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.
