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.

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.