Cockfighter (21 page)

Omar had developed a firm, gruff manner with these farmers who loaned their farms for walks. Despite his strong New York accent, which rural southerners distrust instinctively, he had won them over completely during four years of contact. He didn't merely leave a stag and forget about it until the following season. He wrote letters periodically during the year, asking how his rooster was getting along, enclosing a stamped, self-addressed postcard to make sure he would get a reply. The farmers responded cheerfully to Omar's active interest, and, if nothing else, they were awed by his impressive jet-black beard.

Most farmers, once they accept the idea of having a gamecock instead of a dunghill ruling their hens, are well pleased by the setup. Why shouldn't they be? The eggs they obtain are bigger and better-tasting, the offspring of a gamecock have more meat, and the small payment of ten dollars a year is money from an unexpected source. And any farmer who keeps a few hens has to have a rooster. Why not have a game rooster?

Every time we picked up another country-walked rooster my heart swelled with pleasure. Their feathers were tight and their yellow eyes were bright and alert. Their exercised bodies were firm to the touch, and their dubbed combs usually had the dark red color of health. Out of the twenty-eight cocks Omar had on country walks, we picked up twenty-one. The other seven, in my considered opinion, needed another full year of exercise in the country.

I was happy to get back to Ocala and anxious to get to work. The little town of Ocala has always been my favorite Florida city, combining, as it does, the best aspects of Georgia and the worst side of Florida. A small city of about twenty thousand permanent residents and some one hundred miles below the Georgia state line, Ocala is where the state of Florida really begins.

As a driver enters town on the wide island-divided highway, the first sight that hits his eyes is the banner above the road: OCALA—BIRTHPLACE OF NEEDLES! This famous racehorse will be remembered by the Ocala townspeople forever.

To his left, six miles away, is Silver Springs, one of the most publicized tourist attractions in the world. On either side of the highway there are weird attractions, displays and souvenir shops. Commercial Florida also begins at Ocala. But the town itself is like a small Georgia town. Decent, respectable and God-fearing. The townspeople are good southerners—they provide their services to the rural residents and to themselves, and take only from the vacationing tourists with cameras dangling from their rubber necks.

Two miles outside the city limits in gently swelling country is my small leased farm of twenty-three acres, a small house to live in, an outhouse and outside shower, a well-constructed concrete brick cockhouse and some thirty-odd coop walks. My shack, as I called it, was unpainted but comfortable. The man who built it had started with concrete bricks, but ran short before the walls had reached shoulder height. The remainder of the house had been completed with rough, unfinished pine, and roofed over with two welded sheets of corrugated iron. In a downpour, the heavy pounding of raindrops on the corrugated iron had often driven me out of the shack.

Omar dropped me off first and then drove to his own farm. He had much better facilities to take care of the cocks than I had, and, upon his suggestion, I had agreed to alternate between our farms for conditioning purposes.

Buford ran out of the cockhouse as I entered the yard, a big white smile shining in the middle of his ebony face.

“Mr. Frank,” he said happily, taking my bag, “I sure is happy to see you! My curiosity's been drivin' me near crazy for two days. Just wait till you see them big packages I put in the house!”

I entered the shack, followed closely by Buford, and the first thing I did was reach behind the dresser for my pint of gin. As I had suspected, the bottle contained less than two ounces, and it had been almost half full when Omar had picked me up three days before. I looked sternly at Buford, but he was pointing innocently to the two large cardboard boxes on my bed.

“I don't know what they is, Mr. Frank,” he said quickly.

“The man from the express brought ‘em out day before yesterday, and I signed your name. What do you reckon's in there?”

I finished the gin, and handed the empty to Buford. Buford had had his share while I was gone—the man had an unerring instinct for discovering where I hid my bottle. He thought that finding my bottle was some kind of a game.

I took out my knife and slit open the two cardboard boxes. One box contained a speaker, and the long box held an electric guitar. But
what
a guitar! The instrument was fashioned out of some kind of light metal, painted a bright lemon yellow and trimmed in Chinese red. On the box, above the strings, there were two sets of initials, encircled by an outline of a heart.

If I thought I had made the grand gesture when I sent Bernice a dozen yellow roses, she had certainly topped me. The electric guitar and its matching yellow amplifying speaker must have set her back four or five hundred dollars. I searched through the excelsior in both cartons for a note of some kind, but there wasn't even a receipt for the instrument. The initials inside the heart contained her message.

Buford looked admiringly at the guitar, shaking his head with a feigned amazement. As soon as I looked at him he laughed the professional laugh of the American Negro.

“Whooee!” he exploded with false amusement. “You got yourself a guitar now for sure, Mr. Frank!”

I pointed to the door. Out in the yard I gave Buford a ten-dollar bill in payment for looking after the place for three days. Buford had his own farm, a wife and four children, but he spent more time with me than he did with his family. When I happened to think about it, I'd slip him a five or a ten, but I didn't keep him on a regular salary because I didn't need him around in the first place. He knew as much about the raising and handling of gamecocks as any Negro in the United States, if not more. Unfortunately, because of his color, he was barred from almost every white cockpit in the South. He would have been an invaluable assistant for me on my trips to circuit cockpits, but I couldn't take him along. However, he helped me out around the place, handled opposing cocks in my own training pit and made himself fairly useful during conditioning periods. He loved gamecocks. That much I knew about him. And I believe he would have sacrificed an arm or a leg for the opportunity to fight them. Because I knew this much about the man, I was well aware that his rich and easy laughter was insincere.

What in the hell did Buford have to laugh about?

“I fixed up all them sun coops the way you showed me, Mr. Frank,” Buford said. “And I put some new slats in the cockhouse stalls. But they ain't much else to do, so I won't be back around till Saturday.”

I nodded, and Buford climbed into his car.

“Whooee!” he laughed through his nose. “You got you a git-fiddle now, sure enough! Will you play some for me come Saturday?”

Again I nodded. As Buford made a U-turn onto the gravel road toward the highway, I entered the shack.

The wonderful and unexpected gift had made my heart sing with delight, although I had controlled my inner excitement from Buford. As soon as he was gone I connected shoulder dipped a quarter of an inch lower than her left, the round, three-eyed shape of her button navel, and every golden pubic hair.

I loved her and I had always loved her and I always would love her, and the dark guilty shadows erased her pink-and-white body from my mind. No man had ever treated a woman any shabbier than I had Mary Elizabeth!

Suppose, I thought blackly, she just says the hell with you, Frank Mansfield, and marries a nice stay-at-home Georgia boy… a bloated bastard like Ducky Winters, for instance, the manager of the Purina Feed Store? Why not? He's single and over thirty. What if his bald head does look like a freshly washed peach and the roll of fat around his waistline resembles a rubber inner tube half filled with water? He's got a good job, and he's a member of the Board of Stewards of the Methodist church… well, isn't he? His mother can't live forever, and he did pinch Mary Elizabeth on the ass at the box social that time… remember? You wanted to take him outside, but Mary Elizabeth wouldn't let you.

How many good prospects does she have? Ducky Winters, no matter what you may think, is one of the
better
prospects. Suppose she marries one of those red-necked woolhat cronies of her brother's? Wright doesn't want her to get married, but he would approve of some farmer who would keep her close to her home, just so he would be assured of seeing her every day. What if she married Virgil Dietch, whose farm is only three miles down the road? Virgil's only forty, a widower with two half-grown boys, and he'd be damned happy to marry a woman like Mary Elizabeth. With his growling German accent—despite three generations in Georgia—and his lower lip packed chock-full of Copenhagen snuff, she wouldn't be the various electrical cords, following the directions in the illustrated instruction booklet. I plugged the cord into the wall outlet and tuned the strings. The full tones, amplified by the speaker set at full volume, reverberated in the small room and added a new dimension to my playing. After experimenting with several chords, banding them hard and listening to them echo metallically against the iron ceiling, I tried a song.

Halfway through the song I stopped playing and placed the guitar gently on the floor. Unconsciously, I had played “Georgia Girl” first. The rich amplified tones brought suppressed visions of Mary Elizabeth flooding into my mind, and I dropped the plastic pick.

In the sharp silence, following so closely on the sound of the echoing song, I pictured Mary Elizabeth in my mind, still in the same position where I had left her at The Place. She sat quietly, feet below the surface of the pool, and with dancing dappled sunlight reflecting on her pale nude body. Her blue-green eyes looked at me reproachfully, and her ordinarily full lips were set in a tight grim line.

To make her disappear I shook my head.

This was a recurrent vision of Mary Elizabeth. Whenever I happened to think of the woman, a guilty, sinking feeling accompanied the thought. She was always nude, always at The Place. I never thought of her as fully clothed—that was a Mary Elizabeth I didn't want to think about—the spinsterish, school-teacherish, Methodist kind, with a reproving expression on her face. As a rule, when I hadn't seen Mary Elizabeth for several months, her features became indistinct, except for her hurt blue? green? eyes. But her body was always as clear in my mind as a Kodachrome color print. I remembered every anatomical detail, the way her right able to understand half of what he said, but Wright liked Virgil and ran around with him. And Wright wouldn't object to a marriage between them.

For more than an hour I tortured myself, mulling over the list of eligible suitors in the county Mary Elizabeth could marry if she wanted to spite me. There weren't many left. Most of the men in rural Georgia get married young, and divorces are rare. The remaining eligibles were a sorry lot, especially when I considered the widowers who had worked their wives into an early grave.

It was exquisite torture to consider these ignorant woolhatters who shaved only on Saturday, who wore a single suit of long johns from October 15
^th
to May 15
^th
, and who didn't take a bath until the Fourth of July. And yet, as far as husbands were concerned, every one of these men would make a better husband than I would. As a woman, she was entitled to a home and children and a husband who stayed with her at all times.

I had provided Mary Elizabeth with eight years of nothing. A quickly scrawled line on the back of a picture postcard, and on one of my rare, unscheduled visits, a quick jump in a woodland glen. To make matters worse, I hadn't even talked to her on my last two visits. She had consistently resisted every explanation I had tried to give her concerning my way of life and had never consented to share it with me. Perhaps I could write her a letter, a really
good
letter this time, a letter that would make her think?

This year was going to be my year. I could sense it, and my new partnership with Omar was the turning point in my run of ill fortune. I knew this. My prospects had been as good before, but they had never been any better. I couldn't continue through life silent and alone, and I couldn't keep Mary Elizabeth dangling on a thread—the thread would break, and both of us would be lost. If there was to be a break, it would have to be now—Her way or My way—and
she
could make the choice!

I sat down at the table to write Mary Elizabeth a letter.

Dearest Darling,

I love you! How inadequate are written words to tell you of my feelings! To be with you and yet to be unable to speak, to tell you again and again that I love you is unbearable. To leave without saying good-bye, as I did, hurt me more than you can ever know. And yet, I had to leave silently, like a thief in the night. If I had written you a note with a bare “Good-bye,” you would have rightfully demanded an explanation I couldn't give because I couldn't speak! But an explanation is due, my Love, and on the blankness of this page I shall attempt the impossible. Never, never doubt my love!