TWENTY-SIX

I saw a mild ray of hope when the third of Little’s cocks won handily after forty minutes in the pit. The referee gave the crowd a ten-minute break while the vendors worked the crowd selling soft drinks and peanuts and cotton candy. There were whole families present that night, many of them clans of rough Okie and Arkie hill people, but there were others who were soundly middle class. I noticed two young couples, high school boys and their bobby-soxer girlfriends. One of the girls was pale and looked as though she was on the verge of fainting, but the other had a ruddy blush to her cheeks and a gleam in her eye that was almost sexual. During the last fight her gaze had been fixed on the pit, and her breath was coming in short, breast-heaving little gasps. Unless I missed my guess, a violent and atavistic sport had made another convert.

Then the fourth fight began. In cockfighting the roosters have their spurs clipped off and long blades known as gaffs are attached to their legs. These gaffs are razor sharp and make the whole affair quite bloody. The fight starts after the handlers have gone through a preliminary ritual called billing that consists of holding the cocks face-to-face where they can only peck at one another. This is supposed to raise their rage to a murderous pitch and it usually does. The fight begins when the referee calls out, “Pit your cocks!” and the handlers turn the animals loose with their right hands. There’s a whole set of rules that circumscribe the posture and behavior of the handlers, rules so elaborate and arcane that I’m convinced anyone who can master them would also be capable of becoming a nuclear physicist.

The fourth fight lasted about fifteen minutes and ended when the Thompson bird let out one long, bloodcurdling squawk and then fell over dead. The referee called another break before the final fight. The tension in the room was palpable enough that it could have been boxed and sold at the concessions. During the lull in the action a couple of fistfights broke out, only to be quickly broken up by the off-duty cops who were on hand. I felt the tension myself even though it was a no-lose situation for me. But I’m naturally competitive, and I didn’t want to win by losing; I wanted to win by winning.

Soon the handlers were in the pit billing the cocks. When the referee called for them to loose the birds, the two roosters came together and flew at least four feet up in the air. When they separated I thought I’d lost. Little’s Tulsa Gray fell to the ground on its back, utterly motionless, both feet in the air and its head to one side, its tongue hanging out. The referee was about to call the fight when it came alive and jumped to its feet. It shook itself off, and then tore into the other bird like the Twentieth Century Limited passing a freight train.

It was the bloodiest fight of the evening. Three times the birds got their gaffs tangled and had to be separated by the handlers. Both were exhausted by the time it ended. At the last scratch the birds wobbled toward each other from opposite sides of the pit and struck, flying only a little more than a foot into the air this time. When they came down the Tulsa Gray was again on its back, but it was clearly alive and its right gaff was sunk in the Thompson bird’s brain. After a few quivering death throes, it was all over, and Little’s bird even managed to get to its feet. With the last of its energy it climbed atop the other rooster and crowed once before it fell to the side, spent but still alive. I was $22,000 to the better, and it gave me as much satisfaction as any wager I ever won.

The famed Bo Thompson was a tall, thin, bent man who looked like a human question mark with a sour face. The referee brought him and Little face-to-face in the center of the pit and they shook hands to the roar of the crowd.

“Time to settle all wagers,” the referee called out. Thompson dug his wallet from the depths of his coat and pulled out a single one-dollar bill, which he then handed to Little. The old man held the bill high above his head and the hometown crowd went wild. When the cheers died down, he stepped out of the pit, and said to me, “I need to go check on Tom and the gamecocks. I’ll be just a minute.”

I nodded and told him to take his time. What I had witnessed that night had hardly been a Harvard/Yale game, but winning $22,000 from Clifton Robillard had given it a certain rough charm of its own.

And that was that. I waved to Robillard and tried to get away without talking to him, but he motioned for me to wait. I went around the pit, threading my way through the crowd, and met him halfway. Van Horn stayed in his seat and the two young toughs were nowhere to be seen, though I thought nothing of it at the time. Robillard stuck out his hand. His face held a forced smile, and the fear I’d seen earlier was gone from his eyes. “I’ll have your money next week,” he purred. “Is poker night okay, or do you need it before then?”

“No hurry,” I told him.

“Would you like to have a drink?” he asked. “I know a good night spot.”

I shook my head. “Thank you anyway, but I’m tired and I know Mr. Little wants to get back home.”

“Then I will see you Friday night at the Weilbach.”

Chicken Little soon returned and we left the building. The parking lot was lighted by three large lamps hung high on electrical poles, but our car was in its darkest corner. To get to where I’d parked the Lincoln in the last row of the contestants’ section, we had to walk between two large trucks—a one-ton Chevy panel job and a Dodge stake bed. Little was a few feet ahead of me and to my right. The Chevy was to my left. The old man had just reached the back of the Dodge and turned to say something when I saw an arm go around his neck. The arm was wearing a light-colored coat sleeve and my mind also registered the toe of a two-toned shoe when a blur came out from behind the Chevy. I saw Chicken Little pull his knees up into a standing fetal position and slide from the man’s grasp, leaving the attacker with an armful of fedora and air. But by then I had problems of my own to contend with.

The blur in front of me had a club that was about the length of a cop’s nightstick. If he’d tried for a hard poke in my solar plexus, he might have incapacitated me, but like most amateurs he was overeager for a knockout. Instead, he made a great roundhouse swing at my skull that gave me time to react. I lowered my head and raised my shoulder, pivoting my upper body toward rather than away from him as he had expected. Not only did this surprise him, but it had the effect of making him overswing and hit my shoulder with his arm rather than the club. I landed one good, stiff punch to his left kidney and reached up to grab two handfuls of oily hair. Then using every ounce of my strength, I slammed him face-first into the side of the Chevy panel truck. The impact stunned him and brought him to his knees. This gave me a couple of seconds to get an even better grip on his head, and as soon as I had his greasy mop woven into my fingers, I pounded his face into the truck’s fender three more times as hard as I could. Bones snapped and teeth flew. I stepped back to see Dewey Sipes on his hands and knees, his face a broken, pulpy mass of blood and snot, his eyes gazing out at nothing with an expression of complete amazement. Then I kicked him in the belly as hard as I could, and heard him retching soundly as I turned to Chicken Little. He didn’t need any help. He and his attacker were both on their hands and knees. The goon was trying desperately to crawl away while Little slashed and hacked at the backs of his legs with what I knew was the razor-sharp old German-made switchblade he’d carried for years. By this time the man was screeching at the top of his lungs and imploring any number of deities for relief. Finally, he managed to lunge to his feet and bolt away, and even in the dim light I could see the backs of his pants shiny with the blood that was now streaming from numerous cuts and slashes.

I pulled Little to his feet and he reached down to get his now-mashed fedora. We sprinted the last few yards to my car and we were soon on our way out of the parking lot. I pulled my handkerchief from my pocket and tossed it to the old man. He wiped the blood from his hand and knife, and then looked at his hat sadly. “That damn hat was brand-new,” he said in disgust. “And I think I got blood on the sleeve of my coat, too. Well, I guess I asked for it. I was hacking at his shins by the time I hit the ground. Maybe I ought to have pulled my gun and shot him, but I didn’t.”

“They were with Robillard earlier tonight,” I said.

“I saw them.”

“The other fellow was a friend of his named Simon Van Horn.”

“Well, if they were with your buddy Robillard, then he set ’em on us for sure. The question is why.”

“You didn’t hear?”

“Hear what?”

“I won a heavy bet off him tonight by backing your Tulsa Grays.”

“Really? How heavy?”

“Twenty-five thousand dollars.”

“God Almighty, boy … I think you are crazy!”

“Me crazy? And you won what tonight?” I asked. “A dollar? All this trouble for a dollar? And you call me crazy?”

As I swung the car out into the highway, I heard his high, reedy laughter ringing out against the darkness of the Oklahoma night.