A knock at the door. I check out the peephole. It’s Jesse. I open the door. A miasma of whiskey-stink comes in with him. He looks at Lucy. He whistles a low note.
“She still living?”
“For now.”
“Do what you can, man,” he says. “She’s hardcore. Me likey.”
“She’ll be a hell of dam,” I say. I’m talking too fast. I never was a salesman. “Let’s breed her with that brindle stud that Lopez has…”
“Hell, no, not yet. Bitch has fights in her yet.”
“Jesse, she’ll never come back all the way from this,” I say. “She’s already going to be a legend. Four pounds over and the dead game bitch won. Breed her.”
“She’s going back in the pit,” he says. I chew a chunk out of the side of my mouth.
“That rapper dude who was there, the one who owns Cherry? He wants to match her,” Jesse says. “Shit, man, Cherry’s a grand champion. She’s legit.”
“Lucy’s leg won’t ever heal right. She can’t win another fight.”
“Fuck it, then we lay money on her to lose. It’s still getting paid.”
I don’t say anything. My hands are shaking again. I don’t want Jesse to see.
“Palmer?” He looks at me.
“She can’t go back in the pit,” I tell him. I try to sound calm and steady.
“What’s this can’t shit?” Jesse turns his body sideways. It’s an unconscious reaction of a fighting man to a threat. You turn sideways to make your body a smaller target to your enemy. I think about the stories I’ve heard. The things Jesse’s done to men who cross him. Stories with knives in them. Pliers. Heated pieces of metal.
There is a scratch line in front of me.
I do not scratch. I do not fight.
“I’m your dogman,” I tell him. “You’re the owner. You make the call. If she lives, Jesse. Big If.”
His posture goes back to normal. He smiles.
“That’s the spirit. If she dies, she dies. But if not, patch her up and we match her against Cherry. The gate will be enormous. Anyway, I didn’t get into this to be a breeder, like some bored Grosse Pointe housewife with her goddamn Pekinese. I’m in it for the blood. Win or lose it’s a payday, isn’t it?”
I say “Yeah.”
Cur. Goddamn cur.
Jesse leaves. I look towards Lucy. Lucy’s ribs rise and fall so gently. If she lives, she will not recover fast enough. She will lose her next match. Lucy is dead game. She will not quit until she is dead. And Jesse won’t pull her out.
If she pisses, she lives. But then what? She fights. She dies. Dies bad.
I’m saving her life to kill her in a month.
Tough little bitch. Proud little warrior.
I’m sorry I am not as strong as you.
At the bottom of the tackle box is the final treatment. Vets call it T-61. It’s a fatal mixture of narcotics and paralytics, legally available only to licensed veterinarians. If I inject the T-61 into the IV bag, Lucy never has to wake up again. I take the plastic stopper off of the T-61.
The IV continues its drip-drip-drip. Lucy stirs. Her legs run in dog dreaming, swaddling up the blanket around her. She snarls. She bites the air. Still fighting in her sleep.
Still fighting.
Ok then. We’ll do it her way.
I carry Lucy out into the parking lot and lay her down. She sniffs the ground weakly. Her paws shake with the effort. She looks up at me with pleading eyes. She knows what I want of her. But she is so very tired. She falls into the gravel. Some of her wounds open up again. Blood drips, but no piss.
I’m talking to her. I don’t know when I started. I don’t know exactly what I tell her, but I know that it is true. The world fades out around us until we are the only two things left in it. I make her a promise. I know that I mean it.
I will not let her die.
Lucy squats. My heart sits too large in my chest. It kicks and kicks. Lucy yelps. She squirts hot amber piss onto the parking lot. A flood of it.
Tough little bitch. Proud little warrior.
When she is done Lucy limps over to my side and leans against me, confused by the noises I can’t help making. I stand in the hotel parking lot and cry over a puddle of dog piss.
I made her a promise. I will keep it. Lucy will not fight again. She’s fought enough. Me? I’m just getting started. If Jesse has a problem with that, he better be ready to scratch.
We’ll see who is cur.
Bastards of Apathy by Jason Duke
Nothing would keep the egg from frying on the sidewalk-Angel Rodriguez was that cocksure about it. He looked to the sky where the smog had turned the desert sky from blue to hazy green. The noon sun hung brutal like a furnace over Angel’s head, blasting down on him through the smog.
His homeboy Lauro Cavazos stood next to the gleaming metal statue of the Phoenix (called Garfield Rising), the statue donated by the young hipster artists a block up Roosevelt Street at Alwun House as a symbol of the efforts to gentrify Garfield district. Their motto: using the power of art to transform community. The metal bird rose from a nest of metal flames, screeching down on Angel like it wanted badly to peck out his eyes.
Just in case, Angel kissed the egg for luck. He said a little silent prayer to let him win the bet with Lauro because money was always at the top of the list of things to pray for. Then he shotgunned the egg so hard at the rusted metal pedestal the Phoenix was perched on, he felt the air snap, saw the little sonic boom part the oven heat rising on the air.
The egg sizzled. Lauro stooped to the alligatored sidewalk; put his face near the egg.
But nothing happened.
“It isn’t frying.”
“Just wait.”
The edges fried.
Angel cradled the carton in his free arm, jumping up and down.
“See, I told you! Pay up motherfucker!”
Lauro slapped twenty dollars in Angel’s palm.
Jesus, it was fucking hot! Lauro thought, squinting at the sun. The fact he was short, stocky, and chubby didn’t help him, not in the slightest.
But hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk?
Lauro would never have guessed it. Now his ignorance cost him twenty dollars.
“What the fuck? That’s some bullshit, man,” Lauro was laughing.
Angel shrugged, “Seeing is believing.”
It was hotter mid-July heat than Lauro had experienced last year, after moving to the desert with his mother. As he squinted at the sun, he considered Angel probably knew exactly how hot it needed to get for the egg to fry. Angel had the advantage of being born and raised in Phoenix, living there longer.
They hopped the fence to Garfield Elementary; cut across the sallow playfield. They put as much distance as they could between them and their crime, where the metal Phoenix sat on the other side of the black vertical bar fence.
Like a game of follow the leader, Angel led Lauro through the neighborhood. They kept an eye out for cops; larger groups of teens. They took a shortcut through a ramshackle stucco duplex with a giant banner hung from the side, advertising: Low rent, low move-in fees.
On Fillmore, the next street over, they passed a beautifully renovated pyramidal cottage that had been boarded up and a For Sale sign stuck in the yard. The cottage was wedged into a row of broken-down ranch style homes and empty dirt lots. Another home was boarded up, missing a door, the insides gutted, the copper pipes and wires picked clean. Slivers of shade bordered the sides of the buildings, or under the moribund fronds of wayward palm trees leaning hunched along the broken street like the bowed backs of old, tired men.
Angel was tossing an egg in the air, catching it. Across the street, a skinny girl with ratty matted hair squatted in the feeble shade of the boarded up home with the missing door.