Love and Other Wounds

by Jordan Harper

  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 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 agree: 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 it wants 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 dogfighting, styles as different as tiger style and monkey style in those old kung fu movies. Some dogs are leg biters. Some go for the head. Some dogs use muscle and buzz-saw 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.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” Jesse asked. “No way.”

  I could have picked her up then. I should have. But I didn’t.

  It took her another half hour and maybe her life, but Lucy finally broke the bigger dog. When Tuna went cur and we pulled Lucy off her, Lucy was still clawing to get at the beaten dog.

  Tough little bitch. Proud little warrior.

  It wasn’t until later, while Jesse counted his money, that the adrenaline went away and Lucy collapsed.

  If she pisses, she lives. So I need to get fluids into her system. I take out a plastic bag of saline. I stick it under my armpit to warm it up for a minute. I hook the IV up onto the metal stand. I take Lucy’s leg in my hand and roll my thumb around it until the vein is visible against the bone of the leg. I wipe Lucy down with an alcohol swab. I get the IV needle out. I go to put the needle in. I stop.

  My hand is shaking. I stare at it for long seconds. I take a few deep breaths. The shaking subsides. I slide the needle in. I secure it with horse tape. I take the IV bag out of my armpit and hook it to the IV.

  Next I give Lucy a shot of an anti-inflammatory drug, pre-measured for twenty milligrams per kilogram of bodyweight. Next, penicillin, one cc per twenty pounds of body weight. While the fluids go in her, I get back to treating her wounds. I trim the hanging skin to keep the flesh from going proud. I check her mouth to see if she has bitten through her lips. Her gums are the whitish pink of fresh veal. Better. Not good enough.

  I close the wounds. Some bites just get a little powder. I get out the staple gun for the worst of them. They bind the wounds together with a great loud CLICK. Lucy does not wince or whine while the staples snap down on her flesh.

  Tough little bitch. Proud little warrior.

  I will not let her die. But there’s nothing I can do now. I have to give the fluids a chance to work. She sleeps. I can’t. I watch bad teevee, something with fat people sweating on treadmills. I switch channels. People screaming at each other, throwing glasses, throwing punches. I switch again. The news, nothing but lying politicians and pretty dead white girls.

  A knock at the door. I check out the peephole. It’s Jesse. I open the door. A miasma of whiskey-stink comes in with him. He looks at Lucy. He whistles a low note.

  “She still living?”

  “For now.”

  “Do what you can, man,” he says. “She’s hardcore. Me likey.”

  “She’ll be a hell of a dam,” I say. I’m talking too fast. I never was a salesman. “Let’s breed her with that brindle stud that Lopez has . . .”

  “Hell, no, not yet. Bitch has fights in her yet.”

  “Jesse, she’ll never come back all the way from this,” I say. “She’s already going to be a legend. Four pounds under and the dead-game bitch won. Breed her.”

  “She’s going back in the pit,” he says. I chew a chunk out of the side of my mouth.

  “That rapper dude who was there, the one who owns Cherry? He wants to match her,” Jesse says. “Shit, man, Cherry’s a grand champion. She’s legit.”

  “Lucy’s leg won’t ever heal right. She can’t win another fight.”

  “Fuck it, then we lay money on her to lose. It’s still getting paid.”

  I don’t say anything. My hands are shaking again. I don’t want Jesse to see.

  “Palmer?” He looks at me.

  “She can’t go back in the pit,” I tell him. I try to sound calm and steady.

  “What’s this can’t shit?” Jesse turns his body sideways. It’s an unconscious reaction of a fighting man to a threat. You turn sideways to make your body a smaller target to your enemy. I think about the stories I’ve heard. T
he things Jesse’s done to men who cross him. Stories with knives in them. Pliers. Heated pieces of metal.

  There is a scratch line in front of me.

  I do not scratch. I do not fight.

  “I’m your dogman,” I tell him. “You’re the owner. You make the call. If she lives, Jesse. Big if.”

  His posture goes back to normal. He smiles.

  “That’s the spirit. If she dies, she dies. But if not, patch her up and we match her against Cherry. The gate will be enormous. Anyway, I didn’t get into this to be a breeder, like some bored Grosse Pointe housewife with her goddamn Pekinese. I’m in it for the blood. Win or lose it’s a payday, isn’t it?”

  I say, “Yeah.”

  Cur. Goddamn cur.

  Jesse leaves. I look toward Lucy. Lucy’s ribs rise and fall so gently. If she lives, she will not recover fast enough. She will lose her next match. Lucy is dead game. She will not quit until she is dead. And Jesse won’t pull her out.

  If she pisses, she lives. But then what? She fights. She dies. Dies bad.

  I’m saving her life to kill her in a month.

  Tough little bitch. Proud little warrior.

  I’m sorry I am not as strong as you.

  At the bottom of the tackle box is the final treatment. Vets call it T-61. It’s a fatal mixture of narcotics and paralytics, legally available only to licensed veterinarians. If I inject the T-61 into the IV bag, Lucy never has to wake up again. I take the plastic stopper off of the T-61.

  The IV continues its drip-drip-drip. Lucy stirs. Her legs run in dog dreaming, swaddling up the blanket around her. She snarls. She bites the air. Still fighting in her sleep.

  Still fighting.

  Okay then. We’ll do it her way.

  I carry Lucy out into the parking lot and put her down. She sniffs the ground weakly. Her paws shake with the effort. She looks up at me with pleading eyes. She knows what I want of her. But she is so very tired. She falls into the gravel. Some of her wounds open up again. Blood drips, but no piss.

  I’m talking to her. I don’t know when I started. I don’t know exactly what I tell her, but I know that it is true. The world fades out around us until we are the only two things left in it. I make her a promise. I know that I mean it. I will not let her die.

  Lucy squats. My heart sits too large in my chest. It kicks and kicks. Lucy yelps. She squirts hot amber piss onto the parking lot. A flood of it.

  Tough little bitch. Proud little warrior.

  When she is done Lucy limps over to my side and leans against me, confused by the noises I can’t help making. I stand in the hotel parking lot and cry over a puddle of dog piss.

  I made her a promise. I will keep it. Lucy will not fight again. She’s fought enough. Me? I’m just getting started. If Jesse has a problem with that, he better be ready to scratch.

  I WISH THEY NEVER NAMED HIM MAD DOG

  Some people will tell you that a person’s name has power and meaning. But it’s not so. A name’s just a name is all. It don’t have the power to affect your fate. Maybe you think it’s because I’m named Geat myself that I have this opinion. Here’s what being named Geat means: it means that my daddy was one hardcore Aryan son of a bitch is what it means. But just because I’m named after a bunch of white barbarians don’t make me a natural-born Super White Man. Here in the Ozarks, people here being mostly white as an albino’s scalp, you go around hating the niggers and Jews, you might as well get a hate-on for the Martians. There’s plenty of pale-ass bastards around here to hate anyway. Of course, if you can’t keep yourself out of prison like my old man, you might run into a few more of the brothers. That’s why my name is Geat Mashburn and also why I always had two birthday parties when I was a kid—one in the Leavenworth visiting room. See, the things that happen, the choices folk make, those are the things that shape you, not a name. But nicknames are different. A nickname stuck to you at the right time can twist your life around forever. Most people who you’d ask about Mad Dog McClure, they’d tell you he was so cussed mean and crazy that God himself had that name written down for him in the Book of Life. But most of those people don’t know what I do. See, I was there.

  I was there at Jackie Blue’s the night Joe got the name Mad Dog. When the night started, he was just Joe McClure, a good old boy with a job sticking rebar in concrete. The guy was a metalhead with shaggy hair, usually wearing some black T-shirt with a name like Morbid Angel or Cannibal Corpse on it, but that’s not that strange in these parts. He was a big fellow, almost as tall as me, but in a way you wouldn’t notice. No jailhouse tats, nothing in the world that would have made you think that this fellow was going to become one of the most feared men in the hills.

  To tell the truth, the only guy with a rep that night at Jackie Blue’s—except old Jackie himself—was me. See, I’m a watchdog. Around here we don’t have no Mafia or big crime families to keep the peace between operators, or to police ’em when they try to run games on each other. So if you want to make sure your deal goes down without a hitch, you call on me, and I’ll come along to watchdog the deal. People see me coming their way and all their thoughts of double-crossing and dirty deals just dribble out their ears like creek water.

  The night in question I was drinking double Crown and Cokes and talking to Jackie about what Mike Lewis had done last weekend in the parking lot of the bar. See, the weekend before old Mike Lewis got off at the bus stop down at the square having just come from a seven-year bit for armed robbery and walked straight to Jackie Blue’s to drink away his gate money. About six Wild Turkeys later, Lewis bumps into some square john who’d just walked into the wrong bar looking for a place to watch the Cards game. Now understand when a man walks out of a seven-year stretch, he’s different than when he went in. In this case Lewis done swoll up like a tick and covered his arms in dirty gray tats of the Grim Reaper, FTW, the number 13, and the like. So the square john was real apologetic, tried to buy Lewis a replacement for his spilled drink.

  Lewis just went sort of crazy, talking about how this square john was talking out the side of his neck and whatnot. Jackie tells him to take it outside. Even Lewis knew not to start shit inside Jackie Blue’s—Jackie’s retired, but he likes to stay active—so he drags this little square john outside and gives him an old-fashioned Ozarks ass-whipping. And when he’s done, he props the fellow up against the side of the car and makes the guy open his mouth. And then he pulls out his pecker and takes a leak using that fellow’s mouth for a urinal.

  So the next weekend, Jackie and I are hashing the story over and having a laugh. Maybe it seems a little cold to laugh at it, but you learn quick in the life that you either laugh at the fucked-up shit around you or you start doing it yourself. Is the square world like that too? Anyway, me and Jackie had a big old time telling each other the story, and we never paid any mind to Joe McClure playing the Ms. Pac-Man machine in the corner.

  Maybe twenty minutes later, who walks into Jackie Blue’s but old Mike Lewis himself, looking like a week out of stir hasn’t taken the edge off his crazy. He orders three double Wild Turkeys in three minutes and pays for each of them with a twenty as fresh and clean as a new-snowed field. It doesn’t take Magnum, P.I. to figure that Lewis ran out of the gate money they gave him when he got set free and that he’s robbing gas stations again. Mike Lewis was waving Jackie over to order number four when he got interrupted.

  “Cocksucker!” Joe yelled at the machine, and then he slapped the glass top. A ghost must have got him. But since the song on the jukebox died at just that second, Joe’s swearing comes out louder than he meant it to. You know how that is. For some reason no one will ever know, Lewis gets the idea that Joe went and called him a cocksucker. Like I said, prison can change a man, and sometimes things happen that you don’t ever tell no one about. So Lewis walks over and shoves Joe right out of his chair, just like that.

  Joe’s hammer spilled out his tool belt of its own accord. He didn’t fish it out like you’ve heard it told. And most of the people
at Jackie Blue’s that night didn’t know that Joe had just spent twenty minutes listening to the story of how Lewis turned a man into his private piss pot just the week before. So I guess to them, when they saw Joe come up from the floor and open up Lewis’s head with the claw end of the hammer, it might have looked unprovoked. And I can see how if you didn’t know the whole story, the way Joe turned the hammer around and gave Lewis a few more whacks on the way down could have looked like overkill.

  Well, Jackie Blue’s cleared out pretty quick after that, and I left along with everyone else, not needing that kind of shit in my life, so I can’t tell you what Joe’s face looked like while he watched old Mike Lewis drip blood onto the scummed-up carpet. But I’ve often wondered on it.

  And it wasn’t but a week later that I heard someone call Joe McClure Mad Dog for the first time.

  “You hear about old Mad Dog, what he done last night?” Bill Houser asked and then wiped chaw spit off his flavor-saver. Houser is one of those good old boys always has a plastic cup with him half full of black sputum. Makes me sick. The cash he was paying me to sit in a holler and watch some fellows move bales of weed from one truck to another made it tolerable.

  “Mad Dog?” I sliced a bite off an apple, ate it, and wiped off my knife. Down at the bottom of the blade is carved a cross, followed by the word white, the signature of the old boy who made it for me. Crosswhite’s a good blade, and the old hardass who made ’em died a few years back, so I keep it sharp and clean.

  “Who the hell is Mad Dog?” I asked, pushing the knife back in my boot.

  “That dude what put the hurt on Mike Lewis. Mad Dog McClure.”

  “Joe McClure?” I asked. “Since when is he called Mad Dog?”

  “I ain’t ever heard him called anything but. Anyhow, last night I guess he was over at the Pink Lady, shooting Jäger down on pervert row. He’d gotten himself a favorite—a slice by the name of Sunshine, and not a bad choice neither. The crank ain’t reached her face yet like most of the scags down there. Anyhow, Mad Dog’s throwing his money on the table and getting a face full of fish in return, and some dumb son of a bitch who’d drove down from Monet starts bitching about how Sunshine isn’t giving him the old tuna special. Guess he got mad enough to go ahead and call that stripper a whore, which ain’t exactly like calling the Virgin Mary one, but still I guess—”