The bell was rung and the two gladiators warily began to circle one another. At first, Xerxes seemed content merely to watch his opponent and made no move to go on the offense. Dickle Doug shuffled back and forth for a few seconds and then with a grunt, he charged the ape and tried to kick him. With a movement belying his feeble appearance, Xerxes smoothly stepped to one side to avoid the assault and vaulted up to one side of the cage and hung there, waiting.
With a muffled roar, Dickle Doug spun around and ran toward the ape, trying to ram him with his head. It seemed like Mr. Watford had decided the best defense was a good offense and was trying to take the battle to Xerxes.
That was a mistake.
As soon as he got near his chimp opponent, Xerxes sprang up and over his head, and landed on his back, one arm clinging around Doug’s head. Immediately, the ape began to pinch Dickle Doug about his neck and back, gouging with his free hand into any exposed flesh, pinching the skin and then rapidly twisting it. You could see the welts begin to swell on the man’s skin from where the monkey was striking him. Though the sound was somewhat baffled by the tape across his mouth, you could hear the grunts of pain and anger emanate from Dickle Doug.
After a few minutes of this torture, Dickle Doug dropped and rolled around on the floor of the cage. Obviously, the Mighty Xerxes had seen this tactic before, because he immediately let go, bounded up and onto the cage wall and then dropped back down on to the now prone man and begin to roughly gouge and pinch the man in whatever area was available. When Dickle Doug tried to twist and roll to get the ape off of him, Xerxes merely leaped once more onto the cage wall and waited for the next opportunity to pounce.
This pattern repeated itself for a minute or two. If Dickle Doug tried to stand, Xerxes would once more launch himself onto his back and pinch him around his neck. Dickle Doug alternated between cries of agony and shouts of rage. Blood was soon flowing from the wounds on his neck and much of the tape around his mouth was wet and torn from a combination of spitting from exertion and gnashing his teeth.
Nevertheless, Dickle Doug didn’t cry uncle.
With ten minutes to go, you could feel the pulse of the crowd quicken. From what I later gathered, everyone else who had faced off against Xerxes in the last few days had quit by then, having had enough of the gouging and tearing of skin the beast inflicted upon them.
Dickle Doug, however, was made of sterner stuff. I glanced at the Ringmaster at this time, and saw that he seemed quite cool and collected, so I figured he still had a few tricks up his sleeve.
I was right.
I saw the Ringmaster make a motion to Pete—who obviously was the creature’s handler and trainer—and Pete immediately shouted a command at Xerxes. With a bound, the beast was up and about on the cage side, just above a madder-n-hell Dickle Doug. The ape was motionless for a moment, as if to gather up the strength and concentration needed for his next onslaught. Dickle Doug had struggled to his feet by then and was glaring at the monkey, who was just a foot or so above Dickle Doug’s head.
The ape glared down with apparent contempt at the human who had so far survived his onslaught. Then with a squawk of effort, he flung himself straight up into the air and landed directly on top of Dickle Doug’s head.
Dickle Doug staggered back a couple of steps, but kept his balance. Dried feces and dust off Xerxes’s ass and hindquarters bloomed out and about Doug’s head. I was just thinking of the biological horror this represented, when Xerxes’s true intent became obvious to all.
With a wet plop, the beast began to defecate on top of Dickle Doug’s head and face.
I don’t know what they had been feeding this ape in advance of this battle, but it must not have been too solid. What was coming out of the chimp’s ass was soupy and steamy in nature and streamed onto his victim's face, slithering into his nostrils and mouth.
Dickle Doug went berserk. Random members of the audience began to gag and choke at the sight, and a few began to throw up when the smell of ape shit hit them, which of course set off a chain reaction of more people of gagging, choking and throwing up. Within minutes, the stench in the tent was overpowering and not a few weak willed souls fled out in search of fresh air.
Eventually, things calmed down and attention once more returned to the cage. There was Dickle Doug standing in the center of the cage, his face blackened with dung, while Xerxes hung off to one side of the cage, occasionally pissing in Dickle Doug’s direction. The tape had worked its way off Doug’s mouth and, to the stunned amazement of all, he stood there laughing and taunting at the ape, daring him to shit on him again.
The clock read only four minutes left.
The crowd went wild.
After three successive nights of humiliating defeat, they had found a champion who had endured, who had suffered the worst this bastard monkey and his cronies could throw at him and could mock them in their utter failure. They had bet big on their boy, and soon it’d be time to collect.
I glanced around to get a look at the Ringmaster and was surprised to notice that he seemed not at all agitated or upset. He calmly looked at the audience for a second, then at the clock and then at Pete, who was waiting for a signal from his boss. The Ringmaster gave it, a pumping motion, twice, with his fist. Pete immediately barked another command at Xerxes. A little less than four minutes remained on the clock.
The ape lightly sprung to the floor of the cage and stood before the People’s Champion. Dickle Doug was standing there, solid as an oak, straitjacket on, duct tape in tatters about his face, leather helmet askew and bellowing incoherently at the monkey, unafraid of God, much less than of a puny ape. The crowd, confident in victory, was on its feet, screaming, jumping up and down.
The blood, vomit and stench were all things of the past. It was bedlam.
Then Xerxes proved to one and all why he was known as the Hell Beast of Persia.
He took one stride towards Dickle Doug, pulled back his left arm and struck.
In a motion as smooth as any man will ever witness, Xerxes’s left hand flashed forward, his fingers stiff as a board, his thumb jutting out to the side. Those hairy, bony, filthy, deadly fingers found their way into Dickle Doug’s unprotected crotch, tore through the straitjacket, ripped through his overalls and underwear and lodged themselves directly into Dickle Doug’s groin. A sympathetic groan escaped the lips of every man there and then the crowd was silent.
Then Xerxes squeezed Dickle Doug’s balls. Hard.
Dickle Doug Watford’s face bulged in stunned shock and fear. As the pressure rapidly mounted, his eyes rolled up into his skull, and he then broke the silence with a high-pitched squeal, which sounded incongruous in a man his size. Xerxes, his scarred back standing as mute testimony to his deadly training, held on and refused to let go, his face set in an evil grimace.
Dickle Doug’s high-pitched screams quickly morphed into screams of “Uncle! Uncle!” and the Ringmaster wasted no time in signaling for the bookie/timekeeper to ring the bell. Pete yelled another command and Xerxes, trained assassin that he was, promptly let go of Dickle Doug’s balls and leaped onto the side of the cage. Dickle Doug crumpled into the fetal position on the floor, moaning in agony.
There was two minutes and seventeen seconds left on the clock.
Make no mistake. That goddamn monkey had been toying with Dickle Doug the whole time.
As the crowd slowly came to grips with their champion’s sudden reversal of fortune—and with it, the accompanying loss of their own money—the Ringmaster, bookie and Pete jumped into the cage, got Dickle Doug to his feet, and helped him out of his gladiator outfit. He was a beaten man.
As he stood before the increasingly belligerent crowd and listened to the Ringmaster announce his defeat while congratulating him on making it through almost thirteen of the fifteen minutes, Dickle Doug realized that his hard-earned reputation as a man to be feared and reckoned with lay in tatters.
Various taunts like “Dickle Doug’s a Pussy” and “Monkey Lover” reverberated through the a
rena, and it must have dawned on him that soon his humiliation would spread throughout the county, maybe even into Tennessee. It must have been too much for him to bear.
I sat and watched as a red-faced Dickle Doug hung his head in shame, the scorn and taunts of the crowd washing over him. Then I watched him as that shame slowly turned into anger, and as the crowd got nastier and meaner, Dickle Doug got angrier and redder.
Suddenly, he let out a bellow, bent over, pulled up his pant leg, reached into his boot and pulled out a small .32 caliber automatic he must have kept there for just such emergencies. As soon as they saw the gun, the Ringmaster and his two assistants were hightailing it out of the cage. Xerxes just hung there and watched.
Dickle Doug spun around, aimed the gun and fired at the chimp.
Now Dickle Doug was a lot of things. Father, redneck, bully, drunkard. However, one thing he apparently wasn’t was much of a shot, because despite just being a few feet away from the object of his wrath, he only grazed the ape’s neck. It was, for Dickle Doug Watford, his last act on this earth.
Xerxes was only a chimpanzee, but even he realized that being shot at was a clear violation of the “no biting” rule, in spirit if in not actual fact. All bets were obviously off as far as he was concerned. Not since the death of Stonewall Jackson had anyone in the South displayed an innate command of his surrounding territory and how to take advantage of it like that ape did in the next few seconds.
Xerxes shot straight up the cage wall, flung himself up on the chain-link roof and then came hurtling down, fangs bared, in an arc towards Dickle Doug’s exposed back. Landing there, he immediately bit Dickle Doug on the neck, which caused the huge redneck to drop the gun, stumble forward and slam his forehead on one of the cage’s corner steel poles with a sickening thud.
The coroner later said it was a snapped vertebra in the neck. The result was, however, that Dickle Doug Watford, scourge of Western North Carolina and East Tennessee, was stone cold dead before he hit the ground.
With a leap, Xerxes sprang off the prostrate form of Dickle Doug and reached down and picked up the offending shooting iron. Then, as all apes invariably do with a loaded pistol, he immediately looked down the barrel. The crowd sat there, once more stunned into silence by the rapid turn of events.
Then it happened. Someone, I think near the front of the stage said it; the five words that have sent men and women into a blind, unreasoning panic since the introduction of gunpowder to western civilization from ancient China, some 600 hundred or so years ago.
“The monkey’s got a gun!”
It was like a dam burst. People began to scream and curse, some even praying to the Good Lord for deliverance. Most—like yours truly—tended to duck down for safety and cover, while others rushed out of the tent, screaming to all who could hear, “The monkey’s got a gun! The monkey’s got a gun!”
This caused a general panic rapidly to spread throughout the fairgrounds. I could hear, through the canvas tent walls, the shrill screams of women and children begin to pierce the air. A stampede eventually occurred, and the populace, in a wild flight for safety, rushed for the exits and their cars.
The fat blonde in front of me was wailing in utter terror, her date having used the confusion to dump her. She did, however, make an excellent shield between the armed primate and myself, so when she started to make moves to get the hell out of the tent, I quickly reached up, grabbed her shoulders and forced her down, careful to keep her body between me and the ring.
She reacted to this rough treatment by beginning to flail about hysterically. I grabbed a coat someone had dropped and threw it over her head—I remembered seeing Roy Rodgers do this to a panicky horse in order to calm it down, so I gave it a shot— and sure enough, she quickly settled down, with only the occasional whimpering sound escaping from beneath the coat.
Madness continued to reign inside the tent until Officer Clifford J. Grissom, of the Oldbury Police Department, stepped into the fray. A two-year veteran of the force, the twenty-four-year-old Grissom had an Associate's Degree in criminology from Xavier Community College and had recently completed a refresher course in firearms training.
Immediately sizing up the situation, he drew his .357 Smith and Wesson Magnum, took a combat stance and pointed it at the ape. This should have been his moment.
What happened next is difficult to explain. Maybe that young man saw something of a soul in Xerxes’s good eye. Maybe he took pity on that poor, wretched creature that had spent its whole life being whipped and beaten. Or maybe he was just following his training when confronting a suspect who was not directly threatening an officer’s life.
What he was thinking we would never know, because what Officer Grissom did was yell “Freeze asshole!” at that damn dirty ape instead of shooting him.
Xerxes wasn’t having any of that crap. In what must have been the simian equivalent of “Fuck You!”, he did a back flip and in the same motion brought the gun up and fired, nailing Officer Grissom right between the eyes.
Monkey: 2. Mankind: 0.
Now things were really getting out of hand in that tent.
Fortunately, Ol’Pete had by then managed to make his way to the rope that controlled the wooden panel and raised it. Xerxes, just like he was trained and probably grateful to get away from these silly humans, dropped the pistol and scampered to the exit and down the tin tube to his cage outside the tent. Pete let the panel slam shut.
With the threat of random annihilation removed, some semblance of order slowly began to reassert itself inside the tent. The crowd soon began to survey the dead and damage. I spied the Ringmaster and his bookie associate run out of the tent, and for damn good reasons, because some were beginning to talk of revenge.
Cries of “Hang the black bastard!” were soon heard and I began to fear for Pete’s life. However, it turned out they weren’t referring to the black man but to the chimp, which I personally feel is a good testament to how far the New South has come with regards to civil rights since the days of “Brown v. The Board of Education.”
After a few minutes, I managed to get out of the tent, and headed for my car, blonde in tow. She was shaking like a leaf, and refused to let go of my arm. She wasn’t half bad to look at, in a pleasingly plump sort of way. The way she bleached her hair and displayed her tits in a tight shirt, I figured she had been saddle-broken for quite a while now. Since her date was nowhere to be seen and since I’d sort-of saved her from getting killed, maybe she’d give me a chance to ride her once she calmed down.
In a few minutes, I was helping her into the front seat of my car. We sat there and waited until things simmered down in the parking lot. By now, she was calm enough for me to ask her name.
“Bertha Henson.”
“Well, Bertha, is there anything I can do for you? I know it’s been rough tonight.”
She just stared at her feet, giving me an occasional sideways glance.
“I hope you can forgive me for grabbing you like that back in the tent. I just thought it was best that you kept still until they got that ape taken care of. No need to attract his attention—”
“Tim, the bastard, he just left me!”
“Your boyfriend?”
She looked me up and down a second, and I saw that look in her eyes. I knew I cut a damn better figure than that little shrimp she’d been with.
“Not really—I’m sorry I didn’t get your name.”
“Lyle—Lyle Peabody.” I lied. I knew there was a chance of sleeping with her, so I decided to play it by my rules; no real names.
“Thanks for helping me—Lyle.”
“Hey, not at all, I never mind helping pretty girls.”
She smiled at this and settled her plump ass a little deeper into my front seat. She wasn’t a knockout but she wasn’t all that ugly either. Early thirties, I guessed.
“Is there anywhere I can take you? Are you hungry? I don’t know about you, but all this excitement has made me want a beer. How about it?”
/> She jumped at the chance.
“Sure, I know of a place just down the road. We can get a six-pack there!”
We got our beer and within the hour, we were pulling up to my motel. Her eyes got a bit wide when I got my gun out of the trunk, but I quickly explained to her that I was a private dick working on a case. This seemed to excite her, and before I’d even finished the first beer, she was all over me.
Afterwards, while we sipped on another beer, and I was resting up getting ready for round two, she started asking me what I was working on. I told her about looking for a girl who was originally thought to be from this area. She wanted to know who the woman was, so I showed her the picture I had of Susan Bowman.
She looked at it for a moment or two, then sort of sat up in bed and leaned over to get more light from the bedside lamp to shine on the picture.
“I think I know her.”
My ears perked up.
“You’re kidding. Who is she?”
“Oh, shit, I can’t remember her first name, but she looks like that Baylor girl who used to live here. We went to school together. She was a few years older than me, but I think that’s her.”
“Are you sure?”
“Kind of sure. But I bet my friend Linda could tell us. She works as a waitress and knows everyone from around here.”
“When can I talk to her?”
“She works the breakfast shift. We can see her tomorrow.”
With that last piece of news, I turned off the light and thanked her.
Chapter 16