“Handle that!” the referee shouted.
The handlers moved in to pull them apart. They faced the birds off, waited for the count, and let them go at each other once more. Within another minute Scratch and Gustavo had to intervene again, this time because one bird had his spurs irretrievably embedded in the breast meat of his opponent. The handlers gently pulled them apart and started them again.
It takes a very long time for one bird or the other to die. Presumably they were dying of internal wounds and hemorrhage. Punctured lungs, for example, and literally bleeding hearts. Eventually they began to bleed from the mouths. At that point I could finally tell Scratch’s bird from Gustavo’s because it lay down in the dirt and wouldn’t get up. Scratch had to place it on its feet and push it back in the direction of combat.
“Why don’t they just declare the winner?” I whispered.
“There’s rules.”
It was a ridiculous answer, but correct. A death was required. It took thirty or forty minutes, and I guess the birds were showing their mettle, but it was hard to watch. The cocks were both exhausted and near death, no longer even faintly beautiful. Their blond breasts and ruffs were spotted with blood, stringy as unwashed hair. Collie Bluestone would have his work cut out for him here.
There seemed to be elaborate rules about how to keep things going after this point, when both birds really just wanted to sit with their beaks in the dirt. If one lay still, the other had no incentive to fight. I’ve studied a lot of biology; I quickly figured out that this industry was built around a bird’s natural impulse for territorial defense, and that’s where it broke down. No animal has reason to fight its own kind to the death. A rooster will defend his ground, but once that’s established, he’s done. After that he tends to walk around ignoring the bizarre surroundings and all the people who have next month’s rent riding on him and he’ll just act like a chicken-the animal that he is. The handlers had to keep taking the birds firmly in hand, squaring them off and trying to force the fight.
“This is making me sick,” I told Loyd.
He looked at me with such surprise it angered me. Nobody could look at this picture and fail to see cruelty.
“I’ve seen little boys do this same exact thing,” I said. “Take some pitiful animal and tease it and drag it back by the legs over and over again, trying to make it fight.”
“The knife fights go a lot faster,” he said.
“But you don’t like knife fights. You like this. That’s what you said.”
He didn’t answer. To avoid the birds I looked at the crowd, whose faces betrayed neither pain nor blood thirst but passive interest. It could have been any show at all, not two animals obliged to kill each other; it could have been TV. They were mostly old men in feed caps, or black felt cowboy hats if they were Apaches. I spotted a few families now, but knew if you asked these women about cockfighting they’d use the word we. “Oh, we love it,” they’d say in cigarette-husky voices, meaning he does. A teenager in a black tank top, a greenish tattoo flowering across her broad back, hoisted a toddler onto her shoulder. She lit a cigarette and paid scant attention to the action in the pit, but her child took it in like a sponge.
Several people yelled loudly for Gustavo’s bird. Then finally, without much warning, its opponent passed over from barely alive to dead. Without ceremony Scratch carried his limp loser out by its feet and tossed it into the back of a truck. Loyd Peregrina was called up next. A rooster was delivered into his arms, smooth as a loaf of bread, as he made his way down to the pit. This time I watched. I owed him that.
In the first fight I’d watched birds, but this time I watched Loyd, and soon understood that in this unapologetically brutal sport there was a vast tenderness between the handler and his bird. Loyd cradled his rooster in his arms, stroking and talking to it in a low, steady voice. At each handling call he caressed the bird’s wings back into place, stroked its back, and licked the blood from its eyes. At the end, he blew his own breath into its mouth to inflate a punctured lung. He did this when the bird was nigh unto death and clearly unable to win. The physical relationship between Loyd and his rooster transcended winning or losing.
It lasted up to the moment of death, and not one second longer. I shivered as he tossed the feathered corpse, limp as cloth, into the back of the truck. The thought of Loyd’s hands on me made the skin of my forearms recoil from my own touch.
“What do they do with the dead birds?” I wanted to know.
“What?”
“What do they do with them? Does somebody eat them? Arroz con pollo?”
He laughed. “Not here. In Mexico I’ve heard they do.”
I thought of Hallie and wondered if they had cockfights in Nicaragua. In the new, humane society that had already abolished capital punishment, I’d bet money they still had cockfights.
Loyd watched the road and executed a tricky turn. He was driving a little fast for gravel road and dusk, but driving well. I tried to picture Loyd driving a train, and came up with nothing. No picture. No more than I could picture Fenton Lee in his head-on wreck.
“What do they do with them here?”
“Why, you hungry?”
“I’m asking a question.”
“There’s a dump, down that arroyo a ways. A big pit. They bury them in a mass grave. Tomb of the unknown chicken.”
I ignored his joke. “I think I’d feel better about
