Ben Rehder is a freelance writer, novelist, and outdoors enthusiast who lives with his wife near Austin, where he was born and raised.  Novels from the six-book series, Blanco County comic mysteries, made best-of-the-year lists in Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, and Field & Stream.  Buck Fever, the first in the series, was nominated for the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best First Novel from the Mystery Writers of America. Rehder’s nonfiction articles and essays have appeared in Newsweek, Texas Parks and Wildlife magazine, Texas Co-op Power, and the San Antonio Express-News, covering topics ranging from hunting laws to pit bulls to health care reform. He has had one short story published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.

The Chicken Hanger First Edition, 1 ed. Edition

A novel

By Ben Rehder

TCU Press

Copyright © 2012 Ben Rehder
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87565-436-2
CHAPTER 1

Ricky Delgado Sat in the waiting room of the small medical clinic and wondered whether he smelled like chickens. It was, of course, a valid concern. Did he carry the stench of live poultry? He’d had a chance to wash his face and hands before bicycling over from the plant, but without a full shower, the odor tended to linger. There were four other patients in the room, but one of them—an old Asian man—appeared to have a cold. He was sniffling frequently and blowing his nose into a stained handkerchief. He was too congested to smell anything. The rest of them? Maybe. Ah, well. Nothing much Ricky could do about it.

It was five minutes before five in the afternoon. Ricky had been waiting for two hours. He had tried to nap, sitting there in the chair, but he couldn’t, so he’d thumbed through the magazines. Now he knew how to create his own potpourri, should the mood ever strike him. He’d also learned a revolutionary technique for developing awesome abs in just ten minutes a day.

By five thirty, he’d been moved to a small examination room. A nurse—a pretty Hispanic woman—took his temperature and frowned.

“One oh three,” she said in Spanish. “How long has it been this high?”

“I don’t have a thermometer.”

“When did you start feeling bad?”

“Maybe a week ago.”

“Been staying home from work?”

Ricky shook his head. He wished he had more energy to talk. This was a nice woman. There weren’t many like her in Rugoso.

“Anyone you work with been sick lately?”

“Not that I know of.”

She wrapped the Velcro cuff around his arm to measure his blood pressure. Started pumping the little bulb. “Any other symptoms?”

He could tell from her accent that she was born on this side of the river, probably here in Texas.

But her parents probably weren’t.

“I cough a lot. And my chest hurts sometimes.”

“Hurts how? When you cough?”

“No, it just … aches.”

“You cough up any mucus?”

“No.”

“Are you congested? Your nose runny?”

“Maybe a little.”

“When you blow your nose, is the discharge yellow? Green?”

“No.”

“Do you ever get sinus infections?”

“I don’t think so.”

She nodded and unwrapped his arm. “One eighteen over seventy-five. Not bad.” She made some notes on a chart that contained all his vital information:

Age: Twenty-seven.

Height: Five-eight.

Weight: One fifty-two.

Allergies: None.

Insurance: Yeah, right.

“You taking any medication?”

“No, nothing.”

“Okay, just hang loose for a few minutes,” she said. “Dr. King will be in shortly.”

As she was shutting the door, he said, “Hey, miss.”

She paused.

“What’s your name?”

She smiled. “Cristiana. Cris.”

The doctor bustled in at six fifteen, a very important man, reading the chart, then rolling the little stool over beside Ricky. Didn’t introduce himself, just started feeling around on Ricky’s neck. Poking underneath the jaw line. Feeling the lymph nodes. He still hadn’t said a word.

He looked into Ricky’s eyes with that lighted scope, which was unpleasant, then he looked into Ricky’s ears with a different tool. “You speak English?” he finally asked.

“Sure.”

He looked down Ricky’s throat, then he stood and got behind Ricky and put the stethoscope to his back. Moved it around and asked him to cough a couple of times. Had him lie on his back.

“How long have you worked at the plant?”

The plant had a special arrangement with this doctor. They mentioned that to Ricky on his first day. If you get sick, they said, go see Dr. King. He offers a discount to Kountry Fresh employees.

“Eight months,” Ricky said.

The doctor was squeezing on Ricky’s abdomen, feeling around for something.

Ricky said, “It was either that or get my master’s degree.”

He liked to have fun with these people sometimes. Say things they wouldn’t expect. Bullshit a little. Joke with them. Sometimes it made a difference.

The doctor said, “Have you had any sort of illness that weakened your immune system?”

“No.”

“Are you on any medication?”

“No.”

The doctor shined the light in Ricky’s eyes again. “Does this light bother you more than normal?”

“Yeah, a little. Sunlight does, too. I forgot to tell the nurse about that.”

“Okay, I’m going to draw some blood, but I’m pretty sure it’s the flu. Take some aspirin or Advil for the fever, and I’ll give you some samples of this new antiviral, but it probably won’t help much.

You waited too long to come in.”

The nurse, Cris, caught him just as he was walking out the front door. She stuck her hand out. “Here, take this.”

It was a small, rectangular cardboard box containing a new thermometer. One of the fancy digital models.

“Thanks.”

She made a no-big-deal gesture. “We have plenty. The drug reps give us all kinds of freebies. You need to keep an eye on that fever of yours. Okay?”

She smiled again, and Ricky could feel it all the way down to his toes.

Thirty-three miles away, south of Laredo, a man named Clayton Dupree said, “What we need is some night-vision goggles. I think a lot of ’em are moving through after dark.”

Herschel Gandy didn’t reply. Just kept scanning the low brush-covered hills with a pair of high-dollar Zeiss binoculars. It was two hours before sunset, and they were sixteen feet in the air, in a deer blind. The tower lifted them high above the dense scrub—the guajillo and guayacán, the cat claw, sage, and prickly pear. A harsh and forbidding terrain. Thorns on damn near everything. Then you had your rattlesnakes and lizards, scorpions and tarantulas, and plenty of wild game, too. Turkey and pigs, dove and quail. And white-tailed deer, of course.Some of the biggest bucks a man could ever place in his crosshairs—and the Gandy Ranch, on the eastern banks of the Rio Grande, had more than its fair share.

But deer season hadn’t started just yet.

“They love the full moon,” Clayton said. “Don’t have to use flashlights then. Helps ’em navigate.” He raised his own binoculars, and Gandy thought they appeared out of place in Clayton’s large, calloused hands. Like some sort of anachronism. Clayton had the hands of a blacksmith or a muleskinner or a prospector sifting through hundreds of pounds of river silt a day. He was tall and lean, with sun-baked skin and a slight limp from an encounter with a bull when he was seventeen. That was twenty years ago, back when they were kids, and it seemed like yesterday. Gandy had been there when the bull tossed Clayton like a sock puppet, then crushed his knee with a front hoof. Ruined Clayton’s rodeo career. Still a hell of a ranch hand, though.

Gandy focused on a sendero—a long clear-cut alley through the dense scrub—coming from the southwest. The path of least resistance. That’s where the mojados would appear, if they showed at all. Mojados. The illegal aliens’ own term for “wetback.” Easy to tell which senderos they’d been using recently, because of the footprints and the garbage. Junk-food wrappers. Soiled toilet paper, sanitary napkins, and underwear. Plastic grocery sacks caught on thorny plants, waving like surrender flags. Water jugs that would decompose in, oh, maybe a thousand years. A huge fucking mess, and that was the least of it.

The wetbacks would cut a fence rather than climb over it. Like a lot of locals, Herschel specifically left his front gate open, hoping the wetbacks would leave the fence alone on the highway side of the ranch. But no, they cut that fence regularly, too.

If they could catch a calf or a goat, they would kill and barbecue it right on the spot. They’d break into homes and steal food, or anything small they could hock later. And those were just the average Juans heading north for day labor, or the señoritas coming over here to have babies, because babies born here automatically became American citizens. It was a whole different story with the drug runners. They were laying siege to this country, and nobody seemed to notice. Christ, most of them carried automatic weapons nowadays, making their way across private land like an invading army.

All of the illegals acted as if they belonged here and there was nothing a man like Herschel Gandy could do to stop them.

Wrong on both counts.

Ricky pedaled slowly but steadily along the shoulder of César Chávez Memorial Highway, grateful that he didn’t have to go back to the plant today. But Wayne would expect him first thing in the morning.

After eight months at Kountry Fresh Chicken, Ricky had a reputation as the fastest hanger in the plant. Maybe the fastest anywhere. Thirty birds a minute, which was about as quick as it got. He’d done the math. He was almost as good with numbers as he was with English. It came to eighteen hundred chickens every hour. Eighteen thousand in a ten-hour shift. Five days a week. Four and a half million chickens a year. And he was just one worker in one small plant in south Texas. Where did all those birds go? It boggled his mind. The citizens of this country had an amazing appetite for chicken. And everything else.

The job was the worst he’d ever had, which was saying something. He’d dug sewer line ditches through limestone, shingled houses in the August sun, picked fruit until his fingers bled. None of that was as bad—or paid as steadily—as live hang. That’s what it was called.

Chickens entered in crates, and Ricky had to grab the birds, one at a time, and hang them by their feet on shackles passing by on an overhead conveyor belt. From there the birds went to the kill room, where their necks were sliced with a circular saw. After that, Ricky wasn’t sure of the details, but he knew there were scalders—tanks of superheated water—to kill bacteria and make it easier to remove the feathers, which happened after the head was cut off but before the feet were cut off. Then the bare carcasses passed through a device that would singe the last fine feathers. Then evisceration, then into the chiller, then cut-up and deboning. It was like an assembly line, except it was a disassembly line.

In live hang, you had to hang at least twenty-three birds per minute. Less than three seconds for every chicken. Fall below that mark and you were in trouble. Because the chickens kept coming. They never stopped.

The live hang room was kept almost totally dark—it was supposed to calm the birds—but still, they’d shriek and peck at you, flap and flail, feathers flying everywhere. You’d lift them onto the hooks, and they’d piss and shit from sheer terror. By the end of the first hour, you were covered with it. Yes, you wore protective gear—a smock, goggles, gloves, plastic cones to protect your forearms from their angry beaks—but the filth and grime found their way past all that eventually.

It was always hot in there, too, even now, in October. So hot in the past week that Ricky couldn’t always tell what was fever and what wasn’t.

He was disappointed that he was sick right now. He wanted to be well when Tomás arrived.

Right at dusk, Clayton sat up a little straighter and said, “There we go.”

“Where?” said Gandy. He raised his binoculars.

“Two hundred yards. They just come over that rise. Three of ’em.” Clayton had always been an amazing spotter, even with his naked eye, even at dusk.

“I still don’t see ’em.”

“Off to the right, in the shadows.”

“What’re they wearing?”

“Jeans, all of ’em. Green shirt, red shirt, blue shirt. Still wet from the river.”

Gandy scanned up and down the sendero, not seeing shit, and then … okay. Yeah. There they were. Skinny little fucks. None of them over the age of twenty-five. Maybe even teenagers. Dressed just as Clayton had said, and each man had a backpack—the kind that students carry—swinging from his hand. Toting food and water, no doubt. No weapons that Gandy could see. The men were moving slowly, wary now, because they’d seen the deer blind looming ahead.

“They’re wondering if anybody’s up here,” Gandy whispered. “Now they’ve stopped. They’re talking.”

“Probably don’t even know when deer season is,” Clayton said.

“Wondering if they should go back,” Gandy said.

He could feel his heartbeat picking up.

The wetbacks had only two options, move forward or retreat, because trekking through the brush was unthinkable for anything on two feet. The men would be lost in minutes. Come tomorrow, when their water ran out, they’d be goners. Sometimes Gandy wondered how many sun-bleached skeletons lay undiscovered on his twelve thousand acres.

Come on, boys, Gandy thought. Just a little closer. Give me an easy shot.

And here they came. Slow. Apprehensive. Looking for any movement, or any sign of danger. But the rear and side windows of the deer blind were closed, so Gandy and Clayton were cloaked in relative darkness, especially now that the sun had sunk behind the hills.

Gandy reached for his Sako .270 leaning in a corner of the blind. Raised it—careful not to bang the muzzle against the roof—swung it level, and rested the tip of the barrel on the sill of the open front window.

There was a round in the chamber. Always was. What good was a rifle that wasn’t loaded? Gandy flicked the safety off with his right thumb. He pulled the butt of the rifle in tight to his shoulder and peered through the scope. Also from Zeiss. Cost nearly four grand, but it was worth it. Incredible visibility in low-light conditions. Built-in rangefinder. Took him less than three seconds to find the lead wetback in the glass, and to gauge his distance at one hundred and sixty-two yards. Piece of cake, but Gandy wanted him even closer. He wanted all of them to see the flame leap from the barrel when he shot.

He waited, and still they came. One hundred and fifty yards. One twenty. One hundred. Perfect. There was a slight breeze swaying the tower blind, but nothing he couldn’t handle.

He aligned the crosshairs on the man’s nose. Placed his finger on the trigger. The copper-jacketed bullet would turn the guy’s brain to porridge. Gandy figured he could probably drop the other two with torso shots within six or eight seconds. Man, it was tempting. Who would know? Who would care? Who could blame him for defending his country?

He took a deep breath, held it, and centered the scope on the man’s gray backpack. Checked the range again. Eighty yards. Showtime. He squeezed the trigger, and the rifle roared and bucked in his arms. The sound in the blind was overwhelming. Before it even faded, Gandy was jacking another round into the chamber. The wetbacks, of course, were running, making a mad sprint back the way they’d come.

Gandy took aim and sent another round screaming over their heads. Then another. And another. Then the three men disappeared over the ridge.

Clayton said something, but Gandy couldn’t make it out, because his ears were ringing like a goddamn fire alarm. He felt so … alive.

“What’d you say?”

Clayton was grinning. “It don’t matter how many times we do that, it never gets old.”

CHAPTER 2

You start with nothing. No home, no vehicle, no clothing except what you’re wearing. No clear sense of where you’re going or how you’ll get there. Like a hurricane victim, but you chose this, because it’s better than what you had before. If you’re lucky, you know somebody who knows somebody who’ll help you out, maybe even let you stay with them for a few weeks until you make some better arrangements. Then you begin putting your new life together, one piece at a time.

Ricky’s bicycle was his most valuable possession. The owner had left it unlocked in front of the Wal-Mart three years earlier, when Ricky had first come to Rugoso. It was an old single-speed Schwinn, neglected, but nothing that couldn’t be salvaged.

First, he took it apart. The handlebar stem and the seat post had a fair amount of rust on them, and there were pitted spots elsewhere, so he sanded the entire frame and repainted it with spray cans of Rustoleum. Now it no longer looked like the same bike, so the owner would be less likely to recognize it. One of the pedal cranks was bent, but Ricky was able to straighten it. One of the inner tubes had a slow leak, but he patched it. The chain was in bad shape, but he found a replacement at a garage sale for fifty cents.

(Continues…)Excerpted from The Chicken Hanger First Edition, 1 ed. Edition by Ben Rehder. Copyright © 2012 Ben Rehder. Excerpted by permission of TCU Press.
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