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    Dottie lived up to her reputation as a wrecker in the second. She butted hard into Chinaman’s stifles, attacking that shoulder wound. Chinaman gave as good as he got, slashing at Dottie’s dewlap, shredding it. At the eight-minute mark: a fibrous snap as Chinaman’s shoulder broke. The presa was down to three legs. Dottie pressed her advantage, forcing Chinaman back, attacking the throat, a blur of snapping teeth, questing jaws, and bloody ropes of saliva as each dog angled for the killing clinch.
    Chinaman managed to close his mouth around Dottie’s muzzle, gripping her entire upper palate. The brittle splintering sound was unlike anything I’d ever heard. Dottie’s spine stiffened and her claws tore at Chinaman’s belly.
    The bell rang. An acne-scarred teenager mopped up blood and redrew the chalk line.
    Dottie’s face was in ruins: bloody and cleaved open, shards of bone free-floating beneath the skin. Half her nose was torn off and her dewlap hung like tattered curtains. Alison debrided the worst wounds with hydrogen peroxide and Betadine before slicking them with mixed adrenaline and Vaseline.
    â€œPick your dogs up!” a man hollered. “That’s enough. Enough!” The crowd jeered him.
    â€œMaybe I should,” Alison said. “Pick her up.”
    I’d’ve rather cut my foot off and eaten it! “Look at that one,” I said with a nod at the presa, who was burrowing his head in the breeder’s chest like it wanted to climb inside and die. “Bet you a steak dinner it doesn’t toe the scratch.”
    Chinaman’s breeder grabbed the dog by its neck and whipsawed it back and forth, growling, “Don’t flake on me, you goddamn cur. Don’t you fucking flake .”
    Before the bell Alison injected 10 cc’s Epinephrine into Dottie’s haunch. I felt the dog’s fluttering heart rate normalize. Chinaman staggered from his corner, front right leg limp as a cooked noodle. The presa’s muzzle was frosted white with Lidocaine.
    Round three ended it. Dottie feinted at Chinaman’s bum leg off the scratch and, in one deft move, rammed her skull into his good one. Forced to support his entire forward weight, Chinaman’s left foreleg snapped. The presa toppled face-first, front legs splayed to either side, hinds scrabbling feebly. Dottie started clawing at Chinaman’s eyes. Before long the baling hooks pulled her off.
    After squaring all bets I was lugging Dottie through the parking lot—blood saturating her doggie blanket, dripping through the kennel crate’s metal honeycombs—when this raspy barking kicked up from behind. I wheeled to see a huge Rottweiler bullrushing my blind side. It wore an inch-thick studded leather collar against which the striated muscle of its throat and neck pulsed. Links of twenty-gauge chain spat gravel between its legs.
    I dropped Dottie and fired an off-balance kick. The rottie passed under my leg, clamping down on my calf.
    Events unfolded at the narcotic pace of a fugue. My right knee buckled and I went down, blacktopped gravel dimpling the ass of my cotton Dockers. My skull caromed off the ground and everything whited out for a moment. Then I was struggling up, fists beating a frenzied tattoo on the dog’s head as its square dark muzzle worried into the wound. Dottie pressed her busted face to the kennel’s grate, growling low in her throat, bloody bubbles forced between her black eyes and orbital bone. The Rottweiler wrenched its head sideways, teeth sunk deep into the sinews of my calf, gator-rolling me across that chill November tarmac.
    Five sausage-link digits grasped the underside of the rottie’s jaw, thumb and index finger pressed to the axis where upper and lower palate met, forcing the mouth open. The woman restraining the animal was an eclipse of flesh clad in what appeared to be a pleated topsail, calves thick as an adolescent pachyderm’s