“Why would anyone mess with me?” I asked.
“Well, it’s an illegal fight with illegal betting happening in the middle of nowhere. And, um, are you forgetting how you met Baxter?”
I felt a moment of shock. “Actually, yes, I had. So much has happened since then that I’d sort of blocked it out.”
“You blocked it out?” Baxter asked, eyeing me as he drove.
I shrugged. “Yeah. You saved me from anything actually happening.” I winked at him. “And you’ve had me sort of…um…preoccupied.” Zane covered a laugh with a cough, and I pivoted to shoot him a look. “I was talking to Mara and Claire, and they shared a pretty interesting story about a certain…video.”
He narrowed his eyes at me. “They did, huh?”
“So if you want to laugh at me, I can laugh back.”
He chuckled. “I wasn’t laughing at you, I was just a little surprised to hear you talking openly about it.”
“Yeah, well, between Baxter and the girls, I seem to be doomed to be converted to the rife vulgarity you lot seem to relish so much.”
Uncharacteristically for him, Baxter was silent for most of the thirty-minute drive, letting Zane carry the burden of conversation, in which I heard a few stories from Zane’s days as a Navy SEAL, and some rather amusing anecdotes about growing up with eight boys in a three-bedroom apartment over a busy bar.
We pulled off the highway onto a narrow two-track road, which wound through the forest. After almost two miles, we started passing cars parked at the edge of a huge field in the middle of the forest, a space about a quarter of a mile wide and the same distance long. There were four huge trucks parked at the corners of a roped-off square, the ropes tied to the brush guards of the mammoth trucks, each of which had oversize knobby tires and LED light bars on their roofs, providing illumination for the makeshift arena.
There were at least five hundred people in attendance, at a rough guess, all milling around the ring. We parked, and Baxter and Zane pushed through the crowd, keeping me between their huge bodies, protecting me from the churn of humanity. There were several tables set up to one side of the ring, from which beer was being sold via several large kegs, frat party style. I also saw bottles of booze, and packs of cigarettes, and several handmade signs offering various strains of marijuana, as well as bags of cocaine and magic mushrooms. There was a long line of port-a-potties along one side of the field, and on the other side, a pair of tents stood in isolation.
Whereas the fight at which I’d first seen Baxter had felt more like an underground industrial rave, this setup felt more like a festival. Except, instead of bands playing music, men were going to beat each other up.
Why was I here, again?
Baxter led the way to the two tents, which as we approached I realized had signs affixed to them, with “Basher” printed on one, and “Juarez” on the other. Two huge, burly men stood to either side of each tent’s doorway, and apart from their obvious size and tough, surly demeanor, each man had a gear belt strapped around his waist, equipped with a pistol and mace and other things I couldn’t have named, plus earpieces connected to walkie-talkies; their gear made the “SECURITY” logo printed across their chests seem somewhat redundant.
“Armed security guards?” I asked Zane. “At an illegal boxing match?”
Baxter answered for Zane. “This fight in particular is a big deal. Lotta money on it, and some of the heaviest hitters in the game are here to watch it and bet on it. These guys are insurance that this shit ain’t gonna get out of hand.”
“What would it look like, if things did get out of hand?”
Baxter hesitated. “Nothing good. The kinda folks who go to underground fights in remote fields in the middle of the night ain’t exactly the kinda folks who are all about sunshine and roses, y’know?” He nodded to one of the security guards. “Yo, Kevin. How are ya, buddy?”
The guard, a massive black man with a stare like ice, nodded back. “Bash, my man. Y’boy Moss is in there, waitin’ for you. Go on in.”
Baxter indicated me with a jerk of his head. “She’s with me. Nobody gets within five feet of her, you get me?”
Kevin tipped his head to one side. “And how many reasons am I getting to keep my eye on your girl?” Baxter unzipped his duffel bag, reached in, pulled out a tight roll of money and handed it to Kevin, who unrolled it and counted it. “That’s about enough reasons, I figure. She can watch from one of the corner trucks.”
Which was how I found myself sitting alone in the bed of a pickup truck. I’d been given a folding beach chair, a red Solo cup of beer, and instructions to stay put, no matter what. Kevin had positioned himself at the tail of the truck, close enough to obviously be there to deter people from approaching me, but still in a position to keep an eye on the crowd.
Zane had gone into the tent with Baxter, saying he’d be out to sit with me once the fights got started; apparently Baxter fighting Juarez was—like real, televised boxing or MMA matches—just the main event, and there would be a few other fights first, between lesser known fighters.
I sipped beer, and when I ran out, Kevin gestured at me and someone else scurried over with a refill.
The first fight was quick, two small, lithe men covered in tattoos bashing each other with fists and feet, one man clearly the superior fighter, making quick work of his opponent to win in a single round. The second fight lasted longer. After two minutes, someone rang a bell and the fighters separated, and a trio of bikini-clad women pranced around the ring, dancing provocatively to music blaring from speakers set up in one of the truck’s beds. This went on for a couple minutes, and then the bell rang and the fighters approached each other, and started fighting again; if there was a referee, I never saw him. The second fight went through four rounds, and in between each round the dancing girls danced more and more provocatively, and after the fourth round, the girls started their dance by taking off their bikini tops, to the wild, howling approval of the gathered crowd, which was, obviously, predominantly men. The fight ended midway through the fifth round, with one man knocking the other out with a scything spin kick.
The winner was declared, and the fighters left the ring, and the dancers came back out and resumed their dancing, now topless.
I should have hated this. I should have been mortified, disgusted, and horrified. Not only at the brutality of the fighting, which had featured a lot of blood spraying, but also at the gratuitous nudity of the strippers, not to mention the fact that there clearly wasn’t a permit for the alcohol being sold, much less the illegality of the drugs being sold so openly.
The whole business was sordid in the extreme.
And I loved it.
