Brad Felver - The Dogs of Detroit

Jared’s sparring opponent is no kid. He’s an older man, mid-thirties perhaps, with bad teeth and mangy hair that looks like mulch. He’s built like a 155-pound midget-lumberjack, as wide as he is tall, his neck seeming to sprout directly from his ass. He has an eye tattooed on the back of his neck, and I know immediately my son is in trouble.

I stand cage-side. I stare at Jared as he stretches his long limbs and pulls on the fingerless five-ounce gloves. He windmills his arms, bounces on the balls of his feet. He hangs from the cage top, and each vertebra pops as his spine lengthens. Thiago calls them to center of the ring and reminds them of the rules, reminds them it is full-contact, long rounds, standard stoppages for strikes and submissions. “Real fight, gentlemen,” he says.

Jared wilts almost immediately. Lumberjack makes no attempt to strike with him. Thiago tells them to fight, and he rushes at my son, closes the distance before Jared even has his feet set. Jared topples over, and Lumberjack straddles him, axing the point of his elbow into Jared’s ribs. Then to his sternum, then his jaw. Jared flails from the bottom, his legs fluttering as if he might gather enough lift to fly away if only he keeps gesticulating.

I’m not at all prepared for this. My muscles clench, and I shout to him, shout angry nothings about relaxing and wrist control. All the things I’ve heard Thiago scold into him. Jared hears none of my pleas—this I can tell. His eyes widen, and he’s forgotten where he is, can’t feel the mat below him or see Thiago above, looking down with his sad eyes. He’s in an alley, behind a dumpster, writhing on a heap of cracked asphalt and gutter juice. And this hulking savage aims to cannibalize him. Jiu-jitsu no longer exists. His legs are garter snakes, not boa constrictors. This fight is as righteous as mine was with the pigeons.

Lumberjack flattens Jared out, cranks on his neck, and punches on his temple. Jared yelps. He tries to grab Lumberjack’s wrist but gets shaken off. He’s a buoy with no jurisdiction over movement, just wobbling along with the currents that Lumberjack spews.

“Defend yourself!” Thiago shouts to Jared. “Intelligent defense.”

Jared bleeds from the corner of his eye. Lumberjack has gashed one cheek open and notched a dent into his forehead. I can see the blood pooling there.

I grip the cage harder. I shake it. I clutch it and tear my hands near-bloody until it seems the beaded steel will decapitate my fingertips. I feel that primal ache loose from me, and I want nothing more than to rip my way through the stockade. To chew through the steel ropes if I must and enter that place where I would stomp through Thiago and fall to my knees and hammer on Lumberjack’s spine with my heavy Neanderthal fists until all his breath left him. And when I turned to my bleeding son, he would most certainly recognize me as his father, as that most savage of all predators.

But there I stand, my hands on the fence, my pink fingers wrapping around the links, the cage guarding its fighters like the last lonely sentinel of our civilization.

Here’s a story what got passed around from some folks I gone to school with down in Hocking County. You got these two cousins called Harlow and Tuber who light out from Ohio thinking to deal with the Vietcong but end up pretty well dealt with instead. Harlow, he was a mouthy little balker, like some yappy blue jay. Tuber was the fighting type, looked an awful lot like a potato, which everyone was always telling him. Tuber was put together strange if you’re asking me, squished up, like that kind of midget who’s okay on thickness but not on length. He was regular size enough what the army took him, but since he was so small, he ended up a tunnel rat, and Christ knows what awful shit he done and seen.

Both these boys go and enlist, and it’s Harlow what decides he needs a tattoo. Harlow was like that, couldn’t do good without making it a scene or bad without trying to convince you it was good. Always talking, Harlow. Tuber says he’ll go along, thinking Harlow don’t have the brass to go through with it. They borrow somebody’s truck and drive way over to this tattoo parlor in Lancaster. They’re looking at all the options plastered up on the wall, a thousand of them, more maybe, Harlow talking all the way: This one here might be right and You imagine the cooch a guy like me’d pull with this one ? and Even you’d seem a tough son of a bitch with this one, Tube .

Here, I imagine the old fella what owns the tattoo shop shaking his head at Harlow and Tuber, them being a big bucketful of stupid. Course a guy like that probably needs stupid teenagers to make his business work out. Harlow finally settles on one, a bald eagle with an American flag hanging from its feet. Patriotic as all hell. That’s what the story is, course he don’t end up getting that one because right about then a couple old bikers walk in, leather vests, no shirts underneath, skin like old farmhouse floorboards, facial hair stained with chaw drip. What’s wrong, though, what Harlow and Tuber and the old tattoo fella should have picked out, is that these two don’t have no tattoos.

“How’s things, friend?” the first one says. He strolls around, not really looking at anyone, more like sizing the place up to buy it. The other one, he’s a big bruiser, stands in front of the door and don’t say much. No way he’s letting Harlow and Tuber get by, that much is easy to see.

The old fella what runs the place is looking a little nervous now. One of them times you can just tell shit’s heading south quick, them two’s not the kind you want to be alone with. Not the kind of thing he put in for. But he holds it together and says, “Just fine now. What might we be doing for you all today?”

The first biker, the leader, he keeps strolling around the edges of the shop same as Harlow and Tuber was a few minutes before. He’s looking at all the tattoos. His boots strike on the laminate, and when they do, his wallet chain jangles. He stops when he notices Tuber. “The hell, son? Your folks run out of food or what?”

That’s normally enough to get Tuber all up and bothered, but he just says, “No, sir. I eat okay.”

The biker walks over toward him. “I’d make you for the king dick-sucker of this town,” he says. “Don’t even need to squat down.” Then he laughs at his own joke and looks over to his partner, who grins but don’t laugh.

“Well, we ain’t even from this town,” Harlow says.

The biker looks over to Harlow and studies on him a minute. “Oh, so you’re the smart one, huh? I can always tell the smart one. Gift I got.” He takes a step over toward him. “Okay, smart one, how smart do you feel now?” He pulls out a flick blade and it jumps open. Then his big partner does the same.

“Oh, now!” the old fella what runs the place says. “No need for that, gentlemen. We don’t want no trouble. Ain’t got but a few dollars on hand, but you’re welcome to those.”

“You hear that, Hopper?” the first biker says. “Think we’re here to rob them out.”

“That’s what they usually think,” Hopper says. His voice is deeper but quieter than his friend’s, like he can’t be bothered to care about too much.

“No, sir,” the main biker says, “Not here to rob you. Here for a tattoo.”

“That we can do, sir. No need for that knife then.”

“You’re right, ain’tcha?” He closes the blade and stuffs it in his front pocket. “I’ll just leave it right here, right in this front pocket, so we don’t forget about it, huh? Now, back to this tattoo. I don’t see it nowhere, not what I’m looking for,” he says.

“I can do whatever you like. Just tell me, and I’ll draw it up.”