There is the track and him knowing it, knowing the hungry in fox-print, foot-leavings in the powdered, yellow dirt of the yard. He cuts the oak bough with his teeth, chews away a stem and tastes acorn, a bitter, squirrel-belly taste that makes him spit, finish the job with his knife. The oak shavings curl at his feet. He spits again, into the track, ruins it.

No blood this time, he thinks. No feathers.

The chickens roost above him in the oak, white blots among the dark boughs. He counts again, slow, fingers numbering fowl and, finding the one still gone, says coon. And wants it that way. Big, winter-fat sow coon, tree with a cousin's hound and look with lantern-fire, hide stretched against tackboard. But he knows the track and it talks at him, talks fox until he sees it there. The fine, brief footing, whisper-soft. He thinks of a den, carpeted with chickenbone, a litter of pups harmless with milk-teeth. He clutches his gut, feels the crater of it, counts another rib, close against the taut skin.

In the bad light, he shapes the snare, heat whipping his face, a thing that he waves away like a gnat-cloud. He lances the oak bough, triggers it with a rusted bed spring, covers all with leaves. From his pocket he takes the pork, skillet-thawed and cold with jellied grease, intended bait that he eats instead.

The fledgling dark comes on and he walks back to the trailer. Under him, the brown, summer-killed grass crackles, breaks off clean at the root. From the porch, he watches the fenceyard, wire and post-vine, honeysuck and the hills beyond that know no dry. The drought does not touch them. Their backs are slick with green. A thousand times, he has seen clouds pass over the trailer, skies only miming rain until they reach the hills to down their pours.

In the yard, the dozen rooster barrels stand empty, mean nothing. He watches them turn out shadows like wash, the evening dark beginning to lengthen. He glances back at the oak, the roosting hens. In the grass, he wants to see a worn spot, a beaten place in the soil where something had stayed long ago, but there is only the dirty grass, skirt-swaying in the hot wind. Wiping the grit from his face he feels the small beard, fuzz-whiskers that want a shave. He thinks of a razor, water warm, bright with lather, goes inside.

The bantam makes noise, flicks dark, lead-pellet eyes through the wire of its hutch. It is a rooster, goes scratching at its newspaper bedding, stirs up a scent of seed-corn, guano. Granville sees a little molt beginning to take on the tail feathers, thinks of salve, of ointments and almanac cures that will do more harm than good. He thumps the hutch and the bantam clucks. In his pocket, Granville feels the gaffs. They jingle, a nice sound.

The old man is in the bedroom and he finds him there, a vomit-crusted sheet tucked bib-like under his chin. The room is dark and reeks, a vague mist rising, vapors of whiskey spills and bottle shapes. Under the sheet, there is a body-sized lump and at first Granville thinks woman, wants it that way. Apron-clad and cooking, hair tied in back, dark locks of run-off from the seam of scalp between the part, smell of bathsaltz and underarm. Then he knows better, remembers the dog, three days dead.

"What you doin'?" the old  man gurgles.

"Seeing if you're still alive," Granville says. He walks further into the room, kicks an empty fifth that spins in the lifeless dust of the floor. Under the sheet, the old man groans, hugs the rigor-stiff hound.

"I'm still here," he says. "Ain't going nowhere."

Granville smells the dog, remembers the old man wailing, staggering back from highway with the road-killed red-tick draped across his arms, the filth on his face streaked, turning to salt-mud.

"Get you a little drink," the old man tells him.

"I ain't thirsting."

"Go ahead. I got plenty."

And there is the sound of it, the drinking. The swallow, a drip into a white, shallow face, hard, door-knock noises echoing, the old, feral dark of the room pulling in like a lung, black waters mizering in dank, bile-driven dives. The bottles under the sheet tremolo together, glass on glass. The old man shakes, swallows.

"You take the banney up to Dervin yet?" he asks.

"No. Will 'fore long though."

"If he won't give you no more'n ten, shoot the sonuvabitch." The old man waves a hand at the gun-rack on the far wall, the hard metal of rifle and shotgun gleaming like railroad in the dark. "Use the four-ten. Ain't no since in making too big a mess."

Granville leans into the door-frame, scratches his back against the jamb, straightens a sleeping foot. He sniffs. Somewhere in the room a fly buzzes.

"Might wanna bury that dog after while," he says. "Starting to smell."

The old man groans, pushes against the hound and there is no give.

"Who? Ol' Drip? No. Drip ain't a bad dog. He won't stink less I tell him to."

Granville slides his boot back across the jamb and a pone of mud drops onto the floor. "You musta told him good then," he says.

Again the groan, the bottle upturning, a slur of said likker. "Listen to that sass. Soon as I get off this drunk me and you are gonna have a little talk."

Granville scrapes his boot again, sees the mark it leaves. He has heard the old man's talk before, the gruff language of fists pummeling saw-wood, knuckles dusted with blood. He remembers his mother, backing away, falling into the bare yard, the skirt climbing up past the knee, plaid on worn skin, the old man standing back, awkward, away-turning back into the brief light of morning.

He goes with the boot again and knows the room, the chiffarobe shapes, the bed unmade, sheets roughed only because the old man had lain there unsleeping, a wakeful drunk. He sees the fist arc up again, sees his mother's jaw powdering into rock-salt.

"Get you a swaller," the old man tells him.

This time, Granville goes to the old chiffarobe that stands against the wall, takes a bottle down from the top. He cradles it under one arm for leverage, uncorks it, and gets the stench. Something, way down in the bottle, thumps against the glass and he thinks mouse, almost asks it before drinking.  He swallows, coughs, hears the old man laugh.

"Take a little of that sass off you won't it?"

Granville grunts, feels the old slug of bottled corn, unsugared. He touches his face, feels the cheekbones beginning to leak through, the skin damp like cheesecloth.

"You coulda stopped me, boy. There wasn't that much fight in me. You coulda done it." The old man talks, snuggles with the dead hound. Granville takes another pull from the bottle and the thing at the bottom, mouse or finger or whatever, brushes his lips, leaves a taste. Bitter. Hot.

"Why didn't you stop me, boy? You weren't that little. You could've kept me from hitting her like that. Can't you even say why you didn't?"

Granville tries to spit, but the whiskey has dried him out. He sees them both again, as they were, years ago. Man and woman beneath the oak, chickens above, oil on canvas. He sees his mother offer up the pan of scorched eggs, breakfast brought ruined to the old man. He sees the fist go out, arc up like light. Forever, he listens to the grass catch her, soft forms falling on troubled ground.

"Can't you say it?"

"Didn't want to," Granville tells him and pushes out of the room, goes to load the truck.

The night is uneven as a stile, a go over dark that seems half-wintered, half-June. After sitting the rooster hutch in the floorboards of the pickup, Granville pulls off his old, scabbed work leathers and throws them into the yard. From under the seat he takes a box. The tissue paper billows and there is the oiled scent of the new boots. Dark, steel-toed shit-slinging clodhoppers two sizes too big. He slides them onto his sockless feet and his bony ankles knock around the brim like butter-churns. He looks again at the dozen empty rooster barrels, money made that way. Bartered, boot-buying money that the old man has been too drunk to miss. In his pocket, he feels the greased, waxy wad, bills bailed over like hay, lets his feet slip deep into the new leathers.

At the bottom of the drive he flicks the right blinker and the road glows jade in the moonlight. It goes a half mile further, he knows, turns up dead in the pleated grass and dirt of Dervin's yard. He thinks of old Dervin, meaty and overfed, his yard spread with the bones of the dozen roosters Granville had sold him, the pickings left for dog-strays and possum jaws. He thinks of old Dervin. Wallowing, mouth-greased, smelling always of dumplings, okra, tiny eyes spinning the slack-water face, a widower left to his own ends.

Granville turns the blinker back, makes a left, goes the eight miles to the Ceralvo barn. From the dark of the floorboards, he hears the bantam begin to cluck.
 

The parking lot outside the Ceralvo barn is brim-full. Pickups and shod-broken beaters are regimented in the wash-away gravel. A big crowd, Granville thinks.

He gets out, turns on his heels in the big river-rock that has been laid not a week before and is already beginning to loosen. He feels for the wad again, a slimming sum of fivers and ones, a single twenty. The barn hums and hives.

Its hickory frame is aslump, warped boards beginning, the tin roofing dog-eared, peeling. He sees the yellow scrape in the hill where the back-hoe had come to level off the ground, the cinder-block foundation of the barn settling into bright mud. And at once, the Ceralvo seems not as something built, but as something borne, a yield of all bad harvests, blight among the lacquered wood.

Granville struggles with the rooster hutch, nearly drops it. The bantam squawks and he calms it with a handful of fennel seed. His boots are scuffed already and he spits into his palm, polishes the black toe.

"Get your taps dirty?" It is Merlon. Granville hasn't heard him coming across the lot and now he stands leaning against the pickup's tailgate, patting the rust of the truck like an old dog. The stubble of his burr haircut gleams like buckshot embedded into his bright scalp.

"Nice lil' fryer you got there," he says, pointing at the bantam. "Not sure we got a small enough pan to cook him in though."

"Won't need no pan," Granville tells him. "I aim to spar this bird."

Merlon's face goes into a sneer, high lips over horse-teeth. "Shit," he says, grinning out the word between his teeth. "He'll get ate alive and you know it."

"He'll do alright."

Merlon spits through a gap in his teeth, toes the chicken hutch. "Looks like he's been doing more egg-laying than hen-fucking to me. I bet he's a faggot rooster, ain't he?"

Granville shrugs, undoes his fly, and pisses a short dribble. He shakes and the last dregs of the piss go across his boots. "That banney will take the purse tonight," he says, stooping down to clean them.

Laughter sputters from Merlon. He leans back on his boot-heels, kicks at the pickup's rear tire which is beginning to bald. Hiking one leg up, he balances himself on bumper, points at the bantam.

"That lil' fryer is gonna get tore up. Even a damn pusseyfart like you knows that." He talks sharp, stands looking down into the chicken hutch, and Granville gets the jitters, starts kicking gravel, thinking he sees the molt, the bad-feed, the troubleshooting. But Merlon doesn't say anymore, walks back to the barn, his thin shadow shouldered by the dark yolk of hill-rise. Granville watches him and feels the breeze beginning to coil, sounding from the river and roads below.

The Ceralvo barn is an organ of carbon. A straw-stuffed lung that breathes night, a liver and lights dish of cigarettes still smoldering, of dirt and dung and hay-rot. A heat-stove sits unlit in one corner; a draft fan turns slow, circles a lukewarm squeeze of air. The light is bad, dim. Fluorescent bulbs mostly. Christmas lights are nail-strung between tier and rafter, glow in the dusty haze that simmers and floats, a foot-called fog yellow that settles in a film on Granville's skin. Among the tiers, the Mexicans young enough to climb dangle their legs, watch with soot-cool eyes. In the straw below sit the elders, cross-legged and potbellied in the Levi's and T-shirts scrawled with English unreadable. The sound of their Spanish is quick and they smell of corn, hay. The whites have strayed, keep to themselves in isolated clutches of three or eight, eye the keg which has long since floated, the nozzle leeching its last, spermy dregs onto the floor in a slow, venereal drip.

There is the stale smell of greenbacks, bills greased and crumpled by hands too eager, bets placed on birds, laid down on benchwood. In the back, the dead pile festers, rooster carcasses leaking blood and bird-life from deep wounds.

Granville finds Leapfrog by the gas grille, the old man's belly sagging, a lip of white, stretch-marked torso dripping from over the waist of his trousers. He squints when Granville passes through his light, shifts in his lawn-chair, nods.

"Pilot light's blowed and everybody wants hamburger," he says, slapping the cold metal of the grille.

"Light her again," says Granville.

"Can't. That's more work than I'm willing to commit myself to at this juncture. Believe I'll just sit her for awhile, see if any opportunities present theirself."

"Opportunities for what?"

"Anything I guess. Gotta keep an open mind in this business." Leapfrog keeps nodding, takes a pipe from his pocket, knocks the bowl against his palm. He puts the stem to his mouth, looks up at Granville. "Been gettin' any pussey?" he asks, talking around the unlit pipe.

"Fraid not," Granville says.

The old man nods some more, takes a look at that bantam. "What about that rooster? I guess he ain't worth a shit neither, huh?"

Granville sets the hutch at Leapfrog's feet, watches the old man lean forward for a better look. "He's got spark in him," Granville says, but Leapfrog leans back into the lawn-chair, suckling his pipe.

"How's your daddy?" he asks.

"Drunk."

"Ever bury that dog?"

"No and it's been dead three days now. You don't know about a stink like that."

Leapfrog grins, his face slipping into a wide berth of dark gum. "Oh, I might," he says and lifts a leg to fart, a quick, barking sound. Granville laughs a little, wipes a hand through the grit on his face.

"Getting looser all the time," Leapfrog says, still grinning. "Bet when I was your age I could fart this barn over on its side. Now all I got's this damn mouse-bark."

Granville drops the hand from his face, leans forward, goes into a whisper. "Fox been getting my hens," he says. "Took three this last month."

"So that's where all your pussy's been going." Leapfrog takes the pipe from his mouth, fingers the slobber from his lip. "Got your snare made? Like I showed you?"

Granville nods, remembers with guilt his hunger, the eaten pork, the unpotent trap. "Just like you said."

Leapfrog knocks the pipe against his knee and a few singed tobacco sprigs fall across his hand. From the barn's center there comes a whiplash of shouting, curses and slap-hoots, a fight now finished. Granville sees a man's arm raise, then sling, watches a dead leghorn fall through the bad light of the barn and land among the dead-pile. Granville sees the money pass, communicable currency handed fist over frown.

"Got my slot marked?" he asks Leapfrog.

 The old man leans up from his chair, spits a dark glob onto the floor.

"Got two spots clear," he says. "One's with a Mex and he's fighting  a wormy looking domiknicker." He pauses, both hands shucking together, goes on talking around the pipe stem. "Other one's with Merlon." The old man takes a scrawl-ridden blackboard from under his seat, lays it like a dulcimer across his lap. He searches his breast pocket for a nub of chalk.

"Merlon still spurring that big red?" Granville asks.

Leapfrog nods, works the chalk. "I'll put you with the sand-nigger."

Granville slides his boot out and it scuffs the dry of the barn floor, leaves a yellow mark among the dust. "Don't," he says. "Slot me with Merlon."

The squint again, Leapfrog's old nod. Like the grazing of oil derricks in a pasture, down, then the other way, up, sucking air, gas. He cradles the pipe like it's something he wants to throw, points the chalk-nub at Granville.

"You'll get ate alive and that ain't all," he says. "How much money you bring tonight anyway?"

Granville's lips line out, taut as fencewire, talks through his set teeth. "Fifty," he says.

"That's a lie," says Leapfrog. "Only I ain't sure if it's more than fifty you brought or less. Don't guess it matters. You'll lose it all and then some if you spur with Merlon, but it don't help none me telling you that. You know it just like I'm sitting here. Know it, but can't help it. Or maybe you don't care. One or the other anyway." He works the chalk again, sculpting letter scratch, the sound knocking against the scuffed char of the blackboard. It scritches like rooster claw, the old man's powdered fingers smudging the slow writ. When he is finished, he slides the board back under his chair and slaps a ghost's mane of chalk-dust from his hands.

"You're down for it," he says.

Granville grins, shows a little tooth, digs in pocket for the gaffs, shows them to the old man. They ring like spare change in his palm.

"Those Spanish?" Leapfrog asks, leaning to look.

"Yessir," says Granville, giving them a little jingle.

The old man's face cracks open like a drought-killed creek-bed. "Couldn't save you if I wanted to, could I?" he says and tucks the pipe back between his lips.

Granville slips the gaffs back into his pocket, gives a little more grin before going to stand beside the keg. Best place in the barn, he thinks, if somebody didn't want bothering.

Folks tended to stray from dry kegs worse than skunk-stink, avoiding them like bad luck. He has seen them do it a thousand times. Miners and workmen stiff with thirst turning quick when they see a floating keg, drunks fetching up ever gut left in them and keeping clear, wanting bad to lap the drip, suck away the foam until bone-dry but knowing where that'd get them and not doing it. Fights could happen that way, Granville thinks. Ass-kickings were always in order for anyone who took the last swallow.

His boots slush in the beer dregs. He scuffs the toe, throws up a little spray of Budweiser. The beer has turned to runoff, a foam-heavy flood snaking on the unlevel floor. The stream hits a nail-head, forks away across the boot-whittle grain, an alcoholic oxbow swirling in the straw and dust. Granville sits the bantam, cage and all, on the keg, searches his pocket for a little more feed. The bird eats right from his hand, a bad sign. No meanness in him, Granville thinks. Not an ounce.

He remembers the gamers his father raised: hard, flog-prone fowl with wild spark in their eyes, fierce, devil-bent birds that never crowed, only gave looks, slow and angry, at sunrise. Starving them was key. Towards the end of a week-long famine they'd get mean, start flogging anything. Cattle, dog, tree in the wind. Before a fight, the old man wouldn't even let them scratch for worms.

Granville twists his hand free from the hutch, drops the remaining feed onto the barn floor. The bantam clucks, hen-like behind his wire.

 "Faggot rooster," Granville says and feels again the cave of his gut, the hunger incredibly there.

At the other end of the barn he sees Merlon. Laughing wild, his fingers pinch a cigarette, spume milky smokes and signal. His burr cut gleams, drips. The sweat makes a little halo when it dries, the collar of his shirt powdered white with his body's own salts.

After Granville's mother died, Merlon came up to the trailer wanting a gamer, but Granville wouldn't sell. Even when Merlon pulled out a pair of snakeskin boots to go with the twenty he'd already offered, Granville wouldn't budge.

"Hell, they're your size. Try 'em on," Merlon had urged. But Granville was high-centered, sullen; no tractor-jerk or work-team could pull him off his berm and he had just shook his head.

Merlon had snorted, tucked the boots under one arm, looked over the place, the trailer and game roosters, like it was all something he could take anytime he wanted. His eyes had lit on the barren place, the grassless patch below the oak, and he had pointed, asked outright, "That where he kilt her?"

Two Mexicans are sparring their birds. They've each got Orfingtons, thin, wormy roosters. The two men grunt, throw-up handfuls of grit fine as hourglass filler, cuss in Spanish. Blasphemy and bad English, dark mats of dust-gray hair slipping into eyes. Granville watches the bird's tumble together. They are a whipping storm, a turning lash that makes him remember an oak thick with roosting hens. Wings sucking wind. In the pair of too big Jackson boots, his feet are damp, tired and he thinks always of a fist falling over and over until it is not simply one thing, but everything, the whole, the intact hunger entire.

One of the Orfingtons flops, tucks its head, dies in a gasping roll. The Mexicans glare, red faces polished like saddle-horns, dark tips of mustache reining in eager mouths. Granville sees Merlon cut a path through the crowd, come his way. He splats a hand on the floating keg, says right away his word, "Gravy."

Granville crosses his arms at the sound of the nickname, nods.

"Guess we're pegged to spur tonight, ain't we?" Merlon says.

Again the nodding. "Yeah."

Merlon drops his cigarette and it hisses on the beer-wet floor, burns away into nothing. "Can't quite get it figgered about that banney," he says. "Damn thing looks weak as bath water, but maybe that's just a bluff."

"Maybe." Granville leans back into the keg. The aluminum feels cool through his shirt.

He knows Merlon, has seen him driving among the streets of town, the big, V-8 Dodge fire-stoke red, roll-bar in back, lift-kit on the frame, a swirlstrom of grunt. He has seen the truck idling in all-nite parking lots, gas burning away like nothing, the fenders sprayed with mud, the tires big, boondock eaters with deep tread. Through the smeared windows of pool-hall and pit-pig barbecue shacks he has looked and seen Merlon there, face greased and damp, slavering. Always, Merlon brings at least three birds to the Ceralvo barn, bets a week's wages. Sometimes, he brings girls, once a woman. An honest-to-God woman whose name Leapfrog had told in a whisper. A real woman, all solemn and smoke-eyed, not pretty, but old enough to make Granville think.

"Purse is heavy tonight," Merlon says, pointing a wink at someone in the crowd. "Twelve hundred on top."

Granville scuffs his heel again. "That's chick feed," he says.

Merlon's laugh, high and crackling like burnt paper, breathes hot over Granville's face and he leans up from the keg, takes a half-chewed coffee straw from his pocket, begins working it like quid against his teeth.

"Now that's talk," he smiles. "That's the right kinda talk."

There is only a nod from Granville. He watches the crowd, sees Leapfrog bending to sweep the feathers from the center with an umpire's broom. Hands slap together in the crowd, dollars and curses mixing, the finger-smeared mouths toothey and beginning to sparm froth. From barn center, Leapfrog waves a big, blood-sticky hand at them both.

"If that banney fights anything like your old man we're all in trouble" says Merlon and leaves to prime his bird. And Granville knows what it all means, that it has forever and always cycled back like water to its own place of origin: a barren patch yard beneath a chicken-thick tree.

Granville bends, opens the bantam's hutch. Gaffing the bird he pricks a finger, bleeds a sour taste into his mouth. The rooster clucks, gives a halfhearted crow.

 "If you start getting into any trouble I'll call a handle. Ain't no sense in letting that buzzard of his pick your bird to the bone." Leapfrog talks at him, his brown face smoothing out, the toothless gums dark and wet from suckling pipe stem. Granville sees him take a vile of red powder from his shirt pocket, offer it.

"Cayenne," he says. "Might put a little more fight in that bird."

Granville nods, opens the vile. He wets a finger with spit, dips it into the pepper and slips it into the warm smoothness of the rooster's ass. The bird squawks terrible, tries to flog before Granville can get a handle, but the gaffs cut only air.

"If he gets weak," Leapfrog says, "slip him a little more."

Granville says nothing, barely nods, moves quiet to the barn's readied center. It is an old trick, the cayenne, and means nothing. Merlon will do the same, he thinks. Or worse, use kerosene, send his bird bloodthirsting into a wild spit of spur and horn.

In the barn's center, Merlon is priming his bird. The red is a hoss, its long sprout of tail-feather showering metallic gold and jungle green. The gaffs Merlon put on are two-inch throat-cutters and they gleam from the chicken's leghorns, the bird quiet while Merlon strokes back its thick comb.

Granville takes the bantam, still riled from the dose of pepper, to the fight circle, squats with the bird cradled between his blue-jeaned thighs. From across the dirt, Merlon points a wink.

"Y'all boys know how it's done," says Leapfrog. He has come to barn center, his belly ripe, his stance bowlegged in the motley earth of feather. "I'll call handle after first blood and from then on let 'em spur less I call it again."

A few laughs break from the crowd and Granville sees the Mexicans watching from the tiers, plump faces of chicory, somber and close with straw stuck to wet fingers. Down in his gut, something turns over like a fist, its fingers tight over his innards and someone, deep in the crowd, caws to him.

"Hey Gravy," they say, "we don't spur hatchlings up here."

Laughter again. Dropping like ice onto galvanized metal.

The bantam squirms and he strokes it. Between his hands he feels the structured frame, the hollowed bone ready to fly. He sees Merlon start a grin, wink forever into the dimly strung Christmas lights, his face cut with slivered green, a pox of blue. Between his hands, Granville feels the bantam and it feels like a nothing, a boneless jelly zero that will slide and slip into dark when loosed.

Leapfrog waddles out of the circle, gives him a straight look. Then he nods to Merlon and they beak their birds, the red taking a wild peck at the bantam before both are released and become one, a sudden combustion of feather and flog-thrusts, instant smoke and fluid, alchemy of all angered instinct. The red is aggressive, does no needling, but jumps and comes down, trying to rip out the smaller bird's lungs in one thrust. The bantam is quick though and keeps a distance, clucks and caws, its head bobbing, the scarf of neck feather blown out like umbrella-bloom. The red is old though, big with experience and catches the bantam with a gaff, draws out from the feathers a spurt of blood that makes Leapfrog call a lethargic handle.

Granville is quick at his bird, lifts the lip of the wound. He opens the bird's beak, put his own mouth over, sucks blood up from a punctured lung, turns his head to spit. The taste is dark, like water taken from a gourd dipper. He sucks, spits again, slips a little more cayenne into the bantam before putting him back to the pit. And it is a quickening end, the red moving liquid, coming down with his gaffs going deep into the wounded bantam, leaving nothing but a flounce, a twitch in the fine yellow dirt.

"Be fifty you owe," he hears Leapfrog say, feels something warm enter his hand. And only then is he aware that the old man has handed him his bird, limp and dead, a slow drip of blood slipping from its beak. He tucks it like a primer under one arm, shakes his head.

"Guess that means you ain't got it?"

Again, he shakes his head. In the far corner of the barn, he sees Merlon hutching his red, checking under the wings for scrapes. There are none, Granville thinks. No blood can be drawn from such kind and theirs is forever the kingdom and the glory.

"Merlon'll wanna collect," says Leapfrog. He rubs the sweat-bright knurl of his face, looks up and around the barn. "He don't care what he does neither. He'll beat the hell out of you right here and not think twice."

Granville tucks the bantam into his shirt. Blood makes a smallness of color there, a stain swelling on shirt fabric. He looks at Leapfrog. "Maybe you could slip me out back? He wounldn't see me leave."

The old man's face falls away from the barn and he looks at the boy, the lump of dead bird under his shirt making him seem big, greater. "He'll come after you. I was you, I'd find somewhere else to sleep tonight."

 And he goes and the boy follows to the padlocked door at the barn's back, hears a jangle of keys, the night opening like a can of eels. He steps down into the mud of the lot, feels his boots sink into the loose-stool earth. He slips the boots from his feet and laces them together, stands with the mud budding up from between his bare toes.

 "Give those to Merlon. Maybe that'll stay him," Granville says, handing the dirtied leathers to the old man.

Leapfrog grunts. "Doubt it," he says. "Remember what I said about being careful where you lay yourself tonight."

And he goes and the door shuts, leaves only the barn, noise cocooned by nailed wood.

All the way home, he drives with the dead rooster on the seat beside him. The blood taste is still thick, like molasses, in his mouth. His bare feet shiver in the floorboards, on gas, on brake, on clutch. At the foot of his drive, he idles, goes on up to old Dervin's. The trailer is dark, unlit. He pulls in, doughnuts in the yard, roosting the white aluminum with dark mud. Rolling down his window, he throws the dead bird, catches sight of an old redtick hound, barkless on the plywood porch.

"Caw!," he shouts. And drives on, going to some place he knows, a quiet dead end where all the night's losses could be slept away.