“I said, is that dumb animal gonna win us some
White didn’t answer right away. He held the smoke down in his lungs and let it out slow.
“He gonna win us
“Sure he’s strong enough?”
“Shoot, he was strong enough to drag a log down the block yesterday mornin’.”
“I ain’t ask you can he do circus tricks. Can he hold his shit in a fight?”
“He will.”
“Well, he ain’t showed me nothin’ yet.”
“What about that snatch we did with that boy’s dog over on Crittenden?”
Potter looked in the rearview at White. “That dog at Crittenden wasn’t nothin’ but a cur. Trooper a cur, too.”
“The hell he is. You’re gonna see today.”
“We
“I said, you’re gonna see.”
“C’mon, D,” said Little. “Let’s get a roll on, man.”
Garfield Potter’s street name was Death. He didn’t care for it much since this girl he wanted to fuck told him it scared her some. Never did get that girl’s drawers down, either. So he felt the name was bad luck, worse still to go and change it. His friends now called him D.
Potter turned the key in the ignition. It made an awful grinding sound. Little clapped his hands together and doubled over with laughter.
“Ho, shit!” said Little, clapping his hands one more time. “Car’s already started, man, you don’t need to be startin’ it
“Noisy as this whip is, too,” said White.
“Fuck you, Coon,” said Potter, “talkin’ mad shit about this car, when you’re cruisin’ around town in that piece- of-shit Toyota, lookin’ like a Spanish Cadillac and shit.”
“All this money we got,” said Little, “and we’re drivin’ around in a hooptie.”
“We’ll be gettin’ rid of it soon,” said Potter. “And anyway, it ain’t all that funny as y’all are makin’ it out to be.”
“Yeah, you right. It just hit me funny, is all.” Little took the blunt that White handed to him over the front seat and stared at it stupidly. “I ain’t lyin’, boy, this chronic right here just laid my ass out.”
THE dogfights were held in a large garage backing to an alley behind a house on Ogelthorpe, in Manor Park in Northwest. The fights went down once a week for several hours during the day, when most of the neighbors were off at work. Those neighbors who were at home were afraid of the young men who came to the fights, and did not complain to the police.
Potter parked the Chevy in the alley. He and the others got out of the car, White heeling Trooper to his side. They went down the alley, nodding but not smiling at some young men they knew to be members of the Delafield Mob. Others were standing around, holding their animals, getting high, and drinking from the lips of bottles peeking through the tops of brown paper bags. Little and Wright followed Potter into the garage.
Ten to twenty young men were scattered about the perimeter of the garage. A group was shooting craps in the corner. Others were passing around joints. Someone had put on
In the middle of the garage was a fighting area of industrial carpet, penned off from the rest of the interior by a low chain-link fence, gated in two corners. Inside one corner of the pen, a man held a link leash taut on a black pit bull spotted brown over its belly and chest. The dog’s name was Diesel. Its ears were gnarled and its neck showed raised scars like pink worms.
Potter studied a man, old for this group, maybe thirty or so, who stood alone in a corner, putting fire to a cigarette.
“I’ll be back in a few,” said Potter to Little.
“’Bout ready to show the dogs,” said Little.
“Got a mind to put money on that black dog. But go ahead and bet Trooper, hear?”
“Three hunrid?”
“Three’s good.”
Potter made his way over to the cigarette smoker, short and dumpy, a raggedy-ass dude on the way down, and stood before him.
“
The smoker looked up with lazy eyes, trying to hold on to his shit. “Yeah?”
“You run with Lorenze Wilder, right?”
“I seen him around. Don’t mean we run together or nothin’ like that.” But now the smoker recognized Potter and he lost his will to keep his pride. His eyes dropped to the concrete floor.
