By Charlie Wakenshaw

Biographical Statement

I am a junior in the undergraduate creative writing program at the University of Washington. I was born in Seattle and have lived there all my life. Currently I share a small room with my girlfriend in a small apartment on the edge of the city. Travelling provides me with many great experiences that I try to capture with the written word. I enjoy bringing unique thought and form into the tradition of narrative. Currently I am mining through the experiences of a two month trip to Central America during the summer of 2014. This piece comes from that trip. I have been published in the UW literary magazine Bricolage and the campus journal of speculative fiction, AU.

Island Entertainment

Once a year the town of Moyogalpa, on the Isla de Ometepe in Nicaragua celebrates their patron saint with a three day festival. They parade a statue of this saint through the streets. Townsfolk drink beer by the literful and rum by the bottle. The local park is turned into a festival ground complete with carnival games, plenty of cheap food and beer, loud music, and bull riding. Men jump on the backs of bulls and ride until they’re bucked. There are fireworks in the streets. There are gangs of boys with bundles of rockets slung over their shoulders sneaking through the crowds to side streets where they can light the fuse and stand back. The sound, like a gun shot, is constant. There are people hocking ice cream, cigarettes, and gum in the streets, their yells rising over the din.

Somewhere, in the shadows of all this celebration were cockfights. We had been hearing about the “pelea de gallos” ever since getting into town but they were hard to pin down. On Thursday we were told Friday and on Friday we were told Saturday. Now after a few days of careful questioning and a false alarm or two I was standing on the concrete porch of a cinder block house on a dark village road waiting for the ride that would take me there.

Throw a leg over the bike. Ankle bone singed on burning metal. Freddy’s hand a sledge on the throttle. Two gold rings jeweled and glistening. Headlight beam. Darkness tunneled through. Past an old man rocking on his porch. A horse in the street. Kids on bicycles. Costumed crowds. Dancing. Singing. To the ferry dock. Unlit gravel road. Throttle loosened and a lurch. Stop. Pool of light spilled from the bar sign. Illuminated pyramid flanked by two palm trees.

The rest of Freddy’s family and my girlfriend awaited our arrival like hitchhikers with cutoff thumbs. Freddy was our shuttle. He had taken them in one weighed-down load and come back for me. Freddy was our guide. Everyone followed his lead.

We came through the door, which is the back door, which is a rectangular opening in the cement wall in this order: Freddy at the helm (jet black greased hair), his wife Maria (tight jeans, white blouse), their daughter Andrea (3ft. tall toddler in white dress), my girlfriend (pony-tail-swing), and me.

Through the door came loud driving music of the kind you hear all through town. The same gun-shot snare drum and pepper-grinder percussion, the same sweet voice singing the same sweet song. It is the driving pop sound coming from tiendas and home stereos, and pumped through the speakers of tuk-tuks driven by adolescents with spiked hair and a truant’s grin.

Empty dance floor swimming with rainbow lights. Colors muddled by floor grime. Lone DJ on stage. A bulbous woman in concessions window hands over a beer. Green glass bottle dew-dropped and filled. A white fist reaches across and empties a palmful of heavy gold coins into her hand. Slow motion. Empty beer crate backdrop. A row of spectators standing in the dirt growing bigger. Beer half-cocked by the hip bone. Repeated sips brought forth to awaiting lips.

Freddy’s friend came up and gave him a good smack on the back and cracked some jokes. He gave out firm handshakes to us all and a few words of quick Spanish slang. When he got to Andrea in the line he bent down to get on her level and spoke softly, drawing out a smile. It was her first cock fight and how proud they all were of her. He went off to another group of men to slap laughter out of their arms and chests.

A man weaves through the crowd with a weighted sack. Burlap. He’s going out back. Empty rice sack. Dead birds in the bottom. A circle of men each with a bird in hand. Stroking feathers. Smoking factory cigarettes. Butt falling. Extinguished by the cowboy-boot heel.

We took our places around the ring. Our places consisted of wooden benches and white plastic lawn chairs. Rough boards and chain-link fence formed a circle to contain the fight. Hanging by a chain into the center of the ring was a round wall clock.

The two birds had been weighed in and matched up. The two owners held them tightly in their arms and stroked the feathers vigorously while facing each other.

Before the birds could go at it there was a lot of pre-fight pomp to be taken care of. The birds were allowed to strut as prospective bettors flocked in to pick a winner. One man collected a stack of cash as the men sifted in and out jabbering loudly to ridicule or support the choice of their comrades. Next each bird got outfitted with a sharp spur on their leg and a few minutes to warm up. A training bird was pulled from a wooden pen on the side of the ring.

Mangy ragdoll. Thoroughly throttled. A whole day of fights. Dusty dirt flaking from weak wings. Red throat undulation.

The trainer used the bird as live bait to anger and provoke his prize fighter then passed it off to the other guy who did the same. Good: now each bird is nice and angry and riled up and ready to fight.

The crowd circled the cage. They got close to the fence and piled onto the rickety benches. Men leaned in close to each other to make predictions and point into the ring. If, in that moment just before the birds were released, all the people were zapped into space there would be left behind a perfect connect-the-dots circle of beer bottles and cigarette butts hovering in midair. The ref gave the signal.

Two mini T-rex bodies fly. Collision. Wing flaps and head jerks. Cluck and frenzy. Freddy’s face crumpled. Focused eyes. Face after face jutting toward the ring. Mouths writhing with cheers. Fists slamming the chain link. Denting the chain link. A woman tips to the bench edge, yelling as loud as she can.

She was enthralled, wanted to see some death, wanted to see the throat-ripping kill strike.

The ref rang the bell to signal the end of the round. Both handlers rushed in to snatch up their prize fighters and assess the damage. They checked to make sure the spurs were still fastened tight.

The one owner, the one whose bird seemed to be losing, brought his bird up to his face and started to suck on its head. It was a rooster Popsicle and he was trying to eat the thing in one bite.

Freddy leaned over and told me what it was all about. As their throat gest slashed their lungs fill with blood. The trainers were siphoning out the blood. And there was no spitting either. It was straight down the gullet with the stuff, still warm and metallic no doubt.

Close up on me: white faced with a month and a half of beard turning to a thicket. Eyes caught between observation, approval, and horror.

Shift to Andrea: on and off her mother’s knee, tugging at the strictness of her white dress, the eyes of someone seeing something for the first time. She looks to her father.

Freddy: lips twitching at each attack. Knuckles shadow the pecking. Eyes move through the hexagonal frames of fence links.

The wall clock on the chain: minutes passing, the angle between the minute and hour hand widening to obtuseness.

The rounds ticked away. The excitement of the crowd was swelling and then receding between breaks in the action. As the fighting went on, feathers became more coated in blood and more frequent head-to-mouth suction was required.

There was a clear winner emerging. Still upright, he pecked at the stumbling and jerking body of his opponent flapping in the dirt. It had been a long one and the enthusiasm from the crowd was subdued. A round ended and the owners swooped in.

Empty those lungs. Lips around the skull. Lapping up red blood. Face folded in concern. Prayers whispered into rooster ears.

The last round began feeble. The birds stood apart and raised their wings only slightly. After some pathetic nudging and stumbling it was called without death. There was a clear loser though who, I’m sure didn’t make it much longer after the final bell. The ring cleared. The benches and lawn chairs emptied. The men formed into new groups and lit fresh cigarettes. They debated and went over the details of the fight. One man with a rooster belt buckle drained the last few inches of beer in his bottle and spat into the dirt.

Think back to those afternoons spent taking up as much of the couch as possible. A family gathering at the TV. Siblings sprawled on the carpet. The weekly dose of entertainment. One thousand channels just point and shoot.

Freddy and his family stayed around to meet up with some of their friends and we split off. On our way walking out of town we went through the festival grounds which were still full of weekend revelers, full of that spirit that comes with a multi-day party: the feeling that as long as you keep going, tomorrow will never come. The next day we would leave Moyogalpa to see more of Nicaragua and after that we only had a few more weeks before flying back to Seattle.

I grabbed a beer from one of the many stands, the same kind of beer advertised in the golden light out front of the cockpit. Just on the edge of the park a grimy man came up out of the crowd and held up an empty plastic cup. It was striped with the yeasty remains of dried beer. I filled his cup half way from my bottle, said cheers, and started the long walk home.