Read Online Foodchain by Jeff Jacobson - Free Book Online

smell of spilled blood.
    Eight gates formed an octagon in the center of the room. The clowns marched right on down and leaned against the gates. On the opposite side, one of the gates was open, leading to a tunnel under the stadium seats. Off to the side was a large chalkboard, displaying a round robin style elimination. It only had last names. The last three spaces were vacant.
    Underneath the chalkboard, a plank lay over two sawhorses where a guy sat in front of a ledger and a chipped metal cash box. A second man stood at the chalkboard, carefully writing names across the last two lines. The last two names were Glouck and Sturm.
    Frank hung back from the clowns and made his way over to the table. “What’re the odds?”
    “No odds here. Just even money,” the guy sitting at the table said.
    “I’ll be back.”
    The guy shrugged. “I wouldn’t wait too long, mister. Window closes in…” He peered up at a clock enclosed in steel mesh above the chalkboard. “Three minutes.”
    Frank nodded. “I’ll be back.”
    The other guy walked over until he was standing above the tunnel. He held up a bullhorn. Reading off a sheet, he spoke in a flat, emotionless tone. “Welcome to the one hundred and fourth annual summer fights. In the championship fight, we have thirteen year-old Ernie Glouck at one hundred and fourteen pounds…” There was a smattering of applause but the clowns started booing, drowning out the applause. “Versus thirteen year-old Theodore Sturm at one hundred and twenty-three pounds.” There was a lot of cheering for Sturm. The clowns went nuts, applauding, whistling, shouting.
    The fighters appeared. Theodore Sturm had his blond hair cut short, but it looked expensive, too perfect, as if the artful spikes had been shaped and gelled by a professional hairdresser. His lips were drawn in a thin slash. His nostrils were wide and pumping; eyes flat and hard. Well-defined muscles wriggled up and down his arms. Frank figured the kid had been hitting the weights for five or six years solid. Theo’s taped fists popped the air in a flurry of combinations, right, right, left—left, right, left, left. The kid was quick; Frank gave him that much.
    The man behind Theo was the same little guy from the restroom at the fairgrounds. Horace Sturm hung back, dark and squatting in the shadows, a goddamn midget Grim Reaper in that black, flat-brimmed cowboy hat and ankle-length duster. Frank watched closely, then checked the clock. Two minutes left.
    Ernie Glouck followed Theo. Ernie had a severe buzzcut, so short Frank could see worms of scar tissue like mountain ranges on a relief map, exclamation points of pain across the kid’s skull. Like Theo, he wore shorts and a T-shirt. But while Theo’s shorts looked like expensive boxing trunks, maybe even silk, Ernie’s were oversize jean cutoffs. They hung below his knees, drawn up tight around his narrow hips with a length of extension cord.
    His two moms followed Ernie. They looked like somebody had put two shapeless housedresses on a couple of dull and pitted hatchets and walked them around. Five or six older brothers darted between the two mothers, offering strong words of advice and thumping the scarred skull. Ernie flinched easy. Too easy, Frank figured.
    He pulled out a twenty, flattened it on the bare plywood, and said. “That’s twenty on Ernie Glouck.”
    “Twenty on Glouck. Name?” the guy at the table asked.
    Frank said, “Winchester.”
    The guy wrote down the name and slipped the twenty into the box. Frank headed up the stairs to a nearly empty bench at the top. Just as he sat down, the rest of the men rose to their feet. Their right hand came to a rest over their hearts.
    Frank finally realized that they were looking at the United States flag that hung vertically above the sodium lights just as everyone started in a slow, jagged rhythm, “I pledge allegiance, to the flag, of the United States of America. And to the republic, for which it stands …”