Cockfighter - Charles Ray Willeford [78]
Like people, every gamecock has to be handled a little differently. A chicken's brain is about the size of a BB, but within those tiny brains there is an infinite variety of character and personality traits. I've seen personalities that ranged from lassitude to zealousness, from anarchy to obedience, from friendliness to indifference. Luckily, a chicken can't count. If they could count, they would have resented the daily raising of the number of flirts and runs we gave them.
A gamecock is the most stupid creature on earth and, paradoxically, the most intelligent fighter.
When my chart notations were completed, I dropped a canvas cover over the slatted doorway of each coop, and the darkness kept the birds quiet until it was time for the evening training periods.
The other cocks, not under conditioning, were fed, watered, examined and weighed, and I was through for the morning. Omar and I would then play chess until time for lunch. When Buford was around, I drove to Omar's farm for lunch, and inspected his gamecocks before returning home. If Buford failed to drop by, I would cook either a potful of canned beef stew or pork and beans and fix a pan of hoecakes.
“How come you've never gotten married, Frank?” Omar asked me one day, as he looked unhappily at his heaping platter of hot pork and beans. “By God, if I didn't eat something else besides stew or beans every day, I'd marry the first woman who came along!”
Omar was so used to my silence by now that he answered his own questions. “I don't suppose many women would want to marry a professional cockfighter, though. Most of the women I've known want their husband home every night, whether they like him or not, just so they can have somebody to complain to. But canned beans—ugh!”
In the afternoon, after Omar went home, I took a walk with one of my gamecocks that wasn't undergoing conditioning. When taken out of their runs, some of the cocks would follow me around. They liked attention, but they also hoped that I would drop a grain of corn on the ground now and then. And sometimes I did.
Mary Bondwell either fixed supper for us at four thirty at Omar's farm, or we drove into Ocala for a steak or barbecued ribs. By five thirty, we were ready to start the conditioning all over again—the feeding, weighing, flies, flirts, runs and recording. Not many game strains can stand up to the hard conditioning I give them, but my two cocks—the Mellhorn and the Gray—came along fast, and Icky thrived on it. Omar's Roundheads had a tough time for the first three days, but as soon as their excess fat disappeared, they came up nicely.
At night, to get our gamecocks used to lights and noise, because they would be fighting at night later on in the season, I turned on the overhead lights of the cockpit, and played sound-effects records on a portable phonograph. The records weren't loud enough to suit Omar. He charged around the outside of the pit, shouting out bets at the top of his voice,
“Hey! Who'll give me an eight to ten! I got a blinker here, half dead already! Who'll lay twenty to ten!”
He then accepted preposterous bets in a mincing falsetto, managing to make enough noise for a major cockpit. It was comical to watch his wild antics, charging around the pit, flopping his big bare arms loosely, his black beard glistening under the lights. I could never picture Omar in a homburg and gray flannel suit walking down Madison Avenue. He fitted in with a cocker's life as though he had been born to it.
After only a few nights of noise and lights, every one of the cocks could stand quietly and patiently in the center of the pit, and pay no mind either to the records or Omar.
And of course, we had a bottle every night, either gin or bourbon, and we passed it back and forth. Omar would tell me stories about New York, the advertising business, or anecdotes about radio and television people he had known.
Quite suddenly he would stop