Cockfighter (13 page)

When I finished eating everything in sight, I pushed the empty platter to one side and wiped my mouth with a square of white damask napkin. Smiling over the lip of her cup, Bernice nodded with satisfaction. I winked slowly, returned her smile, and she blushed and lowered her eyes.

“My husband's been dead for five years, Mr. Mansfield,” she said shyly. “You don't know how nice it is to cook a meal for a man again. I'd almost forgotten myself. I loved my husband very much, and still do, I suppose. My brother's always telling me how foolish I am to keep this big house and live here all alone. An apartment would be easier to keep, I know, and give me more free time, but I don't know what I'd do with more free time if I had it. I don't know what to do with myself half the time as it is.

“This old house has a lot of pleasant memories for me, and I'd miss them if I ever sold it. I can see my husband in every room. Sometimes, during the day, I pretend he isn't dead at all. He's at the office, that's where he is, working, and when six o'clock comes he'll be coming home through the front door like always, and…” Her voice trailed away, and two tears escaped into her long black eyelashes.

Bernice wiped them away, tossed her head impatiently and laughed.

“Morbid, aren't I? How about some more coffee?”

I nodded, took my cigarettes out of my shirt pocket, and offered them to her. She put the cork tip in her mouth, and when I flipped my lighter, she held my hand with both hers to get a light. This was unnecessary. My hand was perfectly steady. After refilling the cups, she sat down again and described circles on the tablecloth with a long red fingernail.

“I know that you want to go, Mr. Mansfield,” she said at last, “but I'm finding this a novel experience. It's a rare instance when a woman can pour her troubles into a man's receptive ear without being told to shut up!” She laughed, and shrugged comically.

“But I really don't have any troubles. As far as money goes, I'm fixed forever. My husband saw to that, God bless him. I own the house, and my trust fund is well guarded by the bank trustees. And I have a circle of friends I've known most of my adult life. So where are my troubles?” She sighed audibly and licked her lips with the point of her tongue like a cat.

“I should be the happiest woman in the world. But once in a while, just once in a while, mind you, Mr. Mansfield, I'd like to go into my bathroom and find the toilet seat up instead of down!” Color flooded into her face, and the freckles almost disappeared. She got up from the table hastily and pushed open the swinging door leading to the living room. “I'll get your money for you, Mr. Mansfield.”

She had aroused my sympathy. I wondered what her husband had been like. An insurance executive probably. Every time he had gotten a promotion he had used the extra money for more protection, more insurance. It must have cost her plenty to keep up this big house. And it was a cinch she didn't have any children, or she would have talked about them instead of a man five years dead. If I could have talked, I would have been able to kid her out of her mood in no time. My sex life had really suffered since I gave up talking. Not completely, because money always talks when words fail, but a lot of women had gotten away during the last couple of years because of my stubborn vow of silence.

As I pondered the situation, how best to handle it, Bernice returned to the kitchen. She placed a fifty-dollar bill on the table. The fifty ruined everything for me.

I could have accepted a twenty, because Lee Vernon had set the fee, but I couldn't, with good conscience, accept
fifty
dollars. My concert wasn't worth that much. I knew it, and Bernice Hungerford knew it. She was trying to buy me and I resented it. I folded the bill into a small square, placed it on the edge of the table and flipped it to the floor with my forefinger. I got up from the table and left the room.

I picked up my guitar in the living room and had almost reached the foyer when Bernice caught up with me. She tugged on my arm, and when I stopped, got in front of me, looking up wistfully into my face. My jaw was tight and I looked over her head at the door.

“Please!” she said, stuffing the folded bill into my shirt pocket. “I know what you're thinking, but it isn't true! The only reason I gave you a fifty was because I didn't have a twenty. I thought I had one, but I didn't. Please take it!”

I dropped my eyes to her face, looked at her steadily, and she turned away from me.

“All right. So I lied. Take it anyway. Fifty dollars doesn't mean anything to me. I'm sorry and I'm ashamed. And if you want to know the truth I'm more ashamed than sorry!”

I retrieved my hat from the marble angel's thumb and Put it on my head. But I didn't leave. I reconsidered. Damn all anyway, the woman was desirable! I removed my hat, replaced it on the angel's thumb and dropped my guitar case to the carpeted floor. Bernice had started up the stairs, but I caught up with her on the third step, lifted her into my arms and continued up the stairs. She buried her face in my meck and stifled a sob, clinging to me with both arms like a child. As I climbed I staggered beneath her weight—she must have weighed a solid one hundred and forty-five pounds—but I didn't drop her. When I reached the balcony I was puffing with my mouth open to regain my wind.

Bernice whispered softly into my ear, “The bedroom's the first door on the right.”

The first time was for me. As nervous as Bernice was, at least at first, it could hardly have gone any other way. But I was gentle with her, and providing me with satisfaction apparently gave her the reassurance she needed. There was none of that foolishness about wanting to turn off the bedside lamps, for example, and when she returned from the bathroom, she still had her clothes off.

I had propped myself up on both pillows, and I smoked and watched her as she poured two small snifters of brandy. The cut-glass decanter was on a side table, beside a comforting wing chair. It was unusual, I thought, to keep a decanter of cognac in a bedroom, but having a drink afterward was probably a post-coital ritual that she and her late husband had practiced.

Although Bernice was a trifle on the chunky side, she had a good figure. Her heavy breasts had prolapsed slightly, but the prominent nipples were as pink as a Roseate Spoonbill. Her slim waist emphasized the beautiful swelling lines of her full hips, and her skin, except for a scattering of freckles on her shoulders, was as white as a peeled almond. With her thick black hair unloosened and trailing down her back, Bernice was a very beautiful woman. To top it off, she had a sense of style. I wanted to talk to her so badly I could almost taste the words in my mouth, and it was all I could do to hold back the torment that would become a flood if I ever let them go.

After Bernice handed me my glass, she sat cross-legged on the bed, facing me, swirling her brandy in the snifter she held with cupped hands. Her face was flushed slightly with excitement. She peered intently into her brandy glass, refusing to meet my level stare.

“I want to tell you something, Frank,” she said in soft contralto, “something important. I'm
not
promiscuous.”

She said this so primly I wanted to laugh. Instead, I grinned, wet a forefinger in my brandy and rubbed the nipple of her right breast.

“And no matter what you may think, you're the first man I've let make love to me since my husband died.”

I didn't believe her, of course, not for an instant. But that is the way women are. They always feel that a man will think less of them if they act like human beings. What did it matter to me whether she had slept with anyone or not for the last five years? What possible difference could it make at this moment? Now was now, and the past and the future were unimportant.

As the nipple gradually hardened beneath my circling finger she laughed, an abrupt, angry little laugh, and tossed off the remainder of her brandy. I took her glass, put both of them aside, pulled her down beside me, and kissed her.

The second time was better and lasted much longer. Although I was handicapped by being unable to issue instructions, Bernice was experienced, cooperative and so eager to please me that she anticipated practically everything I wanted to do. And at last, when I didn't believe I could hold out for another moment, she climaxed. I remained on my back, with Bernice on top of me, and she nibbled on my shoulder.

“I could fall in love with you, Frank Mansfield,” she said softly. “If there were only some way I could prove it to you!”

Suddenly she got out of bed, grabbed my undershirt and shorts from the winged chair, and entered the bathroom. I raised myself on my elbows, and watched her through the open door as she washed my underwear in the washbowl. She hummed happily as she scrubbed away. My underwear wasn't dirty. I had put it on clean after a shower at the hotel before reporting in at the Chez Vernon at eight thirty that evening. Women, sometimes, have a peculiar way of demonstrating their affection.

Five o'clock finally rolled around, but I hadn't closed my eyes. Bernice slept soundly at my side, a warm, heavy leg thrown over mine, an arm draped limply across my chest. She breathed heavily through her open mouth. I eased my leg out from beneath hers and got out of bed on my side. The sheet that had covered us was disarranged, kicked to the bottom of the bed. I pulled it over her shoulders, before taking my clothes from the chair into the bathroom. My underwear was still dripping wet and draped over the metal bar that held the shower curtain. I pulled on my clothes without underwear. As soon as I was dressed, I raised the toilet seat, switched off the bathroom light and tiptoed out of the bedroom, closing the door softly behind me.

At the foot of the stairs, I retrieved my hat and guitar, and made my exit into the dawn. The sky was just beginning to turn gray. I opened my guitar case, removed the instrument, and tried to scrape off my name with my knife. It was burned in too deeply, but Bernice would be able to see that I had tried to scrape it off. Then I put the neck of the guitar on the top step, and stomped on it until it broke. After cutting the strings with my knife, I placed the broken instrument on the welcome mat.

There was an oleander bush on the left side of the porch. I tossed the guitar case into the bush. Now I could keep the fifty-dollar bill in good conscience. The guitar had been worth at least thirty dollars, and the fee for the private concert was twenty dollars. We were even. The message was obscure, perhaps, but Bernice would be able to puzzle it out eventually.

I walked down the gravel driveway to the street, and noticed the number of the house on a stone marker at the bottom of the drive. 111. I grinned. I would always remember Bernice's number.

Carrying my wet underwear, I had to wander around in the strange neighborhood for almost five blocks before I could find a bus stop and catch a bus back to downtown Jacksonville.

ALL DAY LONG I
stayed in my room. Ideas and plans circulated inside my head, but none of them were worthwhile. One dismal thought kept oozing to the top, and finally it lodged there.

I had been cheated out of my inheritance.

This wasn't a new thought by any means. I had thought about it often in the five years since Daddy died, but I had never considered seriously doing anything about it before. The telegram informing me of Daddy's death had reached me one day too late to allow me to attend the funeral. I had immediately wired Randall and given him the circumstances. Two weeks later I had received a letter from Judge Brantley Powell, the old lawyer who handled the estate, together with a check for one dollar. He had also included a carbon copy of Daddy's will. Randall, my younger brother, had inherited the four-hundred acre farm, seven hundred dollars in bonds, and the bank account of two hundred and seventy dollars. The check for one dollar was my part of the inheritance.

With plenty of money in my pockets at the time, I had dismissed the will from my mind. After all, Randall had stayed home, and I had not. He had gone to college, earned a degree in law, and passed the Georgia bar exams, returning home ostensibly to practice. I had attended Valdosta State College for one year and had quit to go to the Southwestern Cocking Tourney in Oklahoma City. I had never returned to college and Daddy had never gotten over it. He had always wanted to keep both of us under his thumb, but no man can tell me what to do with my life.

What had happened to the lives we lived?

I had gone on to make a name for myself in cockfighting.

Sure, I was broke now, but I had firmly established myself in one of the toughest sports in the world. And what did Randall have to show for his fine education? What had he done with his inheritance?

When he was accepted for the bar he went to work as a law clerk for Judge Brantley Powell. Six months later, claiming that he was doing most of the work anyway, he asked for a full partnership in the firm. When the judge turned him down, he had quit, and he hadn't done much of anything since. He hadn't even hung out his own shingle. All day long he sat in the big dining room at home, looking for obscure contradictions in his law books, occasionally having an article published on some intricate point of law in some legal quarterly no one had ever heard of before. To get by, he sold off small sections of the farm to Wright Gaylord, my fiancée's brother. He had also married Frances Shelby, a dentist's daughter from Macon. I suppose she had had some dowry money and a few dollars from her father once in a while, but Randall's total income from tobacco, pecans and land sales was probably less than three thousand dollars a year. He was also writing a book, or so Frances said.

By all rights, Daddy should have left the farm to me. There were no two ways about it. I was the oldest son, and there wasn't a jury in Georgia that wouldn't award the farm to me if I contested the will. They read the Bible in Georgia, and in the Holy Bible the eldest son always inherits the property.