The deaths are protracted. That was one thing I learned when I went to see Loyd excel in the profession to which he was born.
I'd had in mind that a cockfight would be an after-dark, furtive thing: men betting and drinking and sweating out the animal suspense under cover of night. But it was broad daylight. Loyd cut the wheel sharply, taking us off the road and up a gravel arroyo. He seemed to navigate the reservation by the same mysterious instincts that lead birds to Costa Rica and back home again unfailingly each year. We reached a thicket where a motley herd of pickup trucks were parked at odd angles, close together, like nervous horses ready to bolt. Loyd pulled his red truck into the herd. Beyond the trees was a dirt arena where roosters strutted around clearing their throats, barnyard-innocent.
Loyd steered me through the arena, his arm around my shoulders, greeting everybody. I saw no other women, but Loyd would have been welcome here if he'd shown up with a shewolf. "Lot of people going to lose their shirts today," a man told him. "You got some damn good-looking birds." The man was handsome and thin, with a long ponytail tied up Navajo style. His name was Collie Bluestone. Loyd introduced us, seeming proud of me.
"Glad to meet you," I said. Collie's hand felt taut with energy. A chunk of turquoise on a leather thong rested on his collarbone, below the scar of an old tracheotomy.
"Collie's a cock mechanic," Loyd said. "We go back a ways."
I laughed. "You give them tune-ups before the fight?"
"No, after," Collie said. "I sew them up. So they live to fight another day."
"Oh. I thought it was to the death." I dragged a finger across my throat.
Collie smiled. "Out of every fight, one of them dies and one lives." He turned to Loyd. "How come the girls always forget about the one that lives?"
"Everybody loves a hero, I guess." Loyd winked at me.
"Nothing heroic about a dead bird," I pointed out.
The arena centered on a raked floor of reddish-brown dirt. Loyd maneuvered me through the men squatting and arguing at its perimeter to a dilapidated flank of wooden chairs where he deposited me. I felt nervous about being left alone, though the atmosphere was as innocuous as a picnic, minus women and food.
"I'll be back," he said, and vanished.
The place was thick with roosters but didn't smell like poultry, only of clean, sharp dust. I suppose the birds didn't stay around long enough to establish that kind of presence. Some men took seats near me, jarring me slightly; the chairs were all nailed together in long rows, the type used for parades. I spotted Loyd through the crowd. Everybody wanted to talk to him, cutting in like suitors at a dance. He was quite at home here, and relaxed: an important man who's beyond self-importance.
He returned to me just as a short, dark man in deeply worn plaid pants was marking out a chalk square in the dirt of the center pit. Betting flared around the fringes. An old man stabbed the stump of a missing forefinger at the crowd and shouted, angrily, "Seventy! Somebody call seventy!"
Loyd took my hand. "This is a gaff tournament," he explained quietly. "That means the birds have a little steel spur on the back of each leg. In the knife fights they get blades."
"So you have gaff birds and knife birds," I said. I'd been turning over this question since our trip to Kinishba.
"Right. They fight different. A knife fight is a cutting fight and it goes a lot faster. You never really get to see what a bird could do. The really game birds are gaff birds."
"I'll take your word for it," I said.
The first two fighters, men named Gustavo and Scratch, spoke to the man in plaid pants, who seemed in charge. Scratch appeared to have only one functional eye. Loyd said they were two of the best cockfighters on the reservation. The first position was an honor.
"The roosters don't look honored," I said. Actually they looked neither pleased nor displeased, but stalked in circles, accustomed to life on one square yard of turf. Their tail feathers ticked like weeds and one of them crowed nonstop, as if impatient. But impatience implies consciousness of time and a chicken is existential. I know that much about birds.
"How come you're not down there playing with your friends?" I asked Loyd.
"I've got people to train the birds, bring the birds, weigh in, all that. I handle. You'll see."
"Train the birds? How do you teach a bird to fight?"
"You don't, it's all instinct and breeding. You just train them not to freak out when they get in a crowd."