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.
But instead I took Lucy to one end of the ring and Deets took Tuna to the other end. Lucy, who had licked my face with a dog’s smile just a minute before, strained to get away from me to head into the fight. The fight is a pit dog’s highest purpose. We have bred them to not feel fear or pain. We have bred them to have wide jaws and a low center of gravity. A pit dog wants the fight the way a ratter wants the rat, the way a bloodhound wants the scent. A dead game dog wants it more than they want life.
On the signal from the referee I released my hold on Lucy. The two dogs collided with a slap and the sound of snapping teeth. Otherwise the warehouse was quiet. The spectators at a dog match are like the men at a strip club. Sometimes they cheer and clap, but mostly they stare on in silence, lost in their own private world.
In the fight there’s nothing for a handler to do but watch. You can’t teach a pit dog to fight any more than you can teach a horse to run. You exercise the dog, but the dog teaches itself. There are many ways of dog fighting, styles as different as the kung-fu styles in those old movies. Some dogs are leg biters. Some go for the head. Some dogs use muscle and buzzsaw speed, while others fight smart. Some just latch onto the bottom jaw and hang on until the other dog burns itself out and gives up. Some dogs are killers whose opponents don’t get the chance to give up. They tear throats and end lives.
Tuna was a killer. She went for the throat. She had a good, strong mouth that tore Lucy up. She had four pounds on her, enough to bully her into position.
Lucy was the smartest dog I ever saw in the pit. She rode Tuna around, denied her the killing grip. Lucy turned the overweight bitch into a leg-biter. But Lucy couldn’t get her own holds to stick. Tuna muscled out of them each time. Thirty minutes into the fight Tuna worked herself out of Lucy’s grasp and sank her jaws into Lucy’s neck. She shook Lucy, trying for a tighter grip, and Lucy slid under her, got her claws into Tuna’s belly and twisted herself free. As the dogs repositioned themselves, bloody, winded, I told Jesse to pick Lucy up. The fight was over, I told him.
