THUGLIT Issue One - страница 2

There are dog-fighters who beat their dogs, who whip them and starve them thinking to make the dogs savage. There’s those who kill their curs, who drown them or shock them and then burn their bodies in the backyard. Some men fight their dogs to the death every time, no quarter asked for or given. Some men fight their dogs in garbage-strewn alleys with rats watching on greedily, the rats knowing they’ll get to feed on the corpse of the loser.

There is another way. In a real dog match, the kind that still draws its rules from old issues of The Police Gazette, there’s a ring about fourteen feet square. Each side has a line in the dirt, a scratch line. You set the dogs behind their scratch lines and hold on to their collars good and tight. You let them go. Each time there’s a break in the action you pull those dogs apart and put them back behind their scratch lines. If one of the dogs doesn’t scratch the earth, running in place to get back into it, the fight is over. No dog fights that doesn’t want it. It has to more than want it-it has to claw for it, it has to want it like the fight was a chunk of steak or a piece of pussy.

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.