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. Suddenly the shed began to spin in a blur of nicotine and nausea, blood and feathers and feed caps. Something in the Copenhagen or the carnage was conspiring with my Ménière’s disease to bring on the mother of all vertigo attacks. Staggering back against the metal wall, I grabbed for the closest support I could find: the rim of the trash barrel, half-filled with dead roosters. Bracing myself on my forearms, I leaned down, my face inches above the barrel’s rim. Just as I felt myself spinning down into darkness, I began to vomit. Halfconscious, I kept on vomiting long after my stomach was empty, long past the point where the violent heaves produced only trickles of tears from my eyes and commingled strings of bile and snot and tobacco juice from my nose and mouth.
“Just blend in,” I reminded myself absurdly, and with that parting thought, I felt my brain fade to black as my body tipped forward, headfirst, toward the mound of lifeless roosters.
CHAPTER 19
I FOUND MYSELF RIDING IN Waylon’s truck. I had been vaguely aware of the big man carrying me through the cockfight shed, parting the crowd like Moses at the Red Sea. Cap-topped faces, gap-toothed and disgusted, had loomed into my field of view, then swiftly disappeared into a fog of nausea and semiconsciousness. Some indeterminate time later, I felt the rumble of pavement beneath wheels. Occasionally I would rouse myself enough to retch; at those moments, a plastic dog bowl materialized beneath my chin, attached to a mammoth paw that I realized must be Waylon’s hand. “Sorry,” I would murmur. “Thank you. I’m sorry.” Then I would slump back into oblivion in my posh captain’s chair.
Eventually the fog began to lift. I sat up, looked out the window, and saw that we were now parked at the Pilot station at the interstate exit, right beside my truck. For the first time in what must have been hours, I felt hopeful about the prospects for a return to civilization and good health. Moving slowly and carefully, I opened the door to clamber out of the cab, then turned to ask a question that had been gnawing at me ever since my head started spinning back at the cockfight. “What’s in that stuff, Waylon? I thought Copenhagen was just tobacco, but something in there hit me like a freight train.”