Bait Dog An Atlanta Burns Novel - By Chuck Wendig Page 0,64
many women, that’s for sure. Those that are here look like pros. Short skirts, too-tight jeans, lipstick so red they look like vampires fresh from a feeding.
But it’s then she sees something that really bakes her lasagna: three students from the baseball team. One of them is Charlie Russo: weed-smoker under the bleachers. Next to him: Carlos, another from the baseball team. And wandering away from those two: Maisey Bott. Atlanta knows Maisey. Shit, they’re in bioscience class together. Or were before the school year ended. She’s a nice girl. Dumb as a bag of coconuts, but nice.
“You good?” Guy asks her.
“Yeah,” she lies. She doesn’t want the kids to see her. They won’t, she tells herself. They’re going to focus on the fight. And if they see you, so what? They’re already scared of you. Like the Beatles sang, let it be.
Atlanta’s feet carry her forward with an undeniable gravity. Feels not like she’s moving forward but rather like everything is moving toward her.
They find a space in the crowd right between the whites and Hispanics—as if the two of them form connective tissue between the two groups.
Her hands hold the plywood wall, a wall that stands about waist high. A splinter bites into the meat of her index finger and she pulls it away, a bead of blood already blowing up like a little red balloon.
Nobody’s in the ring right now. It’s between matches. The parched earth of the arena is scratched and furrowed from earlier fights. A few tumbleweeds of dog hair blow around in the faint breeze. The ground is stained dark in a few places. Or maybe Atlanta’s just seeing things.
Suddenly: commotion. Someone moves through the crowd at the far end, near to the skinheads: it’s a thick-necked white guy wearing a black wife-beater and showing off biceps that bulge with a pair of swollen swastika tats. He hauls a creature into the ring that calls to mind that old adage of how dogs and their owners start to look like one another. His tawny pitbull’s bristling with fat and muscle, a beast wreathed in mean gristle. Around the dog’s neck is a rusted chain wrapped again and again, the ends trailing in the dirt. The dog’s got empty eyes and a muzzle marred with a mesh of pink scar-lines.
Thick-Neck brings the beast to the far end of the arena, celebrated by the hoots and hollers of the skinheads.
The second dog comes into the arena. A brindled pit bull who enters and sits right away, his body making the shape of a pyramid—thick base, thin shoulders, tiny brick head. The dog seems happy. Mouth open. Pink tongue out. Panting in the heat, blissfully ignorant. His handler—owner? trainer? torturer?—is a big black dude in a loose-hanging Chicago Bulls jersey and with one of those helmet-strap beards that looks like someone drew a line along his jaw with a permanent marker. He gets down, nuzzles the dog, gives it a few slaps on the haunches. The dog leans into the attention. The joy of a well-loved animal, ignorant to the boos of the skinheads nearby.
“That dog’s dead,” Guy says.
“What?”
“He’s docile. A pet, not a fighter.”
Her middle tightens. “That’s messed up.”
“That’s dog-fighting.” He sniffs. “Besides, over there, the skinhead? That’s Karl Rider. His dog, Orion, hasn’t lost a match. Trains him with those chains. Forces him to drag around tractor tires. Makes him tough as balls. He’s probably over weight or close to it. But money makes that a moving target. Bribes make the world go ‘round. This world, anyway.”
“Orion.” Her teeth clench. “Figure he’d name it something more Hitlery. Adolf. Himmler. Something.”
“Nah, check it. Orion. O-R-I-O-N. Our Race Is Our Nation.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. Here. Look—the ref. Match is about to start.”
The ref isn’t very ref-like. No black-and-white stripes, no whistle. He’s just a pot-bellied yokel with a fat nose over a big black beard who comes out and gesticulates with his hand almost like he’s whipping around an invisible lasso: “Orion versus Omar. To your corners now.”
Each handler brings the dogs toward the corner, and the ref goes and, using a screwdriver, carves a semi-circle line in the dirt before each dog, saying, “Behind the line, face away.” And both the skinhead and the black dude turn their dogs away from each other, toward the wall, toward the crowd. The ref asks each man to bare his arms, then his calves, then he pats each dog down.