Cockfighter - Charles Ray Willeford [111]
I didn't dare to sponge him. There was very little I could do. Water would make him bleed more rapidly than he was bleeding already. I held him loosely between my hands, pressing my fingers lightly into his hot body, afraid he would come apart in my hands. Fortunately, Little David was as badly injured as Icky. His last desperate attack had taken every ounce of energy he had left.
After three futile counts of twenty, Ed Middleton ordered us to breast on the center score, one hand only beneath the bird.
Which gamecock would peck first?
Which gamecock would die first?
It was an endurance test. Little David had been the last chicken to fight. If Icky died first, Little David would be declared the winner by virtue of throwing the last blow. On the third breast pitting, Icky stretched out his limp neck and pecked feebly. The order to handle was given. Again we pitted, and again Icky pecked, and this time he got a billhold on the other cock's stubby dubbed comb. Little David didn't feel or notice the billhold. Little David was dead. And so was Icky, his beak clamped to the Red's comb to the last.
“I'll carry my bird out,” Jack Burke said.
“You're entitled to three more twenty-second counts,” Ed reminded him, going by the book.
“What's the use?” Burke said indifferently. “They're both dead, now.”
“Dead or not,” Ed said officially, “you're entitled by the rules to three counts of twenty after the other cock pecks.”
Without another word Jack Burke picked up his dead gamecock and left the pit. I picked up the Blue and held him to my chest. His long neck dangled limply over my left arm. My eyes were suddenly, irrationally, humid with tears.
“That's what I call a dead-game chicken, Frank!” Senator Foxhall called out from the judge's box.
I nodded blindly in his general direction and then turned my back on the old man to look for Mary Elizabeth. She wasn't in her seat. I caught a glimpse of her blue topcoat as she hurried out through the side entrance to the parking lot. I ran after her and caught up with her running figure just beyond the closed, shuttered box office.
“Mary Elizabeth!” I said aloud. My voice sounded rusty, strangled, different, nothing at all like I remembered it.
She stopped running, turned and faced me, her face like a mask. Her lips were as bloodless as her face.
“You've decided to talk again? Is that it? It's too late now, Frank. And I know now that it was always too late for us. You aren't the man I fell in love with, but you never were! If I'd seen you in the cockpit ten years ago, I would've known then. I didn't watch those poor chickens fight, Frank, I watched your face. It was awful. No pity, no love, no understanding, nothing! Hate! You hate everything, yourself, me, the world, everybody!”
She closed her eyes to halt the tears. A moment later she opened her purse and wiped her eyes with a small white handkerchief.
“And I gave myself to you, Frank,” she said, as though she were speaking to herself. “I gave you everything I had to offer, everything, to a man who doesn't even have a heart!”
I didn't know this woman. I had never seen her before. This was a Mary Elizabeth I had hidden from myself all these years.
I dropped my dead Blue chicken to the ground, put my left heel on its neck, reached down, and jerked off his head with my right hand. I held the beaten, bloody, but never, never bowed head out to Mary Elizabeth in my palm. I had nothing else to say to the woman.
Mary Elizabeth licked her pale lips. She took Icky's head from my hand and wrapped it in her white handkerchief. Tucking the wrapped head away in her purse, she nodded.
“Thank you. Thank you very much, Frank Mansfield. I'll accept your gift. When I get home, I'll preserve it in a jar of alcohol. I might even work out some kind of ritual,