Let’s see, where were we now…
Uncle Boog had been let into the pallet ring by Jimbo Tuttle who closed the one loose pallet like he might be keeping dumb animals from getting out instead of two presumably rational humans. Either one of them could have easily climbed over the pallet wall, so I can’t figure why the gate needed to be shut. Anyway, Uncle Boog did little more than glance around the ring before he strolled over and leaned back on the top of a scratchy oak pallet with his elbows right beside me. I was on the outside though. I felt him kick the pallet softly as he caught the heel of his cowboy boot on a protruding board for a prop. I could see his left eye from where I stood, and it looked like it was staring far off into some peaceful distance that I could not see. You, know, real serene like a sunset or a baby calf nursing, something like that.
On the other side of the arena, the Mexican Victor Sanchez had taken off his shirt, revealing a back and shoulders covered with raised white scars that looked like ancient runes on his brown skin in the bright brooder light. He had draped his shirt over the pallets, and he had a hold of the top of a pallet with his hands on his shirt, and he was leaning into the pallets like he was doing a sloped pushup and stretching his legs one at a time. His fiendish girlfriend Felina held her hands over his as he stepped in place, and when he was through stretching and stood up close to the fence, she took his scarred face in both hands and very deliberately kissed each of his eyes, his nose, both cheeks, and then his lips. After this display of ritualistic affection, he eased back away from her and started shadow boxing with quick little uppercuts and dust-raising, boot-shuffling footwork.
Uncle Boog, propped on the pallets on one leg, watched the Mexican’s exercises, stretched, and yawned like he had just awakened from a nap or was about to have a little lie down on the couch. It was hard to say which. I could not fathom what he might of thought was so boring, but, if had any smidgen of concern, he certainly wasn’t showing it. He pulled a half-crushed pack of cigarettes out of the front pocket of his pants, thumped the pack on the palm of the other hand so that three bent cigarettes stuck out, offered one to me, and then put the whole pack to his face, lipped one out with his mouth, and muttered around the comically crooked cigarette.
“Got a light, Vern?”
Directly behind me, Ozzie Plimpton was chalking on the chalkboard again, writing names, numbers, and what I assumed was times. I didn’t know what most of the figures meant. I still don’t know much about bookmaking and don’t care to. That’s not my game. The Sam Drucker look-alike had been rounded up from somewheres in the darkness over the berm, and he was back at the table with his adding machine computer, legal pads, and pencils. Uncle Boog noticed that I was a looking that way, and he turned around to face the chalkboard and ponder it with me. In the upper left corner of the black slate, Ozzie wrote in big letters: Sanchez 2-1 and then nodded at the accountant who started the time clock at 10:00, and it counted down 09:59, 09:58, and so on. People, mostly Mexicans because the locals weren’t fully rousted from their vehicles yet, started lining up at the table. Uncle Boog whistled, tapped me on the shoulder, and pointed toward the board.
“I don’t like them odds much.”
I had no idea what he meant. The numbers weren’t favorable financially? Or his chance of winning didn’t suit his liking? Who knew?
Whether he liked the odds or not, he did not seem to be bothered about limbering up and getting ready for a fight as a few of locals started seeping in one or two at a time from the shadows out beyond the pavilion. Uncle Boog nodded at some of them while they sized up the two men standing in the ring. Most of these locals were people whose faces were somewhat familiar but whose names I did not know. There were several men from over in Cleburne County around Prim and Woodrow that I had played softball against in summer tournaments. They were sportsmen of the type who would gamble on just about anything from horseshoes to cards to crickets jumping out of a bucket, and they seemed naturally drawn to such low rent gambling venues as this one. The boys’ basketball coach came back over the hill with one of the girls from the high school basketball ladies’ team hanging on his arm. I suppose any sense of morals or legalities had long since been dispensed with by the people in this crowd, and the coach was safe in promenading his jailbait date around out in the open. Nobody in this crowd was worried much about what was or was not against the law. And, it was getting to be a crowd again. Though people were not lined up three deep from fence like they had been during the dogfight, there were no empty spots shoulder-wide that a person could sidle into around the entire arena. All the gaps had been filled in by men and women, and there was a person standing at my elbow the opposite side of Uncle Boog. Along with the crowd came the hum again, like cicadas and tree frogs, and the shrill shouts, cries, and laughter that busted the crowd’s drone into pieces. It was like I had passed back in time two or three hours, and I was right back looking into the arena at the mutt versus The Tiger except this time the mutt was Uncle Boog and The Tiger was Victor Sanchez.
Suddenly, somebody wolf-whistled above all the clamor, and everybody looked toward the chalkboard where Ozzie Plimpton stood, sucking in a breath so that he could holler out over the noise. The time clock was stopped at 05:00 by the Sam Drucker guy, and Ozzie put forth a challenge.
“I guess you boys from Batesville don’t have as much faith in your man as you did in your dog. Your dog won. You’re not afraid our local boy’s gonna put a whippin’ on your man, are ya? If so, go ahead and tell him to his face. Tell him you’re afraid to place a bet on him. Go on. No more money than there is in the till here, I might as well shut this contest down. You’ve got five minutes to make this worth my while, or you can take this fight back out into the parking lot and kill one another for nothing.”
Ozzie nodded at the timekeeper who started the countdown again. Victor Sanchez waved all the Mexican men into a huddle around one rounded end of the arena, and when the cluster broke, they all headed to the table with money in their hands or a pulling it from their pockets and counting it out. This turn of events seemed to make Uncle Boog very happy. He reached over to me with his right hand, grabbed me by the back of the neck, and pulled me close so that he could whisper in my ear out of range of anybody’s hearing. In his left hand, he had a rolled-up wad of bills palmed, and he very secretly stuck the money into my right hand and closed it up with his as if I could hide that big ol’ stack in my hand.
“This is sixteen hundred and fifty dollars. You go get in that line and wait until there is less than thirty seconds time left to bet, and you bet it all on me. Don’t get up to the table too early, and don’t let anybody see how much you’ve got. Let people cut line in front of you if you have to, but at thirty second or less, you get to the table and bet every bit of it. You hear me, dontcha? You hear what I’m sayin’?”
He patted me on the shoulder, stared into my eyes, and nodded me in the direction of the end of the line. I went. What choice did I have? But you know exactly what I was thinking. You’re probably thinking the same thing. Not only was Uncle Boog gonna get killed or hurt badly, but he was gonna lose all of that money too. $1650 would buy a lot of beer and cigarettes. Hell, it would pay a lot of bills that he and Aunt Charlotte had floating around like hospital bills when she shot him. He could get the clutch fixed on his truck. If he could get Daddy to do the labor, that wouldn’t have cost but about $75. But, oh, no! not Uncle Boog, he wasn’t thinking about paying anybody what he owed or fixing any of his problems. He would rather throw money away on some foolish and prideful idea that he stood a worm’s chance on a sidewalk against a man who was obviously as vicious and malicious as any fighting dog anybody had ever seen. And to prove what? To show who? Wasn’t I the only one there who gave a damn about Uncle Boog? I would have druthered that we just walk away. Actually, I still kind of wish that we had walked away to this day but for very different reasons than what I thought then.
Needless to say, I stood in the line. I did what just he said. I watched that clock with its big red LED numbers. Every second that it ticked down, I counted along with it, and this made every single second seem like a minute, and every single minute lasted an hour. I had to let three or four people cut in front of me get to the table when Uncle Boog said, but I stood at the head of the line when the clock showed 00:30. When I wasn’t concentrating on the countdown, I was listening to other people placing their bets, and so when I stepped up to the table, I had a good idea about what I was supposed to say. I said it with a shaky voice that sounded embarrassingly child-like in my own head.
“Sixteen hundred and fifty dollars on my uncle, Boog Bugler.”
Sam Drucker man tapped some white keys, and white paper clicked up from beneath the clear plastic slot on top of the machine with a clipped finality. He mechanically tore off the ticker and handed it to me. I stepped to the side toward the other end of the table and stretched my hand with the money it to Ozzie Plimpton. He looked at it and wrinkled his nose like a skunk had sprayed that stack of bills
“Your money’s no good here, boy. Take it, now, and get on outta here.”
He reached for the piece of paper in my other hand, but before he snatched the slip away, Uncle Boog’s voice called out loud and strong so that everybody under the pavilion or out in the near dark could hear it.
“You not gonna let me bet on myself, Ozzie? What kind of monkey business is that? I don’t think many people standing round here would feel that’s fair at all. Me being made to fight with no chance of wagering on my own talents and makin’ a little money. You ain’t the type to put a gun in a man’s back and force him into your ring and then try to cheat him, are ya, Ozzie? Take the money from the boy. It belongs to me not to him. Don’t make me have to jump over this fence and do it myself.”
Everybody was looking at me and looking at Ozzie back and forth, and they were all silent, and they were all pondering what was fair and what wasn’t and what would happen if Uncle Boog did jump over the fence. You could see it in their eyes. As ignorant about things as I was then, I knew that what Uncle Boog had said had put Ozzie Plimpton in a position where he couldn’t say “no” without having his reputation as a fight promoter and gambling operator ruined. His standing in decent community was not something that Ozzie worried about, but his status in the underworld of Stone County was of great concern to the man. It was a smart ploy by Uncle Boog to make Ozzie believe that he might lose face. He had won that little battle against Ozzie Plimpton, just like the mutt had found a grip for a moment and kept from being dumped from the crate by Jimbo. The dog had increased his miserable life for a few measly seconds, but what Uncle Boog had achieved in this tiny victory, I did not understand. In the end, would it be worth it?
Well, after Uncle Boog’s words, I didn’t have the gumption to look at Ozzie’s face as he took the money, so I stared up at the board while he yanked the money from my hand and sorted it out into the slots of the metal box. I heard him a counting it under his breath, and I heard the crinkle and slap of the bills onto the others in the till. Sanchez 3-1, the chalkboard read. I looked at the time clock, all zeroes. Doing a little math in my head, I figured that Uncle Boog stood to win nearly five thousand dollars if he could somehow manage to the win this fight. He stood to lose his life if the fight went the other way. $5000 for a life. I still wonder if that was a good deal or not. Most people aren’t ever put into a position where they will have to figure the monetary value of their own life. Uncle Boog set a price on his without so much as a second thought from what I could cipher. Usually, living people get to presume a value for a man’s life after he is already dead and gone. Uncle Boog wasn’t even an old man. If he wasn’t in this fight, he might live for another forty or fifty years with plenty of opportunity to make more than $5000. In my mind at the time, I was sure that Uncle Boog had sold himself more than a little bit short. I don’t know if I was right in that thinking. Whatcha gonna do?
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