Excerpt from Candy Don't Come in Gray
Blood Pye
“They say it come out of England,” Half-Way yelled.
Even out in the yard, the music was so loud Blood Pye had to cup his hand over one ear and strain to catch what his friend was saying. The older man’s nickname had been given to him years before, out of good-natured ribbing for the way he had begun going gray: entirely on one side of his head, as if a draftsman had taken pencil and ruler and drawn a perfect line down the center. Although the hair was as thick as a carpet, one side gleamed like steel wool, while the other was matte black. The coloring extended to his eyebrows, moustache, and the hair on his chest and arms. All in all, he looked like a man who had fallen asleep lying on his side in the sun. Blood Pye had tried to convince him that the best way to deal with the bizarre phenomenon was to shave it all off, but Half-Way refused. His wife liked it that way, he insisted.
“I hear them cocks up there just falling over dead, dead, like nobody business,” Half-Way said.
Blood Pye sucked on the end of his hemp cigarette and contemplated the glow that intensified on the tip of it. He could have done with something stronger; as a matter of fact, he had a couple of spliffs in his back pocket, but it made more sense to start small, working his way up from the hemp rather than the other way around. The smoke filled his mouth, sweet on his tongue and seductive in his mind, like a woman’s kiss. Mattie didn’t like him smoking; not weed, anyway. She said she could smell it on him, even hours after he’d finished his last joint. But right now, he needed it. Unlike a woman, weed was reliable; when life was turning to shit all around you, you knew it would be there, always willing, always able to soothe your troubled spirit.
“Not England,” he contradicted his friend. “That ain’t no white people disease. I been in this business long time, man, and I telling you, this thing come up off the mainland. Venezuela. Is a big place down there; endless jungle and rivers and shit. They got germs down there that could crawl up your legs and eat your dick before you could say Jack Robinson. You take two steps and your balls drop off. This thing what killing my birds—”
“Shh.” Half-Way put a finger to his lips.
Blood Pye shut himself up by popping the cigarette back into his mouth. The Hiding Place Bar wasn’t as full as it could have been, even on a Friday, but there were still enough people about to hear what he was saying, especially since the noise forced them to shout. And Blood Pye was a breeder: the last thing he needed was for word to get around that there was trouble in his camp, something dark and dangerous that was leaving a trail of death wherever it passed.
There was a cockfight on tonight. Not a major one, more of a local thing than an international event, with just a few breeders pitting their birds against each other’s. For the first time since he was seventeen, and his father had deemed him old enough and good enough to fight his own birds rather than tag along to help out, Blood Pye had brought no contenders. He’d made up a hollow lie to the punters who usually bet on his birds, telling them some bullshit about a training regime that required his cocks to rest a few weeks. He wasn’t sure the lie had rung true, but that was not the worrying thing. What bothered him was that he wasn’t the only one who hadn’t brought birds tonight. Half-Way was a gaunt man in his fifties who loved his birds like children, giving them the run of his house, and, much to his wife’s despair, even letting the best ones sleep in two of his three bedrooms. So, when he’d also walked into the compound of the Hiding Place empty-handed, and stuttered something about taking a break for a week, maybe two, Pye had felt his blood chill.
Half-Way had trained birds with Pye’s father, and had known him since he was a boy. It hadn’t taken him long to invite the older man outside for a smoke, away from curious ears, to find that other cocks were dying, too.
So, in the relative privacy of the back yard, each man confessed his secret to the other, and each had found that the other had no solution, no plan to stem the loss. Just this morning, Half-Way had woken up to find a pure-black stud with fifteen victories to its name lying on its back with its claws clenched, already swarming with black biting ants. “Couldn’t even bury him decent,” Half-Way had lamented. “The only way to kill that sickness is fire. And he ain’t the last. I bet you anything, by the time I get home tonight, two, three more gone.”
They stood next to each other on the hard-packed earth, arms folded across their chests, each one unconsciously mimicking the other in the position and tension of his body. Light ash fell on his white shirt, and Pye clicked his tongue as he dusted himself off. Unlike most of the men there tonight, he was dressed, as always, in a plain linen shirt and black tie, even though he rolled his sleeves up as a concession to the heat. Cockfighting was a gentleman’s sport, and he always ensured that he dressed like one.
After a long and thoughtful silence, he finished his hemp, flicked the butt into the bushes without putting it out, and reached for his weed. If he ever needed it, it was now. He lit one and passed it to Half-Way before lighting his own. “So what we gonna do about it?”
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