Cockfighter - Charles Ray Willeford [7]
With new respect for each other, the two birds circled, heads held low, watching each other warily. Little David feinted cleverly with a short rush, but Sandspur wasn't fooled. He held his ground, and Burke's cock retreated with his wings fluttering at the tips.
As he dropped back, Sandspur rose with a short flight and savagely hooked the gaff of his right leg into Little David's wing. The point of the heel was banged solidly into the bone and Sandspur couldn't get it dislodged. He pecked savagely at Little David's head, and hit the top of the downed cock's dubbed head hard with his bill open... too hard.
The upper section of Sandspur's bill broke off cleanly at the doctored crack I had made. A bubble of blood formed, and Sandspur stopped pecking. Both cocks struggled to break away from each other, but the right spur was still stuck, and all Sandspur could do was hop up and down in place on his free leg. I looked at Mr. Middleton.
“Handle!” the judge shouted. “Thirty seconds!”
A moment later I disentangled the gaff from Little David's wing and retreated to my starting line. I put Sandspur's head in my mouth and sucked the blood from his broken beak. I licked the feathers of his head back into place and spat as much saliva as I could into his open mouth. For the remaining seconds I had left I sucked life into his clipped comb. The comb was much too pale.
“Get ready!” I held Sandspur by the tail on the line. “Pit your cocks!”
Instead of flying into the air, Sandspur circled for the right wall. Little David turned in midair, landed running, and chased my cock into the far corner. Sandspur turned to fight, and the cocks met head on, but my injured bird was forced back by the fierceness of Little David's rush.
On his back, Sandspur hit his opponent twice in the chest, drawing blood both times, and then Little David was above him in the air and cutting at his head with both spurs. A sharp gaff entered Sandspur's right eye, and he died as the needle point pierced his central nervous system. Little David strutted back and forth, pecked twice at my lifeless cock, and then crowed his victory.
“The winner is Mr. Burke's Ace,” Mr. Middleton announced, as a formality. “Twenty-eight seconds in the second pitting.”
All I had left was a folded ten-dollar bill in my watch pocket and one dead chicken.
2
There was a burial hole in the marshy ground, about four feet square and three feet deep, on the far side of the parking area. Water was seeping visibly into the mucky pit, and the dead roosters in the bottom had begun to float.
I removed the gaffs from my dead cock's spurs and added his body to the floating pile of dead chickens. As I put the heels away in my gaff case, Bill Sanders joined me at the edge of the communal burying pit.
“I just wanted to let you know that I got all your dough down, Frank,” he said. “Every dollar at three-to-one, and there's nothing left.”
I nodded.
“Tough, Frank, but my money was riding on Sandspur with yours.”
I shrugged and emptied the peat moss out of the aluminum coop into the hole on top of the dead chickens.
“You're going to be all right, aren't you? I mean, you'll be on the Southern Conference circuit this year, and all?”
I nodded and shook hands with Sanders. As I looked down at Bill's bald head, I noticed that the top was badly sunburned and starting to peel. The little gambler never wore a hat.
“Okay, Frank. I'll probably see you in Biloxi.”
I clapped Bill on the shoulder to squeeze out a farewell. He went over to the blue Chrysler convertible and started talking to the blonde. She had evidently recovered from her upset stomach. She had remade her face, and she now listened with absorbed attention to whatever it was Bill Sanders was telling her.
I removed the bamboo handle from the aluminum coop, collapsed the sides, and made a fairly flat, compact square out of the six frames. After locking them together with the clamps, I attached the handle again so I could carry the coop folded. A machinist in Valdosta had made two of the traveling coops for me