Cockfighter - Charles Ray Willeford [79]
He would reach for the bottle, take a healthy swig and pass it to me.
“I know you're tired of listening to me ramble on. Why don't you get out that electronic monster of yours and play us something?”
I had rigged an extension cord from the shack, and I would play for an hour or so, sitting on the bench beside the lighted cockpit. I never played songs, I more or less played with the guitar instead, trying out chord progressions, or attempting to express a mood of some kind. Omar never said whether he liked my music or not, but he listened attentively.
One night Buford drove over with a big pot of greens his wife had cooked for me. Omar told Buford to get his enamel cup from the hook above the faucet where he kept it, and then filled it with whiskey. Before Buford had finished the cupful of whiskey he got mellow and sang for us—old-time blues and field hollers. When he held a note long enough for me to catch it, I would hit the corresponding chord on my guitar. I might have been a little drunk, but I thought Buford had the greatest voice I had ever heard.
These were all pleasant evenings for me. I have always guarded my aloneness jealously. But Omar didn't encroach on my solitude, he complemented it. For the first time in my life, I realized that companionship between two kindred spirits is not impossible—as long as each man respects the other's rights.
On the eighth day of conditioning, the exercising of each cock was cut in half. On the morning of the ninth day my Mellhorn Black got moody and refused to eat. He wasn't sick, he was mean and sulky. I put the Gray game hen in his coop with him for a couple of hours and he snapped out of his lethargy. When I removed the hen and dumped a spoonful of feed on the floor of his coop, he gobbled it up in no time.
Omar thought this was funny. “Maybe that's what's wrong with me, Frank,” he laughed. “If somebody dropped a blonde into my bed for two hours every night, I could probably eat those beans of yours and like them.”
On the twelfth day, the cocks were taken off exercise and food together. They weren't given any water, but they didn't want water. This was a good sign, and meant they were ready for the pit. They would fast right up until pit time. All five cocks were in the peak of condition. I made Omar “feel” every one of them, and his fingers learned the difference.
“If I didn't know better, Frank,” he said, “I'd think these cocks were made out of stone.”
Sunday afternoon we put the cocks into traveling coops and drove to the cockpit in Omar's station wagon. The Ocala Game Club wasn't really in Ocala—it was closer to Martel, eight miles west of the city. But it was called the Ocala pit because out-of-town cockfighters stayed in Ocala motels when the February 24 S.C. derby was held. During the entire season, the pit operator, an old retired farmer named Bandy Taylor, held hack matches almost every Sunday.
Bandy Taylor was in his late sixties, with brown leathery skin and enough deep wrinkles on his face to resemble a relief map. His legs were so bowed, he couldn't have caught a pig in a trench.
Although Bandy's pit was not an elaborate setup, all of the Lownes County cockfighters liked to meet there. His wife maintained a small stand outside the pit area, where she sold coffee, Coca-Colas and hamburgers, and Bandy charged a reasonable, one-dollar admission fee. The old man, an authorized S.C.T. referee, never bet on the fights, but he made enough money on admission fees and the food his wife sold to get by. Any wins I had there could be signed by Bandy on the official records, and they would be acceptable by the Milledgeville judges for qualifying purposes.
The crowd was small, considering that four hacks between Pete Chocolate and our new partnership had been scheduled. There were