Cockfighter
Page 17
I sat down at the table to write Mary Elizabeth a letter.
Dearest Darling,
I love you! How inadequate are written words to tell you of my feelings! To be with you and yet to be unable to speak, to tell you again and again that I love you is unbearable. To leave without saying good-bye, as I did, hurt me more than you can ever know. And yet, I had to leave silently, like a thief in the night. If I had written you a note with a bare “Good-bye,” you would have rightfully demanded an explanation I couldn’t give because I couldn’t speak! But an explanation is due, my Love, and on the blankness of this page I shall attempt the impossible. Never, never doubt my love!
First, I was home to obtain my rightfully owned property. You know this now, of course, because your brother bought my farmhouse and land from me. What you don’t know is that Judge Powell was instructed to sell only to Wright. Whether I was right or wrong in turning Randall out of his home depends upon how you want to look at it. In the Holy Bible the eldest son gets the inheritance of his father, as you know. In the eyes of the Lord, and I recognize no other Master, I was right. But even so, I only sold my land because I had to.
For ten years my goal has been to be the best cockfighter in the United States. Several, not many, times I’ve tried to explain cockfighting and my ambitions to you, but you have never listened. Read this, now, and then decide. Our future happiness, yours and mine, depends upon your decision. Closing your ears to all rational argument, you have always said that cockfighting was cruel and therefore wrong. But you have never SEEN a cockfight, and you said that you never intended to. At last I say you must!
The only way that you can find out that cockfighting is not a cruel sport is to see for yourself. I am now engaged in my very last try to reach the top. To continue fighting year after year without success is no longer possible. If I don’t win the two-day Milledgeville Tourney this year, I promise you that I‘ll quit forever! We will be married immediately, and I’ll enter any profession or endeavor YOU decide upon!
However, if I do win, and I want you physically present at the Milledgeville pit, win or lose, I intend to follow cockfighting as a full-time profession for the rest of my natural life. If you can accept this way of life, we will get married immediately and go to Puerto Rico on our honeymoon.
The remaining alternative, of course, is to tear this letter to bits and put me out of your mind and life forever. If this latter course is your decision, I’ll abide by it, and I’ll never, I promise, write or see you again, but my heart will be completely broken!
Don’t write and tell me what your decision is. If you do write, I won’t open your letters. Two seats will be reserved in your name at the Milledgeville Tourney (bring your brother if you like) from March 15 to March 16. I won’t write again, and will pray daily to the good Lord above that you will TRY—and please let your heart decide—to be there at Milledgeville.
I love you. I always have and always will!
Frank
I read the letter twice before sealing it into an envelope, and I thought it was a damned good letter. The little religious touches were particularly well done, and so was the part about going to Puerto Rico for our honeymoon. There are many luxury hotels in San Juan, and March is a good time to see slasher fights at the Valla Piedros. The pit opened daily at two p.m. and the cockfights are continuous until the cocktail hour. After dinner we could hit the casinos, shoot craps or even play a little blackjack.
Of course, there was always the chance that Omar and I wouldn’t win the tourney. With ten entries scheduled, a lot of things could happen, but the main idea of the letter was to ensure Mary Elizabeth’s physical presence at the pit. Once she saw for herself how well organized the tourney was, and how fair the pit decisions were, I was positive she would like the sport. A lot of ministers follow cockfighting zealously without conflict with their religious beliefs. After all, the cock that crowed after Peter denied Jesus Christ thrice was a gamecock! That was right in the Bible and a damned good point.
I considered rewriting the letter and mentioning this fact to Mary Elizabeth, but it was too late. I had already sealed the envelope. A better idea, perhaps, would be to introduce her to a couple of the ministers who attended the Milledgeville Tourney every year and let them talk to her. I knew little about the Bible and hadn’t read any scripture in fifteen years, maybe more.
Suppose she didn’t show up? My stomach tightened at the thought. I had to risk it. If she couldn’t see my side of things after reading a letter like that, there was no hope left for the two of us anyway. Feeling better about our relationship than I had in months, I picked up the guitar again and strummed it gently, enjoying the amplified sounds.
The tablet was still on the table, and I decided to write Bernice Hungerford a letter. She was entitled to a thank-you note after giving me such an expensive gift. A letter was the least I could do. Perhaps Bernice would like to see the tournament? She thought I was some kind of modern-day minstrel. What a terrific surprise it would be for her to learn that I was a professional cockfighter!
Dear Bernice:
What a wonderful surprise, what a wonderful guitar! There is only ONE way you could have pleased me more, and I intend to get into that later. This may come as a shock to you, but I’m a professional cockfighter, not a musician. For the next few months I’ll he out on the circuit and won’t be able to see you, but two seats will he reserved for you at the Milledgeville, Georgia, S.C.T., March 15-16. Please come. Bring your nephew, Tommy, along to keep you company, because I’ll be too busy during the meet to sit with you. I know it’s a long time off and I don’t know how I’ll be able to wait that long without seeing you again, but I must.
I have reason to hope that my voice will come back within the next few months. A letter is not the best way to tell you how I feel about you—I would prefer to tell you in person, whispering into your pretty ear! Perhaps I’ve written too much already, but you should have a FAIR idea of how I feel about you.
All my love—till March 15.
Frank
P.S. The Milledgeville pit is north of town. Check at any gas station in town for directions.
After sealing and addressing the envelope to Bernice, it occurred to me that she might not know anything about cockfighting or what the initials S.C.T. stood for—most of the people in the U.S. had thought that because cockfighting was illegal it had been abolished. I should have spelled it out in detail, I supposed. But if she made any inquiries at all, she could find out about it easily enough. Her nephew could do the investigating for her, and my name was certainly well known in cockfighting circles. The letter was better this way. If she attended the Milledgeville meet, I’d be able to determine if she was as interested in me as she appeared to be.
I walked down the gravel road to the highway and put two letters and some change for stamps into my R.F.D. mailbox. The night was warm and soft for late September, and a gentle breeze blew steadily across the fields. There was a steady hum from a million insects communicating with each other in their own little ways.
When I switched on the overhead lights in the cockhouse to check the chickens, the Mellhorn Blacks jumped up and down nervously in their coops, clucking and crowing almost in unison. They were all hungry, and I intended to keep them that way. I filled the water dips with water and returned to my shack. Without turning on the lights again, I sat in the dark strumming away on my new guitar until way past midnight.
This was one of the most pleasant evenings I have ever spent by myself. Although I was tired after three hectic days on the road with Omar, I was much too happy to sleep.
12
WE WERE UNABLE to make the first Southern Conference meet, October 15, at Greenville, Mississippi, but there was ample time to prepare our gamecocks for the six-cock, November 10 derby in Tifton, Georgia.
During the interim, Omar wrote to Pete Chocolate at Pahokee and arranged a hack match at the Ocala cockpit to be held on a Sunday afternoon in two weeks. Pete Chocolate was
a worthy opponent, although he was eccentric in many ways. He was a top cockfighter and a longtime Southern Conference regular and usually fought Spanish game fowl and Spanish crosses. He also had the distinction of being the first Seminole Indian to graduate from the University of Florida with a master’s degree in Asian Studies. I don’t know why he wanted a degree in Asian Studies, but I know how he got it. A rich Chinese pawnbroker who had made all his money in Miami left an annual scholarship to the university in Asian Studies for any Seminole who wanted to take it. The Chinaman had been dead for more than fifteen years, and Pete Chocolate had been the first and only Seminole to take advantage of the free degree.
Another peculiarity about Pete was his habit of wearing a black tuxedo suit at all times, even when he handled in the Pit. He didn’t always wear a white shirt and black tie with the tuxedo. Sometimes he did, but he occasionally wore a sport shirt, a blue work shirt, or, as often as not, no shirt at all.
His master’s degree and tuxedo had nothing to do with his ability as a cockfighter. He was a top handler and feeder, and a tough opponent to face in the pit.
The check weights for the hacks were 4:02, 5:00, 5:06 and 5:10. This early in the season, Pete only wanted to fight these weights, and we had to meet them in order to get the match. Each hack was to be a separate pit battle, and we were to put up fifty dollars a fight. With the wide selection of cocks we had, it was easy to meet the weights. I selected two of Omar’s Roundheads, one Ace Mellhorn Black, and my 5:00 Middleton Gray. Although Icky’s weight was only 4:02, I put him on the conditioning program too, in case I could get an extra hack for him. Before I could enter Icky in the Milledgeville Tourney against my old rival Jack Burke, he had to win at least four fights. In my opinion, Icky was the cock to beat Burke’s Little David. With this eventual goal in mind, I intended to select Icky’s four preliminary matches with care.
For the first few days of our partnership, Omar was often sullen, but he gradually came around to my way of conditioning. To prepare a gamecock for the pit is tough enough if he is in good feather already, but if the conditioner has to work off excess fat at the same time, his task is doubly difficult. When I worked out a regular diet for Omar’s flock of Roundheads and Clarets, he objected bitterly.
“Damn it, Frank,” he said, shoving my list of feeding instructions back into my hand, “I feed my cocks three times as much as that!”
We were looking over Omar’s chickens at the runs on his farm, so I tried to show him why the new feeding schedule was necessary. I picked one of his Claret roosters out of a nearby coop, felt his meaty thighs with a dour expression on my face, handed him to Omar and nodded for him to do the same.
“He’s hard as a brick,” Omar said defensively, squeezing the Claret’s legs.
I shook my head, picked up a stick and printed FAT! on the ground with the point of it. Omar rubbed out the word with his toe, returned the cock to the coop, and pawed through his beard.
“All right. If you say so, Frank. But he doesn’t feel fat to me!”
Although Omar had been fighting cocks for four years, it was evident that he had never “felt” a truly conditioned gamecock. The right feel of a gamecock is indescribable. Maybe it is an instinct of some kind, but if a man ever gets the right feel of a perfectly conditioned gamecock in his fingers, his fingers never forget. The exact right feel is an incorporeal knowledge, and once the fingers memorize it, they are never satisfied until they find it again. When a gamecock has the right feel, it is ready for the pit. Omar thought my regular diet was drastic, but I had to get the excess fat off his birds before I could put them on my special conditioning diet.
I checked this list again: 1 tablespoon of 2/3 cracked corn and 1/3 whole oats, once a day, tossed into scratch pen. One-fourth of an apple every four days. Two ounces of hamburger every ten days. Plenty of grit and oyster shells available at all times. Keep the water cups full.
This was a good diet, a practical feed I had learned through long apprenticeship. The chickens wouldn’t starve, and they wouldn’t get fat. If they had any fat when they were put on it, they would lose it in a hurry. And as long as this diet was maintained, any cock could be switched to a battle-conditioning diet and be ready to fight within ten days. By weighing them daily, any sudden, dangerous weight loss would be detected, and the feed could be increased slightly. But Omar had to begin somewhere, and the new diet was the first step forward in his professional education.
I returned the list to my unhappy partner, and this time he accepted it. The Claret crowed deeply, anxious to get some more attention.
“You’d better crow now,” Omar shouted at the gamecock, “By this time next week you’ll be too damned hungry to crow!”
The conditioning of game fowl is not a job for a lazy man. To condition five gamecocks for the hack coming up was easy for me, but I don’t think Omar had ever worked as hard in his life. The way he groaned and complained was downright funny. Just wait, I thought, until we start conditioning twenty or thirty at a time. In order to get six cocks ready for the Tifton derby, we would have to condition at least twenty.
After I rousted Omar out of bed at his farm at four thirty two mornings in a row, he brought a cot and his sheets over to my shack and bunked there. There was an old Negro couple, Leroy and Mary Bondwell, who looked after Omar at his farmhouse. During the two weeks Omar lived with me, Leroy fed Omar’s cocks with the same new diet. Every afternoon Omar drove home to check and weigh his birds, returning to my place for the evening conditioning sessions.
Buford dropped by for an hour or so every day, and I would put him to work changing straw in the coops, painting coop walks with creosote, or give him some other kind of odd job. But Omar and I, on a strict time schedule, did everything else.
I wakened Omar daily at five. I shaved and Omar fixed breakfast. By five thirty, at the latest, we were in the cockhouse.
During the entire conditioning period, the cocks were each kept in a separate stall in the cockhouse. The wooden slats on each door were close enough together so the chicken couldn’t stick his neck between them and jump up and down. They were so hungry, they thought they were going to be fed every time a man entered the cockhouse. If they were allowed to bounce up and down, with their necks between the slats, they would bruise the top of their dubbed heads.
While Omar crushed two hard-boiled eggs, shells and all, into the feed pan, I measured out cracked Flint corn and pinhead oats. When the mixture was blended, each of the five cocks got one heaping teaspoonful. We never mixed more than enough for one feeding, and they all got a second feeding that night. Every other morning I tossed three or four larger chunks of marble grit on the floor of their stalls.
When the chickens finished eating, and they ate fast, a cup of water was put in each coop. As long as they were drinking they were left strictly alone, but the moment they quit drinking or lost interest in the water, the cup was removed.
By six thirty they were ready for the foam-rubber mattress workbench. It was firm and only slightly springy, and it was covered with an Army surplus shelter half. I ran the cocks first, one at a time, of course, from one end to the other, and then back again, twenty times the first day, thirty the second day, increasing the number of runs ten each day until they reach a hundred. A cock fights fast so I ran them as fast as I could up and down the workbench.
Following the runs, the cocks were flirted. Flirting forces a cock to flap his wings to maintain his balance, and his wing muscles are strengthened. Like the runs, they started with twenty flirts the first day, and were increased ten flirts every day until they reached a hundred. Once a man gets the hang of it, flirting isn’t really difficult. A conditioner must remember to always be as careful as he can so the cock won’t get bruised. If a cock is flirted roughly, he will soon get stiff, even if he doesn’t get bruised. Omar was good at flirting, so I usually took the runs and let him fly them back and forth between his big hands. It was a pleasure to relax with a cigarette and watch Omar work.
Every other day, following the flirting period, we heeled a pair of the cocks undergoing conditioning with sparring muffs, and let them fight each other in the pit for about a minute and a half.
If one of the cocks appeared to be too tired, I didn’t spar him. There is always risk involved in sparring. Even when a bird is armed with soft chamois muffs he can get hurt. But by watching two sparring cocks closely, I can observe how well their stamina is building up.
After the sparring period, the cocks were allowed to rest for fifteen minutes, and then we washed them with warm soapy water. To help relieve soreness, I rubbed their legs down gently with a sponge dipped in rubbing alcohol. When the birds were all washed and rubbed down, they were placed in separate sun coops for twenty minutes. There was a roosting pole in each sun coop, and if the cocks were still active enough to have a fine old time jumping up to the pole and then down again with animated eagerness, I made a note to increase their runs and flirting for the next day.
The drying-off period gave Omar and me enough time to have a coffee break.
Before we returned the cocks to the cockhouse for the day, each bird was given two flies. Two daily flies not only bring out the aggressive spirit of a gamecock, they get him used to the idea that the best way to reach his opponent is to use his wings and fly to him. For the fly, Omar held out one of the cocks with his arm extended, with the tail of the bird facing me. I held the flying cock on the ground until Omar was ready, and then I’d let him go. When I released his tail he would take to the air, but before he could reach the bird Omar was holding out toward him, Omar would twist slightly to one side, causing the flying bird to extend himself to fly higher. After a few days of flying, a mature cock could rise eight or ten feet into the air from a standing position. If a cock could remember that he knew how to fly this well, it could save his life when pitted.