Cockfighter (5 page)

“I suppose I've known you for ten years or more and, as a single man, you've got the best life in the world. You've earned the respect of all of us, Frank.”

I was embarrassed by the praise.

“That was a clever trick you pulled this afternoon, Frank!”

I started with surprise, and Mr. Middleton guffawed loudly.

“I haven't seen anyone pull that stunt with the cracked bill to raise the odds in about fifteen years. Don't blame yourself for losing that fight. Write it off to bad luck, or face up that Jack Burke had the better chicken. But that isn't what I wanted to talk about.

“Martha has been after me to quit for years, and I finally gave in. I'm not too old, but I certainly don't need the money. I've got enough orange trees in Orlando to take care of my wants for three lifetimes. If Martha shared my enthusiasm for the game, it would be different. But she won't go on the road with me. This business of living alone in motel rooms doesn't appeal to me anymore. The two months I spent refereeing in Clovis, New Mexico, last spring were the loneliest weeks of my entire life.

“Anyway, I've sold all my Grays. Made a deal for the lot with a breeder in Janitzio, Mexico, and shipped out the last crate of April trios last week. If he fights my Grays as slashers, he'll lose his damned
camisa,
but at any rate, they won't be fighting in the States.

“If you wonder why I refereed today's fight, it was because I promised Captain Mack a year ago. But that was my last appearance in the pit, and you won't see me in the pits again, either as a referee or spectator.” Ed sighed deeply, his confession completed. “Like the lawyer feller says, Frank, ‘Further deponent sayeth not.'”

Several dissuading arguments came immediately to my mind, but I remained silent, of course. As far as I was concerned, what Ed Middleton did was his business, not mine. But his loss to the game would be felt in the South. We needed men like him to keep the sport clean and honest. I didn't say anything because of my self-imposed vow of silence.

Up to this moment I've never told anyone why I made the vow. What I do is my business, but the silver medal on Ed Middleton's watch fob held the answer. Money had nothing to do with my decision to keep my mouth shut.

All of us in America want money because we need it and cannot live without it, but we don't need as much money as most of us think we do. Money isn't enough. We must have something more, and my
something more
was the Cockfighter of the Year award.

The small silver coin on Ed's watch fob was only worth, in cash, about ten or fifteen dollars, but a lot of men have settled for lesser honors. A man may refuse a clerk's job with a loan company, for instance, for one hundred dollars a week. But if the same man is put in charge of three typists and is given the exalted title of office manager, the chances are that he will work for ninety dollars a week. In business, this is a well-known “for instance.”

Unlike Great Britain, we don't have any peerages to hand out, or any annual Queen's Honors List, so most of us settle for less, a hell of a lot less. In large corporations, the businessman has reached his goal in life when he gets a title on his door and a corner office with two windows instead of one. But I'm not a businessman. I am a full-time cockfighter.

My goal in life was that little silver coin, not quite as large as a Kennedy half dollar. On one side of the medal there is an engraved statement: Cockfighter of the Year. In the center, the year the award is given is engraved in Arabic numerals. At the bottom of the coin are three capital letters: S.C.T. These letters stand for Southern Conference Tournament.

To a noncocker, this desire might sound childish but, to a cockfighter, this award is his ultimate achievement in one of the toughest sports in the world. The medal is awarded to the man Senator Jacob Foxhall decides to give it to at the completion of the annual S.C.T. held in Milledgeville, Georgia. However, Senator Foxhall doesn't always see fit to award the medal. In the last fifteen years he has only awarded the medal to four cockfighters. Ed Middleton was one of them.

In addition to the medal there is a cash award of one thousand dollars. In effect, the cocker who wins this award has the equivalent of a paid-up insurance policy. He can demand a minimum fee of one hundred and fifty dollars a day as a referee from any pit operator in the South, and the operator considers it an honor to pay him. To a cocker, this medal means as much as the Nobel Prize does to a scientist. If that doesn't convey an exact meaning of the award, I can state it simpler. The recipient is the best damned cockfighter in the South, and he has the medal to prove it.

For ten years this medal has been my goal. The S.C.T. is the toughest pit tourney in the United States, and a cockfighter can't enter his game fowl without an invitation. Only top men in the game receive invitations, and I had been getting mine for eight years—even during the two years I was in the Army and stationed in the Philippine Islands.

A vow of silence, however, isn't necessary to compete for the award. That had been my own idea, and not a very bright one either, but I was too damned stubborn to break it.

Three years before I had been riding high on the list of eligible S.C.T. cockfighters. In a hotel room in Biloxi, I had gotten drunk with a group of chicken men and shot off my big mouth, boasting my Ace cock, a Red Madigan named Freelance.

Another drunken breeder challenged me, and we staged the fight in the hotel room. Freelance killed the other cock easily, but in the fight he received a slight battering. The next day at the scheduled S.C.T. pitting, I had been forced to pit Freelance again because I had posted a two-hundred-dollar forfeit, and I had been too shamed to withdraw. Freelance lost, and I had lost my chance for the award.

A few weeks later, while brooding about this lost fight, a fight that had been lost by my personal vanity and big mouth, I made my self-imposed vow of silence. I intended to keep the vow until I was awarded that little silver medal. No one, other than myself, knew about my vow, and I could have broken it at any time without losing face. But
I
would know, and I had to shave every day. At first it had been hell, especially when I had had a few drinks and wanted to get in on the chicken talk in a bar or around the cockhouses at a game club. But I had learned how to live with it.

On the day Mr. Middleton picked me up in his Cadillac at Captain Mack's trailer court in Belle Glade, I hadn't said a word to anyone in two years and seven months.

“You're a hard man to talk to since you lost your voice!” Ed Middleton boomed in his resonant baritone.

With a slight start, I turned and grinned at him.

“I mean it,” he said seriously. “I feel like a radio announcer talking into a microphone in a soundproof room. I know I must be reaching somebody, but I'll be damned if I know who it is. You've changed a lot in the last three years, Frank. I know you're working as hard as you ever did, but you shouldn't take life too seriously. And don't let a run of bad luck get you down, do you hear?”

I nodded. Ed jabbed me in the ribs sharply with his elbow.

“You've still got a lot of friends, you big dumb bastard!” he finished gruffly. With a quick movement he snapped on the dash radio, twisted the volume on full and almost blasted me out of my seat. He turned the volume down again and said bitterly: “And on top of everything else, there's nothing on the radio these days but rock ‘n' roll!”

He left the radio on anyway, and said no more until we reached Saint Cloud. We pulled into the parking area of a garish drive-in restaurant and got out of the car. It was only six thirty, but the sun had dropped out of sight. There were just a few jagged streaks of orange in the western sky, an intermingling of nimbus clouds and smoke from runaway muck fires. As we admired these fiery fingers in the sky, Mr. Middleton smacked his lips.

“How does a steak sound, Frank?”

I certainly didn't intend to spend my remaining ten dollars on a steak. In reply, I emptied my pockets and showed him a double handful of junk, and some loose change.

“I didn't expect you to pay for it,” he said resentfully. “Let's go inside.”

The sirloin was excellent. So was the baked potato and green salad and three cups of coffee that went with it. After three weeks of Dody's halfhearted cooking, I appreciated a good steak dinner. On regular fare, such as greens, pork chops, string beans, cornbread and so on, I'm a fairly good cook, and I enjoy the preparation of my own meals. But I never prepare food when I have a woman around to do it for me. As I ate, I wondered vaguely how Jack Burke was making out with the girl. Although I was broke, the steak restored my good spirits, and I felt a certain sense of newfound freedom now that I no longer had Dody to worry about.

We lingered over dinner for more than an hour and didn't arrive at Mr. Middleton's home until after nine. His ranch-style concrete brick and stucco house was about three miles off the main highway on a private gravel road and completely surrounded by orange groves. An avid fisherman, Ed had built his home with the rear terrace overlooking a small pond. He parked in a double carport, set well away from the house, backing in beside a blue Chevy pickup.

Before we crossed the flagstone patio, Ed flipped a switch in the carport and flooded the patio and most of the small lake with light. The pond was about forty yards in diameter, and there was an aluminum fishing skiff tied to a concrete block pier at the edge of the gently sloping lawn.

“I've stocked the damned lake with fish four different times,” Ed said angrily, “but they disappear someplace. Hide in the muck at the bottom, I suppose. Anyway, I've never been able to catch very many.”

When the lights were turned on, Mrs. Middleton opened the back door and peered out. Her dark hair, shot through with streaks of gray, was collected in a heavy round bun at the nape of her neck.

“Who's that with you, Ed?” she asked.

We crossed the patio to the door and Ed kissed his wife on the mouth. He gripped my upper arm with his thick fingers and pulled me in front of him.

“Frank Mansfield, Martha. You remember him, I'm sure. He's going to spend the night with us.”

“Of course,” Martha said. “Come on inside, Frank, before the mosquitoes eat you alive!”

We entered the kitchen and I blinked uncomfortably be neath the blue-and-yellow fluorescent lights. I shook hands with Mrs. Middleton after she wiped her hands unnecessarily on her clean white apron. She was a motherly woman, about ten or fifteen years younger than her husband, but without any children to “mother.”

“Have you boys had your dinner?” she asked.

“We had a little something in Saint Cloud,” Ed admitted.

“Restaurants!” she said. “Why didn't you bring Frank on home to dinner when you were that close?” she scolded. “Sit
down,
Frank! How've you been? Could you eat a piece of key lime pie? Of course you can. I know you both want coffee.”

As we sat down at the breakfast nook together, Ed said in a loud stage whisper, “I'm going to eat a piece even though I hate it.”

“Ha!” Martha said from beside the stove. “You hate it all right!”

After we were served and eating our pie, there was nothing else Mrs. Middleton could do for us. She stood beside the table with her hands clasped beneath her apron, working her pursed lips in and out. I had the feeling that she wanted to ask me questions, but out of consideration for my so-called affliction, she wanted to phrase her questions so that I could answer them yes or no—and yet she couldn't manage any questions of that kind. I hadn't seen Mrs. Middleton or talked to her for at least four years. As I recalled, the last time I had seen her was at a banquet held following the International Cockfighting Tournament in Saint Petersburg. My “dumbness” had been a subject that she and her husband had undoubtedly discussed between them.

“Sit down, Martha,” Ed said. “Have a cup of coffee with us.”

“And stay awake all night? No thanks.” She sat beside her husband, however, and smiled across the table. “Do you like the pie, Frank?”

I kissed my fingertips and rolled my eyes toward the ceiling.

“Lime is Ed's favorite.” She put a hand on her husband's sleeve. “How was the trip, Ed?”

Ed Middleton put his fork crosswise on his empty plate, wiped his lips with a napkin, and looked steadily at his wife. “The trip doesn't matter, Martha,” he said, “because it was the last, the very last.”

For a long time, a very long time it seemed to me, the elderly couple looked into each other's eyes. Mr. Middleton smiled and nodded his head, and Martha's lower lip began to tremble and her eyes were humid. An instant later she was crying. She hurriedly left the table, put her apron to her face and, still crying, ran out of the room.

Mr. Middleton crumpled the square of linen and tossed it toward the stove. The napkin fluttered to the floor, and he smiled and shook his head.

“She's crying because she's happy,” he said. “Well, dammit, I promised to give up cockfighting, and a promise is a promise!” He got up from the table, doubled his right fist and punched me hard on the shoulder. “Pour yourself some more coffee, eat another piece of pie. I'll be back in a minute.”

He pushed through the swinging door and disappeared.

The lime pie was tart and tasty, with a wonderful two-inch topping of snow white, frothy meringue. I ate two more pieces, drank two more cups of coffee. I smoked two cigarettes. Just as I was beginning to wonder whether Ed was going to come back to the kitchen or not, he pushed through the door.

“Come on, Frank,” he snapped his fingers, “let's go get your suitcase.

We went out to his Caddy, and after he unlocked the doors, I got my suitcase out of the back. When we returned to the kitchen, he switched off the patio lights. I followed him through the living room and into his study.