Dogmen

Being raised around dogfighting might condition you to its brutality.

This was my first dogfight. They were still setting up when I got there, holding the dogs by the collars in a hunch near the scratch lines. The fight-pit was a rectangle with scratch lines drawn across from each other, giving each dog a starting position from his corner, akin to the area from which boxers emerge off their stools to meet their opponent with trainer and medic rooting on, leaned over the ropes.

Like boxers, fighting dogs are silent. Most are.

I saw one exception. He had a pale coat and a red leash. He was lifted into the pit by an owner who smoked cigarettes during fights to calm his nerves. They were fighting a pitbull with a white nose whose owner had no trouble hoisting the barrel-chested animal over the 2-foot threshold into the pit.

There were three interested parties in attendance: (1) owners, (2) handlers, (3) watchers. I fit into the last category, although I was an exception to the rule that watchers are bettors.

The only disinterested party is the referee. His duties are administrative. Like cleaning the mat between fights, supervising the prefight wash to confirm that neither dog is covered in poison, and with prefight things done, he officiates. Officiating begins with Face your dogs, a shouted instruction accented by spit, which tells each owner to spread his legs and show the dog’s head and shoulders.

When each dog has peaked through his owner’s legs, Leeggoo is the referee’s shouted invitation to dogfight.

The pale dog spreads his paws as the pitbull charges. The pale dog lays his nose close to the mat which, I am told, they don’t use in third world countries to help the dogs keep from slipping in their own spit and blood. The chain-smoking pale dog’s owner further assures me that American owners try to protect their dogs by laying back on water for their prize-dogs before fights, to reduce their saliva during the head-thrashing that can last (despite posted Rules about times) up to two and three hours.

“How do ya know it’s done?” I ask.

“You can tell,” he says. And he could, along with everyone else there. It was this instinct, telling them all simultaneously, “The fight is now over.” I had that impulse, but it triggered as soon as I watched his dog start to fight. Pale Coat has a soft black nose that almost touches its shadow across from a pitbull that has everything but a shark fin protruding from the ring.

The mat is forever black.

The pitbull circles with Pale Coat frozen, eyes fixed on the ground. The pitbull’s owner adjusts a tie on his do-rag. Pale Coat’s owner puffs his cigarette and slaps the wall.

The break in action gives me a chance to study things. There are two mats, fastened together with electrical tape down the middle. It is a less forgiving version of the wrestling mat setup that cushioned my primitive years in practice rooms where I’d wrestled and been beaten, I thought, like a dog.

Pale Coat, with tail drawn and knees back in an eclipse formation with his front paws, dodges the leaping pitbull. The bull’s tail is perpendicular to the earth. He bear-hugs Pale Coat’s neck. Pale Coat tries to pass. His eyes read VACANCY.

For a moment, it matters to the pitbull. His momentum stops, in midair, with his torso pressing deadweight on Pale Coat’s neck. Pale Coat is silent, but his tail wags now against the far wall. I can’t hear it. But I can see it. He is doing everything he can to test the integrity of the pit walls. Integrity, I repeat to myself, and look up at the man who’s led me here. He led me with little explanation of what I was supposed to look for. I’d been handed off to him as a scout. A learned observer of combat. He expected me to educate him on which dogs seemed more capable.

I had seen Pale Coat before we got in here. I wondered if he trained like the other dogs. If he’d ever been subjected to the Jenny, which was their phrase for the treadmill to prepare dogs for the cardiovascular challenges of dogfighting contests, which I was now being told, could last up to four hours.

I looked back up at the wall where PIT RULES stated, under Rule 8: The interested parties shall choose one timekeeper, who shall remain at ringside.

The trainers seemed excited for an outsider to learn of their ways. They had primitive tools but elaborate routines. It was not unimpressive the way their human words excited sincere responses from headstrong, if impressionable, animals.

I was not smitten but I was intrigued. Perhaps the Surveillance Man was right to identify me for something that, in its narrative description, resonated with my eminence in football evaluations. Everyone here was a layperson, distinguished only by instinct. Much the way I had risen up the ranks of football fandom, these men hadn’t been to school for this. Like them, I hadn’t gotten a diploma to become an agent. Sure, I passed some tests. But the NFLPA exam wasn’t much more of an obstacle for my kind than the mortgage application that deeded these people the homes where they trained their animals, and the drivers’ licenses that got them cigarettes and cars to drive here.

Maybe, I wondered as we wandered the considerable property where this fight would take place in a dungeon of a plainly visible house, I can learn something here. Perhaps I’ll become a more proficient talent scout or considerate member of the human race. Either way, I figured it would be an athletic event, and there’s never been anything I love more.

When Pale Coat realizes the weight around his neck is moving, he twists toward the wall and tries to run through it. The wall, indeed, is still there. With the integrity of the pit walls not letting him escape, he tries to walk around the bull.

The pitbull looks confused.

He looks over his left shoulder. His owner glances across the ring, to Pale Coat’s owner. Somewhere nearby, I hear, “That dog ain’t got it.”

“Sure don’t. Ain’t gon’ be long.”

“Sure ain’t.”

I glance back to PIT RULES where it states, under Rule 12: If , when turned loose, a dog refuses to start up or stops on the way over, or if he fails to reach his opponent, then the opponent shall be immediately proclaimed winner.

I’d turned away, to read that rule, with some part of my soul hoping that the disconnect between my eyes and the event would create a synergy with the universe that stopped the fight. I can’t say this worked. What ensued was not a fight. It was a pale dog briefly in union with a wall and the shadow of a man who called himself his owner, canopied by people who called ourselves watchers. The pitbull stood straight up, so securely fastened into the soft footing of the black mat that he looked human for a moment. His hind legs supported his trunk with thighs so striated in muscle fiber that I had to physically pull a lever in my head to stop comparing the pitbull to my best clients.

The pitbull, posed like a statue, awaited instruction without looking at his sideline. His owner, who was also his handler, gave the go-ahead, shadowed by his son, who was laughing with the watchers.

“Oh shiiit,” someone yelled as the pibull clamped down on Pale Coat, who was writhing supine with his pelvis exposed and front paws reaching for the bull’s neck.

Pale Coat managed to stand, and they competed for a preferred hold, locked around each other’s neck on their hind legs, until Pale Coat committed a turn.

I looked at PIT RULES. It didn’t define turn, though I’d been told it is when one dog turns his head and shoulders away from his opponent.

Pale Coat had done this, but no one yelled, Handle your dogs. Without that prompt, Pale Coat’s owner could be penalized. Pale Coat searched the crowd.

The pitbull, now standing, dragged his front paw across Pale Coat’s bottom half. It was like shark teeth through a map. The pitbull buried his face in Pale Coat’s thigh, his head swiveling on a stick that answered to the calls of a do-ragged guy in a 40oz. to Freedom shirt named Rob. The eyeholes of the crying sun on his album cover T-shirt were cut out so that his nipples protruded over the pit wall, which he banged with a closed fist in anticipation of his dog’s victory. I don’t hear the words. I just see the spit, slow and profuse.

Rob’s older brother was the owner and, to his credit, he didn’t instruct the pitbull to reengage with the chew toy that nature gave him. It was nature’s way that Pale Coat succumbed to the battery-operated shark tooth exhibit affixed to the seizuring neck, reinforced by the steel concrete that had found its way into the pitbull’s neck and perpendicular tail.

Pale Coat took on a human quality as he hugged the pitbull, gathering up for a sound signal that shook me, if no one else. It was the first intentional noise to come out of the pit, after a day of inadvertent noises from being spent or angry. But Pale Coat gave a bagpipe whimper. I don’t even think, if it were translated into language, that it meant anything. Maybe, if it meant anything, it just meant something. The noise he made, I imagined it to mean in his head: something. He said it over and over again. Something, someone. Something, something.

It might’ve been the lighting on our side of the ring--to which he’d made his way as the chew toy for the pitbull--or maybe it was the dark hands gripping the pit wall that I was just now noticing around me as Pale Coat flopped at our feet, but he was yellow now. He’d been a soft opaque before.

But now he was a tufty yellow. The wet flaps of his skin clumped in the gloved grip of a boy wearing square glasses and green scrubs.

“Our new medic.”

The fight had been called. Pale Coat’s face had been washed and now, the boy in scrubs who introduced himself as Paul adjusted his V-neck compulsively as Pale Coat’s owner addressed him with very little distance between his face and Paul’s.

Paul’s pants were loose. So loose that his bare bottom peeked out when he leaned to study Pale Coat.

From a carrying bag near his right knee, Paul took out a vial into which he stabbed a syringe at a sharp angle. He withdrew the syringe, full of clear liquid, and held it perpendicular to the sky, flicking the side before filling his chest with air and leaning into Pale Coat with a heavy-thumbed pump of its syrupy center.

Pale Coat shook. Paul dropped to study him. He held his cheek parallel to the dog’s heart. Then Paul dipped his nose between the dog’s front paw and chest, as if sniffing, and turned away. He dug through his bag.

They’d dropped Pale Coat on the concrete, tufty yellow feathers of his coat fanned out like loose carpet. Blood spread through the creases of fleece. The cement corner, where the mats didn’t reach, had a collection of stiff dog hair shreds, like a wig dropped from a great height on the pavement of a girls’ locker room. Dog hair was swept into it by the broom-like sweeping of fighting dogs.

Pale Coat’s blood made its way inside the ring, under a hole in the wall, and it pooled in that corner.

The man who’d led me here was Ben Blake, and he’d been quiet for most of Pale Coat’s fight. He spent the last several seconds of it shouting. He had wagered on the pitbull, and he was congratulating me on my victory before the fight was called. By now, he’d stopped savoring the victory and directed his attention to Pale Coat. He was yelled at by Pale Coat’s owner. I had a hard time understanding whether, near the fight’s end, Ben was encouraging the black or mocking the yellow. It seemed implausible that he was pleading for the mercy of the latter, which is what he claimed later.

By that point, it didn’t matter. I’d seen enough of him. Heard his screams. Watched him grip and pound.

I left him in the velvet folds of an Appalachian stream.