In the Loyal Mountains by Rick Bass

Author:Rick Bass
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

The Legend of Pig-Eye

WE USED TO GO to bars, the really seedy ones, to find our fights. It excited Don. He loved going into the dark old dives, ducking under the doorway and following me in, me with my robe on, my boxing gloves tied around my neck, and all the customers in the bar turning on their stools, as if someday someone special might be walking in, someone who could even help them out. But Don and I were not there to help them out.

Don had always trained his fighters this way: in dimly lit bars, with a hostile hometown crowd. We would get in his old red truck on Friday afternoons—Don and Betty, his wife, and Jason, their teenage son, and my two hounds, Homer and Ann—and head for the coast—Biloxi, Ocean Springs, Pascagoula—or the woods, to the Wagon Wheel in Utica. If enough time had passed for the men to have forgotten the speed of the punches, the force and snap of them, we’d go into Jackson, to the rotting, sawdust-floor bars like the Body Shop or the Tall Low Man. That was where the most money could be made, and it was sometimes where the best fighters could be found.

Jason waited in the truck with the dogs. Occasionally Betty would wait with him, with the windows rolled down so they could tell how the fight was going. But there were rimes when she went with us into the bar, because that raised the stakes: a woman, who was there only for the fight. We’d make anywhere from five hundred to a thousand dollars a night.

“Mack’ll fight anybody, of any size or any age, man or woman,” Don would say, standing behind the bar with his notepad, taking bets, though of course I never fought a woman. The people in the bar would pick their best fighter, and then watch that fighter, or Betty, or Don. Strangely, they never paid much attention to me. Don kept a set of gloves looped around his neck as he collected the bets. I would look around, wish for better lighting, and then I’d take my robe off. I’d have my gold trunks on underneath. A few customers, drunk or sober, would begin to realize that they had done the wrong thing. But by that time things were in motion, the bets had already been made, and there was nothing to do but play it out.

Don said that when I had won a hundred bar fights I could go to New York. He knew a promoter there to whom he sent his best fighters. Don, who was forty-four, trained only one fighter at a time. He himself hadn’t boxed in twenty years. Betty had made him promise, swear on all sorts of things, to stop once they got married. He had been very good, but he’d started seeing double after one fight, a fight he’d won but had been knocked down in three times, and he still saw double, twenty years later, whenever he got tired.

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