a white dog recently. Couple weeks back. Little. A… a terrier.”
Tressa just sits in the pothole like someone who sat on the toilet while the seat was still up and got stuck. “Yeah. Well, I wasn’t there. But we stole a couple little white ones recently.”
“And where do they end up? Where do Bodie and Bird—“ those scum-sucking sumbitches “—take the dogs?”
“The Farm.” Tressa clears her throat, says it again louder. “They take them to the Farm.”
“The heck happens at the Farm?”
“The fights.”
“What fights?”
“The dog fights.”
That didn’t add up. “You don’t put little white terriers in a god-dang dog fight. That doesn’t make a lick of sense. You use… I dunno, pit bulls and Rottweilers and—“
“The dogs aren’t for fighting. They’re bait dogs.”
“Fuck is a ‘bait dog?’”
Tressa tells her, and things start to add up.
Atlanta’s shaking. The baton end quivering as it points accusingly toward Tressa. “Hundred bucks. That’s it. That’s how much the animal’s misery is worth. How much your soul is worth.”
“I told you, I’m not involved—“
“You better run,” Atlanta seethes. Her voice barely sounds like her own. “You better run right now because if you don’t I’m going to knock your teeth out. Maybe break your fingers. Sell you to someone horrible for five twenty-dollar bills so they can do whatever they want to you. How’s that sound? Huh? How’s it fucking sound.”
Tressa backpedals like a panicked grab, manages to stand. “I’m sorry.”
Atlanta whips the baton an inch in front of Tressa’s face. Had it connected, it would’ve shattered her cheekbone, cracked the porcelain bone protecting her temple. Tressa barks a sob, then turns and runs away, again the clompy moose. Clutching the can of Monster energy like it’s all she has left in the world.
* * *
This is what Tressa said about bait dogs: she said that they take the dogs and sell them to dog fighters. The stolen dogs are worth more if they can’t hurt anybody, so Bodie removes the teeth and claws with pliers. Then the little dogs—or sometimes cats if they can grab those, but they’re worth less as bait animals—end up in an open cage or dangling from a rope or just thrown into a pen with the fighter dog. The spilled blood, the animal’s cries, that’s meant to rile up the fighter dog, get him thirsty and mean for the fight. The bait dogs train the fighter dogs to fight. And to kill.
Bait dogs go for a hundred bucks a pop.
A bait dog is bait. It’s right there in the name.
And it makes Atlanta sick in a place far deeper than her stomach.
* * *
That night, a dream.
Atlanta runs through clouds of gunsmoke. Through a field that’s somehow also a swamp. A big moon overhead, bigger than you ever see, pink like meat and fat like a pregnant woman’s belly.
She chases a dog whose howls of pain echo over the grass.
The dog runs ahead of her. A white flash. Leaving wet blood on the grass.
Atlanta’s foot steps into a hole as she runs. The ankle twists. Snaps as she falls.
She cries out and her cries are the dog’s cries.
Someone reaches in, someone invisible, starts feeling for her teeth, starts pulling them out of her gums real easy, like they’re weeds with shallow roots in loose mud. Someone starts removing her t-shirt, too, cutting it with a knife. Greasy hand feeling along her bra. Fingers working their way past the edges. Into her jeans and panties. The smell of cigarette breath and stale Rolling Rock. A voice in her ear, male, a voice too-familiar—
“Your mother shouldn’t know about this.”
The dream ends and she awakens cold and slick with sweat. She goes downstairs and eats cheap pretzel sticks with trembling hands until the sun comes up, a cairn of salt and crumbs piling before her.
* * *
It’s like diving headfirst into a filthy pool. Where the layers of scum and disease thicken the deeper you swim (or maybe, just maybe, the deeper you drown). Every link she clicks, every news story or website she reads, it just ruins her day that much more until the moment comes where she feels like she’s coming off a days-long food poisoning and she’s not sure if she’ll ever be able to eat anything again.
And all the people here at the rinky-dink Maker’s Bell library, they don’t know. They’re going about their morning like it’s nothing at all. Taking out their popular bestselling books. Bringing their kids to story time. Searching for jobs or playing Solitaire