Shella (32 page)

“Go!”

The white dog crawled toward the black dog, ready to die. The black dog leaped on him. The white dog rolled on his back and nailed the black dog in the neck. Blood was all around his muzzle, but he couldn’t keep the hold.

I figured it out. Every time they broke the dogs, it was a different dog’s turn to move forward first. If they didn’t go forward, they lost. If they did, one had to die.

The black dog won every time they hit, but the white dog never quit.

They faced them again, and the white dog crawled forward. He kept crawling. The black dog stood there, watching him. The white dog stopped. People screamed at him. A long time passed. The referee waved his arms.

“He quit!” one guy yelled near the wall. He looked mad.

“He’s dead,” another one said.

The man was holding his white dog in his arms. I could see he was crying.

The man with the black dog came over to the leader. He held up his bloody dog like a prize.

“Never defeated!” the leader said.

We stayed there. After a while, the other guy came over to the leader, carrying his white dog.

“You should be proud of him,” the leader said. “He was dead game.”

The guy kissed his dead dog. “You hear that, Razor? You hear that? Dead game, boy! That’s you! Dead game!”

He was crying when he walked away.

I was mostly in the dorm by myself, nights. Sometimes I went for a walk, looked at the dark woods. I could never see anything.

I was alone a lot with the leader, days. But I could never get the rhythm, never could tell when someone was coming in.

“You learn anything from the fight?” the leader asked me.

“I don’t know.”

“Dead game, what that means for pit bulls, it means they never quit. That’s the quality you want, gameness. You know why we fight the dogs?”

“To watch them?”

“No, son. I know it must look like that, people screaming, betting, and all that. But the reason is to improve the breed. If you want a dog to be game, you have to test him. Only the true champions get to breed…. That way you get rid of the curs, the ones that will quit. You breed only game dogs, you get only game puppies, see?”

“The white dog, it was game?”

“All the way. Not a drop of quit in that beast.”

“But it won’t breed.”

“Well, no. It won’t. Only the best, John. Only the very, very best. What you want is pure.”

He talked a lot to me about Valhalla. Where warriors go when they die. If they die the right way. It’s a perfect place for a man, he said.

He told me about dying. How it can be perfect. A perfect sacrifice for the race.

He said the white pit bull died for love. Love of its master. That’s why they fight to the death, he said. For love.

He was talking about race when there was a knock from behind him. I didn’t know there was a door there. He didn’t act like he heard it. The knocking came again.

Finally, he got up and opened the door that was behind a curtain. A young woman came in. Pregnant, real heavy in front.

“John, this is my daughter, Melissa.”

She kind of giggled at me. He talked to her, quiet-voice. She was touching his arm, patting at it. There was a button on his desk. He reached over and pushed it. The door opened behind me and shoulder holster came in. He looked at the leader, said “Come on” to me, put his hand on my arm to take me out of there.

As I was going, the girl looked at me. I saw her eyes and I saw what Shella must’ve seen.

The more I practiced with the guns, the more they watched me do it. Every time I held a gun in my hand, I would feel it. What it could do.

I could do it too—I just had to be close.

I kept the gun with me all the time. So they’d expect it. Once, I was looking for a place to put it while I took a shower. They give us plenty of room for things here—not like in prison. Some of the guys had foot lockers, some of them had trunks. Most of the guys, they didn’t stay in the compound anyway, they just came and went. I was the longest man in the dorm.

I couldn’t think of a place to put the gun. I didn’t want to leave it on my bunk. There was a row of metal lockers against the far wall. I looked there, but they all had locks on them. Then I saw it—Murray’s trunk. I remembered it because it was this dark-red color, with black bands around it. It was all covered with dust, just sitting there in the corner.

Nobody was around. I didn’t break the lock, I unscrewed the plate. Shella told me how to do that, once when we were trying to get into someplace.

Inside the trunk Murray had his clothes. And his little weight things for his wrists and his ankles. There was a bunch of letters. He had them tied with a ribbon. They looked old.

He had a jacket in there. It was black, with big white sleeves. It felt like silk. On the front, over the heart, it said
Ace
in little white letters, like writing. On the back it said the name of some gym.

I put my gun in his trunk while I took my shower. I fixed the lock plate so I could just pull it off with my fingers when I came out.

“Who brought him in?” the leader asked the guy in the white shirt. Like I wasn’t there. It didn’t make me mad—people always do that.

The white shirt always has the long flat aluminum box with him. When he opens it up, there’s pads and stuff inside. He looked there for a minute. “Mack,” he told the leader.

The leader looked at me. “Mack say anything to you about the Lightning Squadron?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“He said he was a scout.”

“Anything else?”

“No.”

The leader gave white shirt one of those looks I never understand—it could mean anything.

Every day was the same after that. Every day I would get up and walk around. Sometimes I would look at the posters.
THE JEWS ARE THROUGH IN
’92, was one I saw a lot. Then I would take my gun and go over and practice. After that, I’d walk back to the dorm. More people would be out by then. There would be kids too, dressed up like the older people in soldier suits with little guns. Some of them wore armbands … red with white circles and the black crooked cross inside … and they said nigger and kike and spic and that kind of thing like they were learning their ABCs or something.

They were always beating the kids. With sticks and belts. And slapping them. I saw a man whipping a little boy. The boy was screaming. The man’s wife said it was good discipline and everyone standing around nodded. I walked away. When I looked back, the others were watching the little boy get whipped.

I would look at TV until one of them came for me. They would walk over with me. Then they would take my gun and search me so I could go inside with the leader. Sometimes there were other people there, sometimes we were alone. Sometimes his daughter came in. He never talked on the phone they had in his office. When it would ring, somebody else would take it.

I never knew if I would be alone with him. I never knew how long it would last.

Every day, the same talk from him. Master race, masters and slaves, serving the master. The Lightning Squad, it would strike like lightning at the enemies of the race. Some
of the members, they wouldn’t get out. But they would go to Valhalla for sure. Guaranteed.

Nobody ever talked so much to me. Nobody ever explained things like he did, except maybe Shella.

On one wall of his office, he had pictures. Pictures of men. Each one was in a metal frame. He said those men gave their lives for the Nation. They were heroes. Heroes of the race. The children who went to their schools would memorize their names.

He said the niggers weren’t human, so you couldn’t really blame them for the animal way they acted. The Jews, you could blame them. They knew what they were doing. They were a different race, even though they looked like us. You could tell the difference, but only if you knew them real good.

The leader told me that we were going to win, because we were superior. And because the niggers were starting to really hate the Jews and the Jews were going to have to do something about it.

He gave me books to read. One was a little red book, some kind of story. One of them said PROTOCOLS on it. I tried to read it. I’m not stupid. But I couldn’t understand it. When he asked me, I told him the truth.

He said that was okay—the important thing was, would I do the right thing when the time came?

I always said I would.

Once in a while, they would ask me if I wanted a woman. I always said I did.

When I was fucking one of the women, I wondered if they had ever asked Murray if he wanted one.