The Reapers

The breeders crouched at either side of the pit, their roosters pecking at the air, sensing that combat was imminent. The birds were introduced to each other, their hackles rising in instinctive hatred, and then they were released. Griggs worked his way through the crowd as the birds fought, catching occasional glimpses of flashing spikes, of blood spatter landing on arms, chests, faces. He saw a man instinctively lick the warm blood from his lips with the tip of his tongue, his eyes never moving from the combat below. One of the birds, a yellow-hackled rooster, got spiked in the neck and began to flag. The breeder withdrew it temporarily, blowing on its head to revive it, then sucking the blood from its beak before returning it to the fray, but it was clear that the rooster had had enough. It went cold, refusing to respond to the attacks of its opponent. It was counted out, and the fight declared over. The losing breeder picked up the distressed bird in his arms, looked at it sadly, then wrung its neck.

Alderman had not moved from his barrel, and Griggs could tell that the night had not gone well for him.

“Bullshit, man,” said Alderman, his voice like that of a mourner whispering prayers for the dead, or a soft brush sweeping ashes from a stone floor. “That was all bullshit.”

Griggs leaned against the wall and lit a cigarette, in part to get some of the smell of the pit out of his nostrils. Griggs had never been much for cockfighting. He wasn’t a gambler, and he had grown up in the city. This wasn’t his place.

“Got some news for you,” he said, “something might ought to cheer you up.”

“Uh-huh,” said Alderman. He did not look at Griggs, but began counting and recounting his money, as though hoping that the act of moving it through his fingers might multiply it, or reveal a previously unseen twenty among the fives and ones.

“The boy that done Deber. Could be I know where he’s at.”

Alderman finished counting and slipped the bills into a scuffed brown leather wallet, then placed the wallet carefully in the inside pocket of his jacket and closed the button. They had been searching for the boy for ten weeks now. They had tried intimidating the women at the cabin, pulling up outside it in their big old, beaten-up Ford, all false smiles and implied threats, but the boy’s grandmother had fronted them right there on her porch, and then three men had appeared from the trees, locals looking out for their own, and he and Griggs had moved on. Alderman figured that even if they did know where he was, the women wouldn’t tell them, not even if they took a knife to one of them. He could see it in the matriarch’s eyes as she stood there before her open door, her hands on her hips as she cussed them softly for what they were trying to do. Like Chief Wooster, Alderman knew something of the woman’s reputation. They weren’t ordinary cuss words she was using against them. It made no nevermind to Alderman, who didn’t believe in God or the devil, but he admired the woman’s demeanor, and was respectful of her even as he tried to communicate to her the level of damage he and Atlas were prepared to inflict in order to find the boy.

“So where he at?” he asked Griggs.

“San Diego.”

“Boy’s a long way from home. How’d you come by it?”

“Friend told a friend. Met a man in a bar, they got talking, you know how it is. Man heard we was looking for a young nigger, heard there might be money in it. Said a boy like ours showed up in San Diego looking for work about two months back. Got him a job as a kitchen boy in a diner.”

“This man have a name?”

“White guy, didn’t give no name. Heard about the boy from some redneck owns a bar in the boy’s hometown. But I made some calls, got someone out there to take a look at the boy at his place of work. It’s him, sounds like.”

“Long way to go to be wrong.”

“Got Del Mar out there. Not far to Tijuana neither. It’s him, though. I know it.”

Alderman got up from the barrel and stretched. There wasn’t much to keep them here, and he did owe that boy: Deber had been close to setting up a score, and his death had fucked that up royally. Without Deber, he and Atlas had been struggling. They needed to hook up with someone new, someone with juice, but the rumors about what the boy maybe had done to Deber had spread, and now he and Atlas weren’t getting the respect that they ought to have. They needed to fix things with the boy before they could start making money again.

That night, they hit a mom and pop store and netted seventy-five dollars from the register and the safe. When Griggs put a knife to the woman’s throat, her husband had come up with $120 more from a box in the storeroom. They left them tied up in the back of the store and turned the lights out, tearing the telephone from the wall before they departed. Alderman had been wearing an old gray overcoat over his suit and both he and Griggs had cloth sacks over their heads to hide their faces. He had made sure that they parked out of sight of the store before they went in, so their car couldn’t be identified. It had been an easy takedown, not like some of the ones they’d done with Deber back in the day. Deber would have raped the woman at the store out of spite, right in front of her husband.

They stopped near Abilene at a bar owned by an old acquaintance of Griggs’s, and where a man named Poorbridge Danticat, who knew of Alderman and Griggs and Deber, made a joke about Deber losing his head. Alderman and Griggs had waited for him in the parking lot afterward, and Griggs had beaten Poorbridge so badly that his jaw was re moved almost entirely from his skull and one ear hung crookedly from a flap of skin. It would serve as a message. People needed to learn some respect.

All this because of Deber, thought Alderman, as they drove west. I never even liked him, and now we have to travel for days to kill a boy just cause Deber couldn’t control himself with his woman. Well, they’d make the boy pay, make an example of him so that folk would know that he and Atlas took these things seriously. There was no other way. Business, after all, was business.

The diner stood on National Boulevard, not far from the X-rated Pussycat house. The Pussycat had started life as the Bush Theater in 1928, then became, at various stages in its history, the National, the Aboline, and the Paris, before finally joining the porn mainstream in the 1960s. When Louis arrived for work each morning shortly after five, the Pussycat was silent and sleeping, like an old harlot after a hard night’s whoring, but by the time he left, twelve hours later, a steady stream of men had already begun to make use of the Pussycat’s facilities, although, as Mr. Vasich, the Yugoslav owner of the diner, would often remark, “Ain’t none of them staying longer than a cartoon.”

Louis’s job at Vasich’s Number One Eatery, as a pink and yellow neon sign a