THUGLIT Issue One - [2]

When a dog doesn’t scratch, the fight is over. A dog that gives up, you call that a "cur." Dogs that don’t have any cur in them, we call them "game dogs." Dogs that scratch even when they’re close to death, who’d rather die than give up, you call those dogs "dead game."

But you don’t let them die, not if you’re a real dogman. A dead game dog is the goal, the pinnacle of a pit dog. That needs to breed. To make more dead game dogs. To breed more warrior stock. You’ve got to be the quit for a dog who doesn’t have quit in them. A man who lets a dead game dog fight to the death is both cruel and foolish.

My employer is a cruel and foolish man.

You may think that I am cruel and foolish too. Maybe you want to think I’m the villain of this story. And maybe I am. But now I’m going to tell you about Lucy. And hers is a story worth telling.

*****

The hotel where I have built my emergency room sits in one of those Detroit neighborhoods where it looks like a slow-motion bomb has been exploding for the last thirty years. Even the people are torn apart. I see crutches, wheelchairs, missing limbs. Nothing and no one are complete.

I pull off of Van Dyke into the lot of the Coral Court. Hookers, tricks and pimps scatter like chickens. The tires crunch on asphalt chunks and broken glass. I park as close to the room as I can.

I leave Lucy in the cab of the truck and open the door to the room I have rented. It is just how I left it. One of the double beds has been stripped down, a fresh sheet of my own laid across it. I crank the thermostat up to max. Lucy will need the heat.

I wrap Lucy in a towel and carry her across the lot. She is so small and so cold. As we cross the lot, a fat man drinking from a brown paper bag shoots me a look.

“Goddamn, what’d you do to that dog?”

“Put your eyes back in your head, motherfucker,” I tell him. He looks away. So cur he can’t even see I’m bluffing.

I take Lucy inside. I place her on the sheet. The white sheet blushes as it soaks up her blood. I open up the tackle box that serves as my mobile medical kit. I change the gauze on her neck. I tape it on tight. I take out a long loop of bootlace. I tourniquet the front leg, the one with the most bleeders. I take out a brown plastic bottle of hydrogen peroxide. I yank out the marlinspike on my knife and stab through the lid. I wash out the wounds. Dozens of punctures, tears, jaw-shaped rings all over the front of her.

They say that Vlad the Impaler walked through the field hospitals after battle, inspecting the wounded. Those with wounds to the front of them got promoted. Those with wounds in their backs, like they’d been fleeing-Vlad had those men killed. Vlad would have made Lucy a general. Her back and haunches are unmarred. She’d fought every second she’d been in the bout.

Tough little bitch. Proud little warrior.

*****

The match had been in an abandoned warehouse-no shortage of those here. The ring had been built in the morning out of a two-foot tall square of wood filled up halfway with dirt. Around the ring stood gangbangers, bikers, cholos and mobbed-up types. Dog matches in Detroit are like those ads by that one clothes company that always have the black guy and the white guy holding hands, except at the dog match the other hand is filled with blood money or a gun.

Tuna was owned by Frankie Arno, who lived in St. Clair Shores along with all the other Detroit dagos who didn’t get the memo that the Mafia doesn’t run things anymore. His dogman was Deets from the Cass Corridor. Deets doesn’t hold to the old ways. Deets uses a homemade electric chair to fry his curs, and hangs live cats from chains for his dogs to chew on and improve their grips. When the referee told us that Tuna came in heavy, I told Jesse to kill the match.

“Four pounds is too much,” I told him.

“Fuck that,” Jesse said. “You told me this bitch is game.”

He was a short man with a short man’s temper. He was the only man I’ve ever known to lose money in the drug trade. He bought Lucy and some other prime stock when he was flush. He also hired the best dogman in Michigan, if you don’t mind me calling myself that. Now that he was down, he was looking to recoup his investment. I do not know who he owes money to, only that they are frightening to this frightening man. This type of fear doesn’t make a man listen to reason. I tried anyway.

“She is,” I said. “She has potential to be a grand champion. That’s worth more money than one fight.”

“I’m not bitching out here. I’m not a punk.”

Across the ring, Deets studied us behind hooded eyes. Deets knew Jesse needed the purse money. Deets knew that I wouldn’t be able to talk Jesse out of the match if Deets brought his dog in heavy. Four pounds wasn’t a mistake. It was strategy. I had to hand it to him. He’d played it beautifully. I gave him a nod to let him know. He just kept staring back.

Before a match, each side’s handlers wash the other one’s dog. Keeps a man like Deets from soaking his dog’s fur with poison. Back in the old days, the rule was you could ask to taste a man’s dog if you were suspicious. I didn’t like handling Tuna, much less licking her. I know the signs of a dog who has been treated mean. When I washed her she trembled, and a deep-chest growl burbled in her chest. It sounded like a boat idling at the dock. Pit dogs shouldn’t growl at a man. We breed them to love us. I didn’t want to know what Deets had done to her to ruin that. She kept growling but she didn’t bite me. Maybe it would have been better if she had. If she’d bit we’d have put her down right there. That’s one way our world and the straight world agrees: Dogs that attack men have to go.