I had got Uncle Boog’s wager in exactly when I was supposed to, and it was the last bet allowed to be made, so there was nothing left to keep the fight from starting, nothing unless an asteroid was to strike or some other cataclysmic natural disaster, and, man, was I a wishing something like that would happen, but you know it didn’t happen, or I wouldn’t be telling you this story. There was no announcer calling out the competitors’ names, their weights, or where they were from, there were no bells ringing to hush the crowd, there were no pretty girls in bikinis and heels raising signs above their heads saying “Round One” as they jiggled their bottoms around the ring. No, the Sam Drucker looking guy set the timer at 00:00, and, without a sound nor any ceremony, he touched a button on top, and the fight was on.
Uncle Boog took a step toward the center of the ring, but then stopped as if he suddenly realized that maybe this was all a bad idea and that he couldn’t possibly carry on with this absurdity. I foolishly hoped briefly that he had thought of a way out of this mess. After a second of what seemed deep consideration, he pulled off his t-shirt and tossed it to me. Apparently, whether you are going to fight shirtless or not is a big deal. I didn’t know that, but a thought flashed in my mind that was equally as ridiculous in the moment. You see, I couldn’t recall right then whether I had ever seen Uncle Boog shirtless. Isn’t that a thought to have?
Now, I know that those of you who have seen him in the last twenty years won’t believe me, but in those days, Uncle Boog didn’t look a thing like what he does now. His six-foot two-inch frame carried about 190 pounds, and much to my surprise, all the weight was where it was supposed to be. Now, he was not built like Sly Stallone in Rocky IV, but he wasn’t as flabby as Michael Douglas in Basic Instinct either. He had some pretty good muscle tone in his arms, shoulders, and chest, and he was skinny enough that he had some semblance of a six pack. Well, maybe a four pack…or a two. Anyhow, he looked surprisingly fit for someone with his regular lazy habits, and just the way he looked without a shirt on gave me the tiniest little ray of hope that he might stand a chance of winning. If you are trying to see what I see in my memory, you absolutely cannot picture what he looks like now. I bet he carries 350 on that six-foot two chassis now and most of that right around the middle. Don’t think about that sight though. I know it will be awfully hard to do since I brought it up.
Anyway, I realized that maybe there was a slight probability of victory since he obviously wasn’t in awful shape, and he did have an advantage of at least of four inches of height on the Mexican Victor Sanchez and the equivalent longer reach in his arms. I was looking for something positive anywhere that I could find it. By the time I caught his thrown shirt and looked toward the time clock, fifteen seconds were already gone. He had lasted fifteen seconds. That was something to be optimistic about, wasn’t it?
The two men circled up and got into boxer poses and started jabbing at one another. Uncle Boog did a pretty good job of keeping his arms up to protect his face in the first few exchanges, but Sanchez was poking at Uncle Boog’s ribs and stomach area with a steady barrage of quick upper cuts to weaken him and lure him into making the mistake of lowering his arms. When his fists hit against Uncle Boog’s wet belly, it made a smack, smack, smack noise like when Aunt Helen went to pecking unsuspecting nephews on the cheeks with her slimy kisses. Uncle Boog’s right hand, which he favored heavily, shot out every few second in a rounded sort of cross punch, but his fist only glanced off Sanchez’s left forearm or shoulder and had no effect. Sanchez’s body shots, however, were having the desired effect, and Uncle Boog’s arms got lower and lower in their defensive position until the Mexican was able to uppercut with his left hand to the body and then cross with his right into Uncle Boog’s face and land a solid blow. The bareknuckle fist-to-face contact opened a small cut along the bone ridge under Uncle Boog’s eye, and his cheek immediately started to swell and turn colors. I looked at the clock. It was only at 02:30. I couldn’t see any possibility of Uncle Boog lasting another two and half minutes if they kept on boxing. He was looking tired. He was hunching with his back rounded because his battered stomach muscles wouldn’t let him straighten up. He had to quit boxing with a man who was boxer and figure out what the man couldn’t do.
As if reading my mind, Uncle Boog dropped all pretenses of boxing, lowered his shoulder into Sanchez’s gut and lifted him in a football tackle. The two fighters hurtled across the ring out of control and smashed against the wooden pallet fence, breaking the top zip ties holding two pallets together, and opening a V gap out into the crowd. Both fighters were pinched at the bottom of the V between two pallets for a few seconds, and when they finally pulled themselves out, broke apart, and struggled to their feet, Sanchez had two-inch wide, white scratches down both sides of his back that were speckling with blood, and Uncle Boog had opened a gash above his right ear from which blood was starting to flow in rivulets down around his ear and onto his chest and back. Both men roared gutturally as the ran toward one another and locked up arm in arm, foreheads touching as they twisted, each trying to throw or kick the other man off his feet. As they pulled tight against one another a looking for a way to get a good grip and the blood flowed freely from open wounds on both men and mingled with dripping sweat, they reminded me of a couple of newly birthed piglets, covered in afterbirth, scrambling to be the first to reach their mama’s teats. I don’t know why that thought crossed my mind. There was something basic and natural about either struggle that was life or death, and it meant nothing to anybody else but the two involved in the tussle. Maybe, I’m getting too philosophical in my old age, but I really want you to picture the bloody afterbirth covered piglets so you can get a good idea of what Uncle Boog and Sanchez looked like at the five-minute mark on the timer. Uncle Boog had lasted five minutes. All hope was not abandoned yet.
A minute later, Uncle Boog’s eye with the cut under it was nearly swollen shut, but it hadn’t started to bruise yet, so there was more swelling to come. I could still see the eyeball moving around whenever I could see Uncle Boog’s face, so I was sure he could still see out of it. The cut above the right ear had painted his ear and neck red, but it was just blood, superficially scary but apparently not causing much harm. The Mexican was none the worse for wear around the face, but the two deep scratches on his side from the pallets had to be stinging with the salty sweat that covered both their bodies. I couldn’t tell if he was favoring one side or the other, and it didn’t matter anyway. The match had settled into an arm lock hug as one man tried to get an advantageous hold over the other, and they were mostly doing a blood-spattered slow dance in the middle of the ring without any music or rhythm. The crowd didn’t like this much, and they started to hoot and holler about somebody doing something. In answer to the crowd’s displeasure, the two tired men tumbled to the ground to break the hold. As they fell, both did a shoulder roll in opposite directions, and both came up to standing with their backs and shoulders coated black from the gray dust sticking to the blood and sweat coating their bodies. They slowly walked together with their hands and arms up like they might start boxing again, but Uncle Boog jumped in and locked his arms around Sanchez in a bear hug from which Sanchez wormed out quickly, and they were back to holding one another in the arm lock in the middle of the ring again. I took this moment of relative inactivity to look at the clock. 07:30. Then, I looked at the board to see if I could decipher some of the numbers that looked like clock times. I wondered if Uncle Boog made it to a certain number of minutes if he would get some of his money back. Of course, he wouldn’t have, but I didn’t know any better. For him, it was all win or all lose, but already, he had lasted twice as long as the other mutt.
The red LED numbers read around 08:00 when Uncle Boog made what I thought would be a fatal mistake. They were still just turning slow circles in a variety of arm locks when Uncle Boog ducked under Sanchez as if he might get him in a fireman’s carry on his shoulders, but Sanchez reacted expertly and quickly to this maneuver, getting his left arm around Uncle Boog’s neck below the chin and holding the left wrist tight by Uncle Boog’s ear with his right hand. Uncle Boog ended up cinched up in a solid reverse headlock. With Uncle Boog in his control, the Mexican set down to one knee and pulled his arm up tighter and tighter around Uncle Boog’s neck, cutting his air off and making him use up energy holding both their bodies up and not settling down to the ground where he would have been pinned. Uncle Boog fought to get his feet under both of them and get back to a standing position, but he couldn’t any grip with his cowboy boots in the dusty and loose gray dirt, and he ended up sinking back heavily into Sanchez’s grip with his butt nearly dragging the ground. With his swollen eye turning purple and the Mexican squeezing his air out, Uncle Boog’s head looked like a red ripe tomato with a big rotten spot on the side. People, mostly the Mexicans, were hopefully and excitedly shouting for Sanchez to end it, and I was prepared to accept the reality of a worthy and well-earned defeat so long as Uncle Boog wasn’t dead. I never, ever heard of anyone killed in a headlock, have you? I don’t think I ever heard it then nor since, so I suspect that no one ever died from a headlock. I’ve seen a few folks pass out from a headlock and have a headache for a few days, and that’s about it. It was safe to assume that Uncle Boog wasn’t gonna die, right?
Well, Uncle Boog wasn’t gonna die, and he wasn’t ready to quit fighting neither. It was around 10:00 on the time clock when Uncle Boog finally managed to get a grip with his feet far enough up under his body to get his balance so that he could force Sanchez up into a standing position, and when they were up and wobbling on all four of their feet, Uncle Boog took off running backwards, carrying both of them on his two legs in a mad crab scramble, and they slammed into the pallet wall once more with the Mexican absorbing the entire brunt of the blow. This time, they hit the wall with only about half of the force of the previous tackle because they were both dead weight on tired legs at this point, but Uncle Boog’s desperate act achieved the effect that Uncle Boog needed. The Mexican released his hold. Free of the strangling grip, Uncle Boog rolled forward, caking his wet skin once again with dust from the ground so that it looked like he wore a tight black shirt, and stood unsteadily coughing and gasping air back into his empty and burning lungs. Sanchez was weakened enough by the collision with the wall that he turned and pulled himself up to his feet one oak board at a time. Both men were unsteady on their feet stumbling around like zombies, and both took the time to gulp and wheeze a bit of breath before they slowly crept toward one another to lock up again.
As they wobbled and tottered toward one another for the last time, it seemed like they were going to engage in that same old armlock wrestling hold they had tried two or three times already, but Uncle Boog’s had a different idea. As his hands neared Sanchez’s shoulders rather than trying to gain a grip on the Mexican’s arms and wrestle around more, Uncle Boog hastily grabbed two handfuls of Sanchez’s thick black hair right behind Sanchez’s ears on each side, and he sat straight down. Yes, straight to the ground! Uncle Boog dropped to his butt with his legs out in front of him and pulled Sanchez’s face right down onto the top of his own head, and the two skulls collided with a sickening crack and mushy smoosh. The Mexican stood straight up as a fence post for a half a second and then flailed wildly to the side and smashed into the fence headfirst right in front me. I had to stand up on my tippy toes to look over the pallets where I could see his face. His nose was bent sideways onto his cheek like a piece of boneless red meat. It no longer resembled a nose, and blood bubbled from two slits that looked nothing like nostrils. Under his mouth, a tooth stuck at an odd angle through the skin below his bottom lip. His top lip looked like hamburger meat with barbecue sauce flowing over it. His eyes were glazed like the eyes of a catfish when you cut its head off after skinning it. He was obviously done. He was out. He would fight no more this night if ever again.
Uncle Boog sat in the middle of the ring with his legs splayed out wide in front of him. He leaned forward onto his grime-covered knuckles like he was a playing marbles and he was about to shoot an aggie, but all of the marbles were gone. I could only see his right eye, but it was glassy and not focusing on anything. His head bobbed, and this bobbing started his body to moving. He swayed back and forth several times until I was sure that he would fall over backwards or forwards and be done too, but, on one swing forward, he gathered his momentum and turned his body weight onto his hands and from his hands onto his hands and knees, and with blood still running from behind his ear, across his face, and dripping from his chin, he rose from his hands and knees to his feet. He zombie-walked over to Sanchez, who I wasn’t even sure was breathing anymore, grabbed a handful of hair in his left hand and cocked his right arm as if he were going to hit Sanchez with a closed fist, but he never did swing. He let go of the man’s head, and the force of its fall pulled the rest of the Mexican’s body to the ground, and he was still breathing because he started spitting sprays of blood out his mouth. Uncle Boog fell onto the pallet fence where I had draped his shirt over it, coughed, and shook his head to get the cobwebs out. Suddenly, Ozzie Plimpton was there beside me, and he slapped Uncle Boog on the shoulder and pointed a fat finger.
“Go kill him. Finish him off. This is a fight to the death. You’re not done.”
Uncle Boog looked at Ozzie out of his one good eye with a glare of disdain that I had only ever seen him show for physical labor, and he pushed himself from the pallet fence up to full height. His body from top to bottom was almost completely clothed in blood and dirt.
“I’ll not kill a man because his dog killed yours in a fair fight. You want him dead. You kill him.”
“I’ll not pay the wagers if you don’t. This was a fight to death.”
“I don’t see anything about death written on your board. Who said to the death?”
Uncle Boog took his shirt in his hand and waved it at the crowd standing around the fence, all who were silent and listening and had been listening to what Ozzie and Uncle Boog were saying.
“You folks confused about this fight being over? Any one of you unsure who won? Anybody want to renege on his bet ‘cause Sanchez is not dead?”
There was a short but deafening silence at first, but then angry and forceful shouts started coming from everywhere.
“The fight’s over! Pay up! Boog won! Where’s the money?”
I couldn’t tell you what all was being said, but it amounted to Ozzie’s threats of holding back money from any of the bettors or the fighters was not going to happen or the crowd was gonna tear him and his two henchmen to pieces.
Uncle Boog pitched forward a bit and then caught his balance and shuffled toward the pallet that opened into the arena. Jimbo Tuttle was standing there with the swinging pallet in his hand but with it closed, and at first it didn’t seem like he would open the gate, but he did after only a second’s pause, and I was waiting outside the gate to catch Uncle Boog as he reeled on the uneven ground stepping out of the ring. He put his left arm around my shoulder, and I carried his weight as we stepped out of the light of the pavilion. There was an angry sounding buzz coming from the crowd under the pavilion like a nest of yellowjackets had been kicked, and, above this irritated whir, I heard one woman’s voice a shrieking and a sobbing. I didn’t look, but I could figure who that was, and I’m sure that you can as well.
Well, we hobbled together down onto a big flat rock on the edge of the creek where Uncle Boog finally seemed to get his balance back. He took his arm from around my shoulder, and I kept my arms around him carefully to see how he was going to be able to stand on his own. He seemed fine seeing as what all he had been through, and so I let him go. He looked up at the stars and at the bright full moon, grimacing in his swollen face and rotating his dirty and bloody neck so that it audibly cracked and popped.
“Five thousand dollars, Dewey Lynne, five thousand dollars.”
That’s what that fool said to me after all that he had been through, and, I swear, I looked over at him all coated in blood, grit, and grime with his eye swollen shut and a huge gash still bleeding above his ear, and that idiot had a big ol’ grin on his face. If I’m a lying, I’m a dying, and it ain’t my time yet. I didn’t know what to say. I don’t recall that I said anything, maybe I did and maybe I didn’t. I wanted to cry, more from relief than anything else, but somehow that didn’t seem appropriate either, so I just stood there a looking dumb and watching him do the same. Whatcha gonna do?