Cockfighter

by Cockfighter (retail) (epub)

  If I had been completely broke, or without any gamecocks of my own, I wouldn’t have considered a partnership with Omar. But I had enough Ace chickens to hold up my end. Omar had excellent, purebred gamecocks. All he needed was a man like me to work the hell out of them. The idea of forming a partnership with anybody had never occurred to me before, although partnerships were common enough in cockfighting circles. Besides, I had a good deal of affection for Omar, almost a paternal feeling toward him, despite the fact that he was more than twenty years older than me. He wanted success very much, and there were many things he had to learn. And there was a lot that I could teach him.

  After feeding the chickens that evening, I drove to Omar’s farm for supper. His farm was on the state road, and his house was a two bedroom-den structure with the asphalt-tile floors. It was a luxurious house compared to my one-and-a-half-room shack. There was an arch above the entrance gate, and a sign painted with red letters on a white background stated:

  THE O.B. GAME FARM

  “Our Chickens Lay Every Night!”

  Omar had been in advertising too many years to pass up a good slogan. In addition to the arch sign, there was a smaller sign nailed to the post of the gate at the eye level of passing motorists.

  EGGS. $15 PER DOZEN

  At least once a week, some tourist driving down the highway toward Santos or Belleview would stop and attempt to buy eggs from Omar, thinking that the sign was in error and that the eggs were fifteen cents a dozen. Omar enjoyed the look of surprise on their faces when he told them that there was indeed no mistake. Of course the eggs were fifteen dollars a dozen and worth a hell of a lot more! And of course, Allen Roundhead and Claret setting eggs were a bargain indeed at fifteen dollars a dozen.

  Smiling at the sign, I turned into Omar’s farm. A man like Omar Baradinsky would be a good partner for me. Why not? I couldn’t think of a single valid objection.

  That evening after supper, when Omar brought out the bottle of John Jameson, a partnership was formed.

  11

  FOR THE NEXT three days Omar and I lived out of his station wagon, driving through southern Alabama and picking up his country-walked roosters from various farmers. The back of the station wagon had been filled with young stags before we left, each of them in a separate coop. Every time we picked up a mature cock we left a stag to replace it.

  Omar paid these Alabama farmers ten dollars a year for the privilege of leaving one of his gamecocks with the farmer’s flock of hens. In addition to the board bill, he also had to buy up and kill all the farmer’s stags each year. Selecting the right farm walk for a fighting cock is an art, and Omar had done a careful, thorough job. All his Alabama walks were more than adequate.

  A gamecock is a bird that loves freedom of movement. With his harem at his heels, a cock will search for food all day long, getting as far as three or more miles away from his chicken house on the farm. The more difficult his search for food, the greater his stamina becomes. At night, of course, once the chickens are asleep, the farmer must sneak out and scatter enough corn in the yard to supplement the diet. But he must never put out enough feed to completely satisfy the chickens. Like members of a welfare state, chickens who don’t have to get the hell out and scratch for their living will soon learn to stand around waiting for a free handout, getting fat and useless.

  The hillier the farmland, the better it is for the cock’s legs. Trees to roost in at night, green fields, and, whenever possible, a fast-flowing brook for free water are the requisites for a good walk. Florida is too flat for good walks, and Omar had been wise to put his roosters out in southern Alabama.

  To assist us in picking up the half-wild, country-walked gamecocks, I had brought along my big Middleton Gray. He had a deep, strong voice and an exceptionally aggressive disposition. We had little difficulty in getting the half-wild cocks to come back to the farmyards.

  First, we drove into a farmer’s yard, and Omar told him we were there to pick up the rooster, and that we had another to replace him.

  “Well, now, Mr. Baradinsky,” the farmer said, invariably scratching his head, “I ain’t seen your rooster for two or three days now.”

  “Don’t worry,” Omar would laugh. “He’ll be here in a minute.”

  By that time, I would have the big Gray heeled with a pair of soft sparring muffs. As soon as I dropped the Gray in the yard, he would begin to look for hens, crowing deep from his throat. Within seconds, an answering crow would echo from the fields or the woods a mile away. As we watched, the cock we came for would be running toward us as fast as his strong legs could carry him, his harem scattered and trailing out behind him. He often crowed angrily as he ran—Who is this threat to my kingdom? This interloper who would steal my hens?—he seemed to say. When he reached the yard, he attacked immediately, and the Gray, seeing all those pretty hens, piled right into him with the sparring muffs. Omar would catch the wild country-walked cock, and I’d put the gray back into his coop.

  After closely examining the wild gamecock, I’d saw off his natural spurs a half inch from the leg, and arm him with the other pair of sparring muffs. We pitted the two cocks then and there to see how the bird fought. It is very difficult to spot a runner on his own domain—often a useless dunghill rooster will fight to protect his own hens—but I could always get a fair idea of the bird’s fighting ability. If the cock was satisfactory, we left a young stag to take over the harem and placed the cock in the stag’s coop. Before leaving, Omar would pay the farmer ten dollars in advance for the next year’s board and warn the man against clipping the new stag’s wings. We never took the farmer’s word either. Before leaving we always checked personally to see that there weren’t any other full-grown roosters, turkeys, or guinea fowl around. If there was a mature rooster on the farm, dunghill or otherwise, the stag might have been intimidated and gone into hack, submitting to the dunghill’s rule.

  Omar had developed a firm, gruff manner with these farmers who loaned their farms for walks. Despite his strong New York accent, which rural southerners distrust instinctively, he had won them over completely during four years of contact. He didn’t merely leave a stag and forget about it until the following season. He wrote letters periodically during the year, asking how his rooster was getting along, enclosing a stamped, self-addressed postcard to make sure he would get a reply. The farmers responded cheerfully to Omar’s active interest, and, if nothing else, they were awed by his impressive jet-black beard.

  Most farmers, once they accept the idea of having a gamecock instead of a dunghill ruling their hens, are well pleased by the setup. Why shouldn’t they be? The eggs they obtain are bigger and better-tasting, the offspring of a gamecock have more meat, and the small payment of ten dollars a year is money from an unexpected source. And any farmer who keeps a few hens has to have a rooster. Why not have a game rooster?

  Every time we picked up another country-walked rooster my heart swelled with pleasure. Their feathers were tight and their yellow eyes were bright and alert. Their exercised bodies were firm to the touch, and their dubbed combs usually had the dark red color of health. Out of the twenty-eight cocks Omar had on country walks, we picked up twenty-one. The other seven, in my considered opinion, needed another full year of exercise in the country.

  I was happy to get back to Ocala and anxious to get to work. The little town of Ocala has always been my favorite Florida city, combining, as it does, the best aspects of Georgia and the worst side of Florida. A small city of about twenty thousand permanent residents and some one hundred miles below the Georgia state line, Ocala is where the state of Florida really begins.

  As a driver enters town on the wide island-divided highway, the first sight that hits his eyes is the banner above the road: OCALA—BIRTHPLACE OF NEEDLES! This famous racehorse will be remembered by the Ocala townspeople forever.

  To his left, six miles away, is Silver Springs, one of the most publicized tourist attractions in the world. On either side of the highway there are weird
attractions, displays and souvenir shops. Commercial Florida also begins at Ocala. But the town itself is like a small Georgia town. Decent, respectable and God-fearing. The townspeople are good southerners—they provide their services to the rural residents and to themselves, and take only from the vacationing tourists with cameras dangling from their rubber necks.

  Two miles outside the city limits in gently swelling country is my small leased farm of twenty-three acres, a small house to live in, an outhouse and outside shower, a well-constructed concrete brick cockhouse and some thirty-odd coop walks. My shack, as I called it, was unpainted but comfortable. The man who built it had started with concrete bricks, but ran short before the walls had reached shoulder height. The remainder of the house had been completed with rough, unfinished pine, and roofed over with two welded sheets of corrugated iron. In a downpour, the heavy pounding of raindrops on the corrugated iron had often driven me out of the shack.

  Omar dropped me off first and then drove to his own farm. He had much better facilities to take care of the cocks than I had, and, upon his suggestion, I had agreed to alternate between our farms for conditioning purposes.

  Buford ran out of the cockhouse as I entered the yard, a big white smile shining in the middle of his ebony face.

  “Mr. Frank,” he said happily, taking my bag, “I sure is happy to see you! My curiosity’s been drivin’ me near crazy for two days. Just wait till you see them big packages I put in the house!”

  I entered the shack, followed closely by Buford, and the first thing I did was reach behind the dresser for my pint of gin. As I had suspected, the bottle contained less than two ounces, and it had been almost half full when Omar had picked me up three days before. I looked sternly at Buford, but he was pointing innocently to the two large cardboard boxes on my bed.

  “I don’t know what they is, Mr. Frank,” he said quickly.

  “The man from the express brought ‘em out day before yesterday, and I signed your name. What do you reckon’s in there?”

  I finished the gin, and handed the empty to Buford. Buford had had his share while I was gone—the man had an unerring instinct for discovering where I hid my bottle. He thought that finding my bottle was some kind of a game.

  I took out my knife and slit open the two cardboard boxes. One box contained a speaker, and the long box held an electric guitar. But what a guitar! The instrument was fashioned out of some kind of light metal, painted a bright lemon yellow and trimmed in Chinese red. On the box, above the strings, there were two sets of initials, encircled by an outline of a heart.

  If I thought I had made the grand gesture when I sent Bernice a dozen yellow roses, she had certainly topped me. The electric guitar and its matching yellow amplifying speaker must have set her back four or five hundred dollars. I searched through the excelsior in both cartons for a note of some kind, but there wasn’t even a receipt for the instrument. The initials inside the heart contained her message.

  Buford looked admiringly at the guitar, shaking his head with a feigned amazement. As soon as I looked at him he laughed the professional laugh of the American Negro.

  “Whooee!” he exploded with false amusement. “You got yourself a guitar now for sure, Mr. Frank!”

  I pointed to the door. Out in the yard I gave Buford a ten-dollar bill in payment for looking after the place for three days. Buford had his own farm, a wife and four children, but he spent more time with me than he did with his family. When I happened to think about it, I’d slip him a five or a ten, but I didn’t keep him on a regular salary because I didn’t need him around in the first place. He knew as much about the raising and handling of gamecocks as any Negro in the United States, if not more. Unfortunately, because of his color, he was barred from almost every white cockpit in the South. He would have been an invaluable assistant for me on my trips to circuit cockpits, but I couldn’t take him along. However, he helped me out around the place, handled opposing cocks in my own training pit and made himself fairly useful during conditioning periods. He loved gamecocks. That much I knew about him. And I believe he would have sacrificed an arm or a leg for the opportunity to fight them. Because I knew this much about the man, I was well aware that his rich and easy laughter was insincere.

  What in the hell did Buford have to laugh about?

  “I fixed up all them sun coops the way you showed me, Mr. Frank,” Buford said. “And I put some new slats in the cockhouse stalls. But they ain’t much else to do, so I won’t be back around till Saturday.”

  I nodded, and Buford climbed into his car.

  “Whooee!” he laughed through his nose. “You got you a git-fiddle now, sure enough! Will you play some for me come Saturday?”

  Again I nodded. As Buford made a U-turn onto the gravel road toward the highway, I entered the shack.

  The wonderful and unexpected gift had made my heart sing with delight, although I had controlled my inner excitement from Buford. As soon as he was gone I connected shoulder dipped a quarter of an inch lower than her left, the round, three-eyed shape of her button navel, and every golden pubic hair.

  I loved her and I had always loved her and I always would love her, and the dark guilty shadows erased her pink-and-white body from my mind. No man had ever treated a woman any shabbier than I had Mary Elizabeth!

  Suppose, I thought blackly, she just says the hell with you, Frank Mansfield, and marries a nice stay-at-home Georgia boy… a bloated bastard like Ducky Winters, for instance, the manager of the Purina Feed Store? Why not? He’s single and over thirty. What if his bald head does look like a freshly washed peach and the roll of fat around his waistline resembles a rubber inner tube half filled with water? He’s got a good job, and he’s a member of the Board of Stewards of the Methodist church… well, isn’t he? His mother can’t live forever, and he did pinch Mary Elizabeth on the ass at the box social that time… remember? You wanted to take him outside, but Mary Elizabeth wouldn’t let you.

  How many good prospects does she have? Ducky Winters, no matter what you may think, is one of the better prospects. Suppose she marries one of those red-necked woolhat cronies of her brother’s? Wright doesn’t want her to get married, but he would approve of some farmer who would keep her close to her home, just so he would be assured of seeing her every day. What if she married Virgil Dietch, whose farm is only three miles down the road? Virgil’s only forty, a widower with two half-grown boys, and he’d be damned happy to marry a woman like Mary Elizabeth. With his growling German accent—despite three generations in Georgia—and his lower lip packed chock-full of Copenhagen snuff, she wouldn’t be the various electrical cords, following the directions in the illustrated instruction booklet. I plugged the cord into the wall outlet and tuned the strings. The full tones, amplified by the speaker set at full volume, reverberated in the small room and added a new dimension to my playing. After experimenting with several chords, banding them hard and listening to them echo metallically against the iron ceiling, I tried a song.

  Halfway through the song I stopped playing and placed the guitar gently on the floor. Unconsciously, I had played “Georgia Girl” first. The rich amplified tones brought suppressed visions of Mary Elizabeth flooding into my mind, and I dropped the plastic pick.

  In the sharp silence, following so closely on the sound of the echoing song, I pictured Mary Elizabeth in my mind, still in the same position where I had left her at The Place. She sat quietly, feet below the surface of the pool, and with dancing dappled sunlight reflecting on her pale nude body. Her blue-green eyes looked at me reproachfully, and her ordinarily full lips were set in a tight grim line.

  To make her disappear I shook my head.

  This was a recurrent vision of Mary Elizabeth. Whenever I happened to think of the woman, a guilty, sinking feeling accompanied the thought. She was always nude, always at The Place. I never thought of her as fully clothed—that was a Mary Elizabeth I didn’t want to think about—the spinsterish, school-teacherish, Methodist kind, with a reproving exp
ression on her face. As a rule, when I hadn’t seen Mary Elizabeth for several months, her features became indistinct, except for her hurt blue? green? eyes. But her body was always as clear in my mind as a Kodachrome color print. I remembered every anatomical detail, the way her right able to understand half of what he said, but Wright liked Virgil and ran around with him. And Wright wouldn’t object to a marriage between them.

  For more than an hour I tortured myself, mulling over the list of eligible suitors in the county Mary Elizabeth could marry if she wanted to spite me. There weren’t many left. Most of the men in rural Georgia get married young, and divorces are rare. The remaining eligibles were a sorry lot, especially when I considered the widowers who had worked their wives into an early grave.

  It was exquisite torture to consider these ignorant woolhatters who shaved only on Saturday, who wore a single suit of long johns from October 15th to May 15th, and who didn’t take a bath until the Fourth of July. And yet, as far as husbands were concerned, every one of these men would make a better husband than I would. As a woman, she was entitled to a home and children and a husband who stayed with her at all times.

  I had provided Mary Elizabeth with eight years of nothing. A quickly scrawled line on the back of a picture postcard, and on one of my rare, unscheduled visits, a quick jump in a woodland glen. To make matters worse, I hadn’t even talked to her on my last two visits. She had consistently resisted every explanation I had tried to give her concerning my way of life and had never consented to share it with me. Perhaps I could write her a letter, a really good letter this time, a letter that would make her think?

  This year was going to be my year. I could sense it, and my new partnership with Omar was the turning point in my run of ill fortune. I knew this. My prospects had been as good before, but they had never been any better. I couldn’t continue through life silent and alone, and I couldn’t keep Mary Elizabeth dangling on a thread—the thread would break, and both of us would be lost. If there was to be a break, it would have to be now—Her way or My way—and she could make the choice!