Cockfighter (15 page)

“Your voice still hasn't come back.” It was a statement, not a question.

Slowly, regretfully, I shook my head.

“And you haven't been to a doctor either, have you?” she said accusingly.

Again the negative headshake, but accompanied this time with a stubborn smile.

“I've had a lot of time to think about it, Frank,” she said eagerly, “and I don't believe your sudden loss of speech is organic at all. There's something psychological about it.” She dropped her eyes demurely. “We can discuss it later at The Place. Randall's telephone call caught me just as I was leaving for school, and I don't think Mr. Caldwell liked it very well when I called him the last minute that way. When I take a day off without notice, or get sick or something, he has to take my classes.

“But I've packed a lunch, and it's still warm enough to go for a swim at The Place…” She colored prettily. “If you want to go?”

I opened the front door and took her arm. As we climbed into her yellow Nova, she was over her initial nervousness, and she began to scold me.

“Did it ever occur to you, Frank, that even a picture postcard mailed in advance would be helpful to everybody concerned?” I rather enjoyed the quality of Mary Elizabeth's voice. Like most schoolteachers of the female sex, she had an overtone of fretful impatience in her voice, and this note of controlled irascibility amused me.

I grinned and tweaked the nipple of her right breast gently through the thinness of her white cotton blouse.

“Don't!” The sharp expletive was delivered furiously, and her blue-green eyes blazed with sudden anger. She set her lips grimly and remained silent for the remainder of the short drive to her farm, where she lived with her brother. As she pulled into the yard and parked beneath a giant pepper tree, I noticed that she had cooled off. The moment she turned off the engine, I pulled her toward me and kissed her mouth softly, barely brushing her lips with mine.

“You
do
love me, don't you, Frank?” she asked softly, with her eyes glistening.

I nodded and kissed her again, roughly this time, the way she liked to be kissed. One day, when we had first started to go together, Mary Elizabeth had asked me thirty-seven times if I loved her. At each affirmative reply she had been as pleased as the first time. Women never seem to tire of being told, again and again and again.

“Here comes Wright,” Mary Elizabeth said quickly, looking past my shoulder. “We'd better get out of the car.”

We got out of the car and waited beneath the tree, watching her brother approach us from the barn with his unhurried, shambling gait. Wright Gaylord hated me, and I was always uneasy in his presence because of his low boiling point. He worshiped his little sister and had put her through college. Now in his late forties, Wright was still unmarried. He had never found a woman he could love as much as he loved his sister. He hated me for two reasons. One, I could sleep with Mary Elizabeth and he couldn't. After all these years he was bound to know about us, or at least suspect the best. And two, when I married Mary Elizabeth, he knew that I would take her away and he would never see her again. When our engagement had been announced and published in the paper, he had locked himself in his bedroom for three days.

“I didn't get sick or anything,” Mary Elizabeth said as Wright came within earshot. “Frank came home, so I took the day off for a picnic.”

Wright glared at me. His face reminded me of a chunk of red stone, roughly hewn by an amateur sculptor, and then left in the rain to weather.

“When are you leaving?” Wright asked rudely, shoving both hands into his overall pockets deliberately, to avoid shaking hands.

“Now, that's no way to talk, Wright,” Mary Elizabeth chided. “Frank just got home this morning.” She patted her brother's meaty arm. “We're going to The Place for our picnic. Why don't you come with us?”

“I ain't got time for picnics,” he said sullenly. “I got too much work to do. Anyway, I've been meanin' to go to town all week. Give me the keys, and I'll take your car instead of the pickup.”

Mary Elizabeth handed him her keys. “It might do you good to take a day off and come with us.”

Wright grunted something under his breath, got into the car, and slammed the door. We entered the house, picked up a quilt and the lunch basket to take with us, and then cut across the fields for The Place.

We had called it The Place for as long as I could remember. The tiny pool in the piney woods wasn't large enough to be called a swimming hole. Fed by an underground spring that bubbled into a narrow brook about fifty yards up the pine-covered slope, the pool was only big enough for two or three people to stand in comfortably, and the water was only chest deep. The clear water was very cold, even on the hottest days. On a cruel summer day, a man could stand in the pool, his head shaded by pines, and forget about the heat and humidity of Georgia.

The Place had other advantages. There was a wide flat rock to the right of the pool, with enough room for one person at a time to stretch out on it and get some dappled sunlight. To the left of the pool, facing up the steep hill, there was a clearing well matted with pine needles. For two people, the clearing was the perfect size for an opened quilt and a picnic. Best of all, The Place was secluded and private. Located on the eastern edge of the Gaylord farm, the wooded section merged with a Georgia state forest. The only direct access to The Place was across Wright Gaylord's property, and nobody in his right mind would have trespassed on Wright's land.

Two hours before, Mary Elizabeth and I had arrived at the pool, hot and dusty from trudging across the cultivated fields. We had stripped immediately and jumped into the water. After splashing each other and wrestling playfully in the icy water, we had allowed the sun to dry us thoroughly before we made love on the quilt stretched flat on the bed of pine needles. There had been no protest from Mary Elizabeth, despite my long absence. Her natural, animal-like approach to sex was really miraculous in view of her strong religious views. I sometimes wondered if she ever connected the physical act of love with her real life.

I don't believe she thought consciously of sex at all. If she did, she must have thought of it as “something Frank and I do at The Place,” but not connected with conjugal love or as something out of keeping with her straitlaced Methodist beliefs. Perhaps it was only habit.

I had never managed to make love to Mary Elizabeth anywhere else. She had been seventeen the first time, with just the two of us at The Place. It had been an accident more than anything else. Afterward I had been ashamed of myself for taking advantage of her innocence. But the first time had led to the second, and all during that never-to-be-forgotten summer we had made daily pilgrimages to The Place.

I have never underrated Mary Elizabeth nor underestimated her intelligence, but the situation was unusual. After all, Mary Elizabeth was a college graduate now, and a teacher of high school English—she surely must have known what we were doing. But we had never discussed sex. I had an idea that the subject would be distasteful to her, and she had never brought it up on her own. And yet, every time I came home we headed for The Place like homing pigeons long absent from their coop. I had a hunch, and I had never pressed my good fortune, that as long as Mary Elizabeth never thought about it, or discussed it, we could continue to make love at The Place forever.

Once, and only once, I had asked Mary Elizabeth to drive to Atlanta with me for a weekend. She had been shocked into tears by my reasonable proposition.

“What kind of girl do you think I am?” she had asked tearfully.

Completely bewildered by her reaction, I had been unable to come up with a ready reply. I had never brought up the subject again. And besides, there wasn't a better spot in the world for making love than The Place.

Mary Elizabeth sat up suddenly, swung her long bare legs gracefully around, and sat on the rock facing me, dangling her feet in the water. I was in the pool, chest deep, and I had been studying her body as she lay flat on her back. Spreading a towel across her lap, but leaving her breasts uncovered, Mary Elizabeth looked at me sternly, and then wet her lips.

“What about us, Frank?” she said at last. “How long do we go on like this?” The tone of her voice had changed. It wasn't harsh, but it wasn't feminine either. It was more like the voice of a young boy, on the near verge of changing.

I raised my eyebrows, watching her intently.

She cupped her breasts and pointed the long pink nipples toward the sky. She narrowed her eyes, no longer greenish, but now a dark aquamarine, and caught mine levelly.

“Are they still beautiful, Frank?” she asked in this strange new voice.

I nodded, dumbly, trying to figure out what she was driving at.

“You're wrong.” She smiled wanly, dropped her hands, and her plump breasts bobbed beautifully from their own momentum. “You haven't noticed, but they're beginning to droop. Not much, but how will they look in five years? Ten years? Nobody's ever seen them except you, Frank, but how much longer will you be interested? All I've ever asked you to do is quit cockfighting so we could get married. We've drifted along in a deadlock too long, Frank, and it's impossible for me to accept your way of life. I thought that as you got older, you would see how wrong it is, but now you seem to be entangled in a pattern. And cockfighting is wrong, morally wrong, legally wrong, and every other kind of wrong! You're a grown man now, Frank!”

I sloshed forward in the tiny pool, put my arms around her hips, warm from the sun, and buried my face in her lap.

“Yes, you big, dumb child,” she said softly, running her fingers through my damp hair, “but I can't meet you halfway on an issue like cockfighting. Give it up, please, give it up, and marry me. Can't you see that you're wrong, wrong, wrong!” She gripped my hair with both hands and tugged my head gently from side to side.

“I can't exist in postcards any longer, Frank.
‘Dear M.E., I'm in Sarasota. Won the derby 4-3. I love you. Will write from Ocala. F.!'
In a few more weeks, I'll be thirty years old. I want to be married and have children! I'm tired of people snickering behind my back at our engagement. Nobody believes it anymore. If you loved me only half as much as I love you, you'd give it up. Please, Frank, stay home, marry me—”

There was a catch in her voice, and I lifted my head to look at her face. She wasn't crying, far from it. She was trying to beat me down again with an emotional appeal to my “reason.” I had explained patiently to Mary Elizabeth, a dozen times or more, that cockfighting was not a cruel sport, that it was a legitimate, honorable business, and I had asked her to witness one fight, just one fight, so she could see for herself instead of listening to fools who didn't know what they were talking about. She had always refused, falling back on misinformation learned from reformers, the narrow-minded Methodist minister, and the shortsighted laws prohibiting the sport that were pushed through by a minority group of do-gooders. If she wouldn't see for herself, how could I persuade her?

“You're a brilliant man, Frank,” Mary Elizabeth continued earnestly. “You could make a success out of anything you went into in Mansfield. This farm is half mine, you know, and when we're married, it'll be half yours. If you don't want to farm with Wright, I've got enough money saved that you can open a business of some kind in town. I've saved almost everything I've earned. Wright doesn't let me spend a penny, and I've been teaching for six years. And I'll help you get your voice back. We'll work it out together, you and I, Frank. We can get a book on phonetics and you—”

As she constructed these impossible feminine castles I got restless. I pulled away from her, clambered up on the opposite bank and began to dress without waiting to get dry.

“What are you doing?” she said sharply.

As she could see for herself, I was putting my clothes on.

“You haven't listened to a single word, have you?”

I grinned, and buckled the straps on my jodhpur boots.

“If you leave now,” she shouted, “you needn't come back! We're through, d'you hear? Through! I won't be treated this way!”

When a woman starts to scream unreasonably, it's time to leave. I snatched a cold fried chicken leg out of the basket, draped my coat over my arm and started down the trail. Mary Elizabeth didn't call after me. Too mad, I reckoned.

Mary Elizabeth was stubborn. That was her problem. Anytime she truly wanted to get married, all she had to do was say so. But it had to be on my terms. I loved her, and she was a respectable woman with a good family background. I knew she would make a good wife, too, once she got over this foolishness of wanting me to give up cockfighting and settle down in some dull occupation in Mansfield. We had been over this ground too many times, and I had a new season of cockfighting to get through. Nothing would have pleased me more than to have Mary Elizabeth as a bride at my Ocala farm, preparing meals and keeping my clothes clean. And, until she became pregnant, what would keep her from teaching school in Ocala, if that was what she wanted to do? As soon as she came around to seeing things my way, and quit trying to tell me what I could and couldn't do, we'd be married quick enough. And she knew it.

I grinned to myself, and tossed the chicken bone in the general direction of an ant nest. Mary Elizabeth had a sore point on those postcards. I'd have to do better than that. When I got back to Ocala, I'd write her a nice, interesting letter, a long newsy one for a change.

When I crossed through Wright's yard to the state road, I looked about apprehensively to see if he had returned, but he hadn't come back from town. Every time Wright caught me alone, he attempted to goad me into a fight. For Mary Elizabeth's sake, I had always refused to fight him. It would have given me a good deal of pleasure to knock a little sense into his thick head, but I knew that as soon as we started fighting he would whip out his knife, and then I would have to kill him.