
Winer judged the floorshow about over and he left. He paid his nickel at the counter and went out the door with its small chime and into the sun white and blinding off the tops of parked cars. Motormouth’s Chrysler was parked down the block in its bristling array of antennas and lights and he got in and rolled all the windows down and sat in the heat and waited. He didn’t figure he’d have long to wait and he didn’t.
“He fired your childish ass, didn’t he?”
Motormouth leapt and swore when his neck touched the hot plastic seatcover. “Old Christian was supposed to’ve been in Nashville till tomorrow. I been cuttin up like that all day. How’s I supposed to know the son of a bitch was back?”
“I guess you weren’t. Did he not think it was funny?”
“That whorehopper can’t take a joke. He said it was disrespectful or somethin.”
“What’s your old lady going to say?”
“No tellin,” Motormouth said. “I guess she’ll up and go home to Mama. She’s been lookin for a excuse and this is made to order. She’s always throwin up I can’t hold a job. She thought I was clerkin anyway. She didn’t know I was jerkin feathers off damn chickens and such as that.”
He stared the car and studied the sporadic traffic through the back glass. “I don’t know. Seems like I squander myself huntin a job and then I ain’t got the energy left to do it after I get it. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
He began to back the car into the street. When he was turned to his satisfaction he barked the tires of the Chrysler and then squalled them again braking for the red light.
“Weiss catchin chickens tonight?”
“Yeah. He said if you want to catch be there before dark. I figured I’d ride up with you.”
“I might as well I guess. Money’s money even if you do have to breathe chickenshit to get at it. You want to ride out to my place awhile?”
Winer thought about Motormouth’s wife. “Not really,” he said.
“I’ll show you all my carparts.”
“I’m really not much on carparts. Besides, it’s liable to get squally around your place when she hears you got fired.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right. Listen, when you see Ruby don’t say nothin about me makin that chicken dance. She’s got even less of a sense of humor than old man Christian does.”
“It’s nothing to me.”
“It’s early yet. Want to shoot a game or two of pool?”
Late in the afternoon they drove up the road toward Weiss’s place. Passing Oliver’s gray clapboard Hodges said, “There’s a feller lives there you don’t want to fool much with.”
“Tell Oliver? Why, that old man don’t bother nobody.”
“He may not now but he used to be rough. Back fore my time his old lady took up with some Ingram feller off at Jack’s Branch. This was a long time ago. Anyhow, she sent Ingram back with a wagon and team to pick up her stuff while Oliver was at work. He come in early and caught this Ingram feller draggin a chifforobe across the yard. They took to scufflin I guess over the chifforobe and he pulled a gun on Oliver. They was fightin over it and somehow Ingram got shot through the heart.
“They locked old man Oliver up and then let him out on bond. I guess he’d a got off, justifiable homicide or whatever, but the Saturday after he got out Ingram’s brother jumped him in Long’s store. Ingram come at him with a pocketknife and Tell Oliver jerked a axehandle out of a barrel and like to took his head off. They give him some time over that. I reckon two in one week was a little hard to take. Or else they figured they better get him out of the way while there was still Ingram breedin stock left.”
“That old man’s had a lot of bad luck.”
Hodges glanced at him curiously. “I don’t reckon you could say them Ingrams exactly come up smellin like roses.”
A tractor-trailer rig sat parked before the long chickenhouses. A muscular black man dozed behind the wheel, a checked gold cap pulled over his eyes. Seven men or boys were grouped before the truck telling jokes and lies and waiting for dark to make the chickens drowsy enough to facilitate catching. A floodlight set in the eaves of the chickenhouse washed them with hot bright light.
Hodges walked from the group toward the corner of the chickenhouse and unzipped his pants. He stepped around the dark corner. Out of sight of the men he leaned to avoid the lowering branches of sumac and went at a dead run toward the far corner of the building where it intersected the woods.
He worked rapidly, chuckling to himself. Beneath a window he constructed a makeshift cage of chickencoops. Two high and six square. Standing atop them he took from his pocket a pair of cutters and scissored a triangular cut in the white mesh covering the window and then leapt down. He pocketed the cutters and went back up the ammonia-smelling alley into the light.
He came back into view blinking his eyes and zipping his pants ostentatiously under the acerbic eye of Weiss and his frail wife. Weiss fixed him with a hawklike look of suspicion but Hodges paid it no mind. It was a known that Weiss was suspicious of everybody and besides Hodges was busy computing his money and planning the trip to Lawrenceburg tomorrow to sell his chickens. He fell to thinking of a pair of cowboy boots he had seen in a shop window, a pair of low beam foglights from the pages of a part catalog.
With good dark Weiss awoke the packer and gave the men the word to proceed. “Be easy with my babies,” he told the catchers. Though they were already doomed to the meatpacker’s knife he could not bear to see them handed roughly or maltreated. The packer took his place halfreluctantly on the truck and opened the first row of coops and prepared the onslaught of chickens.
Four chickens in the left hand, three in the right. Groping in the musty dark where the chickens huddled, rising, out then into the white glare of the floodlights where the packer waited and Weiss watched the proceedings with a critical eye. Weary arms loaded with somnolent chickens upraised for the packer to take. Fourteen chickens to the crate, an inordinate amount of empty crates to be filled. Six thousand divided by fourteen, Hodges thought wearily. The precise figure eluded him but he knew it was a lot.
The packer would fill the crate and slam the lid closed and whirl with it to stack it on the rear of the truckbed. Empty crates at the front of the truck, full ones behind. Coming out with their armfuls of chickens the catchers would glance surreptitiously at the number of full crates, the number of empties left to fill.