I made a last round and met Leonard in the break room. He had his security guard cap cocked at a jaunty angle and was standing in front of the soda machine, counting out change.

When I came in he said, without looking up, “You got a quarter?”

I gave him a quarter.

“Any chickens try to break out?” I asked.

“Nope. None tried to break in either. How about on your side? Any trouble?” Leonard pushed the button on the soda machine and a Dr. Pepper dropped out.

“No chicken problems. I saw a suspicious wood rat out by the trees, but he didn’t want any part of me.”

“Well, I can see that.”

I went over and made myself a cup of free decaf because I’d just given Leonard my last quarter. I put lots of free creamer in it. The coffee at the chicken plant needs lots of creamer so it doesn’t taste like something dead.

I stirred the coffee in the Styrofoam cup with a plastic swizzle stick and sipped it. It still tasted like something dead, only with creamer in it. I dropped the full cup in the trash and we went out to Leonard’s pickup.

We had been working at Deerstone’s Chicken Processing for about six months, and it wasn’t so bad. We had the three-in-the-afternoon-to-midnight shift. Mostly you just walked around and made sure there weren’t any holes in the fence and nothing was out of place and you didn’t see workers packing their car trunks with frozen chickens.

It beat one chicken plant I tried to get on at. They didn’t want me as a security guard, but thought I’d be great out at their farm, masturbating roosters for sperm to impregnate hens. No joke. They really did that, or so they said. I tried to imagine if they had you do it with tweezers and gloves, or if you had to do it with a naked thumb and forefinger. Perhaps it was better for the chickens that way.