Cockfighter (27 page)

There was a large blackboard nailed to the outside of the barn. The fans could follow the running results of the derby as they were chalked up by the referee following each battle. Cockfighters looking for individual hacks also used the blackboard. I had written my name and the weights of all my cocks in square letters, hoping for a challenge. When three-quarters of the crowd had left, I decided to quit myself.

I was inside the barn, transferring my birds into my traveling coops, when Vern Packard introduced me to an old farmer and his son.

“Frank,” Vern said, “this is Milam Peeples and his son, Tom.”

I shook hands with both men. Milam Peeples was in his late fifties, tanned and well weathered by his years of outside labor. The yellow teeth on the left side of his mouth, I noticed, were worn down almost to the gum line from chewing on a pipe. The son was a full head taller than his father, with long thick arms and big raw-looking hands. He had a lopsided smile, a thick shock of wheat-colored hair, and he wore a gauze pad over his left eye. His right eye was blue. A thin trickle of spit ran down his chin from the left corner of his slack mouth. Either it didn't bother him or he didn't notice it. I noticed it, and it bothered me.

“Glad to meet you, Mr. Mansfield,” Tom Peeples said.

“I saw on the blackboard out there”—his father made a sweeping gesture with his malodorous briar pipe—“that you got a 4:02 lookin' for a fight. If you don't mind givin' me an ounce, I got a 4:03 out to my place that can take him.”

“He's my cock, Mr. Mansfield,” Tom broke in. “Little Joe. You ever hear of him?”

“Mr. Mansfield hasn't fought in this neck of the woods for some years, Tom,” Vern answered for me. “I doubt if he has.”

“Little Joe's a six-time winner, Mr. Mansfield,” the old man continued, “but I've never fought him here in Vern's pit. He's crowd shy and can't be conditioned to people or noise. But if you want to drive on out to my farm, maybe we could have us a little private hack.”

I nodded sympathetically. Often a gamecock is crowd shy. But I wasn't too anxious to pit Icky against a six-time winner.

“I'll tell you what,” Milam Peeples said generously, “I'll give you two-to-one odds, and you can name the amount. After all, you got to fight at my place instead of here, and I want to be fair.”

I agreed, holding up five fingers.

“Nope,” Milam Peeples shook his head. “I ain't fightin' Little Joe for no fifty dollars. Ain't worth the risk.”

I had meant five hundred dollars. I grinned and opened and closed my fist five times, as rapidly as I could.

“Five hundred dollars?” Mr. Peeples took the pipe out of his mouth.

When I nodded, he hesitated.

“Now that's getting mighty steep. If I lose, you win yourself a thousand dollars.”

“You offered Frank two to one,” Vern Packard reminded the old man.

“Little Joe can take him, Daddy!” Tom said eagerly.

“All right.” Peeples agreed to the bet and we shook hands. “When you're ready to go you can follow us on out in your car.”

“Why don't you load Mr. Mansfield's coops in his station wagon, Tom,” Vern suggested. “And I'll take him up to the house to get his suitcase.”

“Yes, sir,” Tom said.

As soon as Vern and I entered the back door of his house into the kitchen, he dropped into a chair beside the table where we had eaten breakfast. There was an amused smile on his friendly, open face. Vern was a short wiry little man with a sparse gray moustache, and he had been a good host.

“Just a second, Frank,” Vern's voice stopped me as I started for the bedroom. “It's a trick. Old Man Peeples has never heard of you, Frank, and he's taken you for a sucker. I've seen him take itinerant cockers before, and I've never said anything. Why not? Peeples is a local cocker, and most of the drifters who fight here don't come back anyway. But I don't feel that way about you. Because the local gamblers didn't know your reputation I won six hundred bucks today on your hacks.” Vern laughed with genuine amusement.

“You wouldn't fight the old man anyway, once you saw his setup. He's got a square chunk of waxed linoleum in his barn for the floor of his cockpit. And that cock of his hasn't won six fights, he's won at least
eighteen
fights! He rubs rosin on Little Joe's feet, and on that slick waxed floor the opposing cock doesn't have a chance. But if you really think your cock can take him, now that you know their game, I'll give you a chunk of rosin. That way, you'll both start even.”

I got my suitcase out of the bedroom. Vern rummaged through the drawers of the sideboard.

“Here,” he handed me an amber chunk of rosin the size of a dime-store eraser. “You don't need very much, Frank. But don't fight him on that waxed linoleum unless you use it. If you want my advice, you're a damned fool to fight him at all!”

I winked, shook hands with Vern and crossed the yard toward the station wagon again. These two peckerwoods had a lesson coming, and I had made up my mind to teach it to them. Icky was in peak condition, as sharp as a needle. They would be counting on their trick to win. With the rosin safe in my pocket, the odds were in my favor. I couldn't believe that Little Joe, despite his eighteen wins, was in proper condition to beat Icky in an even fight.

I put my suitcase in the back, checked Tom's loading of my coops, climbed into the front seat, and honked my horn to let Peeples know that I was ready to go. I followed his vintage black car out of the parking lot. The Peeples farm was some six miles out in the country, and to get there I had to follow the lurching car over a twisting, rock-strewn, spring-breaking dirt road. When the old cockfighter stopped at the entrance to his dilapidated barn, I parked beside him.

I could see the cockpit without getting out of the station wagon. The linoleum floor was a shiny, glistening design in blue-and-white checkered squares. The glassy floor was such a flagrant violation of pit regulations—anywhere—that I began to wonder if there wasn't more going on here than Vern Packard had told me. But Vern had advised me
not
to fight, so I decided to go ahead with it and see what happened.

When I leaned over to pull out Icky's coop, Tom opened the front door and offered his help.

“I'll hold him for you, Mr. Mansfield.”

I took my blue chicken out of the coop and passed him to Tom Peeples. He smiled, hefting Icky gently with his big raw hands.

“He feels jes' like a baseball!” Tom said, as I opened my gaff case. “Sure does seem a shame to see Little Joe kill a pretty chicken like this one.”

I cleared Icky's spur stumps with typewriter-cleaning fluid, and heeled him low with a set of silver one-and-a-quarter-inch gaffs. Holding the cock under the chest with one hand, Tom passed him back to me.

“By the way,” he said, snapping his fingers, “Little Joe always fights in three-inch heels, if you want to change.” Tom had waited patiently until I had finished heeling before providing me with this essential information. Another violation of form. Of course, he had no way of knowing that I wouldn't have changed to long heels anyway.

I shook my head indifferently, and he ran to meet his father who was rounding the corner of the barn. Mr. Peeples had gone to the rows of chicken runs behind the barn to get Icky's opponent while Tom had helped me heel. I took a good look at Little Joe from the front seat.

The cock had been so badly battered I couldn't determine his game strain. His comb and wattles were closely cropped for fighting, and most of his head feathers were missing, pecked out in earlier battles. Instead of the usual graceful sweep of arching tail feathers, the Peeples cock had only three broken quills straggling from his stern. Both wings were ragged, shredded, in fact. Both wings had been broken in fighting, and although they had knitted, they had bumpy leading edges. As Milam Peeples sat down on a sawhorse beside the pit and turned the cock on its back for Tom to heel him, I noticed that Little Joe's left eye was missing. A blinker on top of everything else. If Little Joe had won eighteen fights, and from his appearance he had been in many battles, Icky was in for the toughest fight of his life.

Maybe his last.

Under cover from Milam and Tom Peeples, I sat in the front seat of the station wagon holding Icky in my lap and briskly rosined the bottom of his feet. I was still rubbing the feet when the old man called out that he was ready. There was only a sliver of rosin left, but I put it in my shirt pocket and joined Milam and his son at the pit.

“I'm goin' to handle,” the old man said. “And if you don't have no objections, Tom here can referee.”

I nodded, stepped over the low wooden wall of the pit, and took my position on the opposite score. The waxed floor was so slick my leather heels slipped on it slightly before I got to the other side. Although I figured Mr. Peeples was expecting an argument of some kind about the illegal flooring, I kept a straight face. I wondered, though, what kind of an explanation he used to counter arguments about the pit. It must have been a good one.

“Better bill ‘em, Mr. Mansfield,” Tom said.

We billed in the center, and Icky got the worst of the pre-fight session. The bald head of Little Joe and shortage of neck feathers didn't give him a mouthful of anything. The Peeples cock was the meanest and most aggressive biller I'd seen in some time. I dropped back to my score. Both sets of scores, the eight and the two feet, had been straightedged onto the linoleum with black paint. As I squatted behind my back score, Tom asked me if I was ready, and I pointed to his father.

“Get ready, then,” Tom said to the old man.

Milam was forced to hold the straining Little Joe under the body with both hands. There weren't enough tail feathers for a good tall hold—and I watched Tom's lips.

“Pit!”

The fight was over.

The battle ended so quickly, all three of us were stunned. I've seen hundreds of cockfights end in the first pitting, a great many of them in fewer than fifteen seconds. But the fight between Icky and Little Joe didn't last two seconds.

I was aware that Little Joe's feet were rosined as well as Icky's. Mr. Peeples had coated them surreptitiously when he got the chicken from its coop run behind the barn. So the only way I can account for the quick ending is by crediting Icky's superior speed and conditioning and my long-time practice of releasing him first. The old man was hampered when the time came to let go, because of the manner in which he had to hold the Ace cock.

Tom's sharp order to pit was still echoing in the rafters of the barn when I released my Blue. Icky, with his sticky feet firmly planted, didn't take the two or three customary steps forward like he usually did. He flew straight into the air from a standing takeoff. Old Man Peeples scarcely had time to pull his hands away from beneath Little Joe's body when Icky clipped twice and cut the veteran fighter down on its score. It happened that fast.
Click! Click!
One heel pierced Little Joe's head, and the other heel broke his neck.

As the three of us watched in silent stupefaction, Icky strutted proudly in the center of the pit, leaving white gummy footprints in his wake, and issued a deep-throated crow of victory. The expressions on the faces of Milam Peeples & Son were truly delightful to see. And then Tom Peeples's face changed from milky white to angry crimson.

“You killed my Little Joe!” he shouted.

I was still squatting on my heels when he yelled, and I was totally unprepared for the enormous fist that appeared from nowhere and caught me on the temple. I crashed sideways into the left pit wall and it was smashed flat under the weight of my body. My eyes blurred with tears. All I could see were dark red dots unevenly spaced and dancing upon a shimmering pink background. I must have sensed the darker shadow of Tom's heavy work shoe hurtling toward my head. I rolled over quickly, and his kick missed my head. Two more twisting evasive turns, and I was in the empty horse stall next to the pit. As I scrambled to my knees, my fingers touched the handle of a heavy grooming brush. I regained my feet and swung it an arcing loop from the floor. Tom saw the edge of the weighted brush ascending, tried to halt his rushing lunge, and half turned away. The brass-studded edge caught him on his blind side, on the bump behind his left ear. As Tom fell, his arms held limply at his sides, the opposite wall of the pit collapsed under him. He was out cold.

I could see all right now, but I kept a firm grip on the brush handle as I watched Milam Peeples to see what his reaction was going to be. The old man shook his head sadly, and removed an old-fashioned snap-clasp pocket-book from his front pocket.

“You didn't have no call to hit the boy that hard, Mr. Mansfield,” he said. “Little Joe was Tom's pet. He was bound to feel bad about losin' him so quick.”

I tossed the brush back into the empty horse stall and rubbed my sore side. My bruised ribs felt like they were on fire. My head was still ringing, and I probed my throbbing temple gingerly with a forefinger. There was a marble-sized knot beneath the skin, and it was swelling even more as I touched it.

“Now, I'm a little short of a thousand dollars in cash, Mr. Mansfield,” Milam Peeples said plaintively, standing on the other side of Tom's felled body, “but here's three hundred and fifty-two dollars in bills. You're goin' to have to take the rest of the debt out in game fowl. We'd best go on down to the runs and you can pick ‘em out. I figure six gamecocks'll make us even.”

I didn't. I counted the bills he handed me, shoved the wad into my hip pocket, and then held up ten fingers.

“Most of these cocks are Law Grays, Mr. Mansfield,” Peeples protested. “And three are purebred Palmetto Muffs. You know yourself there ain't no better cocks than Palmetto Muffs! Take a look first, and you'll see what they're worth. I only got ten gamecocks altogether.”