Now we're standing against the inner edge. Tick socks our shoulders and whispers, “Watch me make coin.” Then he nears his lips to Pillar's left ear and mutters, “Stupid b**h.”
The gameco*ks stand like they haven't even noticed each other, but the way their pupils swarm urges me to leap out. Wielding his beak forward like a rapier, Rex cries a farmer's alarm clock, fans his neck feathers into the hood of a spitting lizard, and switch-blades the red cartilage on his beak upwards. Then he lashes toward the other bird—his claws seemingly clutching from patch of Carolina to patch of Carolina—until he surges up, blows his wings back to parachute from crashing, and strikes like a poltergeist. The white shrieks against the barrage. FLAP CROW SQUAL, FLAP CROW SQUAL. Rex's hooks maul, maul, maul. Alarm clock, alarm clock.
Rex pounces onto the white's back and tumbles it tan into the dirt, vampiring over him with his bat wings. “Oh!” And we watch as Rex's scarecrow feet gnaw and gnaw. He's a vulture he's a vulture he's a vulture. But as if kicking to slide itself on the floor, the white fighter thrashes its pelican wings, scoots from under Rex, then stands with its back to us, wings nestled against its hips, soiled in the sun.
Rex rests, his lungs inflating like the nostrils of a bull, and huffs so sternly that the buoyant dust before his beak swirls. He circles the white contender—prancing forward and dancing back, his pupils wheeling like the gloves of a boxer—and expands his wings from his pumped body as though to ask, “This is it? THIS IS IT?”
Between the white fighter's left wing and left leg, dangles what resembles a tape worm. I point to it and ask, “What's that?”
“Intestine, ese,” says Pillar. “End the fight.”
But Tick says, “No, puto! Till it's dead.”
Rex stiffens still, and over his shoulder, squints at his rival.
With his steel pincer shining like a spur, Rex is a figure at high noon, waiting to draw.