Love and Other Wounds (4 page)

“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 toward 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.

Okay then. We'll do it her way.

I carry Lucy out into the parking lot and put 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.

Some people will tell you that a person's name has power and meaning. But it's not so. A name's just a name is all. It don't have the power to affect your fate. Maybe you think it's because I'm named Geat myself that I have this opinion. Here's what being named Geat means: it means that my daddy was one hardcore Aryan son of a bitch is what it means. But just because I'm named after a bunch of white barbarians don't make me a natural-born Super White Man. Here in the Ozarks, people here being mostly white as an albino's scalp, you go around hating the niggers and Jews, you might as well get a hate-on for the Martians. There's plenty of pale-ass bastards around here to hate anyway. Of course, if you can't keep yourself out of prison like my old man, you might run into a few more of the brothers.
That's why my name is Geat Mashburn and also why I always had two birthday parties when I was a kid—one in the Leavenworth visiting room. See, the things that happen, the choices folk make, those are the things that shape you, not a name. But nicknames are different. A nickname stuck to you at the right time can twist your life around forever. Most people who you'd ask about Mad Dog McClure, they'd tell you he was so cussed mean and crazy that God himself had that name written down for him in the Book of Life. But most of those people don't know what I do. See, I was there.

I was there at Jackie Blue's the night Joe got the name Mad Dog. When the night started, he was just Joe McClure, a good old boy with a job sticking rebar in concrete. The guy was a metalhead with shaggy hair, usually wearing some black T-shirt with a name like Morbid Angel or Cannibal Corpse on it, but that's not that strange in these parts. He was a big fellow, almost as tall as me, but in a way you wouldn't notice. No jailhouse tats, nothing in the world that would have made you think that this fellow was going to become one of the most feared men in the hills.

To tell the truth, the only guy with a rep that night at Jackie Blue's—except old Jackie himself—was me. See, I'm a watchdog. Around here we don't have no Mafia or big crime families to keep the peace between operators, or to police 'em when they try to run games on each other. So if you want to make sure your deal goes down without a hitch, you call on me, and I'll come along to watchdog the deal. People see me coming their way and all their thoughts of double-crossing and dirty deals just dribble out their ears like creek water.

The night in question I was drinking double Crown and Cokes and talking to Jackie about what Mike Lewis had done
last weekend in the parking lot of the bar. See, the weekend before old Mike Lewis got off at the bus stop down at the square having just come from a seven-year bit for armed robbery and walked straight to Jackie Blue's to drink away his gate money. About six Wild Turkeys later, Lewis bumps into some square john who'd just walked into the wrong bar looking for a place to watch the Cards game. Now understand when a man walks out of a seven-year stretch, he's different than when he went in. In this case Lewis done swoll up like a tick and covered his arms in dirty gray tats of the Grim Reaper, FTW, the number 13, and the like. So the square john was real apologetic, tried to buy Lewis a replacement for his spilled drink.

Lewis just went sort of crazy, talking about how this square john was talking out the side of his neck and whatnot. Jackie tells him to take it outside. Even Lewis knew not to start shit inside Jackie Blue's—Jackie's retired, but he likes to stay active—so he drags this little square john outside and gives him an old-fashioned Ozarks ass-whipping. And when he's done, he props the fellow up against the side of the car and makes the guy open his mouth. And then he pulls out his pecker and takes a leak using that fellow's mouth for a urinal.

So the next weekend, Jackie and I are hashing the story over and having a laugh. Maybe it seems a little cold to laugh at it, but you learn quick in the life that you either laugh at the fucked-up shit around you or you start doing it yourself. Is the square world like that too? Anyway, me and Jackie had a big old time telling each other the story, and we never paid any mind to Joe McClure playing the Ms. Pac-Man machine in the corner.

Maybe twenty minutes later, who walks into Jackie Blue's but old Mike Lewis himself, looking like a week out of stir hasn't taken the edge off his crazy. He orders three double Wild Turkeys in three minutes and pays for each of them with a twenty
as fresh and clean as a new-snowed field. It doesn't take Magnum, P.I. to figure that Lewis ran out of the gate money they gave him when he got set free and that he's robbing gas stations again. Mike Lewis was waving Jackie over to order number four when he got interrupted.

“Cocksucker!” Joe yelled at the machine, and then he slapped the glass top. A ghost must have got him. But since the song on the jukebox died at just that second, Joe's swearing comes out louder than he meant it to. You know how that is. For some reason no one will ever know, Lewis gets the idea that Joe went and called him a cocksucker. Like I said, prison can change a man, and sometimes things happen that you don't ever tell no one about. So Lewis walks over and shoves Joe right out of his chair, just like that.

Joe's hammer spilled out his tool belt of its own accord. He didn't fish it out like you've heard it told. And most of the people at Jackie Blue's that night didn't know that Joe had just spent twenty minutes listening to the story of how Lewis turned a man into his private piss pot just the week before. So I guess to them, when they saw Joe come up from the floor and open up Lewis's head with the claw end of the hammer, it might have looked unprovoked. And I can see how if you didn't know the whole story, the way Joe turned the hammer around and gave Lewis a few more whacks on the way down could have looked like overkill.

Well, Jackie Blue's cleared out pretty quick after that, and I left along with everyone else, not needing that kind of shit in my life, so I can't tell you what Joe's face looked like while he watched old Mike Lewis drip blood onto the scummed-up carpet. But I've often wondered on it.

And it wasn't but a week later that I heard someone call Joe McClure Mad Dog for the first time.

“You hear about old Mad Dog, what he done last night?” Bill Houser asked and then wiped chaw spit off his flavor-saver. Houser is one of those good old boys always has a plastic cup with him half full of black sputum. Makes me sick. The cash he was paying me to sit in a holler and watch some fellows move bales of weed from one truck to another made it tolerable.

“Mad Dog?” I sliced a bite off an apple, ate it, and wiped off my knife. Down at the bottom of the blade is carved a cross, followed by the word white, the signature of the old boy who made it for me. Crosswhite's a good blade, and the old hardass who made 'em died a few years back, so I keep it sharp and clean.

“Who the hell is Mad Dog?” I asked, pushing the knife back in my boot.

“That dude what put the hurt on Mike Lewis. Mad Dog McClure.”

“Joe McClure?” I asked. “Since when is he called Mad Dog?”

“I ain't ever heard him called anything but. Anyhow, last night I guess he was over at the Pink Lady, shooting Jäger down on pervert row. He'd gotten himself a favorite—a slice by the name of Sunshine, and not a bad choice neither. The crank ain't reached her face yet like most of the scags down there. Anyhow, Mad Dog's throwing his money on the table and getting a face full of fish in return, and some dumb son of a bitch who'd drove down from Monet starts bitching about how Sunshine isn't giving him the old tuna special. Guess he got mad enough to go ahead and call that stripper a whore, which ain't exactly like calling the Virgin Mary one, but still I guess—”

A bang shook us both from the story. I had my sawed-off up off the bumper and raised before I could see that it was just a fellow who dropped the plastic-wrapped bale he was hauling. I sat back. Houser laughed.

“You all right?” he asked me. “Seem a mite bit jumpy.”

“Just tell the story. McClure's stripper gets called a name, and . . .”

“Well, what do you think happens? Mad Dog gets out that hammer of his he carries like he's just some dumb construction worker—”

“Well, that he is.”

Houser waved this off, rolling his eyes like I'm the stupid one.

“Sure he is. Guess that's why he took that hammer and turned that boy's front teeth to fairy dust floating in the air.” He mimed a tomahawk chop. “Then he went after the dude's friends, all three of 'em at a time, and I heard he had two of them on the ground and the third one balls-out running by the time the bouncers got to him.”

Houser shook his head and swirled his spit cup.

“Can't believe you ain't heard it yet—a mean hombre like yourself ought to know about what the other hardcases are up to.”

To tell the truth, I didn't give much credit to the story—chaw juice isn't the only type of shit known to dribble out Houser's mouth. But over the next couple of months the hits kept coming. Stories about Mad Dog—and it was always Mad Dog in the telling, never Joe—trickled down and around. Mad Dog smashed the window out of a fellow's truck and dragged him out to stomp him in the parking lot at Remington's. Mad Dog and Sunshine—who I guess got smitten when he pulverized that fellow's incisors—smashing empties against the wall of the Dew Drop with no one there brave enough to say boo about it. Mad Dog cracking the arm of some rent-a-cop down at the Ozarks Empire Fair—he got pulled in on that one, but I never heard nothing coming of it.

All this time I didn't see the fellow, as Jackie banned him
from the bar after that action with Lewis and I'm pretty loyal about where I do my boozing. But one night I ended up at a little roadhouse just outside of town on account of having just watchdogged a deal out on a farm. It wasn't the biggest deal I ever saw go down—just a bunch of trembling suckmouthed peckerwoods each scared of their own shadow—but work had been slow as of late. I needed a drink when the deal was done.

I didn't recognize him at first, and might not have at all if he hadn't been sitting with some other fellows from the life that I knew. I shook a few hands before I turned to this fellow in the black tank top.

“Hello, Geat.”

Well, what a few months and a new name can do. He'd grown a tangled billy goat beard, for one. For two there was a tattoo—still wet looking—of a slavering pit bull on his bicep. You could see by the way he was sitting and the way everyone else was sitting that he was the fellow in charge. Maybe helping that out was the woman at his side, who I guessed was Sunshine. She was a pretty little thing all right, but she looked at me with that half-lidded kind of look that I've learned to stay away from. Both of them looked pretty tricked out with flashy jewelry—diamonds on her fingers, another in his earlobe—and clean clothes. Mad Dog McClure wasn't hauling rebar for his scratch no more, that much was clear.

“Hello, Joe,” I say back.

“It's Mad Dog these days,” he says back, twisting his trunk so that the tattoo faced me.

“Course it is,” I say, and take out my wallet and turn to face the bartender. “How about a round for everyone here—and let's get some shots with that. How's Wild Turkey sound to a Mad Dog?”

He smiled and leaned back in his seat like he'd won something.

“Sounds right, Geat. It sounds right.”

So we did our shots and drank our beers while people played pool and stuck quarters in the jukebox and played those songs that I guess it's required by law that you hear every time you step into a bar out here: “Gimme Three Steps,” “Thunderstruck,” “If You Want to Get to Heaven,” shit like that. I mostly sat back and watched the rest of the table slobber all over Mad Dog's ass. He tried to play it cool, but I could see it plain there behind his mask—he was stone hooked on being Mad Dog. After a while he got up to piss. A minute later I went over to the jukebox like I was thinking of playing a song. When he came out the pisser I waved him over.

“What can I do you for, Geat? If you're looking for good music on that juke, forget it. Just that same old redneck shit in there.”

I didn't have no idea how to do this. None at all. But it had to be done—somebody had to try to save this boy's life.

“Look, Joe—”

“Mad Dog.”

Shit. I'd blown it already.

“Mad Dog, look, man, I just—shit. You need to cut this shit out, amigo.”

He laughed like he didn't know what I was talking about, but I could see it in his eyes.

“Cut what shit, Geat? What shit exactly should I cut out?”

“You need to get back to your crew and haul some motherfucking rebar and cut out this ‘Mad Dog' shit. You are not . . . this isn't you, man. This is not going to end well.”

“Aw, fuck all that. You think I'm going to sit back and let y'all have all the fun? Think I want to keep getting to the job site at five in the goddamn
A.M
.? Come on, Geat, I'm not Joe McClure anymore. My name's Mad Dog, see?”

He tapped his fingers on that hammerhead on his tool belt. I looked back and saw that the table was staring at us. I turned back, palms up. Chill out, the hands said.

“All right there, Mad Dog. Look, I understand, I do. But I always thought you were a good fellow back at Jackie Blue's, and I don't really want to see no harm come to you. You keep pumping yourself up like this and some shark is going to come by and take you down just so they can have people say, ‘He's the one who killed Mad Dog.' You just think about it, okay?”

I turned to get going, and one of his boys stood up to meet me on the way out, a rat-faced fellow by the name of Webby. He kind of sneered at me, and my first instinct was to rear back and bitch-slap him. Instead, I turned back to Mad Dog.

“Care to put a leash on your boy?” Mad Dog laughed and waved Webby back in his seat.