In their first dustup, the red-and-black rooster had looked smaller but quicker and more aggressive; the one called a gray, though (actually multicolored, with an off-white neck and head), looked strong and tough. It appeared to be a classic David-versus-Goliath match — except that in the Bible story, I recalled, David had been armed only with a slingshot and stones. These birds, though, were armed with sharpened steel. On the back of one leg — strapped with a leather band to what must have been the stump of his natural spur — each cock wore a gleaming knife blade, two inches long. Judging by the caution with which the handlers carried the birds, the knives were razor-sharp. “Hang in there, Flea-Pay,” a freckled teenager yelled to the Hispanic man, who stroked and blew on the gray rooster.
The handlers began their rhythmic dance again, which I now saw was actually a way of taunting the birds, getting them agitated and ready to fight. As the handlers circled and bobbed and swayed a foot or two apart, the cocks’ heads lashed forward at one another, coming close but never quite making contact. Once the birds were sufficiently enraged, the handlers set them down for another round. As soon as he was released, the gray one darted furiously toward the red and leapt up to strike. This time, though, instead of meeting him in midair, the red cock ducked and ran underneath, spun swiftly, and then launched himself at the gray’s back, windmilling his feet as he made contact. The crowd gave a collective shout, then fell eerily silent. The gray cock toppled onto his side, panted a few startled, ragged breaths, and died in a small pool of blood. The red rooster shook hard and fluffed himself, then strutted over to the body of his fallen rival and pecked at the lifeless body. Next, placing one foot on the gray’s head, he swelled his chest, threw back his head, and crowed triumphantly. As if in reply, the crowd — except for the few dejected-looking losers who had bet on the gray — let loose with a cheer equally primal. A teenager sauntered past, holding a cardboard food tray. It was filled with fried chicken strips.
Waylon leaned toward me and yelled, “That red’un sure is game, ain’t he? I b’lieve that’s his tenth win this year.”
Upset by the animal carnage and the human brutality, I yelled sarcastically, “Yeah, too bad I didn’t get a chance to bet on him.”
Waylon either didn’t notice the sarcasm or chose to ignore it. “If we’da got here a minute sooner, you coulda. I had me a hunnerd on him. Tried to lay five, but didn’t get no takers. Easy way to make a hunnerd, though.”
“Tell that to the dead one,” I said.
He swiveled and studied me, then nodded. “I reckon it does kindly depend on where you’re at in the peckin’ order, don’t it?”
“So this was the financial business you needed to do — putting a bet on a cockfight?” He nodded.
“This ain’t for me, Doc, and it ain’t just for fun. I got a cousin in a bind. Quickest way I know to raise some money for him.”
“Does Orbin Kitchings know there’s a cockfighting pit a stone’s throw from his house?”
Waylon spat in the sawdust on the floor, which absorbed blood and spittle with equal efficiency. “Know it? Hell, he’s a damn regular. Gets a percentage of the take. Bets big, too. If he wins, he’s real quick to collect. If he loses, you can figure on hell freezing over ’fore he’ll pay up. Folks try not to bet with him on account of that, ’cept he pressures ’em, if you know what I mean.” I was starting to get the picture, and it was a deeply disturbing portrait of Cooke County’s chief deputy. “Listen, Doc, I got to speak to this fella over yonder. Won’t take but just a minute.” He reached into a pocket and extricated a small, round container, the size and shape of a tunafish can. “Here, have a little dip while you wait.” He popped off the lid and I caught the moist, pungent aroma of tobacco. I looked down, amazed: in all my years in East Tennessee, I had never before been offered a chew; now, suddenly, I was face to face with a wad of tobacco while standing ringside at an illegal cockfight. What next, I wondered — moonshine? hookers? animal-sex acts? Waylon saw the uncertainty in my eyes. “You ain’t never dipped before?” He sounded incredulous. I shook my head. He held the container closer and smiled encouragingly, a stray strand of depleted tobacco wedged between his upper incisors.
A man leaned down from the bleachers above my head, evidently taking an interest in our exchange. “Go on, buddy, give ’er a try.”
Waylon looked up. “Oh, hey, Rooster.”
Rooster nodded to Waylon, then resumed meddling. “Go on, it’ll perk you right up. You look like you could use some perkin’ up.”
What the hell, I thought, and reached in with my thumb and forefinger. I snagged a pinch of the soft, shredded leaf and brought it slowly toward my mouth. Waylon laughed. “Shit far, Doc, that ain’t near enough. Git you some more.” I reached in and doubled the size of my pinch. “Aw, hell, that ain’t gonna do nothin’. Go on, grab you a hunk.” Embarrassed, I reached in a third time, scooping with my middle finger, too. This time my hand emerged clutching a ragged wad of Copenhagen the size of a cotton ball. Waylon winked in approval, then tugged open his lower lip — mercifully empty at the moment — and pointed, showing me the spot to cram it. When I did, carefully tamping in the loose ends, he beamed. “Doc, we’ll make a good ol’ boy out of you yet,” he said. “Don’t you go nowheres; I’ll be right back.” I nodded, afraid of the harelip sounds and the slobbery mess that might emerge from my swollen lower lip if I spoke. Waylon gave me a final appraisal and felt moved to offer a final word of advice. “Just blend in.”
With that, he threaded his way through the crowd, moving with surprising grace. On the opposite side of the ring, he bent to confer with a wizened bantam rooster of a man whose creased face resembled distressed leather. The man reached into a pocket and pulled out a thick roll of bills; he peeled off one and handed it to Waylon. Waylon leaned down and spoke urgently, but the man shook his head stoically.
Just then another pair of handlers stepped into the pit, accompanied by a new referee. The handlers had numbers on their backs, I noticed; these two were numbered 29 and 57. If the entrants’ numbers started with one and ran sequentially, this cockfight was blood sport on a scale worthy of ancient Rome. And if the betting that was cranking up again for this match was typical — dozens of bets of twenty dollars, a handful more at forty and fifty and a hundred, even one at a thousand — some serious money was changing hands here. Was it possible that the sheriff himself didn’t know this was going on? Or — and this seemed more plausible — were Tom Kitchings and his deputies all being paid to look the other way?
In the pit, the new pair of handlers was beginning the warm-up dance. Anxious to avoid witnessing another death match, I turned away and edged toward the side wall. My mouth was filling with saliva; I didn’t have anything to spit into, so I swallowed, and nearly gagged. My head was beginning to hum just a bit, which surprised me, as I hadn’t had the tobacco in my mouth more than a minute.
A handful of men parted as I drew closer to the wall, and I saw what they were gathered around. Inside a smaller, square pit, a battered and blood-smeared white bird — one eye gone and a wing dragging in the dirt — crawled in circles, trying to escape a rooster that remained largely undamaged, with the exception of a mangled left leg. The upright bird hopped gamely after his adversary, but he hadn’t quite figured out how to leap, strike, and recover with just the one good leg, so he was reduced to pecking at his foe’s remaining eye and tugging at the tatters of comb. Each time he got a beakful of comb, he would yank himself off-balance, falling onto the downed rooster. This spectacle, though less bloody than the knife fight I had witnessed in the main pit, seemed worse, somehow, for the prolonged suffering. I was appalled, but I found myself hypnotized, unable to turn away. I watched the handlers part the birds three times, stroking and breathing them back to life each time, restoring them from a glassy-eyed stupor to a brief resurgence of life and rage. Finally, on the fourth try, the hopping cock got it right: the long, curved spike on his good leg sank deep into the belly of the white bird, which squawked feebly and then flopped lifeless. “She-it,” spat his handler, reaching down to hoist the dead bird by the splayed wing and then tossing him into a trash barrel beside me. The other handler leaned down, too, seized the victor by the head, and gave his bird a brisk, neck-snapping spin before heaving it, too, into the trash barrel. It caught the rim, hung there briefly, then plopped onto the cock it had killed only moments before.