Beautiful Fools

by R. Clifton Spargo

  “Listen to this story,” Aurelio said to Scott, and then to Max, “Tell Scott the story of the bird you lost last year,” speaking first in English, then also in Spanish. Max grunted and smiled at the prompt, then subsided into a babble of Cuban-inflected Spanish, Aurelio letting him go on for over a minute before recounting the highlights for Scott. “It was during the walking period. He had fenced off a long stretch of land, free from predators.” Scott caught pieces of Maximiliano’s excited story, the repeated mention of the bird, “un gallo de pelea,” also the term “pequeño estanque” used over and over again. “What is that word?” Scott asked. “Pond,” Aurelio muttered, then translated more of the story, how the cock grew in his own estimation daily, still not dubbed, his comb and wattle as yet brilliant and full. Max had heard tales about gamecocks and water before but never given credence to them. He would soon learn his lesson. For the walking pen included a small pond, and one day his prized gamecock, the best he’d ever bred, lingered near the pond and while nodding forward to drink, peered into the face of a gorgeous bird, which stared back at him. “Tan lindo es un gallo de pelea en sus propios ojos,” Aurelio said, possibly repeating Max’s words, possibly adding a layer of commentary. So handsome to himself is the gamecock that all he perceives in his own reflection is the threatening beauty of another bird encroaching on his turf. He spreads his wings and lifts himself off the ground, the rival bird matching him move for move, all their tactics instinctive; and now one of Max’s sons is racing for the pond, while a younger son sprints to get Max, who seizes a burlap sack always on hand (because a riled cock, especially before the spurs have been sliced off his feet, can shred clothing, flay skin, even take out a man’s eye), and he makes a dash for the pond, already too late. “Despite his haste, his worry, his time and training,” Aurelio said. It was often the way with tragedy. Maximiliano discovered the most beautiful of any bird he’d ever raised drowned in shallow water, having fought and been defeated by its own reflection.

  Aurelio laughed as Max and he together concluded the story, but Scott detected a hint of sorrow in the villager’s joviality. It had been his best bird, after all. Scott heaved his chest into a laugh, feeling the tickle in his esophagus and bronchia, the involuntary roll of the hacking cough, as he raised a fist to his mouth. Max walked back to the porch, speaking over his shoulder to Aurelio, who translated, “He says the drowned one was the most gorgeous bird ever. But does it mean he can fight? Not always. This bird he will pit for us tonight, which we are wise to bet on, is a fighter like no other.”

  “Has he won many times?” Scott asked, wiping his hand with his handkerchief and tucking it into his pants pocket.

  “I’m sure the record has been exaggerated for our benefit,” Aurelio said. But the gamecock had been pitted and fought well and survived without injury. Always a good sign. It was, in Aurelio’s estimation, a bird with the right instincts.

  “I would not spar my own bird the day before a match,” he informed Scott, referring to the scene they’d witnessed outside the bodega yesterday. “Still, let us bet on Max’s bird, why not, one of our coquettish bets. We tease the local tournament for fun, find out how and where cash flows, though he is not a bird we will win on. You wait, I will show you the bird I select for this task, in your name, in honor of Mr. Scott Fitzgerald.”

  Max returned from the cottage with a bottle of Bacardi rum, cracked the cap, splashed some of the gold-brown liquid at their feet, then passed the bottle, first to Aurelio, who took a long swig, then to Scott, who did the same, the rum smooth and warm, tasting of oak and molasses, though its finish was on the thin side. The men shared the bottle, and each time Aurelio took a swig he praised the bird and its owner, saying, “To your fearless gamecock,” or “To the gameness of the birds tonight.” Scott kept eyeing the gamecock ensconced in the nook of Max’s arm, which stared grimly out into the yard. It bore the shape of a raven, except for the red-orange hue of its reptilian face, except for those intensely bright, protruding brown-black eyes and the trimmed ridge of the comb that reminded Scott of nothing so much as the scales crowning the head of a lizard. The cock showed little interest in the men, but its eyes were alert, looking to take offense.

  The three men loitered near the high-end automobile Aurelio had procured, the driver leaning against its hood, awaiting further instruction. Several times the bottle of rum made the rounds, Aurelio and Max exchanging pleasantries and barbs in Spanish, Scott no longer listening, trying to suppress another fit of coughing. Sputtering, he twisted away from the others, feeling the cough subside even as a raw ache lingered in his lungs. He took another swig. The rum sat heavy in his stomach, making him tired and sad rather than forward-looking. It occurred to him that he shouldn’t be sharing the bottle, not if his tuberculosis was kicking in, but it was difficult to be vigilant about the treatment protocols of a disease his friends and family refused to believe he suffered from. The spotting on the handkerchief, the red spittle on his hands, the hollow burning in his lungs, what did they mean if no one believed him?

  “He’ll ride with us to the fights,” Aurelio announced as the villager ventured inside the cottage, returning with a pen for the bird and a topless wood toolbox filled with equipment: twine, leather swatches, water, herbs, scissors, and sundry other sharp metal implements. Aurelio sat in the middle with the toolbox, Scott flanking him on one side, Max on the other with the bird in his lap, the pen on the floor. After stuffing a wad of tobacco into the corner of his mouth, Max offered some to his companions, the Spaniard politely accepting a small pinch. The driver, though, refused to start the Oldsmobile. He complained of the cock’s getting loose inside the car, knowing how much damage a gamecock could do—if it saw a rival out the window, if they were to hit a rough patch of road—not only to the leather interior of the Olds but to the men trapped there in that enclosed space with an enraged bird. Agreeing to pen the bird, Max slipped out of the backseat, and when he returned to the car held the pen in his lap, the cock peering forward through its steel cage door. The driver whipped the Olds down the uneven, jagged road, tires popping on gravel and branches as the tropical blue-gray evening descended into the trees ahead.

  “What’s that?” Scott asked.

  “It’s the gaff,” Aurelio told him, “you know, which replaces the spur after it is shaved down.”

  Scott studied the curved spike, designed for no purpose other than to puncture flesh with facility, an instrument that might have been conceived by Spanish inquisitors in their spare time.

  “It’s so long,” he said. “How long is the spur above the cock’s heel naturally?”

  “Not quite half this length,” Aurelio said. “The gaff increases efficiency.”

  As they rode through woods onto the main dirt road, the car’s headlights now and then washed over the glowing eyes of roadside animals. All he could think of was Zelda, alone in that hotel room or wandering long moonlit beaches, tempted by the tides. He was crazy to have left her alone so soon. He extended his palm to receive the bottle from Aurelio, swilled the rum, letting it clear his throat and burn his tender lungs, then shook his head, feeling the buzz, dazed, bleary-eyed, muttering, “God damn me”—his remark drawing a query from the Spaniard as to whether he was all right.

  The Oldsmobile now drove along a golf course and soon a white stucco mansion came into view, from the front this time, but still Scott recognized it right away, the same house he had admired from the beach yesterday afternoon. Its many faces, its windowless walls and high parapets, yielded the impression that it was defending itself against something.

  “Whose house is that?”

  Aurelio posed the question to Max, but the driver spoke up first. “It is the estate of American tycoon, Mr. du Pont.”

  Tonight’s series of cockfights was unsanctioned, since the family was not in residence. But cockfights on the peninsula often took place at the du Pont stables. The driver pulled the Olds behind a small line of cars and trucks, several of them in metallic gr
eens and reds with fine chrome bumpers and white roofs, others among them rather obviously weather-beaten and dilapidated. Once inside the stables Scott scrutinized the pit in the foreground of the barn, the open dirt floor swept clean of hay and impediments, strewn with sawdust, and a two-foot-high fence concocted of wire and burlap having been rounded into a ring of twenty feet in diameter.

  An in-progress match drew lackluster shouts from the crowd.

  The novice bird they’d observed sparring outside the bodega yesterday (Scott wouldn’t have recognized it if not for Aurelio’s prompting) was fighting and in bad shape. It had been billed in the head. Now in runaway mode, it refused to engage its rival, bandying about the arena in an uneven gait. Sometime prior to getting brained, the bird had managed to gash an eye of its rival, which circled the pit in a disoriented frenzy, unable to locate its opponent. The standoff had lasted for more than five minutes.

  “Soon they move the match,” Aurelio explained, “to the drag pit.” This was a smaller arena where matches that had become uneventful could be carried to their end.

  “Why don’t they pick the damned birds up and let them live to fight another day?” Scott asked.

  “There has to be a result,” Aurelio said. “For the sake of bets, for the sake of the birds. Probably the winner of this match will also suffer the hatchet.”

  Scott was appalled by the crudity of the logic whereby a bird might survive, even perhaps win a fight, and still surrender its life.

  “What good is he if he cannot fight?” Aurelio reasoned. “If eye is hurt, the bird is of no value. A broken leg can be reset, maybe, probably with success, but only if un gallo de pelea shows itself first to be a fighter.”

  On the other side of the pit Scott caught sight of—he should have been more surprised, but he wasn’t—Famosa García, crouched low along the wall and cheering on the bird with the gashed eye. Maybe he knew its owner or handler, but more likely he had bet on the bird. Now the referee summoned the handlers to retrieve their cocks and move them to the drag pit. In the midst of the commotion, another villager approached Maximiliano and the two men traded heated words. Apparently, the Spanish black had been scheduled earlier on the bill than expected because a bird had been disqualified. Max wanted time to prepare his bird, to draw out its aggression with the sparring mitts. He spat a long gob of brown saliva at his feet, perhaps in disgust at the news.

  “We have to bet on him,” Aurelio said. “Give me some money, I will place our bets.”

  “How much?” Scott asked, taking out his wallet.

  “Twenty American dollars,” the Spaniard said. “This should be fine.”

  It seemed like a large bet, especially given the strategy Aurelio had outlined earlier of wagering mostly to lose on the initial bouts. Almost all the money Scott could lay claim to in the world was on his person, a small reserve stashed in a suitcase at the hotel, no fees due him from the studio or from magazines, his royalties at a standstill, next to nothing in his bank account. The money he drew on for this evening’s revelry had been calculated in terms of the time it bought him: five to seven days here in Cuba, several weeks afterward to scramble for new footing in Hollywood, maybe a month and a half total if he was lucky and frugal, if Arnold Gingrich took another piece or two for Esquire on commission and Scott managed to scrounge up patchwork editing jobs on a few movie scripts. It wouldn’t be long, though, until he was flat broke again and begging from whomever would still float him cash, the circle of candidates ever smaller, shrinking by the year. He was back to surviving on speculation, betting on his next novel to pull him out of hock. Earlier in the day, when Aurelio had boasted that he was sure to win big, Scott played it cool, pretending he didn’t care one way or the other, but of course he did.

  Still, the prospect of an easy score tempted him. If he could double the cash laid out tonight, somehow pocket even a hundred bucks, well, winnings like that weren’t small change at this point in his life. Which was why throwing away twenty on a first bet didn’t sit well. Which was why, as he handed over the cash, he was secretly miffed at the Spaniard for making him bet more than he could afford to lose. He hated it when other people were reckless with his money; he’d done enough damage to his finances on his own.

  “Yes, for first bet this is fine,” Aurelio repeated as he walked away with Scott’s cash.

  Only afterward did Scott think to ask the Spaniard how much of his own money he was wagering, and only after that did he consider that by throwing cash around carelessly he was putting Zelda’s vacation at risk.

  “The match was difficult basically from the beginning because it is a really hot night,” someone said to him from behind. Scott turned to meet the familiar, unflappable gaze of Famosa García. “Once a bird loses his cool, it is all over.”

  In the company of Matéo’s emissary stood a blond-haired man in a white linen suit—white apparently never out of season in the tropics. He was a German, Famosa García explained, without introducing the man. Scott shouldn’t have been surprised. Roosevelt hadn’t declared war on them yet, and it was well-known that Germans with treacherous politics vacationed and transacted business in America’s neighboring nations to the south, crossing borders with impunity. Maybe he was an anti-Fascist, one never knew. Scott studied the man’s grim smile, his blanched pinkish lips and slightly twisted nose, his thick white-blond brows set over burrowed eyes. For whatever reason, the anonymous German chose to stand a foot or two behind the Cuban’s shoulder at all times.

  What bonded the men in the barn, what allowed them to put aside political differences, was a common passion for watching one gamecock square off against another, each descended from birds whose brave genealogy and deadly notoriety went back to antiquity, before the time of Christ’s crucifixion. Fiercely territorial, unyielding, an inspiration to warriors from the classical age on up to the present, the cocks were biologically designed to brawl; even their handlers couldn’t instill the spirited hate in them. It was either in the bird or it wasn’t, what the cockers called gameness. Get Darwin or Herbert Spencer to explain that to you if he could, but you might just as soon blame God.

  “The bird I bet on,” Famosa García said, “he fights with fine and clean movements, his blows straight to the breast, hitting hard, then backing off, again rushing his enemy—except it is not an easy game always. Straight out his opponent struck a lucky blow to the eye, always such things are possible, and now my bird fights desperately, aggressively, he lands a brainer, and al instante, in a flash, there is no beauty left in the way he must kill his rival.”

  “But you’re confident the fight will go your way?” Scott asked.

  “It is the only way,” the silver-haired emissary replied. “I overhear your conversation minutes ago—you bet good money on the Spanish black, a long shot, I believe you say. I did not take you for a gambler, Mr. Fitzgerald.”

  What was Famosa García still doing here anyway? Scott wished to be free of him. Had Cardoña paid him to stay on and attend tonight’s event? But, then, he couldn’t have known Scott would turn up at the cockfights.

  “Your wife, she does not join you tonight?” Famosa García asked even though there was not a single woman in the crowd. He led Scott and the silent German toward the drag pit, the tighter space having worked wonders for the bird that still had gameness. Though ruined for subsequent battle, the one-eyed bird had cornered its rival and now lifted itself to drive the gaffs into the lame bird’s chest. Scott looked away. Focusing too much on the sloppy, brutal end to this bout would only ruin the next for him.

  Afterward the handler of the slain bird, the other man Aurelio had spoken to outside the bodega yesterday, the one with the pug nose and flat Amerindian face, rambled on in Spanish to Famosa García and the German, apologizing for his bird’s sad performance.

  “I should tell you, Mr. Fitzgerald, I have not yet heard from Señor Cardoña,” Famosa García said to Scott. “But the man who died, it turns out, is not a nobody. So, of course, the police must
solve this crime.”

  “I appreciate the news bulletin,” Scott said coolly, then extracted his Moleskine, remarking that it was a professional vice, forever scribbling observations about your experiences, never knowing what they might amount to. “Of course,” Famosa García said. Scott retreated several steps, unfolding the journal, but as he did so a piece of green stationery slipped from its pages, eddying on an ocean-backed breeze and landing in a strip of rippled, grainy dirt, probably smoothed-over manure. He stooped for it, bending at the waist instead of crouching, dizzied for a split second as the wind again caught the letter, and now also fumbling the Moleskine; and though he nimbly slipped his other palm beneath the falling journal, he failed to make the catch, its pages splaying open into the dirt, papers scattering as he cursed himself and crouched to the ground to gather strewn contents: a negative of the photograph taken with Famosa García, directions to a restaurant here on Varadero, several notes scratched on hotel stationery. Zelda’s letter was no longer in sight. He searched in vain for it, distraught, impatient with himself, as he moved along the wings of the crowd that fanned out toward the stables.

  He could smell the hay and sense it prickling in his lungs, breathing in the stink of manure and horse urine but also the vital stench of the horses themselves, their hides like fresh leather on new shoes except different because there was sweat and blood and oxygen in those hides. It was the odor of animal existence in its raw prowess, of yesterday’s black mare on the beach in the sun, still capable of finding her legs when spurred.

  Back at the pit, his head clearer now but also troubled by the loss of the letter, he saw Max seated on a stool, holding the Spanish black across his lap, outfitting the bird for its bout. Aurelio had agreed to serve as an assistant of some sort, and as Scott drew close, he watched the Spaniard wrapping small swaths of leather around the bird’s right shank, securing the patches with twine snug against the spur stub, now sliding the gaff with its large curved spike over the leather, fitting it wide so that the point was positioned lower on the heel but in the same basic direction as the shorn spur. Max grasped the bird firmly, one hand clamping its thighs together, the other up along the bird’s cape, and in one swift motion he flipped the bird and Aurelio walked round behind Max to outfit the other shank.