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This appears in a pre-2010 issue
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Rooster
Mark Scott
Cyrus took his grandson Tommy to the school bus stop every morning at seven. He would tell the children about how the neighborhood used to be, and they would tell him what they learned in school. Everybody in town was talking about the new high school stadium that the city council wanted to name after Rooster Williams, the only famous athlete to come out of their neighborhood. Tommy said, “One of the fourth-graders said the nickname had to do with his weight. A rooster is a bantam, and that’s like a gram or a stone in England, something in the metric system.”
“That fourth-grader has it wrong, Tommy. Bantam does mean ‘Rooster,’ but that’s not where he got the name.”
“It wasn’t on account of his weight?”
“Nope, and I should know. I was at his first fight in 1936 and his last one in ‘45. A bantamweight’s small and full-of-fight, like a rooster. But Rooster fought in the mid-range weight classes, not at bantam. The lightest he ever fought pro was junior-welterweight.”
Tommy squinted his eyes, deep in thought. He couldn’t imagine either a 4th grader or his grandfather being so far off base. “Is there a bird called a welter?”
“Welter means flurry, like a flurry of punches.” Cyrus said that Rooster fought mostly around 147 in the pros, which was indeed the welterweight limit. “He came in too skinny to fight middleweight, even when he bulked up.” Cyrus pointed over to the side of the dilapidated furniture warehouse, where street artists had painted a mural featuring Latino and black boxers, war planes and dancers. “He tipped the scales right around one-forty after his second year as an amateur. The welterweights had a lot of fans back then, when boxing and basketball were the only entertainment around here. In December there was the Bronze Gloves, the Silver Gloves in January, and then the Golden Gloves in February and March. People would all come out to see the Gloves in February no matter how cold it got to be.”
Cyrus stopped talking to look at his watch. The so-called bus schedule was more like a guideline in their town as long as the youngsters got to school before nine. The driver picked up the kids all along the rural routes, so nobody held his tardiness against him. “Boxing and basketball were the only things to watch around here in the winter months.”
“You mean they didn’t have cable?”
“We didn’t even have television.”
Tommy gave Cyrus a confused look. “They had basketball before television?”
“They had it. And they played it right there in the school gymnasium. Sometimes a couple thousand people would show up.” Cyrus looked over to where the Mexican, Texan, and USA flags were flying over the border that separates Juarez from their town. A demolition crew was razing the ground for a shopping mall “The high school used to be over there. We had the best basketball team in the state. After high school Rooster fought for about five years as a pro.” As the morning sun shone into Cyrus’ eyes, a far-away expression crossed his face and his voice dropped to a whisper. “Rooster and I went in to WW II in the same platoon. That’s what ended his career in ‘43.”
“But I thought you saw him fight in 1945.”
“I’ll get to that. First you need to understand why it was they called him Rooster. They called him that because his father was a champion cock fighter in Baja California. He was Cocker of the Year in ‘35, which was a big deal when I was coming up. He brought the family to Texas right in the middle of the depression, and made his living offa farming and cockfighting. But then the talk started, about how his boy would cry over the dead chickens that got killed fighting. It was a great insult to a professional cocker to have a kid like Billy, which was Rooster’s real name. His father said, ‘No son o’ mine is a coward at a cockfight.’”
“Did his father call him Rooster?”
“No, that was the neighborhood boys, mocking him. Calling him Rooster was kinda sarcastic, there at first. One day some zoot-suiters from the barrio roughed him up pretty bad, and he took up boxing after that.”
“Did you box with him?”
“No, I played basketball, though I would go see him fight. After he turned pro and won a few bouts, his father finally reclaimed him, in a way. But boxing never really impressed the old man. The only thing he respected was being able to cockfight, lay down your bet and keep that poker face, whether your chicken wins or ends up in a bloody dead heap.”
“Rooster started making money in the pros in ‘39, fighting hard-as-nails one hundred-forty. He was never a bantamweight except in the amateurs, when he was down in the one-tens his first year.” Cyrus watched the boys watching him, shading their eyes against the sun that had climbed up to 7:30. “In ‘43 he fought Beau Jack to a draw at the lightweight limit, a no-decision fight off the record. Most times he had to sweat down to come in at one-thirty-five. But he made the weight that night without a problem. As far as I’m concerned, just getting into the same ring with the great Beau Jack showed the courage of a lion.
“Right after he fought Beau, the Army called us both up. A few months later we landed at Anzio and over the next year fought our way up to the Austrian border. Outside Padua, in Italy, is where he got the Gold Cross you heard about on television. He took out a machine gun nest, and a sniper shot him just between the neck and shoulder. Nobody knew where he was for about a week. A little Italian girl found him almost dead.”
“I got to be real fond of that little girl. She nursed Rooster back to health and when they came to give him his medals they took her picture along with his. That picture was the most famous thing to come out of our Army group. We were all real proud of Rooster.” A block away the neighborhood ice cream truck was making its rounds. The tune it played was a cross between Old McDonald and the theme from the Sanford and Son television show. “She took care of Rooster after the army doctor gashed him up getting that bullet out. He got so infected his whole head turned blue and yellow.”
“The girl and her mother lived in a little casa near the border, one I never went to see. Her mother named her Anastacia or Annabella-something like that. We called her Annie.” While Cyrus was talking he stared off into the horizon. Tommy and the other boys watched with eyes glued to Cyrus.
“Then she comes down with flu-like symptoms—nobody ever figured out exactly what was wrong with her. She got to coughing and choking like she had something stuck in her throat, and she just went from bad to worse. The doc looked her over and said she had ‘a growth,’ but said he couldn’t tell if it was cancer or not.”
“They put her in the army hospital. An army hospital on the front line ain’t no place to get your health back. If you’re not sick going in, you can betcha you’ll be sick coming outta there. Rooster found out he could have her flown stateside and treated at the best New York hospital for 2,000 American dollars. We wanted to pitch in to help him but he was just too stubborn.”
“Could he sell his medal?”
“Not for $2,000. But something better came along. A lot of the boxing champions actually used to hail from outta Europe. Marcel Cerdan, a top middleweight who later came to be middleweight champion, traveled the continent, even when the Germans controlled everything. After Germany surrendered there was carnivals and all kinds of merriment. Anyway, Rooster hears that they need a prelim bout, and he can make five thousand dollars if he wins.” A sad smile spread across Cyrus’ face at the mention of the purse. He checked his watch and saw that it was a few minutes past eight.
“Like I said, Rooster came in real skinny at middleweight. But they was having a round-robin fight off for the European 160 pound title. The French kid he fought had an Arab look, probably an account of he was Algerian. But he was built like a heavyweight, and was mauling Rooster around the ring. You could see that Frenchie was quite a bit stronger than Rooster.
“In the fourth round Rooster’s legs started to wobble and that Frenchie charged in. Rooster caught him with a lightning fast one-two and he fell like a sack of wet cement. It was winner-take-all as for share of the purse and Rooster got his when they brought it in to his dressing room. Then he came out to sit with us and watch Marcel Cerdan beat up one of the local Italian boys. Rooster looked real tired, his eyes couldn’t focus on anything, kept asking me who was winning. He had taken some hard head shots from that Frenchie.”
“Cerdan threw body shots so hard you could hear a thud each time one landed. Over that you could hear ‘em next door, where they was fightin’ chickens. After Cerdan knocked his man out, Rooster got to thinking– Well, I really don’t know what he was thinking.”
“Instead of going to the hospital he stops off at where they’re fighting cocks, under the tents they had set up next to the stadium. I started to say something about him needing to let go of the past, but I didn’t know exactly what to tell him.”
They all sat quiet for a while as Cyrus seemed to debate whether to go on with his tale. Tommy said, “What did he do? I thought he didn’t like seeing the chickens get kilt.”
“He was a lot older by this time, keep that in mind. But older don’t always mean smarter. I reckon he still had something to prove to his father. He sees them calling out bets and taking them, like his father used to do and goes and lays down his whole purse on a scarlet fighting cock, at 3 to 1. The little bastard hacked and fought like hell, but then gets it in the fifth pitting. He took a metal spur in the side of the head that killed him. Rooster went over and, as calm as could be, carried the dead bird out of the arena.”
“Were you sad, Grand-pa?”
“In a way, yes I was. Understand that everyone was tired of war, and looking to do anything for a few laughs. All the Italian and French women without their men... Anyhow we felt bad for Rooster, but you have to realize that we had been living in the shadow of death for two long years. Rooster moped around for a week or so, not talking to anybody. Then all of a sudden he comes to the canteen for breakfast, happy as can be. He said the little girl had finally stopped her coughing.”
“So she got better on her own?” Tommy asked hopefully.
Cyrus sat silent for a while, then said, “No, I’m afraid not. She died when the winter got cold a week later, and Rooster disappeared. Being as how he was a war hero and all, there weren’t even no talk about desertion or nothing like that. Somebody said he went down to Costa Rica. I figure he’s dead by now.”
The yellow school bus pulled up and Cyrus told Tommy to bring home an A in science if he wanted to grow up to be a doctor.
