Cockfighter (2 page)

I chewed my lower lip, but the bet was fair. My battered Caddy was worth at least eight hundred, but I didn't know what the trailer was worth. Secondhand trailers bring in peculiar prices, and mine was fairly small, with only one bedroom and one door. If I unloaded the car and trailer through a newspaper advertisement, I could've probably sold them both together for at least a thousand. Burke wanted to beat me so bad he could taste it. And if Little David won, I'd be out on the highway with my thumb out.

I stuck out my right hand and Burke grabbed it eagerly. The bet was made.

“Too bad you haven't got anything else to lose,” Burke laughed gleefully. “I'd like to make another bet that you just made a bad bet!”

My lips curved into a broad smile as I thought of Dody sleeping peacefully inside the trailer. In the unlikely event that Burke's cock did win the fight, he would also be stuck with Dody. When I pictured Burke in my mind stopping at every gas station on the road to buy Dody ice cream and Coca-Colas it was impossible to suppress my smile. On the way up from Homestead she had damned near driven me crazy.

But now the bet was made.

I consulted my wristwatch. Two thirty. It was time to go. Bill Sanders was going to meet me outside the pit at three to pick up my betting money. I stashed a hundred dollars in the utensil cupboard to cover my two-to-one bet with Burke, counted the rest of my money, and it came out to an even seven hundred and fifty dollars. That was everything, except for a folded ten-dollar bill in my watch pocket. This was my getaway bread—just in case.

I put my straw cowboy hat on my head to protect my face from the Florida sun, picked up the aluminum coop and my gaff case, and stepped outside. There were fourteen trailers in Captain Mack's Trailer Camp, including mine, and if you had touched any one of them, you would have burned your hand. In the distance, across the flat, desolate country, I could see Belle Glade, three miles away. The heat rising off the sandy land resembled great sheets of quivering cellophane. I turned away from the trailers and started toward the hammock clump a mile away where the pit had been set up. As hot as it was, I was in no mood to unhitch my car from the trailer and work up a worse sweat than I had, and the walk was only a mile.

There was a wire gate behind the camp, with an old-timer collecting an entrance fee of three dollars. I raised my coop to show him I was an entrant, and he let me through without collecting a fee. As I passed through the gate, Dody came flying up the trail, pigtails bouncing on her shoulders. She was barefooted, wearing a pair of red silk hot pants and a white sleeveless blouse. Her big unhampered breasts jounced up and down as she ran.

“Frank!” she called out before she reached the gate. “Take me with you! Please, Frank!”

The gateman, a grizzled old man in blue overalls, raised his white brows. I shook my head. He closed and latched the gate as Dody reached it.

“Damn you, Frank!” Dody shouted angrily. “You don't let me do nothin'. You know I've never seen you cockfight. Please let me go!”

I ignored her and continued up the trail. I had enough to worry about without her yammering around the pit and asking questions.

Captain Mack, who had made all the arrangements for the Belle Glade pitting, was talking earnestly to a Florida trooper when I reached the parking area. The trooper's state patrol car was parked directly behind a new convertible with a Dade County plate. The right door of the convertible was open, and a pretty blonde woman sat in the front seat. Her face was pale, and she had her eyes closed, breathing deeply through her open mouth. There was a wet spot in the sand outside the door. I supposed the girl had watched a couple of fights inside the pit and got sick as a consequence. Not many city women have the stomach for watching cockfights.

The pit was surrounded on four sides by a green canvas panorama made from Army surplus latrine screens. There were about thirty cars in the parking area, not counting the trucks. I set down my gaff case and coop in the sparse shade of a melaleuca tree, and leaned against a parked Plymouth, watching Captain Mack argue with the trooper. Captain Mack shrugged wearily, took his wallet out of his hip pocket, and handed two bills to the trooper. Through a gap in the canvas wall, they went inside the pit. Although cockfighting is legal in Florida, betting is not, so Captain Mack had been forced to pay out some protection money.

There was excited shouting from inside the pit, followed by several coarse curses, and then the voices subsided. Mr. Ed Middleton's baritone carried well as he announced the winning cock.

“The winner is the Madigan! One minute and thirty-one seconds in the third pitting!”

Again there were curses, followed by the derisive sound of laughter. I lit a cigarette, took my notebook out of my shirt pocket, and wrote the essential information concerning Sandspur on a fresh sheet of paper. A few minutes later Bill Sanders came outside and joined me beneath the tree. I handed him my roll of seven hundred and fifty dollars and he counted it. Bill put the money in his trousers and watched my fingers. I held up four fingers on my left hand and my right forefinger.

“I doubt if I can get you four to one, Frank.” Bill shook his head dubiously. “Your reputation is too damn good. You could show up with a battered dunghill, and if these redneckers thought you fed it, they'd bet on it. But I'll try.”

If anybody could get good odds for me, Sanders could, and I knew he would certainly try. When I was discharged from the Army, I had spent two months in Puerto Rico with Sanders, living in the same hotel. We had attended mains at all the best game clubs in San Juan, Mayagüez, Ponce, Arecibo, and Aibonito. I had steered Sanders right on the betting, after I had gotten accustomed to the fighting techniques of the Spanish slashers, and both of us had returned to Miami with our wallets full of winnings. Bill Sanders was not a professional cockfighter like myself, he was a professional gambler. He had lost his share of the money he won in Puerto Rico at the Miami horse and dog tracks. A little bald guy with a passion for high living, he lived very well when he had money and even better when he had none. He was that kind of a man, and a good friend.

I took Sandspur out of his coop and pointed out the “cracked” beak. Bill whistled softly and his blue eyes widened.

“If that bill breaks off, you've had it, Frank.” He shrugged. “But that mutilated boko should get me the four-to-one odds.”

Sanders hit me lightly on the shoulder with his fist and returned to the pit.

I held Sandspur with my left hand, filled my mouth with smoke, and blew the smoke at his head. He clucked angrily, shaking his head. Blowing tobacco smoke at a cock's head irritates it to a fighting pitch, and I was smoking a mild, mentholated cigarette. I enveloped the cock's head with one more cloud of smoke and returned him to his coop. Too much smoke could make a cock dizzy.

I opened my gaff case and removed two sets of heels. I put a pair of short spurs in my left shirt pocket and a pair of long jaggers in my right shirt pocket. After shutting my gaff case, I picked up the coop and entered the pit.

There were only about sixty spectators inside, but this was a fairly good crowd for September. The Florida cockfighting season didn't start officially until Thanksgiving Day, when an opening derby was held in Lake Worth. And Belle Glade isn't the most accessible town in Florida. The canvas walls successfully prevented any breeze from getting into the pit, and it was as hot inside as a barbecue grill.

I recognized a couple of Dade County fanciers and nodded acknowledgments to them when they greeted me by name. There was a scattering of Belle Glade townspeople, two gamblers from Miami who probably owned the blonde and the convertible, Burke and his two handlers, and two pregnant women I had seen around the trailer camp. The remainder of the crowd was made up from the migrant agricultural workers' camp on the other side of town.

The cockpit was made of rough boards, sixteen inches high, and about eighteen feet in diameter. The pit was surrounded on three sides by bleachers, four tiers high. Under an open beach umbrella on the fourth side of the pit, Mr. Middleton sat at a card table with Captain Mack. Behind the table there was a blackboard. I noted that Jack Burke had won both of the short-entry derbies, the first, four-one, and the second, three-two. That accounted for the glum expressions on the faces of the two Dade County breeders. Not only had they made a poor showing, but their one-hundred-dollar entry fees, less Captain Mack's ten percent, had wound up in Burke's pocket as prize money.

Two men in the bleachers I didn't know called out my name and wished me good luck. I waved an acknowledgment to them, and joined Ed Middleton and Captain Mack. I removed Sandspur from the coop and handed the slip of paper to Mr. Middleton. Jack Burke and his handler, Ralph Hansen, came over. The handler was carrying Little David. Mr. Middleton produced a coin.

“Name it, gentlemen,” he said.

“Let Mr. Mansfield call it,” Burke said indifferently.

I tapped my forehead to indicate “heads.” Mr. Middleton tossed the half dollar into the air and let it land with a thump on the card table. Heads. I reached into my left shirt pocket, pulled out the short gaffs, and held them out in my open palm. They were hand-forged steel gaffs, an inch and a quarter in length. Burke nodded grimly and turned to his handler.

“All right, Ralph,” he said bitterly. “Short spurs, but set 'em low.”

Burke was a long gaff man, but I preferred the short heels. Sandspur was a cutter and fought best with short gaffs. Little David was used to long three-inch heels. Winning the toss had given Sandspur a slight advantage over Little David.

The cockfight between Sandspur and Little David was an extra hack, and I had not, of course, been required to post any entry fee. However, Mr. Middleton examined both cocks with minute attention. He was acting as judge and referee and had received at least a minimum fee of one hundred and fifty dollars, plus expenses, from Captain Mack. The judge of a cockfight has to be good, and Ed Middleton was one of the best referees in the entire South. His word in the pit was law. There is no appeal from a cockfighter judge's decision. As sole judge-referee, Ed Middleton's jurisdiction encompassed spectator betting as well. The referee's job has always been the most important at a cockfight. As every cocker knows, for example, honest Abe Lincoln was once a cockpit referee during his lawyer days in Illinois. Hard and fair in his decisions, and as impersonal as doom, Ed Middleton was fully aware of the traditional responsibilities of the cockpit referee.

After completing his examination of the cocks to see that they were not soaped, peppered or greased and that they were trimmed fairly, Mr. Middleton stepped back to the table.

“Southern Conference rules, gentlemen?” he asked.

“What else?” Burke said.

Captain Mack held Sandspur while Jack Burke examined him, and I took a close look at Little David. Burke's chicken was a purebred O'Neal Bed and as arrogant as a sergeant-major in the Foreign Legion. Although I had never seen Little David fight before, I had followed his previous pittings in the
Southern Cockfighter,
and I knew that he liked aerial fighting. But so did Sandspur fight high in the air, and my cock was used to short gaffs. The three additional wins Little David had over Sandspur didn't worry me when I had such an advantage.

Burke tapped me on the shoulder and grinned. “If I'd known your chicken had him a cracked bill, I'd have given you better odds.”

I shrugged indifferently and sat down on the edge of the pit to arm my cock. I opened my gaff case, removed a bottle of typewriter cleaning solvent and cleaned Sandspur's spur stumps. Most cockers use plain alcohol to clean spurs, but typewriter solvent is fast-drying and, in my opinion, removes the dirt easier. After fitting tight chamois-skin coverings over both spurs, I slipped the metal sockets of the short heels over the covered stumps and tied them with waxed string, setting them low and a trifle to the outside. The points of the tapered heels were as sharp as needles and a man has to be careful when he arms a cock. I had a puckered puncture scar on my right forearm caused by a moment of carelessness seven years before, and I didn't want another one.

The betting had already started, but the crowd quieted down when Mr. Middleton stepped into the pit. They listened attentively to his announcement.

“This is an extra hack, gentlemen,” he said loudly. “Little David versus Sandspur. Southern Conference rules will prevail. No time limit, and short gaffs. Little David is owned by Mr. Jack Burke of Burke Farms, Kissimmee, Florida. He's an Ace cock, with eight wins and will be two years old in November. Little David will be handled by Mr. Ralph Hansen of Burke Farms.”

The crowd gave Little David a nice hand, and Mr. Middleton continued.

“Sandspur is owned by Mr. Frank Mansfield of Mansfield Farms, Ocala, Florida, and he will handle his own chicken. Sandspur is a five-time winner and a year and a half old. Both cocks will fight at four pounds even.”

Sandspur got a better hand than Little David, and the applause was sustained by the two Dade County breeders who wanted him to beat Burke's cock. Mr. Middleton examined Sandspur's heels and patted me on the shoulder. Many cockers resent the referee's examination of a cock's heels, but I never have. A conscientious referee can help you by making a final check. Once the fight has started and your cock loses a metal spur, it cannot be replaced.

As Mr. Middleton crossed the pit to examine Little David, I watched the flying fingers of the bettors. The majority of the betting at cockfights is done by fingers—one finger for one dollar, five for five dollars, and then up into the multiples of five—and I was an expert in this type of betting. I had learned finger betting in the Philippines when I was in the Army and didn't understand Tagalog, and I had also used the same system in Puerto Rico, where I didn't understand Spanish very well. Little David was the favorite, getting two-to-one, and in some cases three-to-one odds.