Handsome Hank was happy with his fat sack of mail on his back—never mind his hangover. He was a balding bear of a man with a yellow beard and bad teeth—a loyal and devoted emissary of the United States Postal Service. Neither wind, nor rain, nor a shitstorm of tequila could keep him from his rounds.

Before he’d found his true calling as a mailman, Handsome Hank had been a fencing contractor. He’d put up fences around just about everything: ranchlands, suburban lawns, swimming pools, spas, the odd dog run every now and then. He’d once even built a fence around a pizza parlor patio. That was a fine piece of work, all redwood in funky diagonal slats and four-by-four posts with a little gargoyle heads carved on top of each one. The gargoyles all bore a slight familial resemblance to Handsome Hank’s own striking visage. He wasn’t named Handsome Hank because he was handsome, after all….

The rich guy who owned the pizza parlor never got around to paying him. Handsome Hank tried all the usual methods of receiving payment for services rendered: invoices, phone calls, certified letters. He was simply ignored. One day Handsome Hank decided he’d had enough—it was time for more extreme measures. First, he fortified himself with whiskey, and then he strolled into the pizza parlor wearing a pair of roughed-out buckskin boots—and nothing else.

Handsome Hank’s nudity was awesome to behold. His beergut, vast and hairy, approximated the size of a wine barrel. His buttocks were tiny and sunburned. But most impressive was his elephantine male organ, hanging purple and forlorn in the crevasse beneath the hairy dome of stomach, as if one of Handsome Hank’s gargoyles had come to life and was drowsing there upside-down.

The pizza parlor was almost filled to capacity with a lunchtime crowd. Handsome Hank took a seat at the bar. All eyes were upon him as he ordered a pitcher of Budweiser and told the pimpled young man behind the counter that he wasn’t leaving until he was paid for the fence he’d put up out in back. The pimpled youngster volunteered to call the pizza parlor’s owner. Handsome Hank said that would be fine.

Nora Biddle-Whitney, silver-haired Editor-in-Chief of the Pine Bluff Insurrectionist, arrived on the scene before the owner could be found. She shot some nice profiles of Handsome Hank with her antique Leica, at angles suitable for a family newspaper. Then she got out her famous blue spiral notebook and goaded Handsome Hank and those around him into giving her some colorful quotes.

The pizza parlor soon had the atmosphere of a rowdy party. At one point, Handsome Hank got an erection and pounded it against the bar railing as he demanded more pretzels. Lost in her pursuit of journalistic truth, Nora cried out for a tape measure.

The owner of the pizza parlor eventually showed up and wrote out a check to Handsome Hank that paid the bill for the fence in full. Only then did Hank deign to put on a pair of red bikini underpants lent to him in the bathroom by a friendly cowboy. He was applauded upon his return.

Handsome Hank resumed his place at the bar, displaying his new cowboy underpants with a fierce pride as he drank two more pitchers of beer. There was a lot of backslapping. Then he threw up—but at least he was cheerful about it. It looked like the party would never end.

Nora’s article came out a week later. It seemed to approve of Handsome Hank’s insurgency, in a playful, backhanded sort of way. There was even a coy reference to the size of his penis. Handsome Hank found himself being lauded as the town hero. His notoriety helped spur him on to new heights of drinking and fornication. But he hadn’t counted on his reputation for craziness turning out to be bad for him in a strict business sense. Clients worried about him showing up at their sites naked. Over the next few months, his fencing contracts dried up on him.

Which led, of course, to the postal exam and his present happy circumstance as Pine Bluff’s most fabulous mailman.

•     •     •     •     •     •     •     •     •

Handsome Hank trudged up the road to Mrs. Andersen’s house humming the bass line to “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.” The sky was overcast, but it was hot and muggy—earthquake weather. The green meadow grass seemed to be writhing in the heat, and he would have sworn the clouds were sweating. His tequila hangover was providing him with a somewhat mystical view of life.

Mrs. Andersen’s place was the last house on his route, so he was able to make the long walk out there while his mail sack was at its lightest. It was a good thing, too, because Handsome Hank was so hot that all he wanted to do was take off all his clothes and climb into a cool, mossy horse trough to go to sleep.

He wondered what Mrs. Andersen would do if she found a naked mailman in her horse trough. Would she dial 9-1-1? Try to seduce him? Bring him a glass of iced tea? Probably just more fodder for the Pine Bluff Insurrectionist, however it turned out.

When Mrs. Andersen’s white picket fence came into view, Handsome Hank noticed something weird. Chickens were lined up along the path. They were also perched on top of the fence posts, like the gargoyles he used to carve. As he approached, the chickens stopped their usual, constant clucking and stared at him ominously.

Handsome Hank wasn’t humming “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” anymore. He’d started thinking about that Hitchcock movie, The Birds. But that was about a bunch of killer seagulls that went around blowing up gas stations and pecking everyone’s eyeballs out. Chickens were stupider than gulls, and besides, they couldn’t fly worth a shit.

Still, there were a hundred beady eyes staring up at him with dull yellow hatred…. Handsome Hank thought it best to proceed with caution.

Mrs. Andersen’s mailbox was at the end of the white picket fence. All he had to do was shove the latest Publisher’s Clearinghouse missive into it, and then he could get the hell out of there. It never occurred to him that he might let Mrs. Andersen know a day later that she may have already won over a million dollars…. Neither wind, nor rain, nor a hundred pissed-off chickens would keep him from his rounds.

Handsome Hank shuffled toward the chickens in his steel-toed mailman’s boots. Try pecking through those, you fuckers, he telepathically communicated to the chickens. They parted ahead of him and fell in behind him to cover his footprints on the dusty path. He was almost to the mailbox. Chickens surrounded him, silent and menacing. He couldn’t even see the ground.

As he reached to open the mailbox, a chicken perched on the fence next to it and hissed at him like a viper. Handsome Hank immediately thought of death by chicken venom, illogical as that seemed. He didn’t take his eyes off the hissing chicken as he fumbled for the sacred Publisher’s Clearinghouse envelope.

Brief as the interval between the flash of a nuclear denotation and the first shock wave, Handsome Hank’s vision was obscured by a blur of white feathers, followed by a sudden whirring of wings. A chicken had launched itself out of the mailbox into his face.

“Ghah! Crap!” cried Handsome Hank. He fell to the ground. The chickens descended upon him.

Handsome Hank felt his body wracked by a thousand bloody pecks, as if under assault by a tiny but determined army of sewing machines. His arms and legs were useless against so many vicious chickens. As he sank into the pool of his own nothingness, the vague music of their clucking blossomed in his ears. From somewhere above and beyond that, Handsome Hank thought he heard harsh, metallic laughter.

Then he felt the peck of one giant goddamned rooster.

•     •     •     •     •     •     •     •     •

Philo parked his motorcycle in the shade of Mrs. Andersen’s henhouse and set the sack of hemp seeds on the ground. He walked back to the white picket fence where he had seen a dark blue hat in the dust near the mailbox, crushed so flat that it looked like a stain. He picked it up. It was a mailman’s hat. Cool. Finders keepers, thought Philo as he walked back to the henhouse.

The henhouse was empty. “Mrs. Andersen, where’s your crazy chickens?” he asked of the dust motes dancing in shafts of sunlight. Mrs. Andersen wasn’t there, either.

Handsome Hank was there, but only partially. His severed hand rested among five perfect white eggs in a hen’s nest, not more than a yard away from the feed trough where Philo dumped the hemp seeds.

The hand vibrated ever so slightly as Philo started up his motorcycle and rode away.