The phrasing gave me pause. Where I’d grown up, in Virginia, “I don’t care to” was a polite way of saying, “I prefer not to” or even, given a frosty enough inflection, “hell, no.” In East Tennessee, though — at least in the mountains — I’d noticed that it seemed to mean exactly the opposite. I wasn’t sure how much financial business Waylon could conduct on a Sunday, but I told him I didn’t care to stop.
We headed north on the river road for a few miles, then made a left onto an unmarked paved road that disappeared into a wooded valley. A small, mean-spirited brick house hugged the road, centered in a small clearing fenced with chain-link; in the driveway sat a Cooke County sheriff’s cruiser. I pointed. “Tom Kitchings live here?”
“Naw,” growled Waylon. “His damn brother, Orbin. Sorriest sumbitch in Cooke County.” He opened his mouth as if to say more, then clamped it shut.
A quarter-mile up the blacktop, we turned left onto a broad swath of fresh gravel running up the mouth of a small valley. “Right up this holler here’s our first stop,” Waylon said. We’d barely left the pavement when he halted at a small, glass-doored booth, from which a thirtysomething blonde woman emerged. Clad in snug designer jeans and a short suede jacket, she could have passed for a stylish West Knoxville mom who had been suddenly plucked from a kid’s soccer game or the mall and beamed out here to the boonies. Waylon rolled down his window and handed her a laminated card of some sort. She scanned it with a portable bar-code reader, then gave it back and waved us in. High-tech indeed! As she turned to go back into the booth, Waylon nodded at her shrink-wrapped backside. “That there’s just about worth the trip, ain’t it, Doc?” I didn’t want to admit it, but the view was stunning.
The gravel drive soon widened into a huge backwoods parking lot, measuring forty or fifty yards across and at least a football field in length, bulldozed into the floor of the hollow. The lot was crammed with three neat rows of diagonally parked cars and trucks. As we eased up one aisle and down the other in search of a vacant slot, I lost count at 150 vehicles, mostly pickups, bearing license plates from Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, even as far away as Oklahoma and Texas. As best I could tell, it was a wholesale auto auction — there was a similar auction lot beside Interstate 75 between Knoxville and Chattanooga — though why this one lay so far off the beaten track was a mystery to me.
At the upper end of the lot was a barn-sized metal building, surrounded by dozens of small garden sheds, battered travel trailers, and a new two-story structure that resembled a small, windowless motel, with dozens of doors giving onto the ground-floor sidewalk and the second-floor balcony. Waylon had finally circled back nearly to the entrance booth to park, so we hiked up the long gravel lot toward the big metal shed, which appeared to be the hub of the complex.
“This is quite an operation here,” I said as we trudged across the coarse gravel.
“Yeah, it’s been around ever since I can remember,” he said, “but it seems to be really expanding under this couple that bought the business a few years ago.”
“Are you bidding on one of these vehicles? I haven’t seen anything in the lot that holds a candle to that truck you’re driving.”
“Bidding?” Waylon chuckled. “Well, you might call it that, I reckon.”
The metal building seemed to pulse with a cacophony of yells and whoops. The auction must really be heating up, I thought. A door was set midway along the side. As we approached, I glimpsed a pair of eyes peering out through a narrow slit in the door. The eyes studied me for an uncomfortably long time, with an expression I took to be some combination of suspicion and hostility, then cut in Waylon’s direction. Waylon seemed to recognize the irises or pupils through the slit. “Hey, T-Ray, you gonna let us in, or do we hafta just listen from out here?”
A nasal voice slithered up through the slit. “Who’s that you got with you?”
“Friend of me and Jim’s from Knoxville. He’s all right.”
“He better be.”
Waylon nodded his immense head, though I wasn’t sure whether he was offering further assurance that I was, in fact, all right, or was simply acknowledging what seemed to be the other man’s unspoken “or else.” Maybe both. At any rate, T-Ray’s eyes vanished from view, a metal bolt slid back, and the door swung open. “Stay close,” Waylon rumbled in my ear, and we stepped inside.
It took my eyes a moment to adjust — not to the dimness I’d expected, but to the glare of fluorescent tubes, practically enough to light Neyland Stadium for a UT night game. Nearly two hundred people jammed the building, some of them standing, others perched on wooden bleachers that ascended nearly to the roof. Big-bellied men and gangly boys, mostly, though I noticed several women and even a handful of girls clustered on the top row of bleachers. The crowd’s skin tones ranged from pasty Anglo white to Hispanic olive brown; their attire ranged from overalls and feed caps to hip-hugger jeans, snakeskin boots, Abercrombie sweatshirts, and milky white Stetsons.
A narrow gap bisected the bleachers directly in front of us, and through it, I glimpsed a round enclosure at the center. Waylon began threading his way toward it, and — mindful of his instructions and of T-Ray’s unwelcoming eyes — I stuck close.
As we approached the enclosure, I saw that it was a circle about fifteen feet across, dirt-floored and fenced in by wire mesh rising to a height of eight or ten feet. Dust hung in the air like dry, allergy-baiting fog, giving the scene an even more surreal quality than it already possessed. Shouts punctuated the background din: “Hunnerd on the red!” “Fifty on the gray!” “Call fifty!” “Five hunnerd on the red!” This last cry, in Waylon’s booming voice, nearly shattered my eardrum.
Two men faced each other inside the ring. One was a long-bearded ancient who resembled some Old Testament prophet in baggy overalls. The other was a young Hispanic man in a snug brown jumpsuit, monogrammed “Felipe.” Leaning toward each other, weaving and swaying rhythmically, the men seemed to be cradling something to their chests. I was still trying to make out what it was when they squatted in unison and then stood back up, now empty-handed. There was a momentary lull in the din, followed by an explosive flurry of wings and feathers, accompanied by bloodcurdling screeches and raucous cheers. “Hit ’im, Red! Hit ’im! There you go!” “Come on, Gray! Stick it to ’im!”
As I watched in horror, two roosters beat their wings in midair, kicking and tearing at each other with their feet as they struggled to hover. I caught the glint of steel blades on their legs, and I knew with sickening certainty that the cockfight I had stumbled into would end swiftly. Cockfighting was illegal in Tennessee, I knew — as it was in every state but Oklahoma, Louisiana, and New Mexico — but in a hardscrabble area like Cooke County, which tended to regard the law more as a challenge than as a code of conduct, it was hardly surprising that it continued.
The birds tumbled to the ground in a knot of feathers and blood. “Hit ’im baby, hit ’im baby, hit ’im baby,” chanted a bleached-blonde woman sitting by my right shoulder. “Git ’er done, Red,” yelled a man at my left.
In the ring, a third man — cockfights had referees, apparently — motioned to the birds’ handlers, who swooped in to disentangle the snarled cocks. The men clasped the birds to their chests again, smoothing their feathers, blowing warm air onto their backs; they even seemed to be pressing their lips around the roosters’ combs as if to warm them, though I had no idea whether that was the purpose or whether it was merely some good-luck ritual.