Confessions of a Washed-up Sportswriter (Including Various Digressions About Sex, Crime, and Other Hobbies)
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Almost every state has a law against dog fighting, but the sport is so clandestine that enforcement is nearly impossible. A vice squad detective for the Los Angeles sheriff's department told the New York Times that his department knew when and where the fights were being held, but they couldn't get on the property to obtain evidence. Dog fighting is a Class A misdemeanor in Texas and can cost you $2000 and a year in jail; the catch is you can't prosecute without a witness. There is not a pit bulldog breeder alive willing to testify against a fellow fancier.
But now that pit bulldog fighting has become an issue, all that may change. The Dallas Morning News (which supports the death penalty and Manifest Destiny and longs to invade Indo-China) published an editorial titled "Despicable ‘Game,'" the final paragraph of which I quote:
"Every effort should be made to stop these fights. Quite simply, they are inhumane and appalling to any thinking citizen. Such senseless mayhem should not be tolerated in our midst."
Noble sentiments, but if history has taught us anything, it's that one man's mayhem, senseless or otherwise, is certain to be another's calling. Fanciers—like other individualists or subcultures—consider themselves to be a special breed, a class apart from what, to their point of view, are the drones of mainstream society. Fanciers care for their animals fanatically, certainly as conscientiously as most football coaches or generals treat their charges. Preservation of the bloodline is every fancier's solemn duty and privilege. When an insurance man advertised "White Cavalier (Pit) Bull Terriers" in the Austin American-Statesman, Crater and Stout called on the gentleman, pointing out that he was attempting to pass off lemons as oranges, and promising to break his spinal column if the ad ever reappeared, which it did not. The American Kennel Club should take note, if not of the method, at least of the diligence.
Otis Crater's jaded old daddy had reached an age where he'd lost interest in most dog fights, but he couldn't resist this one; there he was in Stout's house trailer, spitting Garrett's snuff juice into a paper cup and recalling the morning in Dripping Springs when the legendary Black Jack Jr. went nearly two hours before turning Marvin Tilford's Big Red.
The match ended when Marvin Tilford's dog turned, or gave up. Big Red knew when he'd had enough, but Marvin was so humiliated (and broke) that he didn't show up for a year. Big Red was later drowned by a boar coon who got him by the back of the neck in the South San Gabriel River.
"He should of never gone in water," Crater's old daddy pontificated as he rocked slowly and watched Princess chew on his boot. "Men and dogs belong on ground. Birds belong in air. Fish belong in water. When a creation starts believing they invented how things are, they forgot how things are."
"Hey, daddy," Crater interrupted. "Tell ‘em about the deputy sheriff."
"That's another story," the old man snorted, dabbing his gums with a frayed matchstick. "We was going pretty good when the deputy called and asked me how things was going. ‘Pretty good.' I said. ‘The dogs been fighting twenty minutes and the people seventeen.'"
Watching Princess tumble around the floor of Stout's trailer, you wouldn't take her for a killer. She's no larger than a football, this furry little alligator with sad eyes and a wrinkled face, chewing mindlessly, somehow reminiscent of J. Edgar Hoover. According to procedure, Crater had already clipped her ears, which now looked like two raw navels. They were adequate for hearing, but impossible to bite down on.
Princess was fun to play with—the trouble was she didn't like to stop. She was playing with a big black poodle one afternoon when someone noticed that the poodle was no longer playing, or moving: the illusion of movement was caused by the steady jerking motion of Princess' head. Shortly following life's final measure of response, Princess dropped the black curly mess on the lawn and trotted over to examine a rose bush.
Before he got Princess, Crater traveled with a big brindle pit bulldog named Boudreaux. Crater was managing an Austin tavern when Boudreaux tore into a German shepherd three times his size. In the ten seconds or so it took Crater to separate them with his hickory wedge, Boudreaux ripped out the shepherd's chest.
You could already hear the yelps and groans of men and animals down at the creek bottom when Stout arrived, carrying a package wrapped in brown paper.
"I guess you heard Claxon got stabbed," Stout said.
"I heard he got some new marks," Crater said. "What happened?"
"In the bathroom at the Cherokee. Claxon called this dude a Meskin. The dude was a Indian. Hell, I could tell right away he wasn't no Meskin."
"How's he doing?"
"He's about half dead and half proud," Stout said, and his laugh sounded over-oiled, hollow, and obligatory. He tore away the brown paper and held up a framed, hand-lettered scroll. There were tears in his eyes. The scroll was a poem, written by his mama, Toots; her first poem since Stout's daddy was shot to death by three blacks who hijacked his tiny grocery and market. Toots watched her husband die as she fired off several rounds at the fleeing killers. Austin police captured two of the hijackers, and the third, so it's said, was captured by Stout's vigilantes and is now fertilizing a worthy crop in a cedar chopper's garden. Who knows?
Stout turned his head so that the others wouldn't see the tears, and he looked for a place to hang the scroll. He selected a spot on the wall next to a poster of Pancho Villa enjoying a smoke under a mesquite tree.
Toot's poem went like this:
The clock of life is
wound but once
And no man has the power
to tell just when the hands
will stop.
At late or early hour.
Now is the only time we own,
live, love, toil with a mill;
Place no faith
in tomorrow for
The clock may then
be still.
There was silence throughout the trailer as Otis Crater read the words of Toots' poem aloud, but Stout excused himself and slipped outside. He kept his back to the trailer and his head down, following the fossilized debris of an ancient riverbed. He stopped in front of an oak almost as wide as himself and took something from a homemade cabinet nailed to the tree trunk. It was a package of sunflower seeds. His short knotted arms stretched for a low-hanging branch, and he filled a bird feeder with sunflower seeds.
Judging from the license plates of the campers and trucks scattered throughout the woods, the fanciers had come from as far away as California, Mexico, Florida, and even Canada. It was a young crowd, mostly in their twenties and thirties, a mixed bag of longhairs, cedar choppers, and high-risk investors, with a few blacks and chicanos and some transients from a Houston motorcycle gang thrown in.
There were some women and enough children to make it look like a club picnic. A skinny kid named Tarlton, who stole ten-speed bikes for a living, passed out beer in paper cups. Tarlton wore a homemade T-shirt with a picture of Snoopy dragging a dead cat by the tail. There was no mistaking Mr. Maynard. He was the tall, lean, silver-haired man in a blue jumpsuit and wraparound shades standing by his Winnebago talking to J.K.'s daddy. You'd figure him for a bomber pilot in World War II, but he was just another dog soldier a long way from home. The cold scars in Maynard's eyes reached back to quarrels too horrible to translate: it had been a long time since he found it necessary to look tough or talk big.
There were a dozen bulldogs chained to heavy iron stakes around the perimeter of the clearing, but there was also no mistaking which one was Bully. While the other beasts were whimpering and sniffing blood and straining at their chains for some action, Bully relaxed on his haunches, observing the scene with sad, patient eyes.
Mr. Maynard and J.K.'s daddy talked and shared a drink, not at all interested in the fight in progress or the other fanciers clumped around the hay bales that formed the pit walls. A spotted cur owned by two black kids was trying to survive the jaws of one of Marvin Tilford's pups. The match was hopelessly one-sided, which meant there was hardly any betting, and the crowd was restless.
"Why don't you do the fair thing and give that leopard of yours a rest," Marvin told the black kids. They conferred in whispers, then picked up their pet and paid off. The bet was $50.
That's how most dog fights end, with a humiliated owner "doing the fair thing," picking up and paying off. Dogs are frequently wounded and occasionally killed, but only in serious challenges where the stakes are high and the owners' reputations well traveled. Even then an owner will usually do the fair thing when his beast is clearly outclassed, greatly preferring a healthy animal to an over-exercised ego.
"Dogs that are the best performers aren't necessarily the best dogs," Mr. Maynard told me as we drank Scotch in his Winnebago. He knew that I was a writer. He even helped me with my notes, spelling out names, and carefully considering dates. He was only anxious that the sport not get a bad name.
"People talk about pure Maynards as they do about Picassos," I observed.
"It's an art," he said.
"How do you do it? What's your secret?"
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