by Frank Bill
Whalen thought Fu was wasting time. “The fuck are you doing?”
Fu bound the top of the canvas bag with more fence wire. Lowered the hook down from the rafter, hooked the fence wire on the bag, and worked the come-along’s handle, lifting Pete up from the ground, suspending him into the air as he did all the others. Letting them meditate on all their wrongs, what had brought him to them, a second chance of learning through pain. Conditioning. And he told Whalen, “I think he will make a good prospect, maybe I’ll come for him later.”
“Prospect for what?”
“My business.”
As Pete hung from the rafter, his words were garble-tongued. Fu stood in the garage’s open door, helping Whalen to his feet, led him back to the truck, distanced himself from the pebbles-in-a-blender tone of a possible student.
PART III
PANDEMONIUM
20
Saturday of the Donnybrook brought a heat wave of swollen hands, black eyes, and hulled lips. The fourth free-for-all of fresh bodies had entered the ring. Beat on one another till only one remained standing in frayed cutoffs and slick-bottomed boots. Flecks of blood and bone shadowed the spiderweb tattoos that coiled up each of his ball-bat forearms, twisted and tied into the railroad spikes that nailed into his right and left shoulders. They had been inked by a tattoo-artist friend wanting the same thing he wanted, getting out of the Kentucky hills. It was Jarhead Johnny Earl.
Goat and Walkup stood with Angus while Ned sat tied in the barn, getting fingernails of meth from Scar. Angus watched McGill pat Jarhead on the back and say, “Got two more free-for-alls, then get to see you fight for a lot of crumpled green, boy.”
Jarhead hadn’t come all this way robbing, smuggling, and listening to the prophecies of a backwoods soothsayer only to be treated like a child. He told McGill, “Ain’t your boy.”
McGill squeezed Jarhead’s trap and said, “Johnny Earl, you win Sunday, you’ll be whatever I say you are. Make more money than your blue-blooded ass can count.”
Angus laughed. “Win it all, Johnny Earl. Let McGill draw you like a turnip, leave you to bask in the heat.”
Purcell had already figured out who Angus was from his visions. Jarhead sized him up like he did every man he saw. Long hair pulled tight over a shattered-glass complexion. His arms were bound behind his back, forcing his shoulders and pecs to flex. For a man who had to be every bit of forty, his body looked racehorse hard.
McGill introduced them. “Johnny, this here is Chainsaw Angus. Once a bare-knuckle legend. Never beaten. Only man to ever beat—”
“Ali Squires.” Jarhead knew the legend, knew all the men Angus had beat. And he’d be happy to have a shot at him. But rumors had said Angus no longer fought. Still, he was glad Purcell wasn’t lying, wasn’t just a crazy shithouse recluse. McGill smirked. “Good, you know his reputation. Now, go get yourself some food and drink. Relax for tomorrow. Get ready to watch Angus come out of retirement.”
Jarhead’s swollen eyelids lit up like fluorescents. He said, “Coming out of retirement?”
And sarcastically McGill said, “Yeah, putting wheels back on the buggy. Gonna let him take us for a wild ride.”
Jarhead said, “Can’t wait to see the legend in action.” Winked at Angus, stepped away. Met the graying, long-haired Purcell, who’d a backpack slung over his shoulder.
The old man caught Angus’s attention. Shot him a smile, a respectful nod. Then he and Jarhead disappeared into the mass of smacking lips, smells, swells, and slurps.
McGill told Goat, “Get Manny and his Mutts. Bring Ned out. Then get back to Walkup and Scar, keep an eye on the money.” He told Angus, “Time for the ring.”
Angus kept a granite face. They’d fed him grilled venison, blackened potatoes from foil. Let him wash it down with water, a few beers. He’d slept on the barn floor with Ned on the opposite side. Woken before sunrise with the shakes. He hadn’t had a bump in days. Had the itch. He’d told McGill, “I get my shit back, put as much road between us as possible.” That was a small lie. He would—just as soon as he figured a way to get from the ring to the barn’s back room. Because the way Angus saw it, no man had ever been stupid enough to cross McGill at the ’Brook, knowing if he got caught it’d be his burial.
After all his suffering, cooking and selling meth to the lost lives swimming in narcotic sludge, this was where he’d ended up. Being forced to use his fists in some backwoods cockfight with more lives just as lost as his own. His second chance wasn’t the meth, it was McGill’s money.
McGill chuckled. “How long has it been? Two, three years? Think you still got it?”
Angus didn’t blink, said, “Something you’d never understand is that a real fighter never loses his skill. His instinct. Just pray you don’t brush up to me without these rigs around my wrists.”
McGill squinted and said, “Is that spite or disrespect? You making a threat?”
Angus told him, “I don’t make threats. I offer moments to reconcile one’s shitty choices.”
* * *
The wire gate opened. Onlookers cheered, “Blood! Blood! Blood!”
Shirtless, wearing work boots and faded carpenter pants, Angus entered the barbed ring. He stood six feet two inches. His oil-colored locks with hints of ash were raked over his head, woven into his usual braid. His back, shoulders, chest, and abs were lean, striated rib eye over brick, his body graffitied with the names of those he’d beaten outside of taverns and logging camps.
Angus clenched his tattooed fists. Did a few squats to loosen his knees, threw quick jabs, hooks, elbows, and knees at the air. Keeping his muscles warm while burning holes through Ned.
Across the ring, Ned’s face was redolent of a bushel of peaches opened up by buckshot and left to decompose in the summer sun. Flies and gnats accompanied him as he limped back and forth, rags wrapped about his wounds and an axe-handle splint on his leg, his hand trailing the gauged fencing for support.
Ned tried to make a fist with his free hand. Squeezed. The movement brought a jagged tremor that traveled down to his balls. Felt as though a hammer had smashed them on a cast-iron anvil. But the meth in his veins ate up the pain.
In each of the four corners of the cage was a three-by-three plywood door that remained closed. Behind each kneeled a man restraining a hound frothing from pink and black gums for the taste of human. Waiting for the fight to begin, the dogs as anxious as the onlookers for the three-minute window to pass and the door to open.
Four men entered the ring carrying lidded ten-gallon buckets. Two walked toward Angus, the other two split off toward Ned. They removed the bucket lids. Dumped the contents on Angus and Ned. Twenty gallons of steaming cow’s blood. The dogs, and the onlookers, grew even more agitated.
The Hound Round rules had been laid out for Angus and Ned the night before. Two fighters had three minutes to beat each other till one was without fight. If both men were still standing after three minutes, then a hound was released—turning the fight into man versus man versus hound. If another three minutes passed and both men and hound were still mobile, then another hound was released. The key was beating an opponent before the three-minute mark. The round went on till one fighter, on two legs or four, was standing alone.
The men with buckets walked out of the ring. Angus and Ned stood bloody and greased. The gate was bolted. A man with a bullhorn and black hair cut like Moe from the Three Stooges stood on a podium outside the ring and yelled, “FIGHT!”
* * *
After sleeping in the Jeep overnight, Fu navigated through Orange County, following the curved and broken roads Pete had described to him. Whalen rode shotgun, shirtless, his pale body bludgeoned by gunfire to the shade of ruby. He dozed in and out.
Inside the rotted house with a tar roof where one man lay dead on the floor and another sat dead in a wheelchair, each bullet-holed like the house’s interior, Fu had searched through hard and crusted towels for something clean. Found some shirts and, in the bathroom, bottles of rubbi
ng alcohol and peroxide. Cleaned his own wounds in the sink.
In the Jeep, Fu ripped Whalen’s soiled shirt from his body. His left shoulder had been nicked, the right side of his chest and lower abdomen gashed. Fu knew the wounds were not as severe as they appeared. He tore the shirts from Elbow’s house into strips. Dabbed the strips in peroxide, blotted the wounds, watched them fizz into a yellow liquid. Wiped and repeated. Then he poured the alcohol over each wound.
Whalen’s eyes blinked open from the burn. He tried to move his right arm, feel for the pistol that wasn’t there, but his body was stiff like Heath English toffee. He felt as though he’d crumble. He said “My gun, where’s—”
Fu’s left hand cupped Whalen’s wrist, his right held the alcohol, and he instructed him, “Don’t move.”
Whalen blinked a few more times. His mind was foggy. Then he recognized Fu as the hitchhiker he’d saved, began to remember what had happened, quipped, “You ain’t no fighter like I ever seen.”
Fu blotted the alcohol and said, “Have you seen a lot of fights?”
Whalen said, “Had my share of tavern and trailer-trash disputes. Nothing like that Billy Jack shit you’s doing.”
Fu wrinkled his forehead and inquired, “Billy Jack?”
Whalen said, “Never mind,” paused, thinking how he’d found Fu bruised and bloody alongside the road. He asked, “This Donnybrook, I never asked what kind of business you have there.”
Fu set the alcohol on the floorboard between Whalen’s feet, said, “I never offered.” Fu thought how he’d first wanted to test Whalen, see how he carried himself, had thought about how he’d kill him after he’d gotten Mr. Zhong’s money. But Whalen had saved him from the man called Elbow. Fu no longer viewed Whalen, the peacekeeper, as a threat. And he didn’t know if he had any lessons to teach him. As much as it surprised him to think it, maybe even the opposite. He told Whalen, “I am collecting a debt. When I first found the man who owed us, he told me his sister stole the money, and that she was headed for this Donnybrook.”
Whalen’s heart raced. He clenched his fist and blurted, “Angus!”
He ignored the ache, tried to lift himself from the seat once more. His spine cracked and popped and Fu’s left palm offered a soft touch with an unknown force behind it. Whalen coughed, tried to catch his breath, and Fu said, “You know this man who goes by Angus?”
Whalen sat trying to find the air Fu had knocked from him and he gasped, “Yeah … he’s a meth cook and … a murderer. He’s why I’s headed to the Donnybrook.”
Fu sensed something in Whalen’s tone and said, “I would not trust this man. I watched him fight. I thought he was honorable. I made a deal with him that he would lead me to his sister and he would repay the money. He would get to keep his drugs. But he double-crossed me along the way. This Angus, he will double-cross you too.”
Whalen closed his eyes, thought about the guilt he’d carried all these years. The confession to Reese. Maybe he should’ve went about it a different way, but Whalen had grown tired of seeing Reese raise those kids, tired of hearing Reese bitch about how he couldn’t sire a child that wasn’t unmalignant or slow. When the fact was he’d yet to sire a child at all. Day before Reese went mad, over a few drinks, Whalen had told him, them kids—Tate, Doddy, and Gravel—all of them were his. And he would be taking them, the farm, and Azell from Reese.
Whalen felt weak and useless. Too fucked up to hunt down this Angus and kill him. He opened his eyes, looked at Fu and his beat complexion. Realized his redemption lay in this man who was more than he appeared to be. “Double-cross? He murdered my son. My only chance of seeing my lineage seeded.”
Fu questioned, “Son?”
Whalen took in a deep breath and said, “Angus and his sister are connected to a double murder. I got a tip Angus was headed to the Donnybrook, but before coming down here to Orange County, I stopped by my family’s abandoned farm where my son, Gravel, lived. Found him dead in the farmhouse kitchen. Along with a mess of supplies for cooking meth. Found Angus’s wallet in a back bedroom.”
Whalen paused, tears flicked down his face, and he said, “The son of a bitch killed my boy and squatted in the farmhouse, cooked his crank. I’d no intentions of arresting Angus, and now I’m in no shape to do what I wanted.”
Whalen had grabbed Fu’s wrist. Thought of Doddy, his pregnant daughter, knocked up by a neighbor boy, she’d been taken from him that day Reese had found the madness, and with hay fever eyes and gritted teeth, Whalen had said, “I want you to make this killer disappear like he did my legacy.”
Now Fu turned down the entrance to the Donnybrook. Whalen lay motionless in the passenger’s seat. Three men stepped from the black-and-gray guard shack. Fu slid the Jeep into park, opened the door, and approached the first guard, who was reaching across his body and mouthing, “Hold on there, you split-eyed son of a—”
21
In the center of the square ring, red channeled down Angus’s head, chest, and arms like extra arteries. He counted Mississippis in his head, keeping check on the hounds’ three-minute window. His hands raised at his temples, elbows tucked in guarding his ribs, his left foot forward, he created an imaginary line that segmented Ned’s body into halves.
Animal rot coated Ned’s beat frame. Unbalanced, he pillowed his temple with his right hand. Moved forward, pumped a weak left jab at Angus’s nose.
Angus read Ned’s movement before Ned knew what he was executing. Angus dropped his head down, pressed his chin into his chest. Ned’s knuckles mashed into the top of Angus’s skull, the sound of walnuts being broken open. Angus raised his head, smiled, pivoted on the ball of his rear foot. Quick as death, he right-hooked Ned’s inner right forearm before Ned could pull it back, pressed forward, and turned the right hook upside down. Pumped an uppercut into Ned’s solar plexus.
Ned deflated. Dropped to his knees. Heaved cherry red.
Drunken swells of, “Goddamn!” And, “Beat that bastard! Beat that bastard!” erupted from onlookers.
Midday heat weighed down on Angus, and he huffed, “Thought you’d more gas in your tank than that.” Angus cupped Ned’s moist skull in his left hand, pulled Ned’s face into his right knee.
Jarhead watched from outside the ring, leaned to Purcell, and said, “I came to fight, win the money, not watch this Angus walk through some spent meth-head. This ain’t no competition. This is just sick.”
Purcell slid the backpack off his back. Unzipped it. Rested his grip around the pistol that lay in the bottom of it, and told Jarhead, “It’s how McGill works. Man’s always thirsty to see others in pain. Brings him pleasure and money.”
Angus released Ned’s dewy locks, stepped to his right, came down, sliced Ned’s right temple with a left elbow. Added another cut to Ned’s wilted complexion.
Ned hit the rocky ground. Angus spit on him. Exhaled, “Where’s that liquid courage you had that night you blistered me with a slug, pinched my crank?”
Ned chewed on clumps of regurgitated self, swallowed enough juice to refill the corroded tank that the meth had left strung out. He spread his hands across the gritty ground, pushed himself up to his knees, and, scattering pieces of rock, charged at Angus with his head down. Grunting and slobbering, he rammed his right shoulder into Angus’s stomach.
Angus took the hit, exhaled, “Uhh!” The momentum doubled Angus over Ned’s back. Angus wrapped his arms around Ned’s center, hefted him straight up into the air and dropped him straight down. Ned screamed, “Shiiiiiiiit!” as his neck and shoulders crunched and gave.
Onlookers stomped their feet and whooped, “More! More! More!”
Ned lay quivering, and Angus kneeled down, told him, “None of this would’ve occurred if you’d left well enough be. I ain’t gonna kill you. Just make you wish I would end your life.” Angus motioned a thumb outside the ring at McGill, who sat in a lawn chair, bug-eyed and salivating, yelling, “Kill that son of a bitch! Stomp his fucking face!”
To Ned, Angus said, “Whe
n I’m done with you, gonna do the same to that glutton McGill. Take all his money.”
A hopeless, maniacal gleam in his eye, Ned’s beat lips spewed, “I hope you try, you ugly cur. McGill, these people, they will cut you up, Chainsaw—” He spluttered into bloody, crazed laughter.
Angus had counted to one hundred and eighty Mississippis in his head. Told Ned, “Save it, your time’s up. Hope them hounds like to eat shit.” He reached out, pulled Ned’s arms with both hands. Dragged him to his feet. Made him stand. Ned gave a pain-filled scream as the plywood door from the corner behind Angus opened up.
Outside the ring, anger and testosterone oxidized Jarhead’s insides. He couldn’t believe what he was about to see. Lowered his head to Purcell and said, “I do man verses man. Man verses hound, I don’t do.”
Purcell chuckled, held Jarhead’s eye, and said, “Any man wants to fight for McGill has to do whatever he says or end up worser than these two.”
Jarhead bounced those words around in his head. Fighting to prove who the better gladiator was, that was one thing. But he wouldn’t be the slaughterhouse butcher for a deviant like this.
In the ring, claws tacked across granules of stone. Angus held Ned up, grunted and twisted around, pushed Ned in front of him, used him as a shield.
Coal-colored spots stabbed the hound’s gray coat. It came growling, its caramel ears bouncing till its stride ended at Ned. Who tried to raise his salved hands. But his arms held no strength. He was spent. The rabid hound’s teeth were equal to straight razors, shadowing Ned’s complexion a deeper hue of garnet. Opening wounds trying to scab. Mixing them with new ones.
