“You want me to hold him?” the man said.

  “No. You spooked him already.”

  He lay the syringe across the jawed-open medical bag and withdrew another baby-food jar and unscrewed the lid and dipped two fingers of his left hand into the contents and withdrew them, covered with a shining substance.

  Gar said, “What’s that?”

  “Bacon grease,” Claude said.

  “Jesus Christ.”

  He took the syringe in his right hand and approached the dog. The laceration in the dog’s hind leg was serious. The sartorius would be involved, probably also the tensor something or another—he couldn’t remember the name of the muscle. Claude talked quietly to the dog. It didn’t matter what he was saying. The dog watched him. He stopped talking and whistled and hummed at that same time, a two-tone sound that often made dogs curious.

  When he was within arm’s reach of the dog he knelt and put his greasy hand far out to his left. The dog watched him, then hobbled forward. Claude jabbed the syringe into the dog’s hip. The dog scrambled back, the syringe still hanging from his haunch.

  The dog circled, panting, then lay down. “Give him a minute,” Claude said. They waited until the dog closed his eyes, about three minutes. Claude walked over and retrieved the syringe. “He’s out,” he said. “Come and get him.” The man untied the rope and lifted the dog in his arms and set off toward a pickup truck parked on the road. Claude trotted over to him. “The morphine will wear off in a couple of hours. Get a muzzle on him before you leave. Get that wound cleaned and stitched up. He’ll probably be okay. Take him to Ashland, not Papineau’s. Say he got attacked. Understand?”

  “Yeah, I understand.”

  “And you never saw me.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  He walked back to Gar.

  “You’re an idiot, you know that?” Gar said.

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Papineau walks around with a jar of bacon grease in his bag?”

  “No, he keeps it in the shop. I put it in the bag when I came out.”

  “You plan to tell Pap about this?”

  “Gosh. What do you think?”

  “I think if you ever do something like this again, Papineau’s going to be the least of your problems.”

  “Roger. Verily, thou frowneth upon my decision as the mighty storm layeth its shadow upon the fields of the earth. That about sum things up?”

  “Except for the part where I kicketh your ass,” Gar told him. But he was smiling.

  “Fair enough,” Claude said. “Now let’s go shoot some pool.”

  one august night ev picked a place so far back in the middle of nowhere that they didn’t even bother to find a clearing in the woods. They just set the pit up in the middle of the road. Cecil and Len waved the cars into the wide grassy ditches to park and the men came forward leading their dogs and laughing and talking. Claude had finished almost all the examinations, unremarkable to a one, and had gestured the next man forward when he realized that the dog approaching was one of theirs. A Sawtelle dog.

  A queer expanding hollowness occupied his chest. He managed to keep his expression neutral, hide the shock he felt and the panic that followed. He didn’t recognize the dog or the man.

  He performed the exam as slowly as he could. The dog was sound. Better than sound. Claude could only hope the dog might fail the taste, but he didn’t, and unable to think of another way to stall, he began examining the dog all over again.

  “How old is this dog?” he said to the man.

  “Two and a half. Little more.”

  That meant the dog would have been whelped in the spring of 1944. Claude thought he would recognize any dog from the last three or four years, and probably further back than that. And wouldn’t the dog recognize him? They always did, even years later. But he couldn’t put a name to the dog, and the dog only regarded him with imperturbable, inscrutable curiosity.

  Do I know you? Claude thought. Do you know me? Is this a mistake?

  To the man, he said, “Where did you get this dog?”

  “What’s that matter? Just get a weight, will you?”

  Claude stood. “Step back,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Step back or leave.”

  The man retreated, grumbling. Claude trotted the dog off the exam tarp as if to check his gait. Then, hoping what he was doing would look like a normal part of the examination, he tried a simple shared gaze with the dog. An easy discriminator. The dog looked at him and then along his sight path in the way that other dogs never did.

  Claude led the dog to the scale and took his weight. One hundred four pounds. He knelt and palpated the dog’s belly. He was listening to the heave of the dog’s lungs and the beating of his heart when Ev walked over and stood with his back to the group of men who had drifted over to watch.

  “What’s the delay, Doc?” he said, quietly.

  “I’m going to disqualify this dog.”

  “Tainted?”

  “No. No taint.” He wracked his brain for a defensible reason. “Something’s not right. Benzedrine, maybe. Caffeine. I don’t know.”

  Ev looked at the dog.

  “If he had Benz in him he’d be panting like a fiend.”

  “Some dogs yes, some no. It might not be Benzedrine, but it’s something.”

  “Any other problem?”

  “Nope.”

  “Then he’s fine. Let him in.”

  “I’m just telling you what I’m going to say. Overrule me if you want, but then I’m done here. I’ll walk home. It’s not fair to the other dogs. It’s not fair to this dog.”

  “All right, all right. Relax, okay? Call it any way you want.”

  Claude nodded. He stood and passed the lead back to the handler.

  “Take him home.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Disqualified. He’s unfit.”

  The man sputtered, then laughed. “Zeno? Are you kidding? Look at him. What more could you want?”

  Ev stepped in front of the man. Cecil and Leonard materialized to his right and left.

  “Doc said disqualified. It’s not a debate.”

  “I’ll say it’s not. Bring a healthy dog in and get turned away?” He stood glaring at Claude. “I think somebody here already knows which dog is supposed to win tonight and can’t afford to let a better dog enter.”

  “Your dog is doped,” Claude said. “Get him out of here and don’t bring him back. I won’t pass this dog. Not tonight. Not tomorrow. Not ever.”

  “Ooookey dokey,” Ev said. “All votes are cast and the polls are now closed.” He turned to Claude. “Look these last two over so we can get started. And you”—jabbing a finger at the man—“come with me.”

  As Ev and the man walked away, Claude watched the dog moving, its gait, bearing, the way it examined the world, all so familiar.

  When he’d finished the remaining examinations, Claude walked back to the Deluxe and lit a cigarette and leaned against the fender. He looked up at the treetops and at the stars beyond and tried to compute the number of dogs they’d placed in the last two years. Fifty, maybe sixty. He wished, for the first time, that he possessed his father’s capacity for remembering dogs down to the least detail. They’d certainly never named a dog Zeno.

  Ev sauntered out of the night, a darkly jolly look on his face. He clapped a hand on Claude’s shoulder.

  “Tough call, Doc,” he said. “Later, you and I need to talk it through.”

  claude and ev did talk, later that night, over whiskey, on Ev’s front porch. Claude didn’t like whiskey, hated actually the way it tasted, and barely sipped from his glass, though once Ev got rolling, he didn’t notice.

  “I know what you did tonight was well intentioned,” Ev told him, fishing an olive out of the juice of a half-empty jar and popping it into his mouth. “But it was sentimental, and you need to understand why.”

  There were certain similarities between Ev Minch and Dr. Papineau, Claude had discovered, chief among them that sooner or later both men got to propounding. Also, strangely, the longer he let them go on, the more they seemed to trust him. All he need do was feather his conversational paddle into the water once in a while and the boat pretty much propelled itself, though where it ended up was very different. With Papineau, you drifted into the stagnant doldrums of detail. Ev headed straight for the rapids of crazy.

  “Don’t you ever feel bad about it?” Claude said.

  Ev was unapologetic. “Those men, where have they all been? They’ve been fighting other men. They’ve been at war. It wasn’t a contest. It wasn’t sport. It was murder or be murdered. And the first time a bullet slammed into the dirt next to them, the first time they saw a corpse torn in half on the battlefield, all their passion for defending their country evaporated and it became about survival. From that moment on, they knew in their hearts they were weak and ruled by doubt, that they’d sooner run and hide until it was all over, that they didn’t care who won. They’d only gone forward because everyone around them did. So now they need judgment. They need something pure and real. Unless you understand that, none of what we’re doing makes sense.

  “For instance, the betting. Those men aren’t betting that one dog is meaner or stronger. They’re betting that one dog is purer. If their dog wins, for one hour they can believe that the loose bowels and the piss running down their leg wasn’t who they really were. And if their dog loses, they don’t mind losing the money, because in the end they got what they paid for, which was confirmation that they’re flawed. But either way they leave with the certainty that their champion faced his enemy with nothing but the teeth in his mouth.

  “They come here because they know the dogs are better than they are. Always have been. The dogs don’t think about loyalty or chances. They don’t fight with guns. Their only weapon is their belief in themselves. Have you ever seen a Pekinese back a Great Dane into a corner? That’s because the Peke knows it’s right.”

  Claude recognized this as part of the lecture Ev sometimes gave on fight night itself, after he’d spelled out the rules.

  “There’s an urge to fight in men,” he’d say. “Some men bury the urge in tiny hourly doses of cruelty dealt out to their loved ones, their work partners, their fellow men. Parceled out that way, the urge is never-ending. But we take that passion, that rage, and we give it to the dogs, and the dogs are fortified and made stronger. They fight for us, so that we can go home drained and relieved of our suffering.”

  “You’re here to see something pure,” he’d tell them. “You want to know that courage isn’t a fairy tale? Watch closely. This is the only chance you’re going to have to see real courage, life-and-death courage, unspoiled by the ambition of man.

  “People claim that the pit is cruel. But the pit is only an abstraction of nature, and nothing natural is cruel unless everything natural is cruel. They think dogs are just people with four legs and no hands. But dogs aren’t people. You put a dog into a man’s body, it’d beg to have its four good legs back, cry for a muzzle with teeth, and mourn for ears where they’re supposed to be. Dogs fighting is no crueler than boxers boxing. And of course they have a choice. Any dog that doesn’t want to fight can just stay behind the scratch line. You want to talk about cruel? Put two boxers into a ring with knives in their mouths. Or put boxing gloves on a dog. That’s cruel, because it’s unnatural. Cruelty is asking an animal to be a different animal. The moaners and weepers are the cruel ones, because they’re the ones who want dogs to act like men.

  “Some people think any kind of fighting is a sick kind of entertainment, but name me one kind of entertainment that isn’t a fight. Every movie is a fight. Men fighting for girls. Girls fighting over guys. Men fighting for money. Men at war. The more vicious the fight the better the movie. Show me a movie that can’t be boiled down to a fight, and I’ll show you a movie nobody buys a ticket to. Any book you’ve ever read on purpose is the story of a fight. The word ‘story’ means fight, I guarantee it. Man against man. Man against nature. Man against ignorance or disease. Even man against fate itself. But it’s always a fight. Baseball, football? Every single wrestling match? Fights, all of them. Car races? That’s fighting in cars. If fighting is sick, then we’re all sick, because fights are all we’re interested in. And if we can’t watch a fight, we’ll start a fight, just to have one to watch.

  “Fighting isn’t sick, and it’s not cruel. Putting on fights drains the fighting impulse out of the spectators and puts it into the arena, where the fighters know what they’re doing. Then the fight is lawful and orderly. The spectators drink their beer and holler at the gladiators. Their voices and their money are their weapons, and everyone goes home less inclined to fight in the streets. Or at home. It’s a necessity. Hell, it’s a public good.”

  CHAPTER 8

  DOC

  On that friday afternoon in september, Claude had collected the pinkeye medicine from Dr. Papineau and was idling the Deluxe at the end of Pap’s driveway, waiting for a logging truck to go by. Forte sat on the passenger side of the front seat, panting and looking out the window. Glen Miller was playing on the radio. Glen Miller was the official music of the war, and the war was over, and on that sunny, warm September afternoon what a person wanted to hear was Perry Como or the Ink Spots, something that didn’t sound antique. Claude twisted the tuning knob on the radio. He heard a faint tick, tick, tick and glanced down to find the needle on the voltage meter banging back and forth against its stop pins.

  “Aw, fat,” Claude said. In most respects, the Deluxe had been operating beautifully since Ev, Cecil, and Len had torn it down and reassembled it back in May. It was still a creaky old car, but far more reliable, except once a week or so when the voltage needle went crazy and the engine sputtered and cut out—which it now did.

  Claude started counting to thirty. Through trial and error he’d learned that if he waited half a minute after one of these voltage meter episodes, the Deluxe almost always started right up again. If he got impatient and keyed the ignition too soon, especially if he jumped the gun several times in a row, it could be an hour or more before the engine agreed to turn over.

  One night, after he’d described all this to Ev, Ev had poked around under the hood a while. He declared it a mystery. “Next time, after it starts up, drive straight here. Don’t stop anywhere or turn the engine off. Just get here and let me see it.”

  To be safe, Claude counted out a full minute before turning the key. The engine coughed itself to life. The voltage meter needle hovered steadily at twelve volts.

  Claude cut through Tannery Town and onto Highway 77 heading east toward Tyler Forks, then down the dirt road to Ev’s place. Leaving the Deluxe running, with Forte sitting in the front seat, he got out and knocked on Ev’s door. A dog barked somewhere toward the back of the house.

  Ev, freshly shaven, towel still in hand, cracked open the door and looked at him.

  “Doc.”

  “It happened again. You wanted to see it right after, so I came over.”

  “What happened?”

  “The voltage meter on the Deluxe. It went haywire like I told you about, then the engine quit on me.”

  “Ah, okay. Right. Right. Hang on.” Ev closed the door and came out a minute later wearing canvas work pants and a white T-shirt and no shoes. He dropped behind the wheel of the Deluxe, patted Forte on the neck, then operated the high beams, the radio, the dashboard backlight, and the overhead light in various combinations, but no matter what he tried, the voltage meter needle held at twelve volts.

  “It was hitting both pins just before the engine cut out.”

  Ev shrugged. “Probably a bad gauge.”

  “Can a bad gauge stop the engine?”

  “Unlikely,” Ev admitted. “If we had more time, we could get in there and try to track it down. But right now we’ve got bigger fish to fry. Who told you about tonight?”

  “Tonight?”

  “It’s Friday night. Fight night, my friend. Last of the season.”

  “Nobody told me.”

  “Well now they have. Are you stocked up and ready? As long as you’re here we can drive out together.”

  “I can’t do it.”

  Ev shielded his eyes as if against a too-bright sun. “Sure you can.”

  Claude could smell, faintly, the odor of fresh dog feces. The fact that he recognized the smell, that he knew it was fresh, bothered him. At the idea of another fight night his mouth tasted like tin.

  The dog barked again. Claude looked at the house and then at Ev.

  “We’ve got a sweet location lined up,” Ev said, grinning. “And I’ll be bringing a surprise guest.”

  Claude tried to remember what he’d told his father that morning—whether he’d said he’d be working a late shift at his second job. His nonexistent second job.

  “What’s the issue, boy? I need you there tonight.”

  “I’d have to run Forte home, then explain why I need to leave again.”

  “Just leave him here. I’ve got a spare kennel out back. Or, I will later on.”

  “Is that Jonesy I heard?”

  “Look at you. Guessed the big surprise.”

  Claude gestured at Forte. “I’ll figure something out. Thanks.”

  “Better figure fast. We leave here at seven.”

  “Where is it? I’ll meet you there.”

  “That’s the best part. Len found an abandoned farm way the hell south on Boucher Road. House and barn both empty. You know Boucher Road?”

  “Never heard of it.”

  Ev went into the house and came back with a rumpled grocery sack, which he lay across the Deluxe’s hood. He drew a map with a carpenter’s pencil.

  “You go out 77, past my road, through Tyler Forks and Rouse. About two miles before Upson look for a dirt road heading south. It’s easy to miss. That’s Boucher.” Ev narrated four more turns, the roads materializing under his pencil as he spoke. “Park behind the pine trees in the yard. You’ll see ’em. Everyone else we’re sending down the side of the field across the road.”