Laroue giggled. "Why don't you all swim back. I have work to do."

After more whispering and discontent, one man finally emerged with a wager. "For twenty percent of your operation, Buster goes over three minutes. And cripplin' don't count."

"And what do you bumpkins have to put up?" Laroue scoffed.

The men huddled until once again the spokesman emerged. "I'll retire as Jackson's sheriff at the end of this term. And I'll guarantee your election."

For a few seconds, Laroue looked dazed, his eyes hollow and distant. When he recovered, his face took on a new quality, one that I could not readily identify. "Three minutes, thirty seconds, and you have yourselves a spectacle."

The men all shook on it. Laroue turned to me as I stood anchored to the living room floor. "Marlene said you would surely understand," he mocked, then he turned his back on me and walked with the others through the door to a screen patio. Within seconds, I heard the whimpering and yelping of lonely dogs.

Years of therapy will be required for me to understand exactly why I followed Laroue across that patio and into the backyard. I suppose hearing the agonizing echoes of the carnage would have been, to my mind, more ghastly than seeing for myself that the prey had been able to fight back. But I did follow Laroue, and what I saw, the sheer ghoulishness of the production, will be with me as long as I am alive.

Once I had stepped outside, I was immediately struck by the centerpiece of Laroue's estate, a squat pyramid of pallid white skulls piled up against a chain link fence at the rear of the yard. The mound must have counted in the low hundreds. I could not recall ever before seeing bleached canine crania, and I felt no attachment to their departed owners, only a dull hatred for the six senior citizens who were kicking and poking at a growling dog in its wire cage; for Laroue, I had no emotion and it was by lacking such a familiarity that I knew I was human.

I watched as Jean Laroue, wearing steel gloves, calmly slid open the door to Buster's cage, releasing a thick-set, brickle-brown pitbull that ambled out just as surely, scarcely a tremor in its supple musculature. Laroue slid his hand over the dog's flat skull and called out for the other dog to be pitted. The shortest and stoutest of the six men had apparently done this work before. As another man lifted the cage door, he gripped a spotted white brute by the collar as it leapt from the cage. Both dogs began snarling, uncontrolled spittle dropping to the ground from the loose black flesh of their lower jaws.

The four savages came together in the only section of the yard devoid of grass. I set the timer on my cheap Casio as the five onlookers started hooting behind the doomed dog's cage, and when I finally looked down through considerable pools of brine, I could see that Buster had taken four minutes and twenty-one seconds to slaughter his rival. During those minutes, he had first punctured the dog's right eyeball, which dangled hideously for a good thirty seconds before Buster succeeded in tearing it out of the socket. He had then embarked upon a strategy of ruining the loser's rear haunches by literally breaking the femurs in his jaws. But Buster was not quite fast enough to get behind his foe, and in his relative lethargy lost an ear and a goodly chunk of his scalp to the other dog's razoring bite.

Everyone agreed that the pain had spurred Buster on to realize his objective: which, simply, was to leave his adversary crawling with the use of only its forelegs, death following quickly by evisceration through the belly wall. But the time it took to do so concerned Laroue, who, after caging Buster again, shook hands with the six men and walked with them through a gate in the fence to where a truck sat. I was not in that truck when it drove away through the unproven scrub that enveloped this wilderness hideout. Our match would be fought inside.

After locking the gate again, Laroue knelt down and took the butchered carcass into his hands. "I've always said a fight should be stopped with a clear lead," he said, shaking his head, his shaggy mane fluttering in the warm midnight breeze. "But everyone wants to see a mutilation. Is that wrong?" he asked me, but I offered no reply. "I could have rehabilitated this dog. Sold him off as a factory guard." He walked over to a metal vat near the pyramid of skulls and dumped the body into a solution of caustic acids that would strip the bones clean before daylight.

To be continued . . .

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