Cockfighter (18 page)

“These will make a beautiful arrangement,” the gray-haired saleswoman smiled. “Do you want to include a card?”

When I nodded she gave me a small white card and a tiny envelope that went with it. I scrawled a short note:

Dear Bernice:

Drop me a line sometime. RFD #1. Ocala, Fla.

Frank Mansfield

Whether Bernice would write to me or not I didn't know. I did feel, however, that the roses and thirty dollars in cash would make up for my abrupt leave-taking without saying good-bye. And I did like the woman. I tucked the money inside the little envelope, together with the card, and licked the flap.

“And where do you wish these delivered, sir?” the saleswoman asked, handing me a pink bill for twenty-five dollars and fifty cents. I put the money on the counter, and tugged at my lower lip. By having them delivered I could save time.

“We deliver free, of course,” the woman smiled.

That settled it. I had to deliver the roses and the note myself. The woman was too damned anxious. Her gray hair and kindly, crinkled-faced smile didn't fool me. I had selected the twelve yellow roses with care. If I had allowed them to be delivered she would have either switched them for older roses, or changed them for carnations or something. After pocketing my change, I pointed to the stack of green waxed paper and made a circular motion with my hand for the woman to wrap them up.

When I reached 111 Melrose Avenue, I rang the bell several times, but there was no one at home. I waited impatiently for five minutes, and then left the flowers at the door. I slipped the note containing the money under the door. Maybe it was better that way.

The next move, if any, would be up to Bernice. If she had been home, I probably would have stayed overnight with her and lost another day. There was too much work ahead of me to waste time romancing a wealthy widow.

The old pickup drove well on the highway, but I was afraid to drive more than forty miles an hour. When I revved it up to fifty, the front wheels shimmied. Long before reaching Orlando I was remorseful about the grand gesture of giving the roses and thirty bucks to Bernice Hungerford. It would have been wiser to wait until I was flush again. The damned money was dripping through my fingers like water, and I'd have to win some fights before any more came in. But when I pictured the delighted expression on Bernice's jolly face when she discovered the flowers at her front floor, I felt better.

I reached Orlando before midnight. I saved eight dollars by driving through town to Ed Middleton's private road, and by sleeping in the back of the truck in his orange grove. The excitement had drifted out of my mind, and, as tired as I was, I slept as well in the truck as I would have slept in a motel bed.

The next morning, when I parked in his carport and knocked on his kitchen door at six a.m., Ed wasn't happy to see me. Martha Middleton, however, appeared to be overjoyed by my early morning appearance. She cracked four more eggs into the frying pan and decided to make biscuits after all.

“I didn't expect you back so soon,” Ed said gruffly, after he filled my cup with coffee.

I grinned at his discomfiture, took the money out of my jacket, and peeled off five hundred dollars on the breakfast-nook table. Ed glared at the stack of bills. Martha stayed close to her stove, pursing her lips. I drank half of my coffee, and started in on my fried eggs before Ed Middleton said a word. In the back of my mind, I was more or less hoping he would change his mind and renege on the deal. Icarus was a mighty fine rooster, but five hundred dollars was a lot of money, and I needed every cent I could get at the moment.

“Well,” Ed said thoughtfully. He counted the money twice, removed the top five twenty-dollar bills and shoved the remaining four hundred dollars back across the table.

“Here!” he said angrily. “I won't hold you to the ridiculous price we agreed on, Frank. I'll just take a hundred as a token payment. Besides, I'm sick of looking at game chickens. I'm tired of the whole business! Come on, let's go get your damned rooster!”

By the time Ed finished talking, he was almost shouting and out of the nook and fumbling at the doorknob.

“Can't you wait until Frank finishes his breakfast?” Martha said, with quiet good humor.

“Sure, sure,” Ed managed to get the door open. “Take your time, Frank,” he said contritely. “I'll go on out to the runs and put Icarus in your aluminum coop. Also, those two battered Grays are in good shape again. You can have them and the game hen, too. I'll have them all in coops by the time you finish eating.” The door banged shut.

I wiped some egg yolk off the top twenty with a napkin and returned the money to my inside jacket pocket. The kitchen door opened again, and Ed stuck his head in. “Can you use some corn? Barley?”

I nodded.

“Good. There're about three or four partly used stacks of both in the feed shack. But it you want ' em, you'll have to carry' em to the truck yourself. I'll be goddamned if
I'm
going to do it!” The door slammed again.

I wanted to follow him out the door but thought it best to finish my breakfast and let Ed cool off a little bit. He had never really expected me to show up with five hundred dollars for his pretty pet gamecock. But his astonishment was in my favor. He had been shamed into returning four hundred dollars, and now I was way ahead of the game. The Middleton Gray game hen was valuable for breeding, and the two Gray gamecocks were worth at least fifty dollars apiece.

“Don't you pay any mind to Ed's bluster, Frank,” Martha said gently. “He's just upset and doesn't mean half of what he says. I know how much store he sets by those chickens. Someday, he'll thank me, Frank. You think I'm unreasonable, I know, making him give up his chickens and stopping him from following fights all over the country, but I'm not really. Ed's had two heart attacks in the last eighteen months. After the last one he was in bed for two weeks and the doctor told him not to do anything at all. Nothing.” She shook her head.

“He isn't supposed to pick so much as an orange up off the ground. Why, the last time the doctor came out and saw that the roosters were still out there he had a fit! Now go out and get your chickens, Frank, and don't let Ed help you lift anything.”

I slid out from the table and patted Martha on the shoulder. Ed Middleton certainly knew how to keep a secret. I hadn't known anything about his ailing heart.

“I know you won't say anything, Frank,” Martha said, smiling, “but don't
look
anything, either!” Despite her smile and the humor in her voice, there were sparks of terror in her eyes. “Ed hasn't told a soul about his bad heart, and I know he wouldn't want me to tell you. He tries to pretend he's as strong as he ever was.”

I wanted to say something, anything that would comfort the woman, but I couldn't. He was going to die soon. I could tell by her eyes.

I smiled, nodded and left the kitchen. The moment I was outside, I lit out around the little lake at a dead run to get my prize rooster before Ed Middleton could change his mind.

This anonymous English cocking poem was thumbtacked to the wall beside my bed. I had copied it in longhand and stuck it there as a reminder that experience, rather than experiment, would be my best teacher. The poem must have been more than two hundred years old, and yet it still held a sobering truth. The best gamecock has to be of a proven game strain. Crossed and recrossed, until the color of the feathers resemble mud, if a cock can be traced to a legitimate game strain on both sides, he will fight when he is pitted and face when he is hurt. This old poem contained a particularly worthwhile truth to remember, now that I possessed Icky, the most gaily plumaged cock I had ever owned. The bettors at every pit on the circuit would be anxious to back him because of his bright blue color, and he would have to be good, because of the odds I'd be forced to give on him.

While I poured coffee into cups at the gate-legged table, Omar Baradinsky, his hairy fingers clasped behind his back, studied the poem on the wall. He must have read it three or four times, but if he moved his lips when he read, I wouldn't have known about it. Omar's pale face, which no amount of exposure to the Florida sun could tan, was almost completely covered by a thick, black, unmanageable beard. This ragged hirsute growth, wild and tangled, began immediately below his circular, heavily pouched brown eyes, and ended in tattered shreds halfway down his chest. A thick, untrimmed moustache, intermingled with his beard, covered his mouth completely. When he talked, and Omar liked to talk, his mouth was only a slightly darker hole in the center of the jet-black tangle of face hair. Out of curiosity, I had asked Omar once why he wore the beard, and his answer had been typical of his new way of life.

“I'll tell you, Frank,” he had bloomed. “Did you ever eat baked ham with a slice of glazed pineapple decorating the platter?”

When I admitted that I had, he had pulled his fingers through his beard fondly and continued. “Well, that's what my face looked like when I went to the office every day in New York. Like a slab of glazed, fried, reddish pineapple! For me, shaving once a day wasn't enough. The whiskers grew too fast. I shaved before leaving home in the morning, again at noon, and if I went out at night, I have to scrape my jowls again. For as long as I can remember, my face was sore, raw in fact, and even after a fresh shave people told me I needed another. So, I no longer have to shave and I no longer shave, and I'll never shave again!”

To see Omar Baradinsky now, standing in my one-and-a-half-room shack near Ocala, wearing a pair of faded blue denim bib overalls, a khaki work shirt with the sleeves cut off at the shoulders, scuffed, acid-eaten, high-topped work-shoes, and that awe-inspiring growth of black hair covering his face—no one would have taken him for a once successful advertising executive in New York City. A close look at his clothes, however, would reveal that Omar's bib overalls and shirt were expensive and tailored—which they were. He ordered his clothes from Abercrombie & Fitch up in New York, and they would wash and dry without needing to be ironed. In the beginning, I suspect that he had probably started to wear bib overalls as a kind of uniform, to fit some imaginary role he had made up in the back of his mind. But now they had become a part of him, and I couldn't picture Omar wearing anything else.

But Omar had been an advertising man, four years before. Not only had he been a successful executive with a salary of thirty-five thousand dollars a year, he had also owned a twenty-unit luxury apartment house in Brooklyn. He was now a breeder and handler of gamecocks in Florida, keep Claret crosses and Allen Roundheads, and after four experimental years, slowly beginning to pull ahead. The one remaining tie Omar had with New York was his wife. She visited him annually, for one week, when she passed through central Florida on her way to Miami Beach for the winter season. So far, she had been unable to make him change his mind and return to New York. Omar's wife wasn't the type to bury herself on an isolated Florida chicken farm, so they were stalemated.

Unlike most American sportsmen, the cockfighting fan has an overwhelming tendency to become an active participant. There is no such thing as a passive interest in cockfighting. Beginning as a casual onlooker, a man soon finds the action of two gamecocks battling to the death a fascinating spectacle. He either likes it or he doesn't. If he doesn't like it, he doesn't return to watch another fight. If he does like it, he accepts, sooner or later, everything about the sport—the good with the bad.

As the fan gradually learns to tell one game strain from another, he admires the vain beauty of a game rooster. Admiration leads to the desire to possess one of these beautiful creatures for his very own, and pride of ownership leads to the pitting of his pet against another gamecock. Whether he wins or loses, once the fan has got as far as pitting, he is as hooked as a ghetto mainliner.

Of course, not every beginner embraces the sport like Omar Baradinsky—to the point of quitting a thirty-five-thousand dollar-a-year position, and leaving wife, family and friends to raise and fight gamecocks in Florida. The majority of fans are content to participate on a smaller scale—as a handler, perhaps, or as an owner of one or two gamecocks, or as a lowly assistant holding a bird for a handler while he lashes on the heels. Many spectators, unfortunately, are interested in the gambling aspects of cockfighting to the exclusion of everything else. But even gamblers must learn a lot of information about game fowl to win consistently. Whether he wins or loses, the gambler still has the satisfaction of knowing that a cockfight cannot be fixed, and not another sport in the United States will give him as fair a chance for his money.

Omar Baradinsky, however, had gone all the way, caught up in the sport at the dangerous age of fifty, the age when a man begins to wonder just what in the hell has he got out of his life so far, anyway? Omar was still as bewildered by his decision to enter full-time cockfighting now as he had been when he started.

“I can't really explain it, Frank,” he had told me one idle morning, after we got to know each other fairly well, right after he had first moved to Florida. “I had done a better than average job on one of my smaller advertising accounts, and the owner invited me to his home in Saratoga Springs for a weekend. Smelling a little bonus money in the deal, you see, something my firm wouldn't know anything about, I accepted and drove to this fellow's place early on a Saturday morning.