C4 antho - Chamber Four

Black Night Ranch ~201~
“I can read it.”
“Tell him we will do it in one day and one half.”
“Okay,” Billy said.
The boy leaned in close and whispered, “Drink whiskey?”
The sound of James Carl closing the house door straightened
the boys. The rancher returned with a five-gallon orange
water can filled and ready. He took Billy aside. “What’d
Miguel say?”
“That was Miguel?”
“I’ve been gone ten minutes, and ya’ll didn’t so much as
introduce yourself?”
“No.”
James Carl got loud. “Did you talk sheep at all or what?
Pimples and jacking off?”
“He said it would take the rest of today and half of tomorrow.”
“Twenty-three hundred head? Seven Mexicans? You
misheard.”
“No.”
James Carl thought about it. “I guess that boy’s got
faster.”
The Mexicans rigged up, tested their shears, and donned
their chaps, but mostly they waited for sheep. James Carl
and Billy ended their conversation and herded in the animals
from the pasture through hog panel corrals they’d rigged up
for that purpose. After getting ahead of the shearers by fivehundred
head, James Carl sat in lawn chair in the shade of
an elm growing beside the shearing barn. He opened an ice
chest full of beer and watched.
The shed was set up with ten shearing stalls, which were
just plywood cubicles with eight-foot tall burlap bags hanging