“Combine died,” Big Eli said. His voice was a low, gravelly rasp. He took a sip. The carbonation burned the back of his throat. “Need cash.”
Rusty let out a raspy laugh, wiping down the bar with a rag that looked dirtier than the counter. “You ain’t going to find no loans in here tonight, just bad decisions.” He nodded toward the center of the room. “Though, if you’re feeling suicidal, there’s always the open challenge.”
Big Eli followed Rusty’s gaze. In the center of the makeshift ring, a 20-by-20 square of interlocking foam mats held together by duct tape, stood Trent Larson.
Trent was 24, aggressively tanned and smelled violently of aerosol body spray. He wore black board shorts and tightly wrapped hand tape. He was bouncing on his toes, throwing lightning-fast jabs at the empty air. A sharp snap-snap echoed as his punches broke the stagnant air. Trent ran a martial arts gym two towns over. He had three amateur MMA belts, a tribal tattoo wrapping around his bicep, and the kind of loud, unearned confidence that made Big Eli’s stomach physically churn. Not with fear, but with a bone-deep exhaustion.
“Three minutes!” Trent shouted to the crowd, his voice cracking slightly with adrenaline. “Anyone last three minutes, you walk away with $500 cash. No gloves, submission or knockout.”
Trent wasn’t fighting for the money. He was fighting for the dopamine hit of watching someone lesser fold under his hands. Big Eli watched him throw a spinning hook kick. It was technically perfect, beautiful even. The crowd of mechanics and mill workers collectively oohed. Big Eli stared at Trent’s feet. They were clean, uncalloused, the feet of a man who fought on padded mats under bright fluorescent lights with a referee standing by to make sure nobody actually died.
“$500,” Big Eli muttered, staring into his club soda.
“Don’t do it, Eli,” Rusty warned, his tone dropping the jovial bartender act. “That kid’s broken two jaws this month. He’s fast, and he likes hurting people.”
Big Eli closed his eyes. The headache at the base of his skull throbbed. He hated violence. He had spent his twenties drowning in it. As a young soldier in Vietnam, he hadn’t just seen violence, he had survived it in the worst ways imaginable. He had spent the last forty years trying to scrub that cold, calculating part of his brain out with manual labor, raising his daughter alone after her mother died, and later raising her boy after she passed too. But the tractor needed an alternator, and his grandson needed the farm to survive.
Big Eli set the glass down. It made a dull, heavy thud on the wood. He rubbed the back of his thick neck, feeling the tight coiled muscles there. He didn’t feel heroic. He felt deeply, profoundly tired.