Flying Shoes Read Online Free PDF Page B

their jinky distilling contraptions made of cottonseed oil drums and hog intestines (the ones that weren’t eaten), producing unguinous, toxic swills that they sold in used bottles that they painted so that customers couldn’t see the sick color or the varmint hairs and bug pieces that might float within. Deciding on a fresh start, the Valentines descended to Mississippi and bought into the newly rebuilt Mobile and Ohio Railroad as minor shareholders. The family scraped along in considerably reduced circumstances for a couple generations until Mann’s daddy met his mother, Carusa, a hard McComb girl with ambition. She took the genteelly impoverished and feckless Mr. H. M. Valentine Sr., who had been reading for the law at the university for thirteen years and making and drinking his own small-batch shine, and steered him away from alcohol and law. Thanks to Carusa Valentine, the reconstruction of southern railroads, the advent of trucks, and the South’s addiction to fried chicken, the family built another fortune.
    Mann had grown up in the chicken plant, cleaning up, hosing down, packing, wearing waders and slogging through offal, feathers, cigarette butts, tobacco cuds, and blood. Carusa insisted that he learn the business from the bottom up, and she meant this very literally. Every time in his adult life that something unhappy occurred, Mann rated it against the summers he had had to work the conveyor belt, seizing slippery, naked dead birds by their drumsticks, spreading them, and sniffing their private cavities for freshness. He had kept a bucket by his feet for when he puked on the bad ones, and was happy when he was promoted to the chick pens, where he became the only non-Vietnamese at the plant who could sex a three-day-old chick. After prep school at Woodberry Forest, where he and Charles were roommates, Mann was sent off to business school at Emory, where he very belatedly realized his sexual preference amongst the gaggles of fluffy blond Hitler-youth, Jesus-adoring boys. Some were and some weren’t . If he could only sex them or sniff them out, like his chickens. He learned soon enough. But, confused about the nature versus nurture controversy surrounding homosexuality, and worried about all the hormone-dosed poultry he’d come in contact with, Mann had wondered if his chicken experiences had marked him. To Mary Byrd he described his early hetero encounters in terms of chicken; a date situation he’d gotten into once had been “exactly like putting my hand in a bucket of hot, throbbing, just-harvested chicken livers.” Although Mary Byrd assured him that it wasn’t a choice—“You just hatched out of your own queer little egg just the way you are”—Mann never felt completely convinced that the chicken work hadn’t turned him gay.
    After college, he was invited back to Dundee and into the office where he spent long, nutty days on the phone dispatching trucks and fussing with buyers in Russia or Mexico or dealing with shitweasels like Elvers Hartay. A nasty bantam of a man who called himself a preacher, Hartay also ran a dirty little farm where he raised roosters that he somehow, Mann was convinced, stole from the vast chick pens at Valentine Chickens. Mann also suspected Hartay of doping rooster chicks with huge amounts of steroids, and then, when they grew scarily gigantic, selling the roosters, big and mean as turkey vultures, back to Mann as “good breeding stock.” What Hartay’s Cocks LLC was really doing was providing most of the champion fighting birds at work in the Deep South. Even at the end of the twentieth century, a chicken thief was still a chicken thief and one of the lowliest of assholes. Mann was determined to bust Hartay someday, somehow, preferably in his own church pulpit, where Hartay railed every Sunday morning and Wednesday night against cold beer and in less public places about lower-echelon nigras and hummasekshuls .
    At any rate, now Valentine Chickens was enormous,