I find Ben at the side of the ring—an easy thing to do considering his red hair—handing over hundred dollar bills to a morbidly obese guy in a sweat stained Cuban hat. My friend grins, slapping me on the shoulder when I arrive at his side. “There he is! Thought you’d pussied out, motherfucker. You’re almost late. Hey, this is Carlos. You need to pay your cover to him, okay?”
The fat guy in the hat arches an eyebrow at me, his facial expression unchanging as he holds out his hand. I go to shake it, but he speaks before I can make contact. “That’ll be five hundred, friend.” He doesn’t want to meet me. He wants my cash. And too fucking much of it.
“Five hundred?” I glance over at Ben, ready to pop him in the shoulder for lying to me. Ben’s already holding up his hands, that look that he gets already forming on his face.
“Whoa, whoa, slow your roll, C. Mason’s an initiate. It’s one hundred for initiates, right?”
Carlos squints, running his tongue over his teeth. “Two fifty for initiates. Buy in went up.”
“When?”
“Just now,” Carlos says, frowning up at the both of us from under drawn brows. He doesn’t look like the kind of guy who particularly enjoys being questioned.
“That’s bullshit,” Ben argues.
“Maybe. He don’t like it, he don’t have to fight, though. Them’s the breaks.”
Ben sighs, shrugs, then casts me a questioning glance. You got two fifty? I shake my head. I was breaking a sweat over the potential of stumping up a hundred and losing it all. More than double that? I just don’t have it. Ben nods, puts his hand into his pocket, and pays Carlos before I can stop him.
“What the fuck, man? No!” I hiss. “If I lose, I can’t pay you back.”
Carlos tuts as he puts the money into his back pocket and writes something down into a small, ratty book.
“S’okay, man. Just don’t fucking lose,” Ben advises, like it’s the most obvius thing ever. “No pressure.”
“Name?” Carlos clips out. “Hey, asshole. What. Is. Your. Name?”
“Mason Reeves.”
That goes into his book. “Lose the shirt,” he says. I take off my hoody and my shirt and stand there bare-chested as Carlos takes a fat red marker pen and scrawls something onto my left shoulder blade. “And you, dipshit.” He prods his pen in Ben’s direction.
Ben loses his t-shirt and Carlos draws a fat eighty-eight onto his shoulder, and then vanishes into the swell of the crowd, presumably to find more people to verbally abuse and draw on.
Ben whoops, slapping the top of my arm. “Turn around, man. Let me see what ranking he gave you. Oh shit!” he laughs. “Twelve? Damn!”
“Twelve? What the fuck does twelve mean?”
“Twelve percent chance of winning.” Apparently this is the funniest shit ever, according to my so called best friend. Undoubtedly he only thinks it’s so funny because Carlos gave him an eighty eight percent chance of winning, which means a shit ton more money from the house if he does. “Don’t worry, man,” he says, pulling me through the sea of bodies. “They always rank new guys low. He hasn’t seen you fight yet. C’mon.”
On the other side of the packed out market place, a ring has been set up and the first match of the night is already underway. The two guys in the ring are lean and quick, jabbing and striking at each other faster than lightning, barely grazing each other before darting out of reach. The crowd get bored of that pretty quickly. They want brutality. They want blood. They want the sound of bone cracking on bone. These violent things make the blood run hot in their veins.
Four minutes after we arrive, the two guys have been booed out of the ring, neither one of them having landed a proper punch, and two new fighters are climbing into the cage. Their fight is adrenalin fuelled from the moment the bell rings. One broken nose. A couple of potential broken ribs. One K.O. Two minutes and the whole thing is over. The people squeezing in around the cage are screaming at the tops of their lungs. I need a fight like that. I need something violent and bloody that will have them remembering my name until next weekend, where I’ll have to prove myself all over again.
There are three more fights before I’m called up. At least two hundred people go silent as I shove my way past them and up through the opening into the cage. My heart is fucking hammering in my chest. This is such a bad fucking idea.
It gets worse when Carlos, motherfucker that he is, calls out the name of the guy I’m going to be fighting: Hail Mary Harris. Ben. Fucking Ben. It dawns on me all of a sudden—he’s the other eighty eight percent to my twelve. How did I not immediate realize as soon as I found out my ranking. I mean, the maths were staring us right there in the face. Ben vaults up into the cage, shaking his head, his eyebrows drawn tight together.
“Fuck, Carlos. What the hell? It’s his first night. I shouldn’t be fighting initiates. And he shouldn’t be fighting intermediaries, either. What gives?”