Cockfighter

by Cockfighter (retail) (epub)

  My partner didn’t attend the Alabama meet with me. The meet at Auburn on January 29 coincided with his wife’s annual visit to Florida. I never met the woman, but I had seen a half-dozen snapshots she had mailed to him that had been taken at Fire Island. In the photos, all six of them taken in a crocheted bikini, she looked brittle, thin and febrile-eyed. She didn’t look particularly sexy to me, but inasmuch as it was costing my partner more than twelve thousand a year to keep her in New York City, I couldn’t begrudge him a week in bed with her. He was entitled to that much, I figured.

  Johnny Norris of Birmingham won the Auburn derby, and I came in third. Four of my Allen Roundheads were killed during the meet, but I won two thousand five hundred dollars. A carload of arsenal employees drove over from Huntsville, Alabama, and I won most of my money from them. When it came to cockfighting, these rocket makers didn’t know which way was up. In a post-derby hack, I pitted Icky against an Arkansas Traveler that ran like a gazelle in the second pitting.

  Our veterans took every fight in the February 24 Ocala derby. They fought in the familiar pit as though they were defending their home territory and hens against invaders from outer space. Out of fourteen pit battles, I only carried out one bird. In order to get bets, Omar was forced to give three-to-one odds on every fight, but we still made eighteen hundred dollars on the Ocala derby and hacks.

  As the weeks passed, I kept as busy as possible. My personal life, perhaps, may have seemed dull, but I loved the way I lived. On my way home at night, after a day of conditioning at Omar’s farm, I often selected a book out of my partner’s library. Like a lot of businessmen in New York, he had always wanted to read books, but never had enough time. When he moved permanently to Florida, he ordered a complete set of the Modern Library, including the Giants. Starting at the lowest number, I was gradually working my way through them. By March, I was up to The Plays of Henrik Ibsen.

  Not only did I get up with the chickens, I went to bed with them as well, but I still had time for reading and for playing my guitar. My partner had asked me to stay at his house, but I declined. I liked Omar, everybody did, but we were together all day, and that was enough. Both of us were entitled to privacy, and I think he was relieved when I decided to sleep at my own farm.

  Omar Baradinsky, like any man who has strong opinions, liked to talk about the things he was interested in. This was understandable, and most of the time I enjoyed the insight he revealed on many subjects. However, to listen to him every night, especially when he got a little high on John Jameson, was too much. Unable to talk back, I had to grit my teeth sometimes to prevent myself from setting him straight when he got off track.

  Against the day when my voice was over and I could talk again, I made little entries in a notebook. Someday, Old Boy, I thought, I’m going to set you straight on every one of these topics. If we hadn’t separated every evening, our partnership probably wouldn’t have lasted the entire season. As it happened, we were still friends after more than five months. Because we were friends, I was worried. We were leaving the next morning and I didn’t want to hurt my partner’s feelings or interfere in any way with his individuality. But when it came to the Milledgeville Tourney, Omar had a serious problem, and it was up to me to explain it to him.

  On the afternoon of March 13 we sat across from each other at the big oak table in Omar’s living room going over the ledger and our accumulated records in preparation for the tourney. We had received a telegram the week before from Senator Foxhall reconfirming our joint entry in the tournament and acknowledging receipt of our five-hundred-dollar fee. The wire also told us that there would only be eight entries instead of the ten originally scheduled. Two entries had forfeited.

  “It’s going to make a big difference, Frank,” Omar said, rereading the telegram for the tenth time that day. His initial delight over our joint-acceptance—which in my mind had never been in doubt—had gradually turned to concern about whether we would win the tourney or not.

  “I know we won’t need as many cocks as we figured on,” he continued, “but neither will the other seven entries. Every cock in the tourney will be a topflight Ace.”

  I nodded understandingly. Omar’s concern was justified. With only eight entries instead of ten the competition would be a lot stiffen In comparison with a derby, a major tournament is a complicated ordeal. The matchmaker for a tourney has a compounded headache. In setting up the matches for a derby, the matchmaker only has to match the cocks to be shown at the closest possible weights.

  In a tournament, every entry must meet each other at least once. Not only is the matchmaking more complicated, each tourney entry must have an Ace for every weight—that is, if he expects to win.

  I wanted to win the tourney just as much as Omar did, but this was my fifth try against my partner’s first, and I refused to worry about winning. There was nothing more either one of us could do except pray. We had to fight the gamecocks we had, and they were in the peak of condition. To worry needlessly about winning was foolhardy.

  “Do you think we’ve selected the right cocks?”

  I nodded.

  “That’s it, then,” Omar closed the ledger. “I’m not taking our entire bankroll, Frank. Four thousand is in the bank, and I’m leaving it there. That way, if we lose, we’ll still have two thousand apiece to show for the season. I’m taking eight thousand in cash to the tourney, and I’m going to lay it fight by fight instead of putting it all down on the outcome. No matter what happens, we’ll still have a fifty-fifty chance of coming home with a bundle. Now, just in case we win the tourney, how much do we stand to win?”

  I wrote the information on a tablet, and shoved it across the polished table.

  Not counting our separate bets —

  8 entries @ $500 each $4, 000

  Sen. Foxhall purse $2, 000

  Total $6, 000

  If I win the Cockfighter of the Year Award, that’ll be another $1, 000-

  Omar dragged a hand through his beard as he looked at the figures. “Doesn’t Senator Foxhall take a percentage of the entry fees like the derby promoters?” he asked.

  I shook my head and smiled. The senator wasn’t interested in the money. He had more money than he knew what to do with, but he would still come out even and probably ahead. There would be at least four hundred spectators at the two-day tourney paying a ten-dollar admission fee each day. And the senator would make a profit from his restaurant, too. The Milledgeville cockpit was seven miles out in the country. Where else could the visitors eat?

  “Do you have to win the tourney to get the Cockfighter of the Year award, Frank?” Omar asked me.

  I spread my arms wide and shrugged my shoulders.

  I didn’t really know. Senator Foxhall hadn’t given the award to anybody in three years, and it was possible that he wouldn’t give the medal again this year. All I knew was that the senator awarded the medal to the man he thought deserved it. I didn’t want to think about it.

  I studied my partner across the table. If anything, his beard was blacker and more unkempt than it had been at the beginning of the season. He still wore his bib overalls, short-sleeved work shirt and high-topped work shoes. During our association, I had never seen him dressed differently. He was a free American and entitled to dress any way he pleased. Once a week, when he took a bath, he changed his overalls, but he wore them everywhere he went, to dinner when we ate in Ocala, and downtown when we had fought in Biloxi. Everywhere. This was my problem, and I had to tell him. I pulled the tablet toward me and began to write.

  Here are some things about the tourney I have to tell you. As official entries, we’ll be put up in Senator Foxhall’s home and eat our meals there. We don’t have to wear tuxes for dinner, but we do have to wear coats and ties. Entries and spectators alike are not admitted to the pit unless they wear suits and ties. This is a custom of the tourney out of respect to Senator Foxhall. But he’s really a good man. He was never a real senator, I mean in Congress. He was a Georgia state senato
r in the late twenties. But for whatever it means, he’s a gentleman of the old school and we have to abide by the customs. I don’t mind wearing a suit and tie in the pit and you shouldn’t either, because it’s an honor to fight at Milledgeville.

  I also have a personal problem, two of them. I’ve made seat reservations for four people. My fiancée and her brother, and for Mrs. Bernice Hungerford and her nephew. This was several months ago. I don’t know if they’re coming—neither woman has written or wired me. I don’t care. Well, I won’t lie. I DO care. If they come, help me entertain them. I’ll be handling most of the time, and you’ll have to give them some attention for me. Neither woman has seen a cockfight before. My fiancée’s name is Mary Elizabeth Gaylord

  I looked over the message, which had taken two sheets of tablet paper, and then passed it to Omar. He scanned it slowly, folded the two sheets, put them carefully in his shirt pocket and entered his bedroom.

  He slammed the door behind him.

  I wanted to damn Omar’s sensitive soul, but I couldn’t. The custom of the cockpit wasn’t my doing, but I felt ashamed. To dictate a person’s wearing apparel is a violation of every human right, but I had been forced to tell my partner about the custom or he wouldn’t have been allowed through the gate.

  After fifteen minutes had passed and Omar still didn’t reappear, I got out of my chair and knocked softly on his door.

  “I’ll be out in a minute,” he called out. “Fix yourself a drink!”

  I measured three ounces of bourbon into a six-ounce glass. Every time I wrote a note of any kind, I always felt that I was circumventing my vow in an underhanded way, but I was sorry I hadn’t written a more detailed explanation about the suit business. But I needn’t have worried.

  Two drinks later the bedroom door opened. I set my glass on the table, grinned at my partner and shook my head in disbelief.

  Omar had cut his beard off square across the bottom with a pair of scissors, and evenly trimmed the sides. His newly cropped beard was a stiff as the spade it resembled. His heavy black moustache had been combed to both sides, and the ends were twisted into sharp points. The white smiling teeth in the dark nest of his inky beard were like a glint of lightning in a dark cloud. He wore a pearl-gray homburg over his bushy black hair, a dark gray double-knit suit, a white shirt and cordovan shoes. Hanging out for two or three inches below his beard, a shimmering gray silk necktie was clipped to his shirt by a black onyx tie bar. He looked like a wealthy Greek undertaker.

  “I was saving this costume as a surprise for you tomorrow,” Omar said with a pleased laugh. “My new suit arrived from my New York tailor three days ago. How do I look?”

  I clasped my hands over my head like a boxer, and shook them.

  “Do you know what makes my beard so stiff?” Omar said, as he mixed a drink at the table. “Pommade Hongroise. And just in case you don’t know what that means, it’s imported moustache wax from France.”

  Omar added more whiskey to my glass.

  “You Southerners don’t have a cartel on manners, Frank. It may come as a shock to you, partner, but I even know the correct tools to use at a formal dinner.” He raised his glass. “A toast, Mr. Mansfield!”

  I grinned and clinked my glass against his.

  “To the All-American cockfighters, the English-Polish team of Mansfield and Baradinsky! Gentlemen, gamblers, dudes and cocksmen, each and every one!”

  We drank to that.

  We left Ocala at three o’clock, but it was almost two in the afternoon before we reached Milledgeville. I should have traded my old pickup in for a newer one, but I had never gotten around to it. For Omar, trailing me all the way, the slow rate of speed on the highway must have been maddening.

  When we reached Milledgeville, I waved for Omar to follow me out, and drove on through without stopping. Milledgeville isn’t much of a city—a boy’s military academy, a girl’s college and a female insane asylum—but it’s a pretty little town with red cobblestoned streets lined with shade trees.

  Once we were out of town and drawing closer to the cockpit, I didn’t mind driving so slowly because I liked the familiar scenery. During the summer, the highway would be bordered on both sides with solid masses of blackberry bushes draped over the barbed-wire fences. In the middle of March, the fields were iron-colored and bare. The tall Georgia slash pines were deep in rust-colored needles. The sky was a watercolor blue, and tiny tufts of white clouds were arranged on this background like a dotted-swiss design. The sun was smaller in March, but the weather wasn’t cold. The clear air was sharp, tangy and stimulating, without being breezy.

  Like Omar, in his new double-knit suit, I was dressed up, and we both had a place to go. I wore a blue gabardine suit that I had had for two years, but it was fresh from the cleaners. Well in advance of the tourney, I had ordered a white cattleman’s Town and Country snap-brim hat from Dallas, and a new pair of black jodhpur boots from the Navarro Brothers, in El Paso. For the past seven nights I had shined and buffed the new boots until they gleamed like crystal. I wore yellow socks with my suit, and I had paid forty dollars in Miami Beach for my favorite yellow silk necktie, with its pattern of royal blue, hand-painted gamecocks.

  I wasn’t dressed conservatively, but a lot of my fans would be at the tourney, and they expected me to look dashing and colorful. Press representatives from all five game fowl magazines would be present, and Omar and I were bound to get our photos printed in two or three magazines whether we won the tourney or not.

  A Georgia state highway patrolman waved us through the gate to the senator’s plantation without getting off his motorcycle. Seeing the back of the pickup and the station wagon both loaded with chicken coops, he didn’t need to check our identification cards. A mile down the yellowgraveled road, I took the fork toward the cockpit and cockhouses to weigh in and put our gamecocks away before signing in at the senator’s house.

  Peach Owen met us in the yards, assigned us to a cock-house, and gave us our numbers to wear on the back of our coats. We were No. 5, and before we did anything else we pinned our numbers.

  Mr. Owen was the weight-and-time official for the tourney, and president of the Southern Conference Cock-fighting Association. He was a well-liked, friendly man in his mid-thirties who had given up a promising career in cock-fighting to work full time for the senator and the Southern Conference. Senator Foxhall, who was getting too old now to do much of anything, paid Peach ten thousand dollars a year to breed and take care of his flock of fancy game fowl.

  “Do you want to weigh in now or wait till morning?” Peach asked.

  “Let’s get it over with,” Omar said, handing Peach our record sheets.

  “I don’t need both of you,” Peach winked at me. “There’s a fellow up at the house who wants to see you, Mr. Mansfield.”

  He didn’t say who it was so I stayed for the weighing-in, an almost useless precaution at a professional meet like the S.C. Tourney.

  At the majority of U. S. tournaments, cocks are weighed and banded upon checking in. This banding procedure is supposed to ensure that each entry will fight only the cocks he has entered. Before each fight, weight slips are called out, and the entrants heel the cock from their assigned cockhouse according to the exact weight on the slip. If they fail to show a cock making the weight within the check margin, that fight is forfeited to the other cocker who can. The metal band on the leg of the heeled cock is checked by the weight-and-time official immediately prior to the fight and then removed. If the cock wasn’t banded by one of the tourney officials upon arrival, the cock is a ringer. In theory, banding upon arrival at a tourney appears to be a sound practice, but bands can be purchased from a dozen or more manufacturers of cocking supplies by anybody who wants to pay for them. The man who wants to cheat by entering a sure loser, for instance, instead of a legitimate fighter, can buy all the metal leg bands he wants to, and clamp one on a ringer in a couple of seconds.

  Banding had been eliminated at the S.C. Tourney. Every cock pitte
d at the S.C. Tourney was a four-time winner at an authorized cockpit or game club. And all the wins were entered upon an official record sheet and initialed by the pit operator. Weighing-in at the tourney consisted of checking each gamecock against his record sheet and description and weighing the gamecock itself. Minor weight variations were taken into account by the official.

  The system wasn’t foolproof. It was still possible to substitute a runner for one of the checked-in fighters, but a man would be a fool to try it. Among the spectators were most of the S.C. pit operators who could recognize at sight the gamecocks that had fought in their pits earlier in the season. If one of them or one of the other entries spotted a ringer, the man who tried to pull a fast one was through with cockfighting. His name went out on a blacklist to every U.S. pit operator, and the blacklist of crooked cockfighters was published annually in the April issue of every U.S. game fowl magazine.

  The four-win stipulation was a tough rule, but I was all for it because it separated the amateurs from the professionals and raised the breeding standards of game fowl. This single rule had been the biggest advance in U. S. cockfighting since the late Sol P. McCall had originated the modern tournament. Many of the fans and gamblers who attended the two-day event traveled thousands of miles to see it, but they knew they would get their money’s worth. The fighting would be fast, and every cock shown had proven himself to be dead game.

  After completing the weighing-in, which took about an hour, our thirty-one game cocks were transferred to their stalls inside the cockhouse. We gave each bird a half dip of water, and I scattered a very small portion of grain on the moss-packed floor of each coop to give them some exercise after the long trip. We dropped the canvas covers over the coops to keep the birds quiet, locked the door, and drove the short distance to the senator’s home to sign the guest register.