Cockfighter (6 page)

“This was supposed to be a third bedroom,” he explained, “and it's a lot larger than the other two bedrooms in the back. But Martha and I decided to each take a small bedroom apiece so our snoring wouldn't bother each other. And besides, I needed a large room like this as an office. A big man needs a big room.” He opened the door leading to the bathroom. “Here's the can, Frank. Take a shower if you want to. There's always hot water, and these towels are all clean in here. I'll get you some sheets.”

Ed left the room and I could hear him clumping down the hallway, yelling to ask his wife where she kept the clean sheets hidden.

The Middletons' ranch-style home was so modern in design and color that the old-fashioned furniture in the study was out of place. The walls were painted a bright warm blue, and there were matching floor-to-ceiling drapes over both windows. The floor was black-and-white pebbled terrazzo, and there the modernity stopped. The floor was covered with an oval-shaped hooked rag rug. There was an ugly, well-scratched, walnut rolltop desk against one wall, and there was an ancient horsehair-stuffed Victorian couch against the opposite wall. Beneath one window there was a scuffed cowhide easy chair, and a shiny black steamer trunk under the other window. A red-lacquered straight chair, with a circular cane seat, stood beside the desk. Three heavy wrought-iron smoking stands completed the furnishings.

I was attracted to the framed photographs on the walls. Each photo was framed in a cheap glass-covered black frame, the type sold in dime stores. Most of the glossy photos were of gamecocks, but there were several photos of Ed Middleton and his cronies. An old cover page of the
Southern Cockfighter,
with a four-color drawing of Ed Middleton's famous cock Freddy, held the place of honor above the desk. Freddy had won nineteen fights and had died in his coop ten years before. Anywhere chicken talk is held, Freddy's name comes up sooner or later.

Mr. Middleton reentered the room, carrying sheets, a blanket and a pillow under his right arm, and a portable television set in his left hand. He tossed the bedcovers on the couch, placed the portable set on the seat of the red straight-backed chair, and plugged the cord into the wall socket.

“I told Martha you wouldn't need a blanket, but you know how women are.”

I nodded. I knew how women were. I began to make up the lumpy couch with the sheets.

“To give you something to do, I brought in the TV. It isn't much good but you can get Orlando, anyway. I'd stay up and keep you company for a while, but I'm pretty tired. This has been a long day for an old man,”

I soon had the couch made up, but Mr. Middleton lingered in the room. He studied a framed photograph of a cock on the wall, and beckoned to me as I started to sit down.

“Come here, Frank. Take a look at this cock. It's a phenomenon in breeding and you'll never see another like it. A bird called Bright Boy, one of the most courageous birds I ever owned. Yet it was bred from a father and a daughter. By all rules, a cock bred that way usually runs every time, but this beauty never did. He was killed in his second fight in a drag pitting. Sorry now I didn't keep him for a brood cock to see what would have happened. I suppose there are similar cases, but this is the only one I really know is true. Did you ever hear of a real fighter bred of father and daughter?”

I shook my head. If true, and I doubted Ed's story, this was an unusual case. When it comes to cocks of the same blood, those bred from mother and son have the biggest heart for fighting to the death. Somebody had probably switched an egg on old Ed.

“Every time a man thinks he's got the answers on cock-breeding, something like this happens to teach him something new. I'm going to be pretty well lost without my chickens, Frank, but I've got a lot of stuff stored away in that trunk, old game-strain records and so on. Maybe I could write a useful book on breeding.” He shook his head sadly. “I don't know. I suppose I'll find something to do with my time.”

To get rid of him, I clapped him on the shoulder, sat down, and unbuckled my jodhpur boots.

I was growing weary of always being on the receiving end of personal confidences and long sad stories. The man who is unable to talk back is at the mercy of these people. He is like an inexperienced priest who listens tolerantly to the first simple confessions of impure thoughts, and then listens with increasing horror as the sins mount, one outdoing the other until he is shocked into dumbness. And, of course, the sinner takes advantage of a man's credulousness, loading ever greater sins upon him to see how far he can really go now that he has found a trapped listener who is unable to stop him. My ears had been battered by the outpourings of troubles, tribulations, aspirations, and the affairs of broken hearts for two years and seven months. Only by being rude enough to leave the scene had I evaded some of my confessors.

But Ed Middleton was wise enough to take the hint.

“Good night, Frank,” he said finally, “I'll see you in the morning,” and the door closed behind him.

After taking a needed shower I switched on the little television set and sat on the couch to watch the gray, shimmering images. There was a lot of snow, and jagged bars of black appeared much too often. In less than five minutes I was forced to turn it off. I'm not overly fond of television anyway. Traveling around so much I have never formed the habit of watching it. And I've never owned a set.

I was impressed by the pleasant room of Ed Middleton's. It was a man's room, and if he really wanted to write a book on cock-breeding, it was certainly quiet enough. I doubted, however, that he would ever write one. What Ed Middleton did with his remaining years was no concern of mine, and yet I found myself worried about him. He had been fighting game fowl and refereeing pit matches for thirty-odd years. Without any birds to fool around with, what could he possibly do with his time? I felt sorry for the old man.

He had a nice home, his wife was a wonderful woman, and the Citrus Syndicate took care of his orange groves. He had turned over the operation of his groves to the Central Citrus Syndicate some years back. In return, they paid him a good percentage on the crop each year, and now he didn't have to do anything with his trees except to watch them grow. By giving up cockfighting he was giving up his entire existence, and, like most elderly men who retire, he probably won't live very long—with nothing to do. Martha was wrong, dead wrong, in forcing Ed to give up his game chickens.

Mary Elizabeth's opposition to the sport was the major reason we had never gotten married. Why can't the American woman accept a man for what he is instead of trying to make him over into the idealized image of her father or someone else?

There was no use worrying about Ed Middleton. I had problems of my own that were more pressing. But with a little pushing from me, my problems would somehow take care of themselves. All I knew was that I had to do what I knew best how to do. Nothing else mattered.

I switched off the light and, despite the lumpiness of the beat-up old couch, fell asleep within minutes.

IT SEEMED AS IF I
had only been asleep for about five minutes when the lights were switched on and Ed Middleton yelled at me to get up.

“Are you going to sleep all day?” he shouted gruffly. “I've been up for more than an hour already. Come on out to the kitchen when you get dressed. I've got a pot of coffee on.”

Reluctantly, I sat up, kicked off the sheet, and swung my feet to the floor. The door banged shut and I looked at my wristwatch. Five thirty. It was pretty late to be sleeping. No wonder Ed had hollered at me. I stumbled into the bathroom. After a quick shave I dug some clean white socks out of my suitcase, and put on the same clothes I had worn the day before. I joined Ed in the kitchen, and sat at the breakfast nook.

“We can eat breakfast later, Frank,” he said, pouring two cups of coffee. “Coffee'll hold us for a while. I want to show you something first.”

I drank the coffee black, and it was thick enough to slice with my knife.

“You want a glass of orange juice?”

I held up a hand to show that coffee was enough for now.

Ed refilled my cup, set the pot back on the stove, and paced up and down on the shiny terrazzo floor. He wore an old pair of blue bib overalls and an expensive, embroidered short-sleeved sport shirt. The bottoms of the overalls were tucked into a pair of ten-inch, well-oiled engineer boots. His great paunch stretched the middle of his overalls tight, but the bib on his chest flapped loosely as he walked.

The second cup of coffee seemed hotter than the first, and I was forced to sip it slowly. Ed snapped his fingers impatiently, pushed open the back door, and said over his shoulder, “Come on Frank. We can have breakfast later, like I told you already.”

I gulped down the remainder of the coffee and followed him outside to the patio. The sun was just rising, and the upper rim could be seen through the trees. The tops of the orange trees looked as if they had been painted on. A mist rose from the tiny lake like steam rising from a pot of water just before it begins to boil. Ed Middleton sat down in the center of the little skiff tied to the concrete pier, and fitted the oars into the locks. I sat forward in the prow.

“Untie the line, Frank, and let's cast off.”

Mr. Middleton rowed across the lake—forty yards of it. It would have been less trouble to take the path that circled the pond, but if he wanted to use the skiff, it didn't make any difference to me.

When we reached the other side of the pond, I jumped out, held the skiff steady for Mr. Middleton, and then both of us pulled the boat onto dry land. There was a narrow path through the grove, and I trailed the old man for about five hundred yards until we reached his chicken walks. There was a flat, well-hidden clearing in the grove, and about a dozen coop walks that were eight feet tall, about ten feet wide by thirty feet in length, with the tops and sides covered with chicken wire. The baseboards were two feet high, and Painted with old motor oil to keep down the mite population.

Seeing the empty walks reminded me of my own farm in Ocala, although I had a better setup for coop-walked birds than Ed Middleton. At one time, many years before, long before he had converted his land to orange trees, he had had the ideal setup for a country-walked rooster. A pond, gently rolling terrain, and enough trees for the chickens to choose their own limbs for roosting. We walked down the row of walks to the end coop. As the rooster crowed, Ed turned around with a proud expression and pointed to the cock.

If there is anything more beautiful than the sight of a purebred gamecock in the light of early morning I do not know what it is. The fighting cock of Ed's was the most brilliantly colored chicken I had ever seen, and I've seen hundreds upon hundreds of chickens.

Middleton had devoted sixteen years and countless generations of game fowl to developing the famous Middleton Gray, and there were traces of the Gray in the cock's shawl and broad, flat chest. But the cock was a hybrid of some kind that I couldn't place or recognize. He walked proudly to the fence and tossed his head back and crowed, beating the tips of his long wings together. The tips of his wings were edged with vermillion. The crow of a fighting cock is strong and deep and makes the morning sounds of a common dunghill barnyard rooster sound puny in comparison.

The same flaming color that tipped his wings was repeated in his head feathers and thighs, but his remaining feathers, including the sweep of his high curving tail, were a luminous peacock blue. Ed was planning—or had planned—to keep him for a brood cock, because his comb and wattles hadn't been clipped for fighting. His lemon beak was strong, short and evenly met. His feet and legs were as orange and bright as a freshly painted bridge.

The floor of the cock's private walk was thickly covered with a mixture of finely ground oyster shells and well-grated charcoal, essential ingredients for a fighter's diet. The oyster hells were for lime content, and the charcoal for digestion, but against this salt-and-pepper background, the cock's colorful plumage was emphasized.

Unfortunately, coloring is not the essential factor for a winning gamecock. Good blood
first
, know-how in conditioning, and a good farm walk are the three essentials a pit bird needs to win. I knew that thirty years of cock-breeding knowledge had found its way into that cock. I could see it in every feather, and his good blood was assured by the pleased smile on Ed Middleton's thin lips.

“Except for a couple of battered Grays and an old Middleton hen I've kind of kept around for a pet, this is the only cock I've got left. I've never pitted him, and he's overdue, but I was afraid to lose him. Not really, Frank. I know damned well he can outhit any other cock in the South!”

I agreed with him, at least in theory. I spread my arms, grinned, and shook my head with admiration. Ed nodded sagely with self-satisfaction, and I didn't blame him. A flush slowly enveloped his features until his entire face was as red as his bulbous nose.

“He's got a pretty damned fancy handle, Frank,” Ed said. “I call him Icarus. You probably remember the old legend from school. There was a guy named Daedalus, who had a son named Icarus. Anyway, these two—Greeks they were—got tossed into jail, and Daedalus made a pair of wings out of wax for his boy to escape. This kid, Icarus, put on the wings and flew so damned high he reached the sun and the wings melted on him. He fell to the ground and was killed. No man has ever flown so high before or since but, anyway, that's the handle I hung on the chicken. Icarus.”

Ed Middleton cracked his knuckles and clomped away from the walk and entered the feed shack. I gripped the chicken wire with my fingers and turned my attention to Icarus. For a rugged character like Ed Middleton, the highbrow name and the story that went with it were fairly romantic, I thought. Most cockers who fight a lot of cocks don't get around to naming them in the first place. A metal leg band with the cock's weight and owner number usually suffices for identification. Of course, a favorite brood cock, or a bird that has won several battles, is frequently named. But I went along with Ed all the way. As far as looks were concerned the fancy name fitted the chicken to a T. However, if I had owned the bird, I would have called him Icky and kept the private name to myself.