“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.