by Paul Griffin
That Mack dude is gifted. I feel it in my gut. My ESP drives me insane.
(Saturday, June 13, late night)
MACK:
I stole looks. First was her hair, long and loopy and pulled back. Second, she has the prettiest face, open-like and uplooking. Third time I looked she was studying that satellite and I saw her eyes, deep brown, almost black. She has these little scars on her chin. I like that. When a lady isn’t perfect, she’s a lot more perfect, I believe.
I bet when you hold hands with a girl that cool you wonder if it’s possible you’re going to levitate like one of them monks I saw on a TV commercial once, which don’t you wish that was real?
I head downhill and cut along the highway, and of course they’re at it again. The dog fighters. At the end of the alley. They got it going on in the back of a van with the seats ripped out. I see through the back doors left open. Men drinking forties and throwing cash and jawing into their phones. And the dogs.
It’s not loud at all. Pits don’t bark much. They duck and twist like Galveston lightning till they clamp on at each other’s throat. They try to roll each other, but neither dog goes over. They sway. Imagine slow dancing with a bear trap locked on to you. The men kick the dogs and stick them to make them madder. The dogs stay frozen like that, bound by their teeth.
I’m running at that van, tell you what, let them pop me. I reach into my pocket like I’m heavy with a pistol. My other hand is up like it’s badged. “Yo, freeze.”
The van jerks out of its idle and squeals away. They kick the loser dog out the back doors as they go. She’s gasping in a puddle of old rain and mosquitoes and grease runoff from a leak in the Dumpster.
I stroke the dog’s muzzle. Her tongue hangs long in fast panting. Her head is heavy in my arms. Her front left leg is cut. Pouch under her jaw too. Her eyes are rolled back. If she dies, I’ll bury her in the park where nobody can mess with her. Up in the hills, where if you slit your eyes it’s like you aren’t even in the city.
I don’t understand violence. I don’t understand why it’s got to be. And why does it have to be in me? I get so mad sometimes I could cut the world at the neck. A baby in a tenement cries out and cries on.
I pinch a sheet hanging from a fire escape and make a sling of it and scoop the dog. She’s forty pounds, just where they want them for fighting. The small ones are the fastest. I see a lot of old scars. Going to be hard to rehab her, get her so she doesn’t try to fight other dogs.
Here I am huffing and puffing along the highway overlook with this dog in a bloody sheet sling. Yet another truck crashed on the blind bend of the on-ramp just ahead, honking, fumes, feels like August instead of June. Gluey. I don’t do real good in the humidity. Nobody does, but me less than most. I get a little hair-trigger.
This dude guns up the exit ramp in a Mercedes convertible, new, black pearl. He swings hard into the gas station and near about clips my dog, not to mention me.
I don’t say a thing, but I must be giving him the eyes, because after he sizes me up as trash, he flips me off, slow style, like what are you gonna do about it? He does a double take on the bloody sling and the dog, frowns, revs to the gas pump. MD plates.
I’m wrapped in blood, and he leaves me? This man should not be a doctor. This man should not be.
Everything gets real quiet, like you mute the TV, see? Then there’s the hiss of radio static. It comes on so bright and loud, I’m deaf and fighting blindness.
I follow this doctor. Nice clothes. Phone to his ear. He’s jawing all loud and proud like rich folks do. But I don’t hear what he’s saying. I don’t hear a thing but the hissing now. I’m grinding my teeth to keep from roaring out. The street shakes.
The doc does a double take on me, and I see in his eyes that he knows I’m going to cut him. I look down. My knife is in my hand. Dog is dangling under my arm, whimpering. I run my lock-blade tip over the doc’s sparkly black paint job. I start at the back quarter panel, head toward the driver’s-side door, toward him.
The Mercedes guns away without gassing up.
The radio static takes a while to fade. I walk a little, but my legs are weak. Have to sit. Practically fall to the curb. I’m empty. I think about what I almost did, and I want to be anybody else so bad. Being anger’s slave is nowhere to be. I don’t know. That static. If it was a real thing, like a piece of cancer, I would cut it out myself.
The dog trembles on me. Have to get her inside. That’s the thing about dogs: They take your mind off everything. My legs are still shaking. I can’t carry this girl home. And no way a cabbie will let me put a bloody dog into his Chevy. I don’t have a phone. Somebody ripped the receiver off the pay phone, and I have no quarters anyway, and nobody to call. Except maybe Tony. You ever need me, I’m there for you, day or night, he said to me once. But most folks just say that.
I don’t know how long it is before this dude pulls over. “You all right?”
“Fuck away from me, man.” Dudes that pull over try to mess with me sometimes.
“I bring peace, friend,” he says. “God’s blessings.”
“You better drive on, friend.” I side-eye him.
He’s staring real hard into my eyes, and I guess I look as messed-up as I feel, because he says, “Get in the car, and I’ll take you to the hospital.”
“Leave. Me. Be. Last time.”
“The dog. What happened? Did it get hit?” He’s got the Jesus sticker on his bumper and the cross hanging from the mirror.
“Just let me use your phone, man.” I close my eyes. “Please.”
I can’t even get myself up from sitting on the curb, and he has to get out of the car to hand it to me. I pull the piece of takeout bag Tony wrote his number on from my wallet. I keep it next to this old picture of my mom. Her face is kind of worn off, but you can see what she was like, that she was the goodness.
“Tone?”
“Mack?”
“Sorry to wake you, man.”
“Nah, man, I’m—I was awake anyway. What’s up, buddy?”
Tony comes with Vic’s car. His hair is all flat on one side of his head and standing up off the other. He had to be out cold after working that double today, on his feet fourteen hours. He studies the dog, then me. “Mack, it’s gonna be okay, buddy. I promise.” Puts his hand on my shoulder. Then he makes to scoop the dog.
She gets growly, and that snaps me out of feeling sorry for myself. “I got her.” I scoop her and sit in the front seat. Tony runs the belt out for me to take it. I strap me and my pittie girl in, and Tony drives us to where I live.
Our spot is in the basement. Old man is out at the bar. Left two radios going. One has the ballgame loud. The other is on soft with old-style music.
I turn them both off.
Near-empty quart of Boone’s Farm side-lies on the couch. I make to hide it.
“Mack,” Tony says, “forget the bottle. Let’s take care of the dog.”
I grab towels and peroxide, cool water jug from the fridge. Tony carries that stuff. My strength is back mostly, and I carry the dog. We head for the roof. I have the keys to the service elevator. The old man is the janitor of this big old tenement. Most of the tenants in here are veterans and folks in rehab and sad nice folks like that. The kind who don’t mind if you bring in a sick dog, even if it’s against the rules of having no pets.
Elevator clunks Tony and me and my pit bull girl up twelve flights. She’s panting crazy. I check her paws—sweating. Means she’s terrified.
We walk the fire stairs the last flight, to the roof. Tony takes a second to study the view. You can see the park from up here, in the slots between where the line-dried sheets jig. The pigeons scatter and resettle. “They let you pet their heads with your thumb sometimes,” I say.
“No, they let you pet their heads.”
“Yo, Tony, man. Thank you, man.”
“Thank you, brother.”
“For what?”
“For this night. It’s a gift.”
“How do you mean?”
He doesn’t say. He helps me get the dog inside the hutch—or that’s what I call it. It’s the housing for the elevators, to protect the engines that drive the cables. It’s cinderblock and of a fair size, maybe as big as a two-room apartment. The engines are in the back, and there’s a small janitor’s workshop in the front. I like to hunker here. Sleep here sometimes too, especially after the old man comes in from a mean drunk. I like the hum and whir of the elevator cables.
I built a pen of chicken wire scraps I found in a construction site. Okay, I pinched them. But I had to, because I didn’t have money, and I needed the wire, so that made it all right. It says you can do that in the Bible. I fenced the whole roof five feet high with it. I recuperate my dogs here. “When this one is good again, I’ll ask my dog-walking customers if they know anybody looking for a nice pit bull. If she lives,” I tell Tony.
“She’ll live, buddy. With you taking care of her, I’m sure of it.”
“She’d be a good dog, you know? For your moms maybe, while you’re away.”
“My moms, huh?” His eyebrows go up and he smiles. “You like her, right?”
“She’s real nice.”
“No, I mean do you like her like her?”
“Your moms?”
“Céce, bud. Yeah, I can tell: You’re crushin’ on her.”
“What? Nah. Not that I don’t like her. I like her, but not like I like her like her.”
“Why not?” Tone says.
“I could never disrespect you like that.”
“You’re funny, man. Anyway, Céce’s terrified of dogs.”
“I kind of saw that.” I tell him about the dog who came up to us on the way home. “But I could fix her fear, you know? This dog here would be real good for her.”
“Then I guess you’d better try to get her to take the dog, right?” Tony pulls his phone and holds it out to me. “Call her.”
“It’s two fifteen in the morning—wait, ten after three.”
“I guarantee you she’s awake, pretending she’s studying while she’s watching Polar Express.” Tony starts to call, but I clap his phone shut.
“Look, man, she’s got to look a hell of a lot prettier than she is now before I’m ready to make that call.”
“My sister or the dog?”
“What? No no, your sister, man. I mean your dog—my dog. This here dog’s got to look as pretty as your sister is what I’m saying.”
“So you do think she’s pretty.”
“I’ll shut up.”
“Don’t. It’s fun watching you twist.”
“I need to rehab her first, Tone, my Boo here.”
“Boo?”
“What I name all my dogs, boy or girl. Tony man, sorry, man, I swear: When the dog’s all mended and trained, then I’ll reach out to Céce. You can’t rush these things.”
“Of course you can,” he says. “That’s the best way, bud. Crash hard and fast. Nothing like it.” He sighs and helps me wash my Boo. We brush her down with a peroxide towel and lay her out on a clean blanket. I get into the pen with her. Tony sits against the far wall. The moon is on him when the clouds aren’t dunking it. “Man, she’s tough-lookin’ though, huh?” Tony says. “That big pit bull head? Massive.”
“My favorite kind.”
“Seriously?”
“I love pits the most. They’re true. Don’t listen to what everybody says, that they like to attack folks. You’ve got more of a chance of a golden retriever turning on you.”
“Right.”
“Serious. Pits are bred not to bite their handlers, especially in the heat of battle. If you torture them and bring out the fight in them, they’ll be dog-aggressive, sure, but even so, most always they stay human-kind. You’ve got to go a long way into evil to turn a pit against people. They forgive easy as rain falls.”
“I heard they cry like people. Like they tear up.”
“No dogs cry tears. A pit bull’s jaw doesn’t lock either. Tell you what, though?”
“Tell me what.”
“I seen pitties so sad and soulful. You see this girl’s eyes, big and wondering? She feels real deep. You know what this girl wants, the only thing? To give and get love. Right, girl? Right Boo?”
“She’s cocking her head there, huh? She likes that name.”
“Best thing about pits is they take in the fun. They’re the clown of the dog world. They have a ton of energy, which is why you need to exercise them a bunch and train them strict, and I do too. I include training free when I walk them.”
“How much you charge?”
“Buck an hour.”
“We need to get you a business manager,” he says.
“That’s all folks around here can afford. You string six dogs at once, you do all right. Sometimes the walk lasts two hours too, because I’m having so much fun I lose track of time.”
Tony nods. “I’ve never seen you like this.”
“Like what?” I hate when I let my softness show. Soft gets you killed.
“I think you need to let me help you pay for this dog training class. Just let me finish. As an investment, I’m talking. You’ll rock the class, start your own business, and have a house-no-mortgage by the time you’re forty.”
“And what would be your end in all that?”
“The fun of seeing the good guy win one.”
“The good guy, huh?” I can’t figure out what he sees in me. He knows I been locked up. Being around him, I almost feel like what he’s saying is true. That maybe I could be somebody. “Tony, man, I’m sorry for taking up your night like this, jawing your ear off.”
“Stop saying sorry. I’m gonna run down to the bodega and grab us some sodas.”
“I have Sprites in that little cube fridge behind you there.”
Tony cracks us a pair.
“Yo Tone, I’d appreciate you not telling anybody about, like, what happened tonight.”
“What, that you almost got yourself killed running into a dogfight to save a chewed-up pit bull?”
“I just don’t like people knowing stuff about me, you know?”
He stares at me, and after a bit he nods. “All right, kid. I won’t say anything.” He’s looking out the window and laughing quiet.
“What’s funny?”
He shrugs, and we’re quiet for a while, and my mind drifts back to that doctor. The knife in my hand. Mercedes gunning out of there. So close, though. Rewind the night back a little more, to Céce. No. She’s too good to be in my dreams. Her, her mother, Tony: all too good. I can’t imagine Tony overseas. I won’t. They put a knife in his hand? He’s not made to use it. He’s made to lay knives down.
My Boo girl rests her big boxy head in my lap. She’s looking up at me, and I know what she’s saying. The language of dogs is quiet. Tell you what, if there weren’t any dogs on this planet, I would check out right now.
I follow Tony’s eyes out the hutch window. The sky is a mist with the stars trying to poke through, like a razor rash on God’s gray face.
THE THIRD DAY . . .
(Sunday, June 14, an hour before dawn)
CÉCE:
The nightmare wakes me up. Gunfight in the desert. Anthony gets hit. I was cruising YouTube with Ma for soldier’s-eye clips before I went to bed.
Why is he doing this? I know, somebody has to do it, but let it be somebody else. If anybody should go over there it’s me, except I would be the suckiest soldier ever. Violence flips me out. When I see it, I freeze.
I trip myself to the bathroom and splash water on my face. Down the block a dog yips. Two dogs, barking now. Fighting. My hands are shaking.
When I was nine, we were at this block party, crazy hot out, too many people, music way too loud. I had to get out of there. It was either walk all the way around the block on a hundred-plus-degree day or cut through the neighbor’s alley. I side-saddled the fence, right over the No Trespassing sign, picture of a guard dog, teeth barred. The homeowner wasn’t lying: He had this
giant German shepherd mixed with a pit bull—I’m sure it was a pit bull—but it was a horrible guard dog. It had been around for as long as I could remember, and I never heard it bark. Besides, it was always tied to the fence behind the garbage pails on a short chain. As I walked by, it whimpered. It was filthy, matted, a choke collar embedded in its neck. It was panting. Its water bowl was empty. I cranked the spigot and filled it up. The dog drank the bowl dry and looked up at me. I went to kiss the top of its head. It jumped up and bit my face and didn’t let go.
I opened my mouth to scream, and the dog got in there. It knocked me to the cement and shook me. Its jaw locked—that’s how I know it was part pit bull.
How I survived that ... How I got away . . . I can’t . . . I can’t remember.
Twenty stitches. I still have the scars. Those pit bulls are the worst. Their eyes? Creepy. Like they want to eat you.
I go downstairs and make a sandwich in the dark. Not seeing it makes it easier to scarf down. I’m two bites in when I see a shadow bent over the kitchen table.
Carmella Vaccuccia slurps a beer. “Hey.”
“Ma, it’s four fifteen.”
“Cocktail hour.”
“In the morning.”
“Whacha eatin’ there, babe?”