The Dogs of Detroit

by Brad Felver

“You’ve convinced him he can really fight.”

  “Progressions are slow,” Thiago says. “This confidence is important.”

  “And if it’s misguided?” I ask. “He’s six-four and 156 pounds. Jiu-jitsu doesn’t change that, but he thinks it does.”

  It reminds of being a little boy myself, and my parents fighting over my first pellet gun. I was nine, and new people moved next door. They hitched bird feeders to everything: trees, benches, mailboxes, street lamps. If it wasn’t a human or currently on fire, they fastened a bird feeder to it. Apparently the man was an ornithologist. It was still cold then, so there weren’t flocks of birds, but my father didn’t want to risk it. He bought me a pellet gun without talking to my mother.

  “Just in case,” he said to her. He didn’t want to spend his evenings scraping pigeon shit off his grill.

  “You’re a blockhead,” my mother said. “You give him a gun because we might develop a pigeon problem? Once the kid has the gun, I promise he’ll discover a pigeon problem.”

  Thiago shakes his head to this. “No, no,” he says. “Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. After, therefore because. Your mother believes you will kill the pigeons because you have a gun, but this is not true.”

  I stare at him.

  “You will kill the pigeons,” Thiago says, “because you are a nine-year-old boy.”

  And I suppose he’s right. I did kill pigeons, dozens of them, and long after the bird feeder people moved away.

  The doctor approaches us both and tells us it was a bad dislocation, and there is also some ligament damage. He needs to keep weight off of it for several weeks. “How exactly did it happen?” he asks.

  “He fell off the roof,” I say. “We were patching some shingles.”

  “In November?” he says and looks at Thiago. “Nothing dangerous for a while, gentlemen.”

  Jared limps on crutches, never complaining. He’s a different kid than he used to be. He sits on the couch and shadowboxes while watching old fights. He shouts into the kitchen that his dinners need more protein in them. He does upper body and core workouts. He grows a patchy beard. He heals slowly.

  By Thanksgiving, he’s upright again. Thiago shows up that evening to roll on the mat with Jared, but we give him the night off. He stays for dinner, sitting across from me in my ex-wife’s former chair.

  He finds Thanksgiving to be an odd holiday. “This one is for celebrate your good relations with Indians?” he asks, and I tell him that’s correct.

  He shakes his head. “Americans,” he says and then eats a heaping pile of stuffing and green beans. Over crummy, store-bought pumpkin pie, he suggests a full-contact sparring session now that Jared is healed. “Is the next step,” he says. He believes Jared is ready to face another student.

  “Full-contact?” Jared says.

  Thiago nods. “In the cage, full rounds, no headgear.” He clearly has not considered that someone could be nervous for a fight. For Thiago, a fight is one item on an agenda: buy facial tissues, get oil change, punch people in the brain.

  Jared looks over at me and nods. “This is good,” he says.

  It’s odd, the sensation this gives me. A strange combination of embarrassment and mortification and pride.

  Jared turns eighteen, and I buy three tickets to a cage-fighting event in Detroit. “Midwest Cage Fighting Touring Promotions?” he asks, reading the ticket. “Way to go all out, Dad.” I realize this promotion isn’t the most prestigious, kind of like watching a minor league baseball game with the Battle Creek Opossums. It’s an amateur promotion. An open-mic night for fledgling ninjas.

  We take Thiago along, all riding together like some new-age family en route to the local buffet. I ask Thiago about his own family, realizing I never have, and he tells us that he has not seen them for seven years. He looks out the window at the passing city lights. “My wife,” he says, “she dislikes my fighting. Says I spend so much times on my back, I should be prostitute.” He pauses. “My sons soldier for drug cartels,” he says.

  I turn and look at him. He shrugs. “Is all fighting,” he says. “No cages for my boys, though.”

  I don’t know what to say to this. We ride in silence the rest of the way, but I keep picturing Thiago’s boys, camouflaged in the wilderness, searching for rival drug mules, shouldering their AK-47s, shouting commands and then pointing their guns at anything that moves too quickly.

  We sit cage-side in what seems to be a junior high gymnasium. I enjoy the fighter introductions, especially the nicknames, so menacing they’re comical: Brent “The Kalamazoo Wolverine” Carlson; “Vodka” Joe Nemerov; Jonah “Rigor Mortis” Morris. I tell Jared his new nickname is “Giraffe,” but he finds this less funny than I do. In fact, he looks tense sitting this close. He leans back on his seat, as if it is an electric fence he must never touch.

  The main event is a lightweight match—Jared’s division—between a local kid with no nickname who wears glasses to the ring and looks like he came directly from biology class and “Vodka” Joe Nemerov. Vodka Joe couldn’t possibly look more Russian if he bench-pressed Lenin’s embalmed body in the middle of Red Square. His widow’s peak descends between his eyes like an arrowhead, and he grimaces for no apparent reason. I suspect his solution to a broken clavicle would involve rubbing bear fat on it. His eyes bulge and do not leave Dr. Biology.

  Dr. Biology is outclassed. The program tells us he holds a black belt in jiu-jitsu, but it seems hard for him to enact any defense or submission while he’s getting punched in the head. Vodka Joe thumps his face so many times, it swells tight and goes tomato red. His cheeks puff inward, as if trying to pinch his nose. An elbow slices above his eye, leaving a canyon of a gash. By the end of the first round, Dr. Biology is a limping, bleeding pile of loss.

  In the second round, Vodka Joe pins him up against the fence directly in front of us. He punches down, drops elbows onto Dr. Biology’s head again and again, like enormous pistons reciprocating in their cylinders. Dr. Biology can’t move—the cage curls him up in an awkward position—and we hear him moan, long, guttural whimpers like some pathetic animal in the process of becoming roadkill. I stand up, lean toward the cage for better angle, and when I do, Vodka Joe drops a stiff right cross onto the kid’s mouth, loosing gobs of thick blood and spittle through the cage and onto my jacket. I breathe it in, the blood and sweat, and I briefly think that I could do this, that its base is pure violence, not martial arts. I could pound other men in the head, slice down with elbows. These men should feel lucky that they have a cage guarding them from me.

  The referee finally steps in and waves his arms, and Vodka Joe starts celebrating. Dr. Biology sits against the cage like a tree stump. I turn back to see Jared wiping splattered blood from his brow. He isn’t looking at me, isn’t looking at the cage. He gazes down, taking long breaths. Sitting cage-side is new to him. Blood is new to him. Thiago sits next to him, legs crossed and calm, as if he has just listened to a panel of blue hairs talk about doilies and denture cream.

  No one talks during the drive home. Jared says good night very quietly and closes his bedroom door. I examine myself in the mirror and realize I’ve somehow missed a dried speck of Dr. Biology’s blood that must have splashed me. I lean in close and scratch it off.

  I lie on the couch and picture the fight. I can’t ignore how badly I wanted to jump in there and help, tear through the cage and kick the poor kid like Vodka Joe, like my next meal depended on it. The damage I could have done. I’m suddenly a hunter, a ferocious brute of a man, a shirtless Roman stomping into the Flavian Amphitheater to dispatch all living things. Thiago is right: humans are fighters. We’re a violent and successful species. We didn’t rise to the top of the food chain by baking muffins for our predators. We did it by making them our prey. And now that all our natural predators gone, now that we’ve conquered them and erected mini-malls in their old habitats, we turn toward one another because what every species covets is an enemy.

  Jared’s sparring opponent is no kid. He’
s an older man, mid-thirties perhaps, with bad teeth and mangy hair that looks like mulch. He’s built like a 155-pound midget-lumberjack, as wide as he is tall, his neck seeming to sprout directly from his ass. He has an eye tattooed on the back of his neck, and I know immediately my son is in trouble.

  I stand cage-side. I stare at Jared as he stretches his long limbs and pulls on the fingerless five-ounce gloves. He windmills his arms, bounces on the balls of his feet. He hangs from the cage top, and each vertebra pops as his spine lengthens. Thiago calls them to center of the ring and reminds them of the rules, reminds them it is full-contact, long rounds, standard stoppages for strikes and submissions. “Real fight, gentlemen,” he says.

  Jared wilts almost immediately. Lumberjack makes no attempt to strike with him. Thiago tells them to fight, and he rushes at my son, closes the distance before Jared even has his feet set. Jared topples over, and Lumberjack straddles him, axing the point of his elbow into Jared’s ribs. Then to his sternum, then his jaw. Jared flails from the bottom, his legs fluttering as if he might gather enough lift to fly away if only he keeps gesticulating.

  I’m not at all prepared for this. My muscles clench, and I shout to him, shout angry nothings about relaxing and wrist control. All the things I’ve heard Thiago scold into him. Jared hears none of my pleas—this I can tell. His eyes widen, and he’s forgotten where he is, can’t feel the mat below him or see Thiago above, looking down with his sad eyes. He’s in an alley, behind a dumpster, writhing on a heap of cracked asphalt and gutter juice. And this hulking savage aims to cannibalize him. Jiu-jitsu no longer exists. His legs are garter snakes, not boa constrictors. This fight is as righteous as mine was with the pigeons.

  Lumberjack flattens Jared out, cranks on his neck, and punches on his temple. Jared yelps. He tries to grab Lumberjack’s wrist but gets shaken off. He’s a buoy with no jurisdiction over movement, just wobbling along with the currents that Lumberjack spews.

  “Defend yourself!” Thiago shouts to Jared. “Intelligent defense.”

  Jared bleeds from the corner of his eye. Lumberjack has gashed one cheek open and notched a dent into his forehead. I can see the blood pooling there.

  I grip the cage harder. I shake it. I clutch it and tear my hands near-bloody until it seems the beaded steel will decapitate my fingertips. I feel that primal ache loose from me, and I want nothing more than to rip my way through the stockade. To chew through the steel ropes if I must and enter that place where I would stomp through Thiago and fall to my knees and hammer on Lumberjack’s spine with my heavy Neanderthal fists until all his breath left him. And when I turned to my bleeding son, he would most certainly recognize me as his father, as that most savage of all predators.

  But there I stand, my hands on the fence, my pink fingers wrapping around the links, the cage guarding its fighters like the last lonely sentinel of our civilization.

  Patriots

  Here’s a story what got passed around from some folks I gone to school with down in Hocking County. You got these two cousins called Harlow and Tuber who light out from Ohio thinking to deal with the Vietcong but end up pretty well dealt with instead. Harlow, he was a mouthy little balker, like some yappy blue jay. Tuber was the fighting type, looked an awful lot like a potato, which everyone was always telling him. Tuber was put together strange if you’re asking me, squished up, like that kind of midget who’s okay on thickness but not on length. He was regular size enough what the army took him, but since he was so small, he ended up a tunnel rat, and Christ knows what awful shit he done and seen.

  Both these boys go and enlist, and it’s Harlow what decides he needs a tattoo. Harlow was like that, couldn’t do good without making it a scene or bad without trying to convince you it was good. Always talking, Harlow. Tuber says he’ll go along, thinking Harlow don’t have the brass to go through with it. They borrow somebody’s truck and drive way over to this tattoo parlor in Lancaster. They’re looking at all the options plastered up on the wall, a thousand of them, more maybe, Harlow talking all the way: This one here might be right and You imagine the cooch a guy like me’d pull with this one? and Even you’d seem a tough son of a bitch with this one, Tube.

  Here, I imagine the old fella what owns the tattoo shop shaking his head at Harlow and Tuber, them being a big bucketful of stupid. Course a guy like that probably needs stupid teenagers to make his business work out. Harlow finally settles on one, a bald eagle with an American flag hanging from its feet. Patriotic as all hell. That’s what the story is, course he don’t end up getting that one because right about then a couple old bikers walk in, leather vests, no shirts underneath, skin like old farmhouse floorboards, facial hair stained with chaw drip. What’s wrong, though, what Harlow and Tuber and the old tattoo fella should have picked out, is that these two don’t have no tattoos.

  “How’s things, friend?” the first one says. He strolls around, not really looking at anyone, more like sizing the place up to buy it. The other one, he’s a big bruiser, stands in front of the door and don’t say much. No way he’s letting Harlow and Tuber get by, that much is easy to see.

  The old fella what runs the place is looking a little nervous now. One of them times you can just tell shit’s heading south quick, them two’s not the kind you want to be alone with. Not the kind of thing he put in for. But he holds it together and says, “Just fine now. What might we be doing for you all today?”

  The first biker, the leader, he keeps strolling around the edges of the shop same as Harlow and Tuber was a few minutes before. He’s looking at all the tattoos. His boots strike on the laminate, and when they do, his wallet chain jangles. He stops when he notices Tuber. “The hell, son? Your folks run out of food or what?”

  That’s normally enough to get Tuber all up and bothered, but he just says, “No, sir. I eat okay.”

  The biker walks over toward him. “I’d make you for the king dick-sucker of this town,” he says. “Don’t even need to squat down.” Then he laughs at his own joke and looks over to his partner, who grins but don’t laugh.

  “Well, we ain’t even from this town,” Harlow says.

  The biker looks over to Harlow and studies on him a minute. “Oh, so you’re the smart one, huh? I can always tell the smart one. Gift I got.” He takes a step over toward him. “Okay, smart one, how smart do you feel now?” He pulls out a flick blade and it jumps open. Then his big partner does the same.

  “Oh, now!” the old fella what runs the place says. “No need for that, gentlemen. We don’t want no trouble. Ain’t got but a few dollars on hand, but you’re welcome to those.”

  “You hear that, Hopper?” the first biker says. “Think we’re here to rob them out.”

  “That’s what they usually think,” Hopper says. His voice is deeper but quieter than his friend’s, like he can’t be bothered to care about too much.

  “No, sir,” the main biker says, “Not here to rob you. Here for a tattoo.”

  “That we can do, sir. No need for that knife then.”

  “You’re right, ain’tcha?” He closes the blade and stuffs it in his front pocket. “I’ll just leave it right here, right in this front pocket, so we don’t forget about it, huh? Now, back to this tattoo. I don’t see it nowhere, not what I’m looking for,” he says.

  “I can do whatever you like. Just tell me, and I’ll draw it up.”

  “Now that’s the spirit!” The biker grabs a marker from next to the cash register. He goes over to the wall and finds the one empty spot in between all the other sample tattoos. Got his back to Harlow and Tuber and the old fella, so they can’t see what he’s drawing till after he’s done, but it don’t take him long, and when he moves away, it’s a big black swastika he drew. No mistaking it. “Now, I ain’t the artist I’m betting you are,” he says, “but that’s the rough cut of it.”

  “Sir,” the old tattoo fella says, but Christ, what’s he supposed to do? It’s like he knows he’s fucked deep, but he can’t just go on and do it without complainin
g some. Folks have swastika tattoos, I guess, but it don’t seem right what they make somebody else draw it on them. But the old fella says, “Okay, then, go ahead and set down in that chair and I’ll get things ready.”

  “Oh, it ain’t for me,” the biker says. “I don’t care for tattoos, myself. Ruin my complexion.” He runs a hand through his beard. “No, I want it for this one here, the smart one.” He points at Harlow.

  “Sir—”

  “Now, friend,” he says, “let’s not get on repeating ourselves. We know what’s in the front pocket, and we know what I want, so let’s just get on with it.”

  The old tattoo fella’s all jammed up, no doubt about that. He looks over at Harlow, his face drooping like a hungry dog, probably trying to apologize a thousand different ways without saying nothing out loud. But then Harlow, to that boy’s credit, he rips his shirt off, his ribcage poking through his skin, and he walks over to the chair and sets on down.

  “Goddamn, if I wasn’t right!” the biker says. “You are smart.”

  The old tattoo man sets things up and goes to work, and it don’t take him but half an hour to mark Harlow up with the swastika. It’s thick and dark, and it covers up the whole left side of his chest. Harlow, he don’t make a goddamned sound, that’s the story I heard anyways. His whole life he’s been the loudmouth, always telling folks how he’d do this or he’d do that, how he pulls so much cooch that don’t even get the clap no more, how he’s the toughest son of a bitch around, but right then he just takes it, quiet and almost dignified. “Damn, son,” the biker says, “that can’t feel good now.” But Harlow don’t say boo, and the old biker don’t push it like he done before.

  That’s the end of the story as most people in town learned it, but there’s more to it I heard years later when I came back to the states for a reunion and I run into Harlow’s sister. I was always sweet on her but never had the stones to talk to her until after I was safe and married. Turns out Harlow and Tuber head off to basic a couple months later and then over to Vietnam a couple months after that. They end up in different units, but they try to talk when they can. It’s Tuber what makes a real show of himself as a tunnel rat. I guess he’s just fearless, like he knows he was engineered just for it. Got a whole process. Every hole and bunker they come across, Tuber strips down to his skivvies and takes just a flashlight and a .45. Sometimes he’s gone a long time, but he eventually comes back and calls it clear, meaning there wasn’t nothing down there or there was but now there ain’t. Then he packs the hole with explosives and they set off. Tuber earns medals and commendations and all that. Harlow’s sister tells me all about it, like she remembers all the details all these years after, which seems strange, but I guess ain’t seeing as what Tuber done for her brother next.