Stokes was to referee the first match. "All right," he said to the handlers, "bring your dogs and let's get it on."
He stepped over the plywood wall into the pit and scratched his belly, surreptitiously shifting the flat Mauser.380 Autopistol under his waistband to a more comfortable lay. Pit fighting used to be a small, gentleman's sport, but it was growing bigger, and the money heavier, and undesirable elements were moving in. Last year in Georgia two rip-off artists had shot — a guy and knocked over a match for $20,000.
Stokes had spotted half a dozen men in the barn with concealed guns.
The.380 was a dinky little caliber, but easy to hide, fast-firing, and accurate, and Stokes used hand loaded jacketed hollow-point slugs which would blow up a pretty good hunk of meat. At short ranges, the load had the impact of a.38 Special, a decent man-killer.
The dogs were brought in. Stokes was disgusted. This was a slop match. One of the animals was a huge Great Dane-Doberman cross that snarled and showed its teeth at everyone. It was charged with amphetamine. Drugs were rarely used on real dogs; it burned them out too quickly and left them weak and vulnerable. The crossbreed was more than twice the size of its opponent, a nice-looking black-and-white Staff. A handful of amateurs shouted out bets on the cross. The smart money picked them up right away. A couple of pros bet a little on the cross at five-to-one, trying the long shot just for kicks. The dummies grew uneasy, suspecting they'd been suckered, which they had.
The dogs were pitted under Stokes' instruction. The cross attacked the Staff crazily, slashing all over its back and side. Silently, the Staff seized one of the cross's forelegs and crushed it. The cross fought like a maddened bird of prey, the Staff like an imperturbable juggernaut. The fight lasted less than ten minutes. Bones broken, deep gaping wounds in its chest and sides, the cross tucked its tail, screamed and tried to flee.
"Cur! He's gone cur!"
Stokes turned to the cross's owner, who'd bought the dog from a junkyard dealer for a hundred dollars. "Your dog has cur red Mr.
Andrews. That's the match."
Andrews stuffed his hands in his pocket and looked unhappily into the pit, where the Staff had the cross down and was on its neck. "Aw shit, let Scanlan's dog finish him."
The cross was dead a few minutes later. Someone helped Andrews lift its corpse out of the pit. Scanlan removed his dog and began cleansing its wounds. Only one needed suturing. The dog licked Scanlan's face.
The winners collected their money, the farmer raked over the dirt and worked in some sawdust to dry up the blood. A ten-minute break was called.
Men got new beers and chewed down sandwiches. There were brags, tales of other fights, speculation on impending ones, a lot of jibing.
"Hey, Charlie. How you going to write up that abortion?" The man who asked had his shirt unbuttoned to the navel. A tattoo of two dogs twisted in combat spanned his chest.
Charlie Daws published an underground news magazine for the fight audience. Its subscription list was closely guarded and expansion was cautious. He looked disgusted. "Garbage match," he said.
"Scanlan's Iron Bite killed a big mongrel in a quarter hour, period."
Stokes brought Digger in, a four-year-old fawn Staff with a white chest.
The Staffordshire terrier had been evolved down through the centuries from the best stock of what had once been the broadly popular sport of pit fighting. Their primogenitor, far back in history, was the early English mastiff, a terrible brute the hairy tribes had sent against the Romans in barbarous Britain. The Romans were sufficiently impressed with the beasts to name them Canis pugnaces, warrior dogs, and they imported and bred them by the thousands to fight in the arenas against men and bears and wild bulls, and incorporated them into the army where their ferocity and power were used to break infantry attacks and rout cavalry.
The Staff was a shade smaller than a Labrador retriever, but there comparison ended. The Staff's head and muzzle were deep, the skull broad and domed. The cheek muscles bulged like swollen bladders. Its chest was massive and hard. The wide shoulder blades were sheathed in muscle. The ribs were well sprung and prominent and the back and hindquarters were muscled in cables. Occasionally, other breeds were fought and someone was always experimenting with crossbreeding and pitting the results, but the Staffordshire terrier was the favorite, and the finest fighting dog on earth. The whole of its being tightened into a knot of fighting frenzy at the sight of another dog, it was grossly powerful, a creature of raw courage, and it considered pain beneath its attention. With human beings, it was affectionate and gentle, particularly responsive to and protective of children.
Some guys said it was all in the blood and training didn't make any difference, you couldn't build heart in a loser. Well, the blood part was true, but the rest was bullshit. You bred for a monster, a wildass gut-eater who'd keep coming after he'd been quartered with an axe, but it was training and careful management that made the final difference between glory and a fortune, and a sack of ripped meat that was a dead dog. Stokes started a pup when it was three months old. He used a thick piece of leather as a pull toy, tugging hard against the pup, strengthening its bite and developing its musculature. When the pup was six months, Stokes began bringing home kittens, and a little later, cats. He nipped off the claws with a wire cutter and hung the felines in a loose mesh bag from a spring-fixed rope that had bounce and give, over a small pit he had in a shed. He restrained his pup to let its eagerness and frustration mount as the cat thrashed and moaned, then he said, "Go get 'imf" and released it, and urged it on excitedly while it worked the kitten over. If the kitten survived, Stokes kept it overnight and tossed it into the pit the next day for the pup to finish He used up to fifty kittens and cats on the average dog, burying the carcasses in the bed of his rosebush. After the cats came the suspension leather, a thick piece on a rope. Once the dog locked its teeth in, Stokes hauled the rope up, lifting the animal into the air.
Then he squat ted next to it saying, "Hang in, hang in, that's the boy, that's my killer, keep it up, you're iron, baby, you can do it, hang, sweetheart, hang, all the way, baby…" In time, a good dog could twist there half an hour, forty-five minutes. It built jaws with the bite of a hydraulic vise, a front assembly with the power of a locomotive. He maintained the hang work through all of a dog's fighting life, and he never stopped working them on the treadmill, walking in confinement atop an up tilted belt whose speed could be varied; muscles turned into stone. It was one thing to have a hard biting dog with heart, but another to have one with experience to boot.
The best training for combat was combat. So Stokes and a couple of friends would pit their younger animals in controlled matches, careful not to let it go to the point of grievous damage, getting the dogs used to pain, pairing them with animals just a hair more rugged, to force them to greater effort. In a real match, for blood and money, people usually pitted equals. Some liked bitches-they fought faster and more viciously but Stokes preferred males, who had more guts, were more brutal and willing to take greater punishment. A guy in Chicago was supposed to have a seventeen-fight winner — Podowski's Gutbuster-but Stokes didn't believe it.
A dog needed at least three months to recover from a decent fight-frequently as long as a year-and Stokes had never seen a veteran of six or seven fights that didn't look and move like he'd been put together by Dr. Frankenstein.