The Rogues' Game

by Milton T. Burton

  I considered for a moment. “Sure, why not?”

  “Good,” he said with satisfaction. “I’ll set it up. He says that he wants to meet the man who’s steering the deal. It’s a prudent move on his part, and I don’t blame him.”

  “Me either,” I said.

  We fell silent and stared off to the west where the setting sun was a blood red half circle in the hills beyond the broad silver band of the Cimarron River. I could smell the rich odor of the river bottom in the distance, and somewhere nearby a dove called to its mate. A soft breeze had been blowing, rippling the grass and fluttering the leaves of the blackjack trees that surrounded the house. Suddenly the wind lay and a hush fell on the world. I reached for the jug and poured another dram of moonshine over my ice. Down in the river bottom an owl hooted twice, and from somewhere behind the house came the muted clang of a cowbell. It ceased and the silence reigned once again. Finally Chicken Little spoke. “Willie has been crabbing about the long wait.”

  “What’s wrong now?” I asked with a sigh.

  “He claims he’s short of money and he needs to get something going pretty soon. Says he’s had bad luck here lately in other ventures and needs a little money to live on.”

  “Is there any truth in that?”

  Chicken Little shrugged. “I wouldn’t be surprised. You see, Willie’s got some very odd tastes and they can get expensive.”

  “You realize that he’s already been down to Texas bothering me about money, don’t you?” I asked.

  “No, I didn’t know that.…”

  I nodded. “I gave him a thousand that time. What would it take this time?”

  “I think a couple of thousand would shut him up till Christmastime, at least. It’s come to the point that we’re going to have to either do something or cut loose from him. And if we do, we’ll need to find somebody else.”

  “No, we don’t want that,” I said, shaking my head. “I suppose it’s reasonable since it’s taking so much longer than we thought. We can’t expect anybody to thrive on air and goodwill.”

  Little nodded. “I believe it’s a wise move. And fair. He claims that keepin’ himself free to jump on this deal when the time comes has caused him to miss some opportunities, and I don’t doubt it. I’ll be glad to front the money, if you want me to. That’s no problem. I would have went ahead and give it to him already, but I didn’t want to make no kind of move without checking with you first.”

  I pulled out my money clip and stripped off the two thousand. “Just make sure he knows the wait is going to be worth it. That game is getting hotter and richer all the time.”

  Chicken Little nodded again and took the money.

  “Willie ain’t really a close friend of mine,” he said with a sigh. “And I regret the trouble he’s caused you. I wouldn’t have picked him in the first place except that I didn’t have much to choose from. Most of my old cohorts have fallen by the wayside.”

  “You’re the last of a vanishing breed, Little,” I told him seriously.

  He nodded sadly. “I guess so. Besides, Willie will be rock steady when the time comes, and that’s worth some aggravation. He won’t talk, and he won’t never rat out his partners. That you can count on. The Little Rock police beat him half to death a few years back over a chickenshit burglary, and they never got a damn thing out of him.”

  We lapsed back into silence once more and sat watching the growing dusk. From somewhere behind the house a dinner bell clanged loudly and I heard a woman’s voice call us to supper. I’d started to rise from my chair when I felt Little’s hand on my arm. “Sit back down a minute,” he said softly. “There’s one more thing you need to know.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  He sighed. “Your friend’s coming up here for the cockfight tomorrow night.”

  “Which friend?” I asked.

  “Clifton Robillard.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  Little was a country man and his house was a country house. It had that clean, spare feeling that only sparsely furnished farmhouses seem to have, with their high ceilings and waxed pine floors and interior walls of painted planking. The dining room held a heavy oval table of golden oak that was covered with a cloth of white damask and laden with a great platter of fried chicken and bowls of country vegetables. The room was cool and filled with the odor of freshly baked cornbread, and over our heads a ceiling fan turned languidly in the soft evening air. Two people, a man and a woman, were already seated at the table. Little introduced the man as Tom Moore, a huge, silent Cherokee of about thirty years who conditioned and pitted the gamecocks. Moore’s wife was a tiny, intense young Indian girl named Lacy who had a pretty face and a shy smile.

  My host removed his hat and hung it on a hall tree that stood near the door. He took his place at the head of the table and a moment later his wife, Annie, came into the room carrying a steaming bowl of cream gravy. She was a small woman near his age, still lovely despite her years, with a calm face and a pair of liquid brown eyes a man could get lost in. As soon as she set the gravy on the table, I scooped her up in a big hug and swung her around, her feet off the floor.

  “Put me down, you big ox,” she said with a laugh.

  A few moments later we were seated at the table. We all waited with our hands in our laps while Annie said a long blessing, then we dug in. When the meal was finished, Little and I rose from the table. I went over to where Annie sat, and leaned down to give her another kiss on the cheek. Poking me gently in the ribs, she looked up, and said, “Don’t be gone so long the next time, stranger.”

  She’d been one of my favorite people as long as I could remember. Like many young mountain girls, she’d come down out of the Ozarks not long after the turn of the century with stars in her eyes and dreams in her heart. Landing in Hot Springs, she got a job as a waitress in one of the resort hotels where she soon fell under the thrall of a gambler named Spunk Morgan, a surly, ill-tempered man from Kansas who used her hard and often beat her unmercifully. Somewhere along the way she encountered Chicken Little and true love blossomed. Not long after they met, Spunk Morgan suffered a belated attack of good manners and vanished, never to be heard from again, and the happy couple quickly wed. Less than a decade later they moved to the farm near Tulsa where they raised three children—two boys and a girl. The girl and the older boy were both college graduates, but their youngest son was in the Oklahoma State Penitentiary at McAlester doing ten years for manslaughter. “There’s wild blood coming from both sides in them kids of mine,” Little once said to me sadly. “And blood will tell whether it’s in people or fighting cocks.”

  One time several years earlier over a bottle of good scotch that loosened his tongue, he’d told me of a trip he and Annie made back to the Ozarks in the early days of their marriage. They stripped and swam naked in a wide, gravel-bottomed pool where Licking Creek meets the White River, and then spread out an old quilt on a bed of honeysuckle and made love in a shaded glade where all around them the green-clad mountains rose high into the sky.

  “Annie’s a Baptist now,” he said once he and I were reinstalled on the veranda. “She got religion a few years back, but I don’t begrudge it. My momma, God bless her poor old soul, was a Holiness, and I reckon that she got slain in the Spirit at least a dozen times.”

  “Slain in the Spirit?” I asked, puzzled.

  “That’s when the Spirit of the Lord descends on you and knocks you out cold. Usually you come up talking in tongues. I’ve seen it myself on occasion, though it has never happened to me. But as for Annie being a Baptist, it hasn’t made her any less lively where it matters. However, I’ve told her several times that she could stand to pay more attention to that verse in the Bible where it says a Christian woman should bridle her tongue.”

  I laughed. “I don’t think there is any such verse, Little.”

  “Well if there ain’t, they ought to be.”

  Before he had a chance to explore other deficiencies in the Holy Scriptures, I brought
the conversation around to our business. “Here,” I said, reaching in my pants pocket for the keys that had come in the mail the previous Friday. “It’s a garage,” I told him. “A good, sturdy building, with meshed windows and strong doors.”

  “Have the windows been painted up on the inside?” he asked.

  “No, but that’s a good idea. I’ll take care of having them blacked out as soon as I get back home.”

  “It won’t hurt a thing to be safe,” he said. “We don’t want nobody looking in there and remembering that car. You got the address?”

  From my wallet I took the card that had come with the keys and gave it to him. Without looking at it he dropped it into his shirt pocket where he’d put the $2,000 I’d given him earlier.

  “Who rented the garage?” he asked. “We need to make sure the rent is kept current.”

  I grinned but he couldn’t see it in the darkness. “Nobody rented it,” I said. “It was bought by a moving company up in Cicero, Illinois, that’s really just a post office box.”

  “Is that a fact?” he asked casually. I could hear the smile in his voice.

  “Yeah, and the car’s a dark gray ’41 Pontiac four-door with a rebuilt motor. It’s registered to the moving company.”

  “When’s it going to be put into the garage?” Little asked.

  “A couple of days beforehand. It’s got a brand-new battery and runs like a dream, so you shouldn’t have any trouble with it.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  “Now, what about Clifton Robillard?” I asked. “Do you know why he’s going to be up here tomorrow night? I don’t like coincidences. They spook me.”

  “Ain’t no coincidence to it that I can see. I’ve been told that he’s been making the cockfights around Tulsa for years, and since this is the big fight of the year it makes sense that he’d be here. It’s been advertised in cocking newspapers all over the country, and I imagine there will be a whole slew of folks from down in Texas.”

  “How did you find out he was coming?”

  “A fellow I know just happened to mention his name and I perked up my ears. This man talked to him on the phone last week, and Robillard said he’d be looking for some heavy betting action.”

  “You don’t know him, do you?” I asked.

  “Not by name or I would have mentioned it when you first come up here and told me about him. I may have seen him around, but I ain’t never met him that I can recall. I just figured you’d want to know.”

  I thought for a long while. The only risk I ran was that it was not wise to have Robillard see me and Chicken Little together. But that was a very minor risk. If everything went right, he’d hardly be in a position to tell anyone. On the positive side, running into him at the chicken fight would give me the pleasure of popping up where I wasn’t supposed to be and perhaps irritating him even more than I already had.

  “I probably should play it safe and go home in the morning, but I think I’ll stay an extra day and try to get under the man’s skin,” I finally said.

  “That’s fine with me, boy. It’s your call.”

  “Can you put me up another night? I hate to be an inconvenience to you.”

  “Oh, hush. You’re always welcome here and you know it.”

  “I’ll need to phone Della and let her know I’m staying over.”

  He nodded. “It might be best not to call from here at the house, though.”

  I quickly agreed. In those days a long-distance call was made by first dialing the operator, who then called your party for you. When the call was completed, she made a separate receipt for it, then the carbon of the receipt was included when the bill came. Which meant that the phone company kept a paper record of all long distance calls. And the cops knew it.

  “We’ll take Annie into Tulsa tomorrow for lunch at the Mayo Hotel,” Little said. “She’ll like that and you can make your call from a pay phone.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The next day we drove into Tulsa where I made my phone call, then we went to the Mayo for lunch. It was the town’s premier hotel, patterned on the Plaza in New York, and its dining room was regal.

  After our meal Little checked in at his two bookmaking parlors, while Annie was off at Metzinger’s Department Store with a handful of cash he’d given her. Then we came back downtown and I parked across from Metzinger’s where we could sit and talk until Anne appeared.

  “How’s the booking going?” I asked. “Do you do pretty good with it?”

  “I clear about five hundred a week out of the pair, and nearly that much from the whiskey. Of course, I could squeeze more out of both of them, but I like to spread it around. I never was a hog about money, and it all works better if you give everybody a nice cut. You know what the Bible says about not binding the mouths of the asses that thrash the grain. And I have to kick a part of the gambling money up to the outfit up in Kansas City, and that cuts down my net. But it’s always been that way.”

  “Do they get a piece of the moonshine too?”

  He shook his head. “Otis Shamblin put a stop to that back in 1934. Did you ever know Otis?”

  “No, but I’ve heard my dad talk about him.”

  “See, I inherited my whiskey business from Otis. He had a bunch of stills over there in the Cookson Hills back during Prohibition, and all I had to do with the moonshine operation in them days was trucking the liquor up to Kansas City for him, though I brought up several loads of import stuff of my own that came in at night along the Texas coast. Back then the Italians up there were buying all the corn whiskey they could get from us and not crabbing about the price, neither. I figured that after the repeal come in, the bootlegging business was just about done for, but Otis had talked to a fellow up in Kentucky who told him all about flavoring it up and selling it for bonded whiskey. Otis is the one that got that business started here in Oklahoma, and he come to me to help him get sugar. I had a contact down in Texas where I could get the stuff by the truckload, so me and Otis went into business. Well, it didn’t take the boys up in Kansas City long to hear about it, and they decided they were due a piece of the action. Four of them come down one Saturday in a big fancy Packard looking for Otis, and they just vanished, Packard and all. Then a few days later another carload come looking for the first bunch, and they up and disappeared too. No one seemed to know where they had went. It was all a great mystery.”

  “No kidding?” I laughed.

  “It’s mercy’s own truth if I’ve ever told it. From what I heard, they kinda regrouped up there to figure out how to deal with the situation. They hadn’t never had two whole carloads of folks just evaporate away like that, and it was a new experience for them.”

  “What did they finally do?” I asked.

  “They decided to leave Otis Shamblin alone, that’s what they did. There just wasn’t enough profit in the operation to fight a war from two hundred miles away and come out ahead. And hell, everybody up there in the hills knowed what had happened to those fellows. But there was one funny little follow-up to the story. Otis had a backhoe he’d used for this and that, a wheezy, wore-out old thing that popped and snorted something awful. You could hear it five miles away. Now, Otis’s oldest son was a churchgoing family man, and one night the preacher was at this boy’s house having supper when Otis cranked up that old backhoe to scrape out a ditch out behind his barn. When them folks sitting around the table down there heard it, one of the kids jumped up, and said, ‘Hot damn!! Granddaddy done kilt himself another carload of them Eye-talians! I wanna go see!’”

  By the time he finished the story I was doubled over in laughter. Little shook his head. “Otis Shamblin was the tush hog of the Cookson Hills, and didn’t nobody but God Almighty ever get the best of him. He died about five years later and I took over the business.”

  * * *

  That evening about six, Little came into the kitchen where Annie and I sat drinking coffee. He was wearing a stiffly starched white shirt with French cuffs. His wide flowered tie was of mottl
ed blues and golds, and I noticed that his cuff links were gold rooster heads set in onyx ovals. Under his left armpit rode a black shoulder holster that carried his old Colt Pocket Auto. He had a dark blue pinstriped suit coat slung over his shoulder, and on his head sat a new fedora of dark gray felt. “You about ready?” he asked me, the unlighted Camel bobbing in his lips as he spoke.

  I got my own coat from the back of my chair, and Annie made adjustments to both our ties. Little kissed her good-bye and minutes later we were on the road.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The pit was a large warehouselike building in a creek bottom several miles north of Tulsa. The place was surrounded with cars and trucks that ranged from fancy convertibles and limousines all the way down to ancient Model T Ford junkers and worse. To one side of the parking lot lay a roped-off area reserved for fighters and their vehicles. Little motioned for me to swing into this part of the yard. An off-duty deputy sheriff was guarding the entry to keep out nonfighters, and he waved us through as soon as he recognized my companion.

  “What kind of fight is this, exactly?” I asked.

  “It’s a derby. It’ll go on two days and the prize money goes to the last three cockers still in the game after the last fight. But I’m not in it. What I’m here for is a five-cock grudge match between me and a man named Bo Thompson from up at South Bend, Indiana. Bo’s got a breed he calls Thompson’s White Hackles and they are good chickens. He’s also a son-of-a-bitch, but he comes by it naturally so I don’t hold it against him.”

  “Who’s going to win?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “He has some fine birds. Overall I’ve got the best flock, and in a year’s time I’ll get maybe five percent more wins than he does from the same number of fights, but his best cocks are hell on wheels. If you want to bet on something where the odds are just about as even as a damn coin toss, then put some money on either one of us here tonight because I figure that’s just about the call. I sent seventeen birds up with Tom earlier today and I imagine Bo will have at least twenty.”