Where was I? Oh, yeah…
Well, the crowd had started gathering thicker and thicker along the pallet wall of the ring, and the noise they made was like the steady hum of tree frogs and cicadas with a coyote yip here and there. I was still leaning up against a tree a little outside the pavilion, on a rise above everyone not standing on the concrete slab, and mostly in the shadows. From this vantage point, I was studying people’s faces and body language and listening to bits of conversations so that I could form a general idea about how they felt about what was fixing to happen. Some folks were laughing and cutting up like they were at a birthday party, some were flirting heavily, and I figured they would be in a backseat, a bouncing a car as soon as this shindig was over, and some others were serious as mud, a looking at the dusty ground and a running their fingers up through their hair like they might of come to a funeral. I guess, in a way, they had all come to watch something they didn’t know how to react to, and that was violence and death. Every person here knew that not all the living things in this place tonight would leave here alive. I was pretty sure they all knew. How could they not? Still, who can be ready for that? Death? And how?
Suddenly, a hush fell over the proceedings, and Ozzie Plimpton waddled out of the dark with a skinny white-haired man by his side. The guy was wearing a white shirt, thick horned rim glasses, and one of those funny green visors like old-timey bankers and casino workers used to wear. You know, like ol’ Sam Drucker in Green Acres whenever he was playing his banker role at the general store. In fact, this guy looked a whole lot like Sam Drucker or maybe my memory has made him look like that. Memory does that sometimes. You know, confuses what you remember with what you think you remember that wasn’t that way at all? Anyway, this Sam Drucker-looking dude had an adding machine computer under one arm and several rolls of white paper ticker tape stuck on the fingers of his other hand. He sat in the folding chair behind the table that had been set up earlier, and he arranged all of his accoutrements on the table around him. When he was ready, he turned and said something very quietly to Ozzie who walked over close to the guy and leaned and whispered into his ear. They whispered back and forth a couple times. Then, Ozzie walked to the chalkboard, picked up a new chalk piece, and started writing. Of course, I don’t recall all that he wrote or exactly what he wrote, not familiar with gambling vernacular either then or now, but it went something like this from the top of the board down on the left side. 10-1 < 1 minute: 8-1: 1 to 2 minutes, etc. After two minutes, the time was divided into thirty second slots until the odds were even 1-1 at five minutes. Over six minutes was 3-2 or 9-5 whatever that means. Finally, Ozzie drew a small box in the upper right corner of the chalkboard and wrote in it: Mutt Wins 100-1. Mutt? I thought. What does he mean by “Mutt?” It would be a few minutes before I found out.
When Ozzie slapped the piece of chalk back down into the tray below the board, people started lining up in front of the table. When each man stepped up to the table, he would say something that was muffled by the crowd noise to me, and the Sam Drucker-guy would poke some keys on his computer adding machine, write something on a legal pad, and when the ticker tape spit a little piece of paper out the top, he’d tear it off and hand it to the wagerer. The bettor, stepped one step to the left and handed the appropriate amount of cash to Ozzie who counted it into the money box he stood behind. One guy tried to hand Ozzie a bank check, but Ozzie reached out and plucked the tickertape out of the guy’s hand, tore it up, threw it on the ground, and pointed the man out into the darkness. As the fellow stepped half out of the light, I saw Jimbo Tuttle step half into the light and grab the man by the arm. I don’t think the next few moments of life were very pleasant for that guy. After a few minutes and roughly thirty-five wagers being jotted down and made into tiny pieces of paper, the Sam Drucker look alike reached over and pulled at Ozzie’s sleeve. Ozzie leaned down into the man as he whispered something in Ozzie’s ear. Ozzie nodded and raised his hands into the air like a revival preacher about to cut loose with a come-to-Jesus sermon, and he called out in a cold, authoritative, and loud voice.
“Betting will stop now until you have had a chance to take a good look at The Tiger’s first victim of the night.”
The crowd cheered raucously.
Gopher mysteriously appeared from out of nowhere and pushed the loose pallet open on its plastic hinge and stepped aside as Jimbo came by him carrying a large plastic dog carrier with a wire cage front. Jimbo was toting it with two hands on the top handle like he was picking up a bale of hay. He set the crate down, unlocked the front gate, and opened it. Nothing came out, and a host of giggles made a broken ripple of a wave through the crowd around the ring. Jimbo picked the carrier up, raised the closed end, and shook the whole thing like he was trying to get all the slop out the bottom of a hog bucket. It took a few shakes, but the first competitor of the night’s event lost the battle of attempting to stay in the crate and out of the light. I suppose there was some dignity in that part of the fight. I’m not sure.
Holy cow! The muttiest of mutts that anybody has ever seen, and everybody has seen one, dropped down into the dusty, soft dirt out of the plastic container like a newborn calf falling from its momma’s backside, and it immediately started seeking a dark corner, a hole, a small crack in the wooden fence that it could snake its skinny, bony body through to escape into the darkness it knew gave it a chance to survive. Of course, it didn’t find one because the ring was so well put together. The dog was yeller. Cowardly, yes, but I mean a color not a character trait. It was not yellow but yeller, somewhere between cream, tan, and brown, and all of them but none of them neither. Since you’ve seen this kind of mutt as often as I have, you can put some white, black, or brown spots on the tip of its tail, its ears, its chest, or its paws. It doesn’t matter. It probably had some mixture of all those colors. I don’t remember. It had that perpetual snarl of strays that fight over food at every meal and those flop ears that were not rounded on the ends like a proper hound but triangular for slipping through half-cracked doors on chicken coops. People who find bitches with litters under their porches or in their sheds and barns often try to pass this type of mutt off as part Lab and part Walker and maybe some border collie or shepherd, but anybody who tries to tell you that a dog is half this and half this and half something else is trying to sell you cube steak for rib eye. This dog was exactly that variety. It was so many breeds that it was no breed and probably so inbred that it would not register as a dog if you checked its DNA. The creature tucked its head down deep between shoulder blades that stuck up like dinner plates in its loose skin, and its tail was tucked so tight that the tip came out up under his front legs. Had it been healthy, it might have weighed fifty pounds given its height and length, but with it ribs showing and skin hanging loose over its muscles, it was obvious its weight was forty or less, certainly no strength match for a hundred pounder like The Tiger. The dog circled the ring a time or two in a slinky, sidewinding sort of gait as the crowd hooted and whistled. Occasionally, it dropped its chest on the ground at some noise that I did not hear, but when someone tossed a half-eaten hamburger into the area, the dog darted quickly and bravely over to it and swallowed the whole thing in one gulp. Someone yelled out, “I bet he’d beat The Tiger in an eating contest.” This activity prompted Jimbo to point a baton-sized finger at a certain section of the crowd and shake his head no. His back was to me, so I don’t know if he said anything.
After the admonishment, Jimbo picked up the plastic carrier and left through the gate that Gopher opened and guarded against the escape of the mutt while Jimbo walked out. Bettors started lining up at the table again, and Ozzie changed some odds on the chalkboard. Don’t get me to lying about what the changes were. I have no idea and furthermore didn’t care then and don’t care now. I was too busy watching this doomed yeller animal slink and fret and cringe and strangely feeling myself growing sorry for it. And then, I was angry at myself for feeling sorry for it. Hadn’t I plunked dozens of dogs like this with my pellet gun, chasing them away from our trash, newborn barn kittens, or sows with small piglets? Yes, I had. Maybe not killing them necessarily but thumping them good with .144 domed pellets that knocked them down a yowling. Didn’t this type of stray sometimes eat our kittens, our yards chickens, and occasionally carry off a piglet? Yes, they did. I hated these mutts and had often baited them just so I could shoot them. Maybe someday, somebody with a lot more brains than I have can tell me why I felt the way I was feeling about some creature that I had every reason to hate. I still don’t know why. Oh, yeah. Underdog! I suppose society made me feel that way, always pulling for the underdog and all. It’s a weakness of all humans not just me, that sympathy for the condemned no matter how wicked they are. Whatcha gonna do?
I hadn’t noticed it yet, but on the table where Sam Drucker was sitting, there was a thing that looked like a clock. It had big red LED numbers that said 00:00. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the man fiddle with it, and when he turned it back around it was on 02:00, and it started counting down 01:59, 01:58, and so on. I suspected, and turned out to be right, that the betting ended when the clock stopped. It did, and many men were turned away grumbling and waving money in their hands until a hush settled out evenly over the crowd, and all was soundless and still. Even the creatures of the woods around seemed to join in the reverent silence.
From where I was standing, I could only see Gopher Lewis with a bit of shiny chrome log chain in his hand, but I knew The Tiger was on the end of that chain, and something terrible was about to happen. The mutt had stopped at the end of the ring away from me and sniffed at the air while trying to make himself invisible by curling up into a tight a ball as he could and still stand. Nobody was looking at him but me. Everybody watched as Gopher stepped into the arena and leaned down beside The Tiger to remove the spiked leather collar. When the collar was free from around The Tiger’s neck, Gopher nodded at the timekeeper, and the clock, this time starting at 00:00, counted each second moving forward. I didn’t notice Gopher exit the arena, but he wasn’t in there when I looked back. The game was on.
I have to give the mutt some credit for a strategy that added a few minutes and seconds to its miserable life. He kept the right side of his bony body against the wood pallets and rubbed against them, tail tucked and running. The Tiger kept lunging at him and trying to hem him into a corner up against the wood, but the mutt managed to keep circling with only bit of hide and hair from his tail and backside in The Tiger’s teeth. People who had bet on short times booed and ballyhooed the running strategy, but most of the crowd cheered at the mutt’s tactics. Of course, a warrior such as The Tiger wasn’t going to be fooled forever, and about one second after I heard the timekeeper call out “2 minutes, 30 seconds,” The Tiger stopped chasing the mutt and stood in the center of the arena with his chest puffed and shook his head as if he might have been trying to shake some cobwebs out. Then, he went straight toward the mutt, and when it tried to dart to his left as it had been doing, he caught the mutt’s head in his mighty jaws. The mutt jerked and managed to pull away, but the The Tiger’s upper canine gouged a flap of skin loose above the mutt’s eye and the bloody tatter completely concealed and covered the mutt’s eye. The Tiger’s lower teeth had sliced a gap from the throat to the ear and a thick red seep of liquid flowed down between the mutt’s front legs and dripped into the dust. Sensing that death was inevitable, the mutt seemed to decide that he was not going to leave life skulking about and running like a coward. He turned full toward The Tiger, flattened his head, straightened his tail, and plunged forward bravely into the chest and neck of the much larger adversary who easily flipped the mutt onto its back and clamped his jaws onto its throat. The smaller dog kicked and scratched with virtually no effect until it quit kicking and simply tried to breathe. I could hear the wheezes trapped in its throat, and then I heard the gurgle of air bubbling through blood that was its last attempt at a breath, but The Tiger wouldn’t let it go. He wasn’t letting go. He didn’t let go as Gopher came into the ring and knelt beside the bloody contestants, and he didn’t let go when Gopher put his left hand onto the mutt’s chest and his right hand up in the air. “3:45,” the timekeeper said, and Gopher’s hand was still up. When Gopher finally dropped his right hand, Sam Drucker yelled out, “3:54, 3:54.”
Some of the crowd cried out wildly with excitement and hugged whoever happened to be standing next to them. Most of the crowd tore up the tiny white pieces of paper they held in their hands and threw them up into the air. Many of these pieces fluttered to the dirt in the arena like little white dying moths. I felt sick, not like stomachache sick, but like soul ache sick. I didn’t know that people did this, that they were capable of this disdain for life, or did I? I felt woozy like I might fall down. I leaned hard against the tree. It did not help when I glanced back into the arena and saw Jimbo grab the dead mutt by a back leg and walk out dragging its bloody head in the dirt and leaving a shallow trench with a dark line at the bottom.
Uncle Boog suddenly materialized beside me as my head swam in a swoon as thick as a Russian novel.
“You win any money?”
I shrugged. He knew I didn’t have any money, but he didn’t know that I could not watch anymore of this, the way it made me feel so sick way down deep inside my heart and made a cramping pain flow down into my guts. Of course, I couldn’t tell him anything about any of that or he would of asked me if I was wearing panties. He seemed to ask that a lot.
“I’m going to go get a cold beer and a smoke. I’ll be back in a minute.”
Surprisingly, he grabbed me by the arm and pulled me in close to whisper.
“If you got money, bet it on the Mexican dog.”
“I will.”
Bet on the Mexican dog? What the hell? Right then, all I wanted was not to be standing right there where a helpless creature had been brutally slaughtered by another of his own species while members of my species hooted, hollered, and cheered. That was all I was thinking.
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