Cockfighter - Charles Ray Willeford [92]
I put my suitcase in the back, checked Tom's loading of my coops, climbed into the front seat, and honked my horn to let Peeples know that I was ready to go. I followed his vintage black car out of the parking lot. The Peeples farm was some six miles out in the country, and to get there I had to follow the lurching car over a twisting, rock-strewn, spring-breaking dirt road. When the old cockfighter stopped at the entrance to his dilapidated barn, I parked beside him.
I could see the cockpit without getting out of the station wagon. The linoleum floor was a shiny, glistening design in blue-and-white checkered squares. The glassy floor was such a flagrant violation of pit regulations—anywhere—that I began to wonder if there wasn't more going on here than Vern Packard had told me. But Vern had advised me not to fight, so I decided to go ahead with it and see what happened.
When I leaned over the seat to pull out Icky's coop, Tom opened the front door and offered his help.
“I'll hold him for you, Mr. Mansfield.”
I took my blue chicken out of the coop and passed him to Tom Peeples. He smiled, hefting Icky gently with his big raw hands.
“He feels jes' like a baseball!” Tom said, as I opened my gaff case. “Sure does seem a shame to see Little Joe kill a pretty chicken like this one.”
I cleared Icky's spur stumps with typewriter-cleaning fluid, and heeled him low with a set of silver one-and-a-quarter-inch gaffs. Holding the cock under the chest with one hand, Tom passed him back to me.
“By the way,” he said, snapping his fingers, “Little Joe always fights in three-inch heels, if you want to change.” Tom had waited patiently until I had finished heeling before providing me with this essential information. Another violation of form. Of course, he had no way of knowing that I wouldn't have changed to long heels anyway.
I shook my head indifferently, and he ran to meet his father who was rounding the corner of the barn. Mr. Peeples had gone to the rows of chicken runs behind the barn to get Icky's opponent while Tom had helped me heel. I took a good look at Little Joe from the front seat.
The cock had been so badly battered I couldn't determine his game strain. His comb and wattles were closely cropped for fighting, and most of his head feathers were missing, pecked out in earlier battles. Instead of the usual graceful sweep of arching tail feathers, the Peeples cock had only three broken quills straggling from his stern. Both wings were ragged, shredded, in fact. Both wings had been broken in fighting, and although they had knitted, they had bumpy leading edges. As Milam Peeples sat down on a sawhorse beside the pit and turned the cock on its back for Tom to heel him, I noticed that Little Joe's left eye was missing. A blinker on top of everything else. If Little Joe had won eighteen fights, and from his appearance he had been in many battles, Icky was in for the toughest fight of his life.
Maybe his last.
Under cover from Milam and Tom Peeples, I sat in the front seat of the station wagon holding Icky in my lap and briskly rosined the bottom of his feet. I was still rubbing the feet when the old man- called out that he was ready. There was only a sliver of rosin left, but I put it in my shirt pocket and joined Milam and his son at the pit.
“I'm goin' to handle,” the old man said. “And if you don't have no objections, Tom here can referee.”
I nodded, stepped over the low wooden wall of the pit, and took my position on the opposite score. The waxed floor was so slick my leather heels slipped on it slightly before I got to the other side. Although I figured Mr. Peeples was expecting an argument of some kind about the illegal flooring, I kept a straight face. I wondered, though, what kind of an explanation he used to counter arguments about the pit. It must have been a good one.
“Better bill 'em, Mr. Mansfield,” Tom said.
We billed in the center, and Icky