By the Balls

by Jim Pascoe

  This guy checked in at about my height, about my same build; he even had a similar haircut as me. One big difference—he looked dumb, mean, and ready to prove it.

  I saw her glance my way. The expression on her face puzzled me: a combination of playful indifference and joyous vindictiveness. Specifically, the way she latched onto this guy’s huge arm and the way she leaned up to plant a kiss on his cheek suggested that she must be doing this mostly for my benefit. Whatever.

  Trying my best to ignore her, I walked over to the pit. I couldn’t deny that I was curious about what this cockfighting business was all about. Besides, it couldn’t hurt to blend into the crowd a little better.

  I guess I thought I’d see two roosters beating the feathers out of each other, real no-holds-barred action. Instead, what was most likely the end of the fight found these two fighters tired, barely able to stand, and only occasionally lunging in to peck at the other’s head.

  I had to struggle to see these birds, both because of the crowd in front of me and because of the three guys huddled in the pit with them. A guy crouched behind each cock, tending to it. The guy nursing the more-injured rooster lovingly stroked the bird’s neck while trying to wipe the blood from the animal’s eyes. He even stuck the rooster’s head in his mouth; when he pulled it out, he spit the excess blood onto the dirt. Then it was ready to fight again.

  Instead of watching the last throes of the fight, I found myself intrigued by the third man. Unlike the other two fellows, who wore dirty T-shirts and faded, muddy jeans, this one came decked out in a gray sharkskin suit, an open-collar tuxedo shirt, and a Mexican wrestling mask.

  He looked like a dance hall demon, except this was no dance hall. He squatted down, knees pointing outward, and hovered over the men and their birds. He shook in a fit of ecstasy or hysteria—probably drug-induced—as he counted to ten. He drew two lines in the dirt with his index finger, then the men placed their roosters behind the lines. Wings outstretched, the cocks met in one last, tired embrace.

  The end was quick: the one rooster fell beneath its stronger opponent. More blood had covered the losing cock’s eyes—only this time, they were closed. The poor bird laid there like a wet towel, its feathers dark and slicked with blood. The winning cock walked around the loser. My eyes caught the reflection of the bloodied knife strapped to the shaft of its left leg.

  I looked up at the crowd. For a moment, all the faces blended together. I shook off the hypnotic effect and focused my attention on finding Trout Mathers again. A couple glances back and forth, and I had his lean figure in sight. He just stood there, arms still crossed, with the thinnest smile cracked beneath his thin mustache. He checked his watch; I checked mine: eleven thirty-seven.

  Beth was easier to spot. Blood and feathers didn’t seem to faze her one bit. In fact, judging by the way she slobbered all over this new meathead of hers, I’d say the excitement of the fight had actually energized her.

  The man in the wrestling mask collected and redistributed money from the losers to the winners, presumably keeping a little bit to line his own pockets. People didn’t just bet against the house; plenty of money exchanged hands privately, discreetly. Good gangsters always act like they’re being watched.

  Lawton, though, looked more concerned about having a good time. He played around with one of the girls. She giggled as he fed her a drink from his cup.

  I switched over and watched the guy who Beth had been kissing and hugging get a fistful of cash from the masked ringmaster. Beth kept picking at the wad of bills like she was trying to pluck a flower from a bouquet. Her new boyfriend just waved her off. With the hearty guffaws of a recent winner, he elbowed the guy next to him, a slightly overweight hooligan with a cheap-looking crewcut and the worst polyester suit I’d seen in a decade or two.

  This guy had flabby skin that hung on his face, which was red and wet with sweat. Even from where I stood, I could hear his loud mouth: “The next fight my luck’ll change! You’ll see. I can feel it coming! I can feel it coming right to me! Tyler! Gimme the odds on the next round!”

  Again Beth caught me staring. I turned and made my way back to the drink table, where I grabbed another cup of cheap whiskey. My whole face wrinkled at the bite of the harsh alcohol, then from behind me came a voice.

  “You look kinda confused there, like you’re, I don’t know . . . confused or something.”

  “I’m not confused,” I turned and said to the scrawny, mouse-like man behind me. “I’m just a little bit—”

  “Oh, I got it.” He tapped the dimple in his chin with his index finger. “This is your first cockfight, right?”

  “Right.” I could bluff my way around a lot of things I only knew a little about, but this was one circus for which I could sure use a tour guide. Looked like this clown would do.

  “So let me ask ya then,” he continued. “What makes you interested in the chickens?”

  His sparse mustache looked like animal whiskers. His mouth kept busy by chewing on a wooden match that danced from one side of his lips to the other. His eyes were less busy; they hung lazily in his head like two big sleeping pills.

  “I suppose I’m just the curious type. How about I get you a drink, and you get me the highlights of all the interesting stuff going on here.”

  “No thanks.” He pulled a cigarette from behind his ear and lit it with the chewed-up remains of the match. His first lungful of smoke came out of his mouth and nose like exhaust from an engine. “I don’t drink. Bad for the health.”

  We both smiled. I offered him a hand to shake.

  “Ben Drake, by the way.”

  “I’m Aubrey Barnes . . .” He grasped my hand, his words trailing into another puff of his cigarette. “So, lotta big names here tonight, huh?”

  I looked around. “Yeah, I guess there’s some real rooster star power here.”

  “No man, the G’s in the crowd!” He gave me a friendly push to show he knew I was joking with him. “Look all around you. You don’t have to work in a post office to see who’s wanted around here. There’s Nick ‘Thin-Man’ Reed, Small-Tooth Kelley, Tommy ‘Two-Gun’ Glanzer . . .”

  Aubrey kept going with the list; some names I knew, some I didn’t. Two names I hadn’t heard before, but just made my list of ones to remember: Stash Mulligan and Yo-Yo Harrington. Stash was the guy Beth had her arms around; Yo-Yo was the adrenaline-case next to him.

  “. . . Still, there’s a couple of guys I never seen here before.” Aubrey scratched the spotty stubble on his neck. “Like that guy over there.”

  My eyes went to the gent he singled out. With difficulty, I held back my smile as I uttered, “That’s Trout Mathers, some big-time bank robber.”

  “There’s another one, that guy there. See ’im? Hasn’t said word one to nobody all night.”

  I saw him all right—a pasty youngish guy with long, slicked-back white hair, almost albino-like, dressed in a white, ribbed T-shirt and blue jean overalls.

  “Don’t know that one.”

  It occurred to me I should find out a bit more about my new friend. “Say, are you someone I should know?”

  “Me?” Aubrey gasped in overreacting shock. “Naw, I’m here ’cause I grew up loving the sport. My daddy was a cocker just like his daddy before him.”

  You can grow up learning a lot of vices in Testacy City, but I didn’t think you could grow up learning to fight roosters. I said as much.

  “I wasn’t raised here. This ain’t my kind of town. In fact, I can’t imagine why anyone would live here.”

  I’d run into this sort before. They lived in Testacy City but couldn’t find a single damn good thing to say about it. I always felt that if they didn’t like it, they could just ship out. This Barnes fellow was a little different, though, and that intrigued me.

  “So what are you doing here then?” I asked.

  “Well, I’m just waiting for the wife to get out of prison.”

  He spat out a stray bit of tobacco that sailed through
the cloud of smoke hovering around his head and scuffed the toe of a well-worn work boot in the dirt floor.

  “What did she do to get in there?”

  “She was a bad girl,” he slurred out of the side of his mouth.

  I glanced at my watch: eleven forty-eight. I began to wander away from this guy, turning back toward Mathers. He’d gone over to talk to the man in the mask, and now the two of them stood away from the crowd.

  Barnes clapped his hand on my shoulder.

  “So . . . if you’re new to cockfighting, then I bet there’s somebody else you don’t know. I bet . . . I bet you don’t know Sven.”

  “Nope. He another gangster?”

  “No man, he’s the breeder, Sven Gali—everyone knows him as Sven the Hen. Come on, I’ll introduce ya.”

  “So this guy knows what goes down here?”

  “Oh yeah, he’ll set ya straight for sure.”

  Aubrey cut a path through the crowd, steering me toward the cock cages in the corner. Maybe this Sven the Hen could set me straight on what Trout Mathers was after.

  As we walked, I had a clear view of Mathers. He still talked to the dance hall demon, doing his best Mr. Smooth routine. The masked guy wasn’t buying it. A lot of the assembled thugs clamored for his attention. He ignored them, shaking his head as the bank robber tapped a finger into his open palm. The masked man turned and began to walk away. Mathers grabbed him, spun him around, and pointed in his face. The ringmaster shrugged out of Mathers’s grip and walked away. Mathers let him go.

  Right after this exchange, we passed by Mathers. He surprised me by half-turning and slapping the back of his hand against my lapel.

  “Hey, pal,” he muttered to me while pointing across the room at Beth with a nod of his head, “looks like your new girlfriend is girl enough for everybody.”

  I didn’t bother to answer; I just kept on walking with Aubrey. But as much as I wanted to resist, I couldn’t help gazing over at Beth.

  She had switched her amorous attentions from Stash Mulligan to the fat, hothead hooligan named Yo-Yo. Worse still, this simpleton side-of-beef pawed at her with no sense of decency or decorum.

  And she looked like she loved every bit of it.

  I asked Aubrey about Yo-Yo and what his deal was. Aubrey said he was your typical violent type—a sore loser always on a losing streak. Well, he may not be winning the fights, but tonight he apparently had marks in the win column for Beth.

  “Come on! Come on! Come on! I ain’t got time to wait!” Yo-Yo spat out into the center of the pit. He pulled up his jacket sleeve to get a look at his watch. Then, as if he knew I had my eyes on him, he lifted his head and stared right at me.

  I held his stare. His beady eyes sized me up.

  Beth grabbed his face and pulled it close to her. He thrust his nose into her neck and kissed her like he was a dog lapping up water. She winked at me.

  Off to my side, a Mexican-looking gent in a blue baseball cap said, “Is she the little señorita that kissed you?”

  “What are you talking about?” I tried not to act as flustered as I felt.

  “I mean the little chickie, the one with Yo-Yo, she kissed you on the side of your face, eh?”

  This guy sat there with his round, brown face smiling right at me. The tattered lawn chair that barely supported his frame kept him so low to the ground I almost tripped over him. His polished white teeth matched the brightness of his new all-white sneakers. He wore crisp, dark-blue jeans and a red-striped polo shirt. He was a man in his mid-to-late forties trying to look young and clean.

  Aubrey jabbed me an elbow and muttered, “Mr. Sven probably noticed that lipstick smudged on your cheek.”

  “This is Sven Gali?” I said, rubbing the back of my hand against my cheek trying to remove what I could of Beth’s kiss. “And you—” I shoved Aubrey, “how come you didn’t tell me I had lip marks on my face?”

  “You were not expecting a Mexican, eh, señor? Well, I tell you my full name is . . .” He tapped his rib cage loud enough for me to hear. “My full name is Sven Gali Chavez.”

  Aubrey gave a weak shove back. “This here is, ah, Ben Drake. It’s his first time to a fight.”

  “I certainly didn’t mean any offense,” I said to Sven. “But you weren’t wrong. That girl over there in the short hair and tight dress gave me a good smack on the cheek. What can you tell me about her?”

  Sven rose to his feet. “Your first cockfight? You must be very excited, eh? You a friend of Tyler?”

  I looked to Aubrey to give me some indication of how to answer, but his stone expression revealed nothing. So I fired straight off: “I don’t know this Tyler.”

  Sven laughed in a way that made his jaw sink into his throat. I could smell the tequila rolling off him. “Of course you know this Tyler; everybody knows this Tyler. Funny man, you, this Tyler is the man in the mask. This is his club!”

  The joker in the wrestling mask strutted in the center of the cockfighting pit. The crowd around him continued to make preparations for the next fight.

  “Señor, look, right over there.” Sven tugged at my elbow. He pointed to a couple of guys in suits who were now in the pit. One of them pulled out a long, thin wooden box.

  “What d’you see?” he asked.

  “Looks like that guy is about to offer up some choice cigars, judging from that box . . . except I’ve never seen a box of smokes that looked quite like that,” I answered. Talking about smoking got my lips twitching. I pulled out a tin and lit up one of my own.

  “Some choice cigars? Ha! You keep getting funnier, señor. No, no, they are no cigars. Look carefully.”

  I did what Sven said. The guy with the box went over to one of the two guys who seemed to be in charge of handling the birds when they fought in the pit, sort of like a boxer’s coach. When the case opened up, I saw a series of inch-and-a-half-long blades with red, forked handles lined up against a bed of burgundy velvet.

  “Very, very sharp, señor. You no want to smoke those, eh?”

  In the pit, the two handlers in the dirt-spattered T-shirts selected their blades.

  “Perhaps in some places, the owners fight their own birds. But here, we got Curtis and Jesse to tie and pit the cocks. It’s easier, quicker, and a lot less dirty for well-dressed owners of prize game cocks, eh.”

  “Hey, Sven,” Aubrey spoke up, “this looks like a good fight comin’ up, pretty even match at that. Who’s your favorite?”

  “Well, I tell you, Señor Barnes. We got two hatch going to get pitted. Now, for fighting the short knife, I prefer a spangle hatch—you see how the yellow-leg has some markings in his hackle? It make me think maybe he got some spangle blood. Still, both these no match against my reds, I tell you that.”

  “Hatch is a breed of rooster,” Aubrey whispered to me as if it were a secret.

  “Yeah. I figured as much.”

  The chatter had already started to annoy me. I turned around to check on Mathers. He had his arm around the short man with the silver tie, who quivered, looking less friendly than before and plenty scared. He stared wide-eyed at Tyler, slipping the masked man a slow nod of his head. Mathers smiled and patted his gun beneath his jacket.

  “You are wondering about how we keep the cocks, eh?” Sven crowed to me.

  “Not really.”

  “All right then, I tell you.” He grabbed the front of one of the larger cages that had a bar about five feet from the ground that looked like a swing from a trapeze act. “This is where we grow them up real powerful. They get their exercise, build their leg muscles nice and strong. On this swing here, they do the exercise, like the chicken push-ups, eh!” He laughed at his own joke.

  “How do they get up there?”

  “Do you know nothing about the chickens, señor? They may not be able to fly south in the winter, eh, but they got the wings that let them jump high off the ground. You see this?” He pointed to a feed dish and water supply. “We make sure they get the extra-special food. It helps them get n
ice and strong.”

  Along the outside of the cages sat one-gallon plastic jugs filled with a dark purple liquid. Hand-lettered in magic marker were the words B-Complex, Liver & Iron. Next to the jugs, I saw a brown glass bottle labeled Energy Steroids (for horses only). I turned away.

  “Tell ’im about keeping ’em in the dark,” Aubrey said with that dead look in his eyes.

  “Si, si. We keep them covered in the darkness, eh. The only time they see the light is when we bring them out, and when we bring them out we hold them down while another bird attacks them—pecks at him, stabs at him with a knife. This way, when we ready to fight the bird, he sees the bright light and is ready to kill, eh. Look, they do it right now.”

  Curtis and Jesse cradled their birds in one arm and held onto the back on the neck feathers with their free hand. Tyler strolled over with a rooster held outstretched in both hands. This bird attacked one of the upcoming contestants, and with its beak, pulled out a couple of neck feathers and landed some pointed pecks to the head.

  The handler then put his fighter on the ground, placing its rear end high in the air, facing center. Tyler’s bird swooped down and attacked again, this time with its sharp claws.

  The rooster on the ground screamed and desperately tried to flap its wings free. When this ordeal was over, Tyler gave the opposing cock the same treatment.

  “See, señor, this is what we call flirting the cocks. It gets them pumped up and ready to cause some trouble.”

  I heard Sven, but I was too busy watching Yo-Yo Harrington’s sweaty face to answer right away. Beth still had her arms around his large waist, but he had stopped playing with her. His eyes beaded on Tyler antagonizing the second game cock. He rubbed his hands, ready for the action.

  Then it hit me.

  “Sven, what did you say this was called?”

  “Sí, now you interested! We call it flirting.”

  “Oh, Christ . . .” I couldn’t believe I’d almost been played for a sap.

  Aubrey Barnes cried out: “All right! Fight! Fight!”