“The dagger!” screams the announcer. “Oh lord, he hits the dagger! ”
The crowd breaks up, drifting away in twos and threes to bars and parks and restaurants. A work crew dismantles the nets and sound equipment, packing everything into cube vans to truck to the next venue.
“Great game, son.” Somehow I’ve managed to slop beer down myself so it looks I’ve pissed my pants. Try to pawn it off as excitement. “A real barnburner—look, you got me sweating buckets.”
Jason’s sitting on the curb with his teammates. “Yeah, guess it was a pretty good one.”
To Kevin and big Al: “Lucky Jason was here to drag your asses out of the fire, huh?”
They don’t reply but instead pull off their shoes and socks, donning summer sandals. Big Al’s toenails thick yellow and thorny, curling over his toes like armor plating.
“What say I take you boys out for dinner?” I offer breezily. “A champion’s feast.”
“That’s okay,” Jason says. “Kev’s parents are having a barbecue. They’ve got a pool.”
“A pool? How suburban.” Jam one hand in my pocket, scratch the nape of my neck with the other. “So Kev, where’s your folks’ place at?”
Kevin hooks a thumb over his shoulder, an ambiguous gesture that could conceivably indicate the city’s southern edge, the nearest town, or Latin America.
“Could I tag along?”
Jason sits with his legs spread, head hanging between his knees. “I don’t know. They sort of, like, only did enough shopping for, y’know, us three.”
“Well, wouldn’t come empty-handed. I could grab some burgers, or … Cheetos.”
“You see, it’s like, we kind of got a full car. Y’know, Al and me and all our gear and stuff. Kev’s only got a Neon, right?”
“We could squeeze, couldn’t we? Get buddy-buddy?”
“I don’t know. Gotta do some running around first.”
“I love running around. It’s good for the heart.”
Without looking up, Jason says, “Dad, listen, Kev’s still on probation—his license, right?—so, it’s like, he can’t have anyone in his car who’s been drinking. If the cops pull us over, Kev’ll get his license suspended.”
“Oh. Alrighty then.” Stare into the sky, directly into the afternoon sun. Close my eyes and the ghostly afterimage burns there as a sizzling imprint, searing corona dancing with winking fairylights.
The boys gather their bags and waterbottles. Shake Kev and Al’s hands, hug my son. His skin smells of other bodies, the sweat of strangers. Used to love the smell of his hands after practice, the scent of sweat and leather commingled. When I let him go the flesh around his eyes is red and swollen and it gets me thinking of that distant afternoon, grape soda and a sense of horrible pressure.
“Great game,” I tell him. “You’re gonna show ’em all one day.”
He walks down the street, hitching the duffel up on his shoulder. Charting his departure, it’s as though I’m seeing him through the ass end of a telescope: this tiny figure distorted by an unseen convex, turning the corner now, gone. Sun high in the afternoon sky, brilliant and hostile, beer’s all gone and it’s the middle of the day though it feels like it should be later, much later and near dusk and it dawns on me I’ve nothing to do, nowhere to be, the day stretching out bright and interminable with no clear goal or closure in sight.
NIGHTTIME AT THE KNIGHTWOOD ARMS subsidized housing complex. My bedroom window overlooks a dilapidated basketball court, tarmac seized and buckled, nets rotted from the hoops. Early mornings I’ll head down and shoot baskets beneath a lightening sky, mist falling through the courtyard’s arc-sodium lamp to create a cool glittering nimbus. Often someone’ll crack a window in one of the overhanging units, Knock it off with the damn bouncity-bounce. Don’t make much fuss anymore, just go back to my room.
Eleven o’clock or so and the bottle’s almost empty when the phone rings.
“Hey,” Jason says. “It’s me.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“Yeah, well, wanted to talk to you about something.”
Good news, I’m guessing: Duke, Kentucky, UConn. “Your old man’s all ears.”
“Well, it’s like, I’ve decided to not play ball.”
“You mean you’re going to take the year off?” Try to remain calm. “Don’t know that’s the best idea, kiddo—gonna want to keep in the mix.”
“No, I sort of mean, like … ever. I mean, forever.”
“Forever? Don’t get you.”
The mouthpiece is shielded. Jason’s muffled voice, then his mother’s, then Jason’s back on the line. “I’m sick of it. Sick of basketball. Don’t want to play anymore.”
“Well,” I struggle, “that’s … sort of a childish attitude, son. I don’t always like my job, but it’s my job, so I do it. That’s the way the world … works.”
A sigh. “You know, there are other things in life. Lots of jobs out there.”
“Yeah, well, like what?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “I was thinking maybe … a vet?”
“You mean … a veterinarian?”
“Uh-huh. Like that, or something.”
“Oh. Well, that’s … y’know … that’s grand. The sick cats and everything. A grand goal.”
“Anyway. Just thought I’d tell you.”
“Yeah. Well … thanks. What say you sit on it a bit, Jason, let it stew awhile. Who knows—might change your mind.”
“No, I don’t think so. Alright, goodbye.”
“All I’m saying is—”
But the line’s already dead. Hang up and lie back on the mattress, stare out at the starblown sky.
When Jason was a kid I bought him this mechanical piggy bank. You’d set a coin in the cup-shaped hand of a metal basketball player, pull the lever to release a spring and the player deposited the coin in a cast-iron hoop. Jason loved the damn thing. Sit him on the floor with a handful of pennies: hours of mindless amusement. Every so often I’d have to quit whatever I was doing to unscrew the bottom, dump the coins so Jason could start over. The snak-clanggg! of the mechanism got annoying after the first half-hour and I would’ve taken it away if Jason wasn’t so small and frail and I so intent on honing that fascination. There were other toys, a whole closetful, but he chose basketball. Right from the get-go. And yeah, I encouraged it—what’s a father supposed to do? Guide his kid towards any natural inclination, gently at first, then as required. If that’s what your kid’s born to do, what other choice do you really have?
All I’m saying is, I’m no monster, okay? As a father, you only ever want what’s best for your boy. That’s your job—the greatest job of your life. All you want is that your kid be happy, and healthy, and follow the good path. That’s all I did: kept him on the good path. I’m a great father. A damn fine dad. Swear it on a stack of bibles.
So my boy wants to be a veterinarian, does he? Well it’s a tough racket, plenty of competition, no cakewalk by a longshot. Don’t I know a guy out Welland way who’s a taxidermist? Sure, Adam somebody-or-other, stuffs geese and trout and I don’t know—bobcats? Ought to shoot him a call, see if me and Jason can’t pop by, poke around a bit. I mean, you want to be a doctor, got to know your way around cadavers, right? It’s the same principle. Adam’s one easygoing sonofabitch; doubt he’ll mind.
Yeah, that’s just what I’ll do. Finish off this bottle, hunt up that number, make the call. I mean, hey, sure it comes as a shock, but nobody can call Hank Mikan a man of inflexible fiber. When life hands you lemons, make lemonade. Life offers sour grapes, make sweet wine. A veterinarian, huh? Well, that’s noble. Damn noble. And hey, money ain’t half-bad either.
Let’s finish this last swallow and get right on the blower. It’s a long road ahead.
Like the shoe commercial says, right? Just Do It. Hey!
A MEAN UTILITY
MIDWAY THROUGH THE PITCH I pass a note to Mitch Edmonds, big kahuna of graphic design: This is going good? He grimaces and scribbl
es back: If by “good” you mean heart-stoppingly BAD, then yes, everything’s PEACHY. Diarrhetic adjective use aside, I suspect Edmonds is correct. In fact, the pitch is veering towards a crash of Hindenburglike proportions: feel the heat of compressed hydrogen flames and charred tatters of zeppelin silk buffeting my face, hear Herbert Morrison’s breathless voice screaming “Oh the humanity!” into a giant wind-socked microphone.
Supp-Easy-Quit is a stop-smoking aid in suppository form. The science is sound: the rectal arterial clusters, feeding directly into the larger sacral and iliac branches, are ideal nicotine-delivery channels. Yet the stone-cold fact persists: most smokers—most human beings— exhibit a distinct disinclination to propel foreign objects up their bungs. They’d rather chew Nicorette until their mouths seize with lockjaw, festoon their bodies with the Patch, Christ, insert flaming nicotine wedges under their fingernails. This hardwired predisposition renders the product a tough sell.
Don Fawkes, lead hand on the Supp-Easy-Quit account, aims a laser-pointer at a storyboard montage. “Okay,” he says, “so here’s this smoker who’s trying to quit. He’s in a smoky tavern—upscale, jazzy, bit of a speakeasy feel—tipping a few bevies, itching to fire off a lung rocket.” Don believes his timely employment of hipster lingo is key to the middling success he enjoys. “So our man slips into the men’s room and enters a stall, jazz music swells, he exits all smiles. Fade to black on the product logo.”
The Supp-Easy-Quit reps—a power-suited Eva Braun flanked by a pair of lab-coated scientist pastiches—sit with arms crossed. The trio strike me as just-the-facts-ma’am types: their ideal commercial no doubt involves clinical footage of suppositories inserted into rectums, endoscopic cameras filming the dispersal of nicotine molecules into the bloodstream.
“Tell me: do you like it?” Don Fawkes, Ignoramus extremus, asks. “Do you love it?”
Fawkes’s towering colossus of ineptitude fails to elicit any surprise or sympathy from me for two reasons: (1) last month Don singlehandedly scuttled the Juicy Jubes kosher jujubes account, enraging a group of Hasidic entrepreneurs with the utterance of his ill-conceived tagline: Juicy Jubes are Jui-y JUI-licious!; and (2) a large chunk of meat is missing from my left calf, a chunk roughly correspondent to the bite radius of a Rottweiler named Biscuits. The wound is cleaned and dressed but the calf is a fussy area, a locus of veins and connective tissues—blood seeps through the bandages, pooling in the heel of my Bruno Magli loafer.
I was mauled two nights ago, at a scratch-and-turn dogfight held in a foreclosed poultry processing plant outside Cobourg. Dottie, a three-year-old pit bull and my wife Alison’s darling bitch, was matched uphill against a hard-biting presa canario named Chinaman. Dottie was a ten fight champ with heavily muscled stifles and a bite to shatter cinderblocks; Chinaman was cherry but his lineage legendary with chest and flews capable of deflecting bullets. Betting skewed in Dottie’s favor on account of her experience and ring generalship.
After Alison gave Chinaman a thorough inspection—the breeder a jug-eared hillbilly known to soak his fighters’ fur in poison—the dogs were led into a chicken-wire pen. White worms of chicken shit dotted the floor, some with downy feathers stuck to them. The concrete was puddled with blood from the previous fight.
Dottie started out fast, butting her muzzle into Chinaman’s chest and tearing a gaping hole above his right shoulder. Chinaman looked ready to buckle—it’s the first critical injury that separates gamers from curs—but when Dottie went for his front leg he snapped at her skull, canines opening deep furrows across the bridge of her snout. Blood flowed down Dottie’s chest and sprayed in her eyes. Alison gave a little moan. Chinaman’s handler hollered, “Get at it, boy! Sic! Sic! ”
The presa rushed hard and tried to pin Dottie against the pen. Dottie back-pedaled a few paces before fastening her mouth around Chinaman’s advancing foreleg and ripping free a network of muscle and tissue. Chinaman kept pressing, chewing on Dottie’s head; it sounded as if his teeth were raking bone. The crowd pressed around the pen, slapping the chicken-wire, stomping their feet. The smell was close and hot, sweetly animal.
The bell rang. Men with blunt baling hooks reached over the wire, digging into the dense muscling of the dog’s chests, prying them apart. In the corner, I held Dottie while Alison went to work. After rubbing powdered Lidocaine into the dog’s gumline to kill the pain, she chemically cauterized the facial wounds with ferric acid. Then she saturated a Q-tip with adrenaline chloride and swabbed the rims of Dottie’s nostrils and ear holes, her anus. The dog’s eyes, previously glazed, attained a clear focus.
The bell rang. Both dogs scratched the chalk line.
Dottie lived up to her reputation as a wrecker in the second. She butted hard into Chinaman’s stifles, attacking that shoulder wound. Chinaman gave as good as he got, slashing at Dottie’s dewlap, shredding it. At the eight-minute mark: a fibrous snap as Chinaman’s shoulder broke. The presa was down to three legs. Dottie pressed her advantage, forcing Chinaman back, attacking the throat, a blur of snapping teeth, questing jaws, and bloody ropes of saliva as each dog angled for the killing clinch.
Chinaman managed to close his mouth around Dottie’s muzzle, gripping her entire upper palate. The brittle splintering sound was unlike anything I’d ever heard. Dottie’s spine stiffened and her claws tore at Chinaman’s belly.
The bell rang. An acne-scarred teenager mopped up blood and redrew the chalk line.
Dottie’s face was in ruins: bloody and cleaved open, shards of bone free-floating beneath the skin. Half her nose was torn off and her dewlap hung like tattered curtains. Alison debrided the worst wounds with hydrogen peroxide and Betadine before slicking them with mixed adrenaline and Vaseline.
“Pick your dogs up!” a man hollered. “That’s enough. Enough!” The crowd jeered him.
“Maybe I should,” Alison said. “Pick her up.”
I’d’ve rather cut my foot off and eaten it! “Look at that one,” I said with a nod at the presa, who was burrowing his head in the breeder’s chest like it wanted to climb inside and die. “Bet you a steak dinner it doesn’t toe the scratch.”
Chinaman’s breeder grabbed the dog by its neck and whipsawed it back and forth, growling, “Don’t flake on me, you goddamn cur. Don’t you fucking flake.”
Before the bell Alison injected 10 cc’s Epinephrine into Dottie’s haunch. I felt the dog’s fluttering heart rate normalize. Chinaman staggered from his corner, front right leg limp as a cooked noodle. The presa’s muzzle was frosted white with Lidocaine.
Round three ended it. Dottie feinted at Chinaman’s bum leg off the scratch and, in one deft move, rammed her skull into his good one. Forced to support his entire forward weight, Chinaman’s left foreleg snapped. The presa toppled face-first, front legs splayed to either side, hinds scrabbling feebly. Dottie started clawing at Chinaman’s eyes. Before long the baling hooks pulled her off.
After squaring all bets I was lugging Dottie through the parking lot—blood saturating her doggie blanket, dripping through the kennel crate’s metal honeycombs—when this raspy barking kicked up from behind. I wheeled to see a huge Rottweiler bullrushing my blind side. It wore an inch-thick studded leather collar against which the striated muscle of its throat and neck pulsed. Links of twenty-gauge chain spat gravel between its legs.
I dropped Dottie and fired an off-balance kick. The rottie passed under my leg, clamping down on my calf.
Events unfolded at the narcotic pace of a fugue. My right knee buckled and I went down, blacktopped gravel dimpling the ass of my cotton Dockers. My skull caromed off the ground and everything whited out for a moment. Then I was struggling up, fists beating a frenzied tattoo on the dog’s head as its square dark muzzle worried into the wound. Dottie pressed her busted face to the kennel’s grate, growling low in her throat, bloody bubbles forced between her black eyes and orbital bone. The Rottweiler wrenched its head sideways, teeth sunk deep into the sinews of my calf, gator-rolling me across that chill November
tarmac.
Five sausage-link digits grasped the underside of the rottie’s jaw, thumb and index finger pressed to the axis where upper and lower palate met, forcing the mouth open. The woman restraining the animal was an eclipse of flesh clad in what appeared to be a pleated topsail, calves thick as an adolescent pachyderm’s networked with bluish spider veins. A slimly ironic menthol cigarette hung off her bottom lip, defying all known laws of gravity.
“Bad Biscuits,” she chastised the dog in a breathy baby-voice. “The manners on you. Why you want to go biting the nice man?”
Alison arrived in a blur of shawls and indignation. I noticed she poked her fingers through Dottie’s crate before arriving at my side. Bright arterial blood pumped from my calf.
“Stop squirming,” she told me, breaking out the peroxide and catgut to attend to the wound.
The woman waddled to her idling Cutlass Supreme. She opened the driver’s door—sunblistered dashboard lined with neon-haired Treasure Trolls; bingo dabbers spilling from a sprung glovebox— swatting the dog inside. A shrewish, stoop-shouldered man sat in the passenger’s seat, wearing camouflage fatigue pants and the kind of sleeveless white T-shirt favored by aged Italian gardeners.
“You can’t,” I said, reaching out to her. “Can’t just … your dog bit me! ”
She tucked her chin to her chest, setting in motion a rippling domino-effect of subsidiary chins. “Biscuits got a touch of the ringworm, misser. Gives him the cranks.” Her look suggested I wasn’t much of a dogman if I didn’t know that. “Every one my babies is papered and rabies free. Don’t need shots, promise.”
“That dog should be destroyed!”
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