Cockfighter (9 page)

The signature was indecipherable, but vice-president was typed beneath the inked scribble. I put the letter down on the desk.

“Do you realize what that letter means, Frank?” Doc said excitedly. “They're interested, definitely interested! They couldn't find a single fault and do you know why? Licarbo doesn't have any, that's why! I've dealt with companies like that before. They think I'll sell out for little or nothing, but if they want Licarbo, and you can read between the lines of the letter that they're dying to get it, it'll cost them plenty!”

Doc sat back in his big chair, steepled his fingers together, and attempted to look shrewd by narrowing his eyes. His narrowed eyes only made him look sleepy, however.

“Not only do I want a flat ten thousand for my rights, Frank, I'm also holding out for a percentage on every package sold. Now what do you think of that?”

I admired Doc's spirit, but, evidently, he refused to recognize a politely worded turndown when he saw it. I shrugged my shoulders noncommittally.

“By God, I forgot!” Doc snapped his fingers. “You haven't tried Licarbo yet, have you?”

I shook my head. Doc opened the top right drawer of his desk and removed three flat packets approximately the size and shape of restaurant-size sugar packets. The name Licarbo was printed in red ink on each packet, including directions to take as needed, with or without water, following overindulgence, overeating or for mild stomach distress.

“Go ahead, Frank, open one up and taste it. There isn't a better relief for indigestion in the world than Licarbo! Take it with a glass of water and you'll belch every time. What more does a man want than a big healthy belch when his belly hurts him? Right? In the South we like our medicines in powder and liquid form. No self-respecting Southerner will take a fancy capsule for belly pains, no matter how many colors its got.”

I ripped open a packet and spilled some of the mixture into my hand. Licarbo resembled gunpowder, or a mixture of salt and black pepper, heavy on the pepper. I put my tongue to the mixture. It tasted like licorice, not an unpleasant taste at all.

“Mix it in with your coffee, Frank. Licarbo will dissolve almost instantly.”

I shuddered at this suggestion, shook my head and smiled.

“Tastes good, don't it?” Doc beamed proudly, folding his short arms across his chest. “All it is, Frank, is a mixture of licorice root, bicarbonate soda, a few secret ingredients and some artificial coloring. But the formula will make me rich, and you too, Frank. It takes time, however, to invent and develop a new product and get it out to the waiting market. The New York company isn't my only prospect, not by any means. I've got feelers out all over the nation. This is the
big
one, Frank, the one I've been working up to through thirty years in practical pharmacy. I've invented other products and sold them too, but this time I'm holding out to the last breath. Why, if I only had the capital I could manufacture Licarbo myself and literally make a fortune. A fortune!”

Doc turned in his chair, sighed deeply, and looked out the window at the rusty wall of the theater.

“People just don't have faith no more, Frank. People today don't recognize a commercial drug when they see and taste it, damn them all, anyway! But this product has got to go over, it
has
to!” Doc dropped the level of his voice, and said softly, as if to convince himself, “It's only a matter of time, Frank. Only a matter of time…”

I slipped the two unopened packets of Licarbo into my jacket pocket. At least I had something to show for my eight-hundred-dollar investment. Doc swiveled his chair and faced me with a bright smile.

“I made this first batch up myself, Frank, and had the sample packages printed up here in town. It costs a lot of money to get started, but you've got to admit the product is good, don't you?”

I nodded, pursing my lips. As far as I was concerned, Licarbo was as good as any one of a hundred similar products on the market. Plain old bicarbonate soda will make you belch if a belch is required, and that was Doc's main ingredient.

“You'd like to have your eight hundred dollars back just the same. Am I right?” Doc said hesitantly.

I spread my hands, palms up, and nodded.

“Well, I just don't have it. But you'll get it back one of these days soon, every damned dime, and with plenty of interest. To be honest, I'm just hanging on these days. Don't even have a phone anymore in the office, as you can see. I've got a part-time pharmacist's job at night in a drugstore near my rooming house, and every cent I make goes into my office rent and promotion of Licarbo, and I'm barely getting by on what's left. I've dropped everything else to concentrate on Licarbo, but when it hits big, and it's going to, it'll be big, really big!”

Old Doc Riordan was another man like myself, riding along on an inborn, overinflated self-confidence and a wide outward smile. Deep inside, I knew he was worried sick about being unable to write me a check for my money. Well, I could relieve him from that worry in a hurry. Whether his product ever went over big or not was no concern of mine. I wasn't about to ride another man's dream; I had a big dream of my own. It was time to get the hell off Doc's back.

There was a writing tablet on his desk. I reached for it, took my ballpoint lead pencil out of my coat pocket and wrote on the pad:

After signing my name with a flourish, I smiled, and handed Doc the tablet. He read the note and frowned.

“Don't you have any faith in Licarbo, Frank?”

I looked at him expressionlessly and nodded slowly.

“Then why are you pulling out?”

I got to my feet, leaned over the desk and underlined “ten-year supply” on the note I had written.

A knowing smile widened Doc's tiny mouth, and he nodded sagely.

“You're a mighty shrewd businessman, Frank. Why, if you ever expand your farms you'll double your eight hundred dollars in five years easily! But damn your eyes, anyway!” he laughed gleefully. “I'm just going to take you up on this proposition! Whether Licarbo hits it big or not, I'll either have my own lab or work in a pharmacy someplace where I can get wholesale prices on drugs. So on a deal like this, neither of us can lose!”

We shook hands, and I turned to go. Doc stopped me at the door by putting his hand on my arm. “Just a minute, Frank. As soon as I can afford it, I'm moving to a better office. And, of course, when I get enough capital I'm going to build my own laboratories. But meanwhile, here's the address of the drugstore where I work.” He handed me a card and I slipped it into my wallet. “I'm on duty there every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night from six to midnight. And almost every Wednesday from noon till midnight. I relieve the owner, you see. So when you need anything, drop me a line there, or come by and see me yourself.”

I opened the door, and returned my wallet to my hip pocket.

“You going to put an entry in the Orlando tourney, Frank?”

I shook my head and pointed north.

“Southern Conference then?”

I nodded.

“Well, I'll probably see you in Milledgeville, then. I haven't missed an S.C.T. in ten years and I don't intend to now. And when you see any of the boys on the road, say hello for me, and tell them I still send out a few things when they write.”

I winked, clapped him on the shoulder, and we shook hands again. I started down the hallway toward the stairwell and Doc watched me all the way. When I reached the stairs, he called good-bye to me again. I waved an arm and descended the stairs. At the drugstore on the corner I had a cup of coffee at the counter and then returned to my room at the Jeff Davis Hotel. Fortunately, I had kept my morning newspaper.

I turned to the classified ads and looked under the Help Wanted, Male section to see what I could do about getting a job.

IT IS A FUNNY THING.
A man can make a promise to his God, break it five minutes later and never think anything about it. With an idle shrug of his shoulders, a man can also break solemn promises to his mother, wife, or sweetheart, and, except for a slight, momentary twinge of conscience, he still won't be bothered very much. But if a man ever breaks a promise he has made to himself he disintegrates. His entire personality and character crumble into tiny pieces, and he is never the same man again.

I remember very well a sergeant I knew in the Army. Before a group of five men he swore off smoking forever. An hour later he sheepishly lit a cigarette and broke his vow to the five of us and himself. He was never quite the same man again, not to me, and not to himself.

My vow of silence was much harder to maintain than a vow to quit smoking. It was a definite handicap in everything I did. I read through the want ads three times, studying them carefully, and there wasn't a single thing I could find to do. A man who can't, or won't, talk is in a difficult situation when it comes to finding a job in the city. Besides, I had never had a job in my life—except for my two years in the service.

Of course, during my year of college at Valdosta State I had waited tables in the co-op for my meals, but I didn't consider that a job. Growing up in Georgia, I had done farm work for my father when I couldn't get out of it, such things as chopping cotton, milking a cow, and simple carpentry repair jobs around the farm. There were a good many things. I was capable of doing around a farm without having to talk. But the want ads in the newspaper were no help to me at all. Unwilling to use my voice, I couldn't even ask for a job unless I wrote it down. The majority of the situations that were open in the agate columns were for salesmen. And a man who can't talk can't sell anything. I wadded the newspaper into a ball and tossed it into the wastebasket.

One thing I could always do was walk and condition cocks for another breeder. There were plenty of chicken men in the South who would have jumped at the chance to pay me five dollars apiece for every game fowl I conditioned for them. But for a man who was still considered a big-time cockfighter throughout the South it would be too much of a comedown to work for another cock breeder. I had never worked for anybody else in my thirty-two years on this earth, and it was too late to start now. By God, I wasn't that desperate!

Sitting in that hotel room, with only a few loose dollars in my pocket, I was beginning to feel sorry for myself. My eyes rested on my guitar case.

My guitar was an old friend. During the first few months of my self-enforced silence, the days and nights had almost doubled in length. It is surprising how much time is killed everyday in idle conversation. Just to have something to fill in time I had purchased a secondhand Gibson guitar for thirty dollars in a Miami pawnshop. The case wasn't so hot—cheap brown cardboard stamped to resemble alligator leather—but the guitar was a good one, and it had a strong, wonderful tone. The guitar served as a substitute for my lost voice, and I don't know what I would have done without it.

I opened the guitar case, removed the instrument and ran through a few exercises to limber my fingers. I hadn't played the guitar for five or six days but the calluses on my fingers were still hard and tough. The Uncle who sold me the Gibson had also thrown in a free instruction booklet, but I had never learned how to play any regular songs. After learning most of the chords and how to tune and pick the strings, I had tossed the book away.

I only knew three songs, and they were tunes I had made up myself, sitting around picking them out until they sounded like the mental images I wanted them to resemble. One was Georgia Girl. This was a portrait in sound of Mary Elizabeth, my fiancée. The second tune I had composed I called Empty Pockets. My pockets had been empty many times in my life, and in making up this song I had discovered a way of getting a hollow sound effect by banging the box near the hole and playing a succession of fast triplets on the lower three strings at the same time. Despite the hollow sounds, this was a gay, fast tune and I was rather fond of it. The remaining song was merely my impression of an old patchwork quilt Grandma had made many years ago, and that's what I called it: Grandma's Quilt. I had tried to duplicate the colors and designs of that old patchwork, faded quilt in chord patterns, and I had been fairly successful.

My repertoire, then, consisted of three highly personal songs. If it was music, it was reflective music made up for my own personal enjoyment, and not for the general public. But I had to get a few dollars together, and soon, and maybe my guitar was the way? I could have pawned the Gibson for twenty dollars or so, and this sum would pay a week's rent, but if I pawned the guitar, where would I be then?

I decided to take a chance and temporarily invade the world of music. As a last resort, when push came to shove, I could pawn the instrument. I removed my wristwatch, waited until the sweep hand hit twelve, picked up my guitar and played my three songs in succession all the way through. Time elapsed: seventeen minutes, fourteen seconds. Not a lot of time for a guitar concert, but I had nothing to lose by trying, and the songs were all different. Perhaps some bar owner would put me on for a few dollars in the evening.

I shucked out of my black cowboy shirt, which was getting dirty around the collar, even though it didn't show very much, and changed into a clean, white shirt. I retied my red silk neckerchief, slipped into my corduroy suit and looked at myself in the dresser mirror. I looked clean and presentable. The red kerchief looked good with a white shirt and my gray-green corduroy suit. The cheap straw cowboy hat pushed back from my forehead was just the right touch for a would-be guitar player. I had burned my name into the yellow box of my guitar with a hot wire two years before, so all I had to do was write something simple on a piece of paper and get going.