Love and Other Wounds (3 page)

If she pisses, she lives.

Lucy's gums are bone white, whiter than the teeth set into them. It is a sign of shock. Her body is shutting down, one system at a time. Kidneys close shop first. If she pisses, it means her body is starting up again. If she doesn't, her blood will fill with poisons and she will die.

If Lucy was my dog I would not have matched her against Tuna. Four pounds is a serious advantage for a sixty-pound dog. It should have been a forfeit. But Jesse needed the money. I told myself that I let him get his way because he is Lucy's owner and I am just her handler.

Icy wind off Lake Erie rocks the truck, making me swerve. I pull my hand back from Lucy's mouth and put it back on the wheel. I must drive steady. I must not speed. I cannot risk the po
lice pulling us over. Lucy would die on the side of the road while I sat helpless in handcuffs.

Lucy's fur is the color of a bad day. Deep gray turned to black where the blood soaks her. Her blood is everywhere. There is gauze over a bad bleeder on the thick muscles of her neck where Tuna savaged her. I wanted to end the fight then, pick Lucy up and declare Tuna the victor. But Jesse said no. Again I let him win. And Lucy scratched the floor trying to get back in the fight.

Tough little bitch. Proud little warrior.

She cannot fight again. Her front leg will never be the same. After tonight she can retire, she can breed, she can heal. But she isn't done yet. We both have a fight waiting for us in the hotel room.

I am a dogman. I breed fighting dogs. I train fighting dogs to fight better. I take fighting dogs to their fights and I handle them in the pit. This is what I do. It may not be your way but it is an old way. My father was a dogman. He learned the trade from my grandfather, and he taught it to me. I have seen dogs fight and bleed and die. I have cheered them on as they fought. It can be cruel.

There are dogfighters who beat their dogs, who whip them and starve them thinking to make the dogs savage. There's those who kill their curs, who drown them or shock them and then burn their bodies in the backyard. Some men fight their dogs to the death every time, no quarter asked for or given. Some men fight their dogs in garbage-strewn alleys with rats watching on greedily, the rats knowing they'll get to feed on the corpse of the loser.

There is another way. In a real dog match, the kind that still draws its rules from old issues of the
Police Gazette,
there's a
ring about fourteen feet square. Each side has a line in the dirt, a scratch line. You set the dogs behind their scratch lines and hold on to their collars good and tight. You let them go. Each time there's a break in the action you pull those dogs apart and put them back behind their scratch lines. If one of the dogs doesn't scratch the earth, running in place to get back into it, the fight is over. No dog fights that doesn't want it. It has to more than want it: it has to claw for it, it has to want it like the fight was a chunk of steak or a piece of pussy.

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 that doesn't have quit in it. 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. Hook
ers, 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.

They say that Vlad the Impaler walked through the hospitals after battle, inspecting the wounded. Those with wounds to the front of them got promoted. Those with wounds in their backs, like they'd been fleeing, Vlad had those men killed. Vlad would have made Lucy a general. Her back and haunches are unmarred. She'd fought every second she'd been in the bout.

Tough little bitch. Proud little warrior.

The match had been in an abandoned warehouse—no shortage of those here. The ring had been built in the morning
out of a two-foot-tall square of wood filled up halfway with dirt. Around the ring stood gangbangers, bikers, cholos, and mobbed-up types. Dog matches in Detroit are like those ads by that one clothes company that always have the black guy and the white guy holding hands, except at the dog match the other hand is filled with blood money or a gun.

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.