If Lucy was my dog I would not have matched her against Tuna. Four pounds is a serious advantage for a sixty-pound dog. It should have been a forfeit. But Jesse needed the money. I told myself that I let him get his way because he is Lucy’s owner and I am just her handler.
Icy wind off Lake Erie rocks the truck, making me swerve. I pull my hand back from Lucy’s mouth and put it back on the wheel. I must drive steady. I must not speed. I cannot risk the police pulling us over. Lucy would die on the side of the road while I sat helpless in handcuffs.
Lucy’s fur is the color of a bad day. Deep grey turned to black where the blood soaks her. Her blood is everywhere. There is gauze over a bad bleeder on the thick muscles of her neck where Tuna savaged her. I wanted to end the fight then, pick Lucy up and declare Tuna the victor. But Jesse said no. Again I let him win. And Lucy scratched the floor trying to get back in the fight.
Tough little bitch. Proud little warrior.
She cannot fight again. Her front leg will never be the same. After tonight she can retire, she can breed, she can heal. But she isn’t done yet. We both have a fight waiting for us in the hotel room.
*****
I am a dogman. I breed fighting dogs. I train fighting dogs to fight better. I take fighting dogs to their fights and I handle them in the pit. This is what I do. It may not be your way but it is an old way. My father was a dogman. He learned the trade from my grandfather, and he taught it to me. I have seen dogs fight and bleed and die. I have cheered them on as they fought. It can be cruel.
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.
