Cockfighter (26 page)

No. Seven.
Both showed 5:12 cocks. Burke an O'Neal Red, Mansfield a low-stationed Mellhorn Black. Jack was rattled in the 3
^rd
and down on his score in the 14
^th
. The Mellhorn Black who spiked the steel with unerring accuracy in every pitting won for Frank in the 20
^th
.

No. Eight.
Both showed 5:13 cocks. Burke a Butcher Boy and Frank an Allen Roundhead. The steel was tossed from every angle in the 1
^st
and 2
^nd
pittings as sudden squalls hit Middle Florida. The Butcher Boy weakened in the 3
^rd
but grew stronger in the 7
^th
and hurt the Roundhead in the next two pittings. In the 9
^th
the Roundhead slowed and the Butcher Boy put him out of the running. Frank carried him out after the 10
^th
.

No. Nine.
Both showed 5:14 cocks. Burke a battle-wise Whitehackle, Mansfield a fine-colored Claret. Frank was smiling all over the place up to the 8
^th
pitting when the Whitehackle got down to business and changed his smile to a frown. His Claret was counted out in the 12
^th
.

No. Ten.
Both showed six-pounders. Mansfield a side-stepping Mellhorn Black that skipped constantly to the right, and Burke a black-and-white Spangle. The Black broke the Spangle's leg in the 3
^rd
and Burke carried his cock out. Frank had a real Ace here, and his way of fighting bewildered the Spangle. This was the sidestepper's fourth win this season.

No. Eleven.
Two more six-pound cocks, Burke with an Ace Kansas Cutter, and Mansfield with a three-year-old Alabama-walked Claret. The Kansas chicken hung every time he got close to the Claret, and Frank had to take him out in the 9
^th
.

No. Twelve.
Burke showed a 6:02 Sawyers Roundhead and Mansfield gave him two ounces with the Claret he showed. These cocks came out with plenty of gas, and buckled hard for the first five pittings. An even match, one in and then the other. Mansfield was cut down on his score in the 13
^th
. A few fast shuffles by the Sawyers Roundhead and the blood-sodden Claret was carried out helpless.

The score was tied six to six!

Odd fight. Shakes. No weights were given, of course. Burke looked determined to win the odd fight when he showed an enormous Shawlneck. My educated guess gave the Shawlneck at least two ounces over Mansfield's oversized Roundhead. But Jack needed more than weight. In Frank's hands the Roundhead showed a furious style of fighting that befuddled the heavier bird. Burke was down in the 18
^th
with a broken leg and Frank won in the 23
^rd
.

But there was an even better fight to come!

As Jack Burke, great sportsman that he is, was counting out the greenbacks into Frank's eager hand, Mrs. Dody Burke, Jack's beauteous young bride, decided to put on a hack of her own! Weighing approximately 125 pounds, and armed with red shoes (with three-inch heels), she flew across the pit and gaffed silent Frank in the shins. She also tried a right-cross to Frank's jaw with a free-swinging red leather purse, but was blocked by her handler, Jack Burke, and carried out of the pit screaming. A fine ending to a fine main! We wonder what kind of conditioning Mr. Burke is giving to his new bride?

“WHEN THE PRESSURE'S ON
,
a promoter's got to do the best he can,” Fred Reed said petulantly for the fourth time during his sales talk. He ought to make a recording, I thought to myself.

Fred Reed had done the best he could all right, but I didn't like the setup, not any part of it. Including Mr. Reed, there were nine of us sitting around in the plush pink-and-white bridal suite of the new Southerner Hotel in Chattanooga. Johnny Norris, Roy Whipple, Omar and myself were all Southern Conference regulars, but the other entries were not, although they had paid their fees for the Chattanooga derby.

Except for promoter Fred Reed, who wore a suit and necktie, the rest of us were either in sports clothes or blue jeans, and we looked as out of place in the mid-Victorian décor of the bridal suite as a honeymoon couple would have looked bedded down in a cockpit. My picturesque partner, with his wild beard and bib overalls, sat uneasily on a fragile gilded chair by the door to the bathroom. I was sharing a blue velvet love seat with Old Man Whipple, a gray-stubbled cockfighter from North Carolina whose odor would have been improved by a couple quick runs through a sheep-dip.

Mr. Reed wiped his sweaty brow with a white linen handkerchief and continued: “Boys, when the S.P.C.A. really puts their foot down, the sheriff has to go along with ‘em, that's all there is to it!

“Elections are coming up, and I just couldn't pay nobody off. But I did get to the city officials and we can stage the derby right here in this suite without interference. I know you men have all fought cocks in hotel rooms before, but you've never had a better one than this! Just take a look at this wonderful floor.” Mr. Reed bent down with a broad smile on his face and rubbed the blue nylon carpet with his fingers. “Why, a carpet like this makes a perfect pit flooring for chickens! And don't worry about damages. The manager has been tipped plenty, and I promised him I'd pay any cleaning charges on the carpets. You've all got reserved rooms on the floor, and we've got the exclusive use of the service elevator to bring the cocks straight up from the basement garage.

“Frankly, boys, I think the Chattanooga derby is better off here than it is at my pit outside of town. There won't be as many spectators because of the space limitations, but I've invited some big money men, and you'll be able to place bets as high as you want to on your birds.”

Old Roy Whipple, sitting beside me on the love seat, spat a stream of black tobacco juice onto the nylon carpet and then cleared his throat. “Where're we goin' to put the dead chickens, Mr. Reed?”

“That's an excellent question, Mr. Whipple,” Reed replied pompously. “I'm glad you asked it. The dead cocks will be stacked in the bathtub. Are there any other questions?”

“Yes, sir. I have one,” Johnny Norris said politely. “The action will be slowed down considerably, won't it, if we have to bring the cocks up from the basement before every fight? It'll take forever to finish the derby. And what do we use for a drag pit?”

“That's another good question, Mr. Norris,” Reed replied, with the deference in his voice that Johnny Norris usually received. “But these matters have all been taken into account. Except for the traveling pit, the rest of the furniture in here will be removed, and folding chairs will be set up. You'll heel the cocks in the bedroom, and the weights'll be announced far enough in advance so that there'll always be another pair waiting to pit. There's another connecting door through the bedroom to the next suite—the V.I.P. suite, the hotel calls it—and the living room of the next suite'll be used as a drag pit. With two referees, I can assure you, gentlemen, that the fighting will be as fast here as anywhere else. Are there any more questions, anything at all?”

There were no more questions.

“All right then, gentlemen. The fighting starts at ten a.m. tomorrow morning. Mimeographed schedules will be run off tonight and will be slipped under the doors to your rooms. If you'll all give me a list of your weights, I'll get started on the matching right away. By the way, gentlemen, if you don't want to dress up for dinner, you can have your meals served in your rooms. Otherwise, the hotel's got a rule about wearing coats and ties in the dining room. Your meals have been paid for, too, including tips.”

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
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 book'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, Omar said: “Fred was mighty unhappy about our withdrawal, Frank. We were the only entry to pull out. He tried his damnedest to talk me out of it. There's going to be a bar with free drinks and sandwiches all day, he said, which only proves that we're doing the right thing. By one tomorrow afternoon that suite'll be so full of smoke and drunks you won't be able to see the chickens.”

Although I couldn't have agreed with Omar more, I hated to leave. There was something exciting about fighting cocks in a hotel and the prospect of winning large sums of money. It's almost impossible to resist free drinks, and there would be some beautiful women around to spend some money on. And when it comes to good-looking women, Chattanooga has got prettier girls than Dallas, Texas.

I had written to Dirty Jacques Bonin in Biloxi and arranged a deal to put Omar and me and our gamecocks up at his game farm. When he came to fight his chickens at the Ocala derby in February, we would fix him up with like facilities either at my place or Omar's.

We shook hands and parted in the basement garage of the hotel. Omar headed for Biloxi in the pickup with twenty-two gamecocks, and I drove to Cook's Hollow with Icky and the derby-conditioned birds in the station wagon.

In the heat of the fighting the next day at Vern Packard's pit, I realized how much I had depended upon Omar to look after things during the season so far. If Vern hadn't done a good portion of my talking for me, I would have had a rough time getting matches. But thanks to Vern's efforts, I managed to fight five of my eight cocks, and I won every hack. By picking the winning derby entry and laying even money with a local gambler, I won four hundred dollars. My five hack wins added two hundred and fifty dollars more to my roll, and I was well satisfied with the outcome of the side trip to Cook's Hollow. This was a small sum compared to what we might have won at Chattanooga, but it was enormous compared to winning nothing at all.

By four that afternoon the fighting was over, and I hadn't been able to get a match for Icky. Icky scaled now at a steady 4:02 and was too light for derby fighting in the Southern Conference. All of the S.C. derby weights began at 5:00, and the only way I could fight Icky was in hack battles. In New York and Pennsylvania, where the use of short heels is preferred and smaller gamecocks are favored, I could have had all the fights I wanted. So far, Icky had only had two fights. Before he met Jack Burke's Little David at Milledgeville, I wanted him to win at least three more. He would need all of the pit experience he could get to win over Burke's Ace.

The Cook's Hollow Game Club was similar to a hundred other small southern cockpits. The pit was on Vern Packard's rocky farm, adjacent to his barn, and covered with a corrugated iron roof. There were three-tier bleachers on three sides, and the fourth side was the barn wall. A double door in the barrier provided an entranceway inside, and two-by-two coops were nailed to the interior walls of the barn to serve as cockhouses for visitors.