"Pit!" the referee cried, and Richard began pep-talking his dad's blue: "That's it son! Ke-el that red. Come in tight, son! Come in tight!"
"Blues never quit," he says.
Still, several rounds later, it did not look good for the blue. Blood flowed from his neck and breast. "He got our blue all up in the breast, all up in the breast," Richard said, his voice trailing off.
Seconds later, when the red won the fight, and Bill Livesay carried a badly injured blue from the pit, Richard jumped to his feet.
"I gotta go," he blurted. "My job is to go and open up the cockhouse for my dad and help him cut the gaffs off. I gotta get there before he does, cause he's gonna need me."
Like Richard Livesay, Gary, a 40-year-old cocker who refuses to give his last name, grew up against the backdrop of cockfighting. His daddy fought roosters. And now he raises them himself on his North Fort Worth property. His birds keep him busy, but not so much that he can't stop in and help out Roy with his chickens, too.
Gary is a shirttail relative of Roy's. Learned everything he could about cocking from Roy, hanging around the shack as a kid. They built chicken pens together, taking care to put solid wood planks between each pen so the birds never see each other. That way, Roy's reasoning went, they'll remain quick and aggressive on fight day. And he learned from Roy the best feed mixes--fighting chickens eat well--tons of oats, corn, millet, and fresh fruit a year.
"This used to be a real beautiful place," Gary says, weaving between rusted oil drums in Roy's weed-choked yard. "Roy got old and sick, and it's hard for him to take care of it anymore. Sometimes he gets some of the kids in the neighborhood to help him, but they rip him off," says Gary.
"Thieving little scumbags," grumbles Roy, standing a few feet away in the tiny disc of shade beneath a tree. "I've gotta stand right out here and watch 'em or they rob me blind."
Gary can feed all of Roy's chickens in about 10 minutes. Exercises them, too. He often takes a few of the birds to a neighboring state to fight them in legal contests. Today, he's brought a red-brown of his own to show off. The bird doesn't have a real name, of course. Just call him "Big Boy," Gary says.
The language of this rooster, pacing in his pen and crowing, is easy to understand, Roy says: "Oh, he's just happy." Then Roy, generally unwilling to pick up one of his chickens, reaches into the pen for Big Boy, and demonstrates the proper way to hold a rooster: one hand on his back, the other hand between his legs and firmly gripping his belly.
Perhaps it's the oppressive heat of the 96-degree day, but the rooster is scarcely moving. His breast moves in and out in tiny pulses, and his rich red feathers are velvety, almost oily, to the touch. This subdued, glistening creature will--as early as the coming weekend, perhaps--go nobly into the cockpit, consumed only with fighting. He may very well win. Or he may not live to greet the next sunrise.
But you won't catch Roy Bingham getting too philosophical about this bird's fate.
"What else can he do but fight?" he says. "That's when he's at his best. He dies doing what he's good at. Most of us humans can't make that claim, can we
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