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.