Cockfighter - Charles Ray Willeford [89]
Discussions began among the other cockfighters, and they started to work on their weight lists. I caught Omar's eye and jerked my head for him to follow me out into the hall. When Omar joined me in the corridor, I led the way to our room. I wrote a short note to my partner on a sheet of hotel stationery:
No good, partner. Deputies understand agrarian people and cockfighters, but city cops have a bad habit of not staying bought. There'll be a lot of drinking and a lot of money changing hands. That means women present and women mean trouble. We've got thirty of our best cocks in the basement and a confiscation raid would ruin us for the season. Get our entry fee back from Mr. Reed.
Omar read the note and then stared at me morosely with his large brown eyes. The corners of his mouth were probably turned down as well, but I couldn't see his mouth beneath his heavy moustache. “Damn it, Frank,” he said, “I'm inclined to go along with you, but we'll be passing up a whole lot of easy money. Fred Reed told me personally that there were two big-money gamblers flying in from Nashville tonight, and we get fat. Really fat! The only entry we really have to worry about is Johnny Norris from Birmingham.”
I took the note out of his hands and ran a double line under every word in it to emphasize the meaning, and passed it back.
“I'm with you, all right. Don't worry,” he said earnestly. “But don't forget those eight cocks we selected to enter. They're trimmed mighty fine. If we don't fight them tomorrow they're likely to go under hack.”
I nodded, thinking about the problem.
If we didn't fight our eight conditioned gamecocks, we would have to put them back on a regular maintenance diet and then recondition them all over again for the January 10 Biloxi meet. Even if they were reconditioned, they would be stale. And stale, listless cocks aren't winners.
I opened my suitcase, remembering the four-cock derby scheduled at Cook's Hollow, Tennessee. I flipped through the pages of my current Southern Cockfighter magazine until I found Vern Packard's advertisement for the meet. As I recalled, the derby was scheduled for the next day, December 15, at the Cook's Hollow Game Club. Vern Packard was a friend of mine, although I hadn't fought at his pit for more than four years. I circled Vern's telephone number in the advertisement, and wrote on the margin of the magazine:
Call Packard. We're too late for the derby, but I can fight our cocks in post- and pre-derby hacks. Vern's a friend of mine. You take the truck and the rest of the cocks on to Biloxi like we planned.
Omar, cheered considerably, laughed and said: “I'll buy that, Frank. And raid or no raid, the idea of fighting cocks in a bridal suite doesn't appeal to me anyway.”
Omar picked up the telephone and called Vern Packard. As I thought, I was too late to enter Vern's derby, but there were only three entries instead of four, and Vern planned “feathering the pit” hacks as well as post-derby hacks. He was happy to have me, and told Omar that he would put me up in his spare bedroom and have some coops readied for my eight cocks.
While Omar looked for Fred Reed to get our entry money back, I packed both our bags. Ordinarily, we would have had to forfeit the two hundred dollars we put up, because we had already signed the contracts and mailed them in from Ocala. But we had contracted to fight at the Chattanooga Game Club, five miles out of the city, not in a hotel suite. It was Fred Reed's hard luck that the sheriff had padlocked his pit, not ours. I repacked our bags, and by the time Omar returned to the room we were ready to leave.
As we entered the elevator,