Dirty Rice (24 page)

“Why not?” Phil Pellicore said. “The Chief is liable to pitch another no-hitter the next time he gets up on the mound. This ain't likely to be no big thing to him.”

“He might just do that, scarce as hen's teeth are,” Dynamite said. “And if he does, I'll say the same thing to him then that I'm saying now. But he can't miss a chance to howl the first time he does it.”

“I ain't getting drunk,” I said. “Let me get that said first thing. Keep that in mind.”

“I ain't talking about getting drunk,” Dynamite said. “Why's that worry you so much you got to make claims about it? Hell, a man can always get drunk. But you can't always go to the Atchafalaya cockfights. That don't happen every time it gets dark in Acadia Parish.”

“It's tonight?” Phil Pellicore said. “Why didn't I know that?”

“It's lots of things other folks know and you don't, Phil,” G.D. Squires said. “So let me tell you. The rooster wars are tonight, way out yonder on Thibodaux Road toward Church Point, and we're fixing to load up and go see them.”

“Rooster fights,” I said. “I never been to one, but I have seen birds fight.”

“You can tell us that story on the way, Mr. Pitcher,” Dynamite said. “Let's go, y'all.”

“I ain't getting drunk,” I said again. “But I got to go get something out of my locker.”

“I want some of that, too,” Dynamite said. “If it'll make you feel good.”

“I wouldn't call it good,” I said. “It just makes you a different man.”

“Well, hell. All of us could stand some of that,” G.D. Squires said. “Let's load up the car and get on the road.”

We did that, and as we headed to the Atchafalaya cockfight, I sucked on a pinch of mikko root and told myself it was good that I wasn't having to think every minute about Teeny Doucette and the way her black hair looked rising up on a pillow. And I wasn't, right up to that time I told myself I wasn't. Think about that last pitch I threw, instead, I told myself, the one that batter hadn't even swung at, and the way his knees buckled when it went by him. I put that in my head and remembered not to look out the car windows at the dark rice fields rolling by us in the moonlight. I might see a berdache, I reminded myself, a half-man with no legs but just smoke to stand on, looking back at me, and I couldn't afford to do that just now.

• • •

Well before we got to the dirt road that turned off the blacktop we were riding on, we could see parked on the sides of the road and in the bar ditches a bunch of cars and trucks and even a wagon or two with the mules unhitched. The closer we got, the more automobiles showed up in our car beams. They were bigger and newer ones than the old Fords and Chevrolets and Starrs we'd seen, and there weren't any mules and wagons mixed in among them now. Men were standing and milling around by some of the biggest cars, smoking cigarettes, and turning their backs toward our car as we passed by them.

“Why ain't they at the cockpit?” Tubby Dean said. “Them guys standing there playing pocket pool. Has it started yet?”

“Fool,” Dynamite Dunn said. “That bunch ain't going to the cockfights. They drive them Packards and Lincolns and Cadillacs for the ones inside laying their money down. You see what color most of them happen to be, don't you?”

“You ain't talking about the cars now.” Tubby said. “When you say color.”

“I'm talking about chauffeurs, and I'm talking about bodyguards,” Dynamite said. “Where was you raised, Tub, and where've you been?”

“Illinois, that's where I was raised. You don't see chicken fights in the Prairie State.”

“You do in the Pelican State, let me tell you.”

“It ain't against the law?”

“No, it's not, but if it was, it wouldn't be,” Dynamite said. “See, down here in the marsh country, if it's against the law, it's all right to do it. You just got to pay the right man to get permission. But chicken fighting, now that there's a noble sport. That goes back to Napoleon. Everybody thinks that's jake.”

“So you don't have to pay nobody to be able to do it.”

“I didn't say that. I just said it's legal. You got to pay somebody for everything you do in Louisiana that's worth doing,” Dynamite said. “Look up yonder, G.D. I believe you can squeeze this old wreck of a car right in that hole.”

We unloaded and made our way toward the building where the rooster fights was going on. “You said bodyguards while ago,” I heard Tubby say to Dynamite. “Why they need bodyguards, people in them Packard and Cadillac cars?”

“It's big wads of money being put up for grabs, Tub, that's why. And whenever money's changing hands, it's a good chance an accident or two might happen. Them bodyguards been hired to make sure the right hands get to hold on to that cash. Lord, how did you get to be so old and fat and learn so little?”

A couple of fellows with shotguns in their hands was standing by the door into the barn where all the noise and light was coming from, looking hard at us. One of them seemed to know Dynamite, and he said something and then moved away from the door to let us in. The building looked like a regular barn, but it was oversized and made out of galvanized tin. It was the only building around, and that wasn't usual on the rice farms.

“You that big Indian pitcher for Rayne?” one of the men holding the twelve-gauge said to me as I passed by him.

“Yeah, I reckon,” I said. “I ain't all that big, though.”

“How?” he said and looked at the other man to see if he'd laugh. He did, and I said back to him what Alabamas and Coushattas back in the Nation always said when some white man made that joke. We'd learned it from Frank Had Two Mothers, a Coushatta from the Snake Clan, a fellow who'd left the reservation and gone to California to pick tomatoes for a while and then come back.

“How, hell, who?” I said, and both of the shotgun holders laughed the way whites always did when they heard that.

The building was full of folks, and it was lit up mainly by some spotlights aimed at a big pen made of planks in the middle of benches rowed up. The seats were lined up full of people, most of them standing to see down into the pen, with only a few too drunk to stay upright and having to wallow around on the benches.

Everybody had been smoking a lot of cigars and cigarettes, and they were going to smoke a whole bunch more, judging by the way the cloud from burning tobacco was hanging all over the building. Just as we all got in and started trying to work our way up to where we could see what was happening in the pen, something happened in it that made the crowd holler together at full volume.

A high-pitched scream lifted above all the deeper sounding yells, and it hung in the smoke so long you could almost see it right there above the heart of the wooden pen.

“Some gamecock has done hung a gaff in another one's head,” Dynamite hollered, “and broke it off in him, the way that sounds.”

“Was that a woman just screamed?” I said back to him.

In a minute or two, the noise let up enough for people to talk to each other, and they were waving paper money in each other's faces and cussing and saying numbers and the names of roosters. One name I kept hearing was Louisiana Black Top.

From what I could tell from hearing the labels the white eyes in Louisiana were slapping on fighting chickens, the ones in the cockfighting business had something in common with the People of the Nation back in Texas. Both the ones watching chickens fight in a place special built for them and betting on which one would kill the other one, and the Alabamas and Coushattas trying to find the right names to call everything around them where they lived, showed they believed it matters what name belongs to each particular thing.

The difference I could see was that the chickens with the special names promising what they would do to another chicken didn't have no choice in the matter of finding out what name fit them and was theirs alone. A white man had decided what the chickens would be called and what fit them. The chicken didn't earn his name and wouldn't know it.

The naming of a fighting chicken wasn't meant to satisfy the chicken but the man who'd slapped it on him. So there wasn't no real power in it, like there is in the name a young man of the People comes to know is his when he dreams it during his spirit quest in the Big Thicket. He earns that name, and he tells it to only one person other than himself. It ain't cheap is what I'm saying about that name a young man of the Nation works to get.

After a while, we got close enough and at the right angle to see what was going on in the pit. It was dug down into the ground so folks in the stands could get a clear view. The losers got throwed into a wooden box over in one corner of the pit, and that box was full enough I couldn't count the ones dead there. A lot of blood was on most of them, so you couldn't tell the colors right off. The eyes of the cocks were open, but glazed over, and there wasn't any doubt most of them was dead. A couple was still quivering, but that didn't mean they were yet alive.

“Chief,” somebody said to me as I was leaning over to see into the pit. “Glad to see you here. You ever been to a cockpit before?”

“No, sir,” I said to Sal Florio, still dressed in that nice suit and tie, “this business is all new to me.”

“Cockfighting's got a long history to it,” Sal Florio said. “It goes back all the way to the Romans, probably even before them. They might have taken it from somebody else. But they perfected the sport, like they did most things. They're like your people, Gemar Batiste, the Romans were. They got things done, they were brave, and they were filled with the fighting spirit. Just like you in that game you pitched against Lake Charles tonight. The Explorers were not going to get a hit, you decided, and by God, they didn't. They were having to deal with a full blood Indian on the warpath, and they didn't have the stomach for it. Did they now?”

“Maybe not that game,” I said. “But it's baseball. It can be turned around all the way different the next time we play Lake Charles. Winning won't necessarily last.”

“That's the spirit, Chief,” Sal Florio said, putting his arm around my shoulder and squeezing it. “Look, I'm not going to take up any more of your time. They're about to put beaks together and get these next two pitted. You going to put some money on this one?”

“I don't believe so,” I said. “I don't know enough to bet money.”

“That's a wise position to take,” he said. “But look. Would you see it as an insult if I put a bill or two in your pocket to get you started?” Sal Florio held his hand out toward me. “I don't expect a thing back if you win or lose, understand.”

“I don't think so, Mr. Florio,” I said, keeping my hands where I had them on the edge of the pit. “It don't feel right to me.”

“Another wise statement, if I ever heard one. You don't know this great and ancient sport, so you're not comfortable laying down a bet. But you do know baseball. You're a lot more at ease about that game. I can swear to that.”

“I got a lot left to learn about ball playing still,” I said. “I don't reckon anybody ever knows it all.”

“You're an impressive man, young as you are,” Sal Florio said. “You got a lot to teach us all about baseball, and I want to be one of the ones you instruct. I'm a student of the game. We'll be talking again pretty soon, I know. Now, watch close at this pitting about to start up here. It'll be your first lesson in learning how to hazard your money and come out on top.”

Sal Florio slapped me on the back and walked off then, and Dynamite Dunn squeezed in beside me to look down into the pit.

“Did Sal make you a proposition, pitcher?” Dynamite said. “Or y'all just passing the time of day before the next round of blood-letting kicks off?”

“He was talking about the Romans,” I said. “How they invented cockfighting. How it's like baseball and whether I was going to bet some money on it. Stuff like that.”

“Sal will go on about them Romans, all right. But them boys in the old days bet on more than roosters fighting.”

“I know all about gladiators,” I told Dynamite, “and how they killed each other in the ring and went toe-to-toe with tigers and lions and bulls. I learned about that in school.”

“You paid attention in school? I never did, and I'm glad I didn't. Saved me a whole bunch of worry and time.”

“I paid attention when Miz Amerine told us about fighting and wars,” I said. “It was a lot more interesting than hearing about all them treaties that got signed.”

“You don't like treaties? That's what you're saying, Gemar?”

“We always come on the wrong end of them treaties, Dynamite,” I said. “My people did, it looked like to me, no matter how much that old lady teacher tried to twist it and make us appreciate how nice everything always ended up.”

Dynamite had stopped listening to me by then, taken as he was by what was going on in the cockpit, so I watched along with him and with everybody else in that big tin building. I got to admit it drawed your attention a lot more than thinking about the way treaties had divided up chunks of land and water and air to favor one party of folks over another.

Below us in the middle of the pit, two men were dancing around facing each other, each one of them holding a gamecock straining forward with their eyes bugged out to get at the other one. When the handlers got the birds close enough to touch beaks together, they'd peck away like they wanted to eat the head off the one facing them, lifting their legs up and slashing forward with them at the same time. Right above their feet, where the real spurs grow on a bird, the handlers had fastened with rawhide thongs what looked like sharp knives to improve what the birds came with natural out of the egg. The way the spotlight from above fell on the new and improved spurs made them shine like silver as they jerked back and forth in a blur so fast you couldn't follow it with the eye.