I was sitting on the back of a produce truck in the alleyway behind the Shoprite, taking a break from my duties (those duties being the unloading of a shipment of mouth-watering Grapricots). “Genetically redesigned for your pleasure, Grapricots blend the scrumptious flavors of grapes and apricots into one spectacular little fruit. Try one, they’re grape!” read the side of every crate I’d unloaded that day. Personally I preferred Grapples. It was as I sat there eating my fourth Grapricot that I noticed him standing in the shadows, trying, I think, to look mysterious. It was Ol’Charlie. Folks in Little Canada all knew about Ol’Charlie for all sorts of dubious activities – everything from his underground sword-fighting ring to his underground illegal alien railroad. In fact, most of what Ol’Charlie did took place underground, so I didn’t figure he would be above ground, least of all in this dingy alleyway, if it wasn’t real important.
“That’s one impressive body you got there, eh?” Ol’Charlie said with a slight Canadian accent. I wondered if he had picked it up from all his years in Little Canada selling tukes, maple syrup, and poutine underground, or if he was an Escaped Canadian, like so many others in this part of our crazy little city.
“I’m afraid my tire swings the other way, Ol’Charlie,” I said with a small chuckle. It’s not wise to upset a man like Ol’Charlie. You never know what could happen.
“Isn’t that nice. You took the time to learn my name, and here I am, like an ass, not knowing yours… What’s your name, son?” Ol’Charlie said earnestly.
“It’s Allan,” I said as I sank, teeth first, into my fifth Grapricot.
“Alright, Allen” I heard him say my name wrong, but I didn’t think it wise to correct a shadowy, possibly Escaped Canadian while alone in the alleyway. Even if I was certain that I could beat him in a fair fight. These muscles can’t stop bullets, after all. “I’m no queer, by most meanings of the word, and in any case I have a completely different interest in your body. I’m putting something together that can make me a lot of money, and I’ll need a man of your… physical prowess… in order to pull it off.”
“What kind of thing are we talking about here?” I asked, still not sure what he meant by “most meanings of the word.”
“I’m talking, of course, about the age-old and illegal sport of underground tiger wrestling. It requires a lot of skill and a lot of upper body strength in order to survive, but I’m confident that you are the man I’ve been looking for.”
“I’m sorry, Charlie, but no way. I have a perfectly decent job and a life that I very much would like to continue.”
“That’s fine. I can understand why you might have some reservations about a job of this caliber, but let me just say this… the fight will have quite a handsome purse.”
“How handsome could this purse be, Ol’Charlie?” I asked, surprised by my own curiosity.
“I can’t guarantee an exact amount due to the nature of this kind of thing, you understand. However, I’m confident that a fight of this magnitude can pull in at least enough for a purse of, say, two million.”
“Dollars?”
“Yes, Allen. It pays two million dollars, at least.”
“How can something like that gross two million dollars?”
“Well, Allen, deeply rooted within our own human nature is the type of bloodlust that creates a market for these fights. Every man wants to see carnage. Unfortunalty, due to the high demand and illegality of these events, not every man can afford to place a bet, or even attend. This leaves the richest of the rich. People who have everything that money can legally buy them, and so much still that they turn to people of our persuasion to fill the blood-lust that cannot be filled by legal means. But if you don’t think you can handle a pussycat for two million dollars, then I’ll just have to find someone who thinks he can.” And with that, Ol’Charlie turned around to leave.
I can’t say exactly why I did what I did next. Youth has a way of making a person feel that he’s indestructible. And at the age of twenty-three with no more wife, no career, and working at a job with no future, I guess I felt I had nothing left to lose.
“Wait… wait, I’ll do it!” I shouted as I leapt from the back of my produce truck and bounded after Ol’Charlie.
* * *
From that moment forward I was in training. Sheba, the Sumatran tiger I was to fight, weighed two hundred and thirty five pounds, the average weight of a Sumatran tiger, and looked as though she could probably slice me in two with one of her razor-sharp claws. At the time I weighed just under two hundred pounds, and although I had very little body fat due to the physical demands of my previous employment at Shoprite, I calculated that I would need at least another fifty pounds of muscle in order to have a chance.
For the next two months I spent my days alone in Ol’Charlie’s personal gym drinking protein shakes and building my upper body strength day in and day out. I became Ol’Charlie’s personal project and he insisted that I live with him while I trained. I made no wage during this period of training, but Ol’Charlie made sure that my every need was taken care of. He supplied me with a healthy, protein rich diet and gave me a bed to sleep in his sub-terrainian home. He even paid the rent on my empty efficiency apartment, not a large expense for a man of Ol’Charlie’s means, but a kind gesture as it gave me confidence that at least one person expected me to live through this ungodly match between man and beast.
Meanwhile Ol’Charlie worked on building the hype for the main event, during which time I hardly saw him, even in his own home. He spent the weeks touring the seedy underbelly of Little Canada to spread the word. He visited cock fights, sword fights, break-dance fights, and even the oft-scoffed-at turtle fights in order to inform people of all walks of life in Little Canada of the upcoming fight of the century.
“Not since the times of the great gladiatorial games has there been a match-up with such raw power and bloodlust. On July the 18th at exactly 8:45pm, I, Ol’Charlie, will be hosting here in Little Canada, a fight to the death between one man and one two hundred and thirty five pound Sumatran tiger. Our hero will utilize no tool or weapon in this feral battle other than mental strength and his own two hands. Tickets to the show can be purchased now or at my website: www.olcharliessuperdeadlytigerfight.com for five thousand dollars, or at the door for ten thousand. Wagers can be made at the time of the event only.” Ol’Charlie would announce at each event he visited, and at each event he would sell a good many tickets to the fat-cat gamblers that frequented them.
As the date of the event grew closer, it seemed the days grew shorter. Each day I would continue my routine, but I had seemed to hit a plateau in my muscle gain. At two hundred and thirty five pounds I hadn’t put on a single pound of muscle mass in over a week, and although this had put Sheba and I at the exact same weight, I still felt I was at a disadvantage. I began to question whether I had made the right decision. Sure, I was happy to escape my cruddy apartment and my dead-end job, but was it worth the price of being maimed or killed? I wasn’t ready to die. I had never even gotten the chance to leave Little Canada and see the rest of the city, maybe even the real Canada, or the world. But I would never have been able to do those things with my old life, anyhow. At least this way, I told myself, I might have a shot at freedom, however slim that shot might be.
One day in late June while I was on my seven-hundredth rep of squats, Ol’Charlie came in to the gym and began to spot me. It was the first time I had ever seen Ol’Charlie in the light, and I have to say it did not suit him. In the shadows he looked tough and mysterious, but in full fluorescent light he just looked ridiculous. First of all, he dressed in a zoot suit and a fedora, like it was the 1920’s or something. In terms of physical features he was a scrawny man beneath all that suit. He had orange hair, the color of cat vomit, and cloudy hazel eyes that do not compliment his pale, freckled complexion. Not to mention the fact that he was almost completely crazy. In all, the man was a train wreck.
“Allen, my boy?” Ol’Charlie said, with a cigarette hanging from his lips. The cigarette had more pigmentation than his long, over-exposed, Jacob Marley face.
“What’s up, Ol’Charlie?” I huffed between reps.
“The most important thing a man can do before he dies is to reproduce. Have you had a chance to reproduce, Allen?”
“I’m afraid not, Ol’Charlie.”
“No? Not even by mistake with an ex-girlfriend or a hooker, eh?” Ol’Charlie asked, looking at me with surprise and intrigue.
“Nope, not even a hooker,” I replied. I didn’t know where this line of questioning was headed, but I was already sure that I didn’t like it.
“Oh! Reproduction is the best. It’s the closest thing we mortals have to immortality. Even when you’re dead and buried and serving as a breakfast buffet for a colony of earthworms, a part of you always lives on in your children and your children’s children. It’s the circle of life, eh?” Ol’Charlie said.
“If you say so, Ol’Charlie.”
“You’re damn right I say so. Well, don’t you worry, Allen. If you don’t make it through this tiger fight, I’ll take the two million that would have been your cut, have you a nice funeral, and then clone you up proper. We can’t have these gorgeous genetics going to waste, eh?” Ol’Charlie said, looking me up and down in an awkwardly seductive manner.
* * *
In an attempt to tip the scales in my favor, as it were, Ol’Charlie had decided that he would stop feeding young Sheba three days before the fight. Ol’Charlie wanted a great fight, but he also wanted it fair. At least as fair as an illegal fight between a man and a tiger could be. Whether this lack of food would weaken Sheba or just increase her lust for man flesh, neither of us could say. Because of the possible variability in Sheba’s reaction to her hunger, Ol’Charlie felt confident in that he was not necessarily fixing the fight in my favor, but making the fight more even, and much more interesting for the lusty spectators.
On the evening of the fight Ol’Charlie’s underground compound was alive with the buzz of spectators. All the best of the best of the underground fighting circle were at Ol’Charlie’s side. Louie “The Fist” McMillan, Archie “Dog Snot” Jones, and even “The Turtlenator,” and I was sure they all had hundreds of thousands bet against me. Ol’Charlie had an arena attached to his attached garage where he had hosted his numerous fights over the years. He had told me that the arena was one of the first things that he had built when he first began to amass his fortune. Between the hassle of finding abandoned warehouses in an ever-expanding metropolis and the amount of money he had lost due to fights broken up by the cops, he had decided that he needed a place that he could readily have access to and hide more easily. The underground arena had been the answer. Tonight that underground arena was jam-packed with people who had all paid and bet thousands of dollars to see me fight a tiger to the death. I couldn’t have imagined that there were so many rich folks in Little Canada. Ol’Charlie told me that he had expanded his advertising in the last few weeks, and that we were looking at the richest 1,000 people in the world. I wondered how many of them had bet their savings on me and how many on the tiger. The idea that I could be a safe bet was farfetched, and this gave me no comfort. I realized that I was probably going to die.
I had no life outside of this fight anymore. And even when I did, it wasn’t much. Unloading produce from the backs of trucks, running from my past, drinking my nights away, and thinking about the wife who had left me for a Russian trapeze artist. Maybe Ol’Charlie was right. Maybe I should have had kids. They might have given Linda a reason to stay. They might have been my legacy. All that didn’t matter now. I realized that I didn’t much care what the outcome of the fight would be. I would either kill a tiger, or die trying.
At exactly 8:40pm I was standing in one corner of a concrete square staring into the eyes of a very hungry, and very angry, Sumatran tiger. She was tied to an iron support beam, waiting to be set free. As Sheba paced back and forth, eyeing me hungrily, Ol’Charlie stepped into the center of the ring with a microphone in one hand.
“In the blue corner we have Mr. Allen Cradock weighing in at two-hundred and forty five pounds and raring to get his fight on!” As Ol’Charlie said this, a portion of the crowd burst into fervent cheering. It was the first time in my life that I had ever felt such confidence and power. I actually believed that I could do this. “In the red corner we have Sheba, a female Sumatran tiger, weighing in at two-hundred and thirty five pounds and thirsty for blood!” As Ol’Charlie finished, a tsunami of applause and cheering swelled up and drowned me in an ocean of fear. It was safe to say that the majority of the bets had been in favor of Sheba. For the first time I was afraid that even if I did survive the tiger, I might not be so lucky with the crowd.
When the bell rang, Sheba leapt towards my face, jaws first. To my surprise I caught the great beast by the mandibles and held them from snapping down on my hands as I flipped her on the ground. The crowd let out a mix of cheers and moans of disappointment. Sheba shook it off and lunged at me again, this time for my jugular. I responded with a smart punch to her temple followed by a swift uppercut to her jaw. In a few seconds Sheba recovered again and this time connected with a lightning fast swipe of the paw. A nice gash opened across my chest, right through my left nipple.
Our fight continued in this fashion for some time before fatigue began to slow down the beast. I had been training all day every day for months and had developed, among other things, an extraordinary amount of stamina. Sheba, on the other hand, had been confined to her cage for the better part of six months. That’s not to say that I hadn’t been dealt some devastating blows, the most personal of which was a swat to the crotch, which left me bloodied and doubled over. If that had happened earlier in the fight, then the beast would have certainly finished me. Luckily, she was so tired that after the adrenaline kicked in, I was able to hop back up and knock her out with one final blow to the dome.
As it turns out, a fight to the death really only meant a fight to my death or until the tiger was knocked out, because as soon as she fell over, Ol’Charlie was in the ring to declare me the champ. Tigers are very expensive and hard to come by, so Ol’Charlie was glad that I didn’t kill her. I made a few people extremely rich and a lot of people very angry that night. Ol’Charlie had my back, though. We were escorted to the hospital by his personal guards, where I was sewn and bandaged up. Ol’Charlie played it smooth and told the doctors that I was an animal trainer and that my wounds were the result of a freak tiger mauling.
“You done good, old boy.” Ol’Charlie said and then smirked as he looked down at was once my crotch. “With the millions I made off you this evening, I should have more than enough to get you a proper clone. Maybe even have him ‘genetically redesigned for your pleasure.’ After all, the most important thing a man can do is to reproduce.”
“Thanks, Ol’Charlie, you’ve been too good to me.” As I said this and looked up into ghoulishly white face, I knew everything was going to be all right.
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