by Matt Burgess
If candy and the fat man have the five second rule, then drugs and the drug addict have five years. Winston brushes the pill against his shirt and throws it down the hatch.
“What’s the problem?” he says. As he chews the pill, his face sours, comes alive. “So the X got logos? That’s beautiful, far as I see it. Saves us the trouble of branding it ourselves.”
“You told me—”
“I was wrong. I guess that’s my bad. But maybe—just hold on—maybe there’s no reason to get our panties in a bunch. Maybe these logos will turn out to be a positive factor in our overall plans. Because like I’m saying—”
“Please,” Alfredo says. Blood hammers his temples. He raises his hand—for what? to bunch Winston’s shirt in his fist?—and ends up just patting him on the chest, as if Winston were the one who needs soothing. “Just … okay? Just not right now.”
“All I’m saying—”
“You’re pushing me.”
“Jesus,” Winston says. “I’m not pushing anybody. All I’m saying is—”
“All you’re saying should be nothing right now. Right now you should be keeping your fucking mouth shut.”
Winston takes off his Spider-Man cap and flexes the bill. He and Alfredo do not speak to each other this way. Sure, they bicker. They know each other’s limits, and sometimes—as if that knowledge is too much to bear—they test those limits. But bickering ain’t fighting. Alfredo and Winston aren’t supposed to raise their voices or bark at each other or curse each other out. Pain shoots across Alfredo’s forehead. A cabinet drawer slides open.
Winston stares into the empty shell of his hat, as if it concealed some secret message, a cryptic code, a sun-bleached map. He says, “I just thought of where we might be able to find a dog.”
He’d been clueless all week, but he gets yelled at and cursed at, and all of a sudden—how convenient!—he has an idea regarding the whereabouts of a pit bull. Okay, Alfredo thinks. That’s fine. Alfredo’s pulled this shit himself. In sixth and seventh grade, he’d hide his decent report cards in his book bag, saving them for when he got into trouble. He never had to wait long. He’d break a vase playing Wiffle ball in the house with Jose Jr., or he’d get lippy with his mother at the kitchen table, and then it’d be all hijo de Diablo, you’re grounded, no TV for a month. After about an hour, Alfredo would slink out of his room and say, “Sorry, Papi—but I need you to sign my report card.” And Jose Sr. would see A– in Language Arts, B in Social Studies, B– in Science, A+ in Math, and how could he stay mad at him after that, particularly when he probably didn’t want to be mad at him in the first place. So it goes with Winston. He’d kept this dog info under his Spider-Man cap as a kind of collateral. Divulge in Case of Emergency. Or maybe not. Maybe Winston thought of it right when he said he thought of it. Doesn’t matter to Alfredo. He’s just happy for the distraction, happy to think about something other than his anxiety marquee: The Return of Tariq, and below that, just now added to the signboard, Infinity-Branded X.
“I figure we just been waiting to get lucky this whole time,” Winston says. “Going through people’s backyards. Waiting outside Seven-Eleven. We’re like sitting around, expecting a dog to drop out of the sky.”
“Okay,” Alfredo says. “I like where your head’s at.”
Winston closes his eyes, as if he just misplaced the thread of his argument. “But what if … okay, hold on … what if we went to a place we know has dogs. Yeah? What if we went looking for an intimidating dog where dog owners need to intimidate?” Winston spreads his arms out wide and suggests a place they’ve passed thousands of times before, a place where at this time of night there’d be some scary motherfucking dogs just waiting to get took: the Queens County Savings Bank.
“A bank?” Alfredo says. “There ain’t any dogs in banks.”
“Sure there is. At night and shit. To guard the money. I’ve seen them, I think.”
“Like you thought Vladimir’s pills didn’t have logos?” When Winston looks away, Alfredo says, “Even if Queens County had pit bulls—so what? How we supposed to rob a bank of its dogs?”
“I guess it’s a dumb idea.”
Alfredo wonders if it’s an intentionally dumb idea. Is Winston playing stupid to be annoying, as payback for Alfredo’s outburst earlier? In the end, it seems irrelevant—Winston’s dumb idea sparkplugs a better one.
“What about the used car lots?” Alfredo says.
Because car lots in Queens, like little old ladies, all seem to huddle together, Winston and Alfredo are able to limit their reconnaissance to a ten-block radius. At the first lot they visit, Alfredo rattles the fence while Winston mimics woof-woofs. A cat darts under a fender. At the second lot they think they see some kind of dog crouching in the shadows, but it turns out to be a tire. At the third lot, at the fourth lot, at the fifth lot, more of the same, and so—who can blame them?—they approach the sixth lot with diminished hopes.
Northern Boulevard’s redundantly named Allouez Preowned Used Cars Supercenter is protected by a twenty-foot-high fence. Razor wire slithers across the top, each coil evenly spaced as if a giant snake had come here to molt. Behind the fence glint Caravans and Cherokees and Honda Odysseys, their respective prices scribbled onto their respective windshields in bright white soap.
$3800. $5295.
120,000 miles. 94,000 miles.
One owner. Runs like new.
“What’s that?” Winston says, pointing toward the back of the lot.
Alfredo squints. “What’s what?”
“You don’t see that? Between the cars? Way back there? What is that?”
Alfredo cleans his glasses against the hem of his shirt. Once he’s respectacled, he thinks he sees something, a blur maybe—yes, yes, he definitely sees it, a black blurry creature dancing between cars, spinning and leaping.
“I think it’s a cat,” Winston says. Disappointment floods his voice. “Yeah, that’s a cat for sure.”
Alfredo kicks the bottom of the fence. The chain links’ quivering shoots reverberations through the asphalt toward the back of the lot and tickles the bottoms of paws. The blurry black creature lifts its blurry black head. Slowly, as if annoyed, it squares its shoulders and begins to gallop toward them, revealing itself in long-legged strides.
“Doberman,” Alfredo says, as the dog gets closer.
“Is that a fighting dog?”
“I wouldn’t want to fight one.”
It is possible—no, rather it is likely—that somewhere along the trip out west Lewis turned to Clark and told him to shut his fucking mouth. Perhaps they walked on for hours or even days in awkward silence, but all was surely forgiven when at last they passed Mount Hood and saw for the first time the shimmering Pacific. Mission accomplished! Grinning, Winston and Alfredo slap palms. For here, finally, is their own prize: a dog, and a mean-looking one too. Just inches away, close enough to tap on the nose. Close enough for Alfredo to feel its hot breath on his knuckles. The Doberman steps forward, darkly displeased.
In a threatening situation, a dog will often look toward its owner for cues on how to behave. Rounded eyes, open mouth, tense arms, shallow breaths: if a dog sees these in its guardian, it knows to attack. But the Doberman’s owner is not here. The Doberman’s owner—Mr. Allouez of Allouez Preowned Used Cars Supercenter—is probably at home on Long Island, watching Letterman throw pencils at the camera. Without Mr. Allouez’s nonverbal input, the Doberman must make decisions on its own.
“Do not,” Alfredo whispers, “look into its eyes.”
The dog lunges. Up on its hind legs, it gnashes its jaws and claws at metal. Saliva, thick and heavy, spills across the fence. The blessed fence. The Doberman turns its head sideways and insinuates its long snout into a diamond-shaped chain link. Lips curl upward, expose sharp yellow teeth.
“Jesus Christ,” Alfredo says, and immediately—to atone for the blasphemy—makes the sign of the cross. Both he and Winston take generous steps away from the fence. Their heels hang o
ver the lip of the curb. “You looked in its eyes,” Alfredo says.
“I looked in its eyes,” Winston says. His hand covers his heart. “And while I’m admitting things let me admit something else. I ain’t going near that dog.”
Well that’s too bad, Alfredo thinks. Because I ain’t going near that fucking dog either. And that’s just the start of their trouble. Not only is this Doberman snarling, but it is snarling within a well-lit compound, circumscribed by a twenty-foot-high fence. Alfredo closes his eyes. Think of it as a math equation with a complex string of integers, plus and minus signs, parenthetical asides. You need to break the problem down into smaller problems and isolate its component difficulties. Solving part one, Alfredo hopes, will help unlock part two.
He reaches into his baggie of prescription pills and pulls out a Valium. The pill—ten milligrams, the smallest dose he sells—costs about fifteen dollars on the street. It hurts to be throwing money away, but that’s the cost of doing business. Gotta spend cash to make cash. Pill in hand, Alfredo rears back and goes into his windup.
One of the great frustrations of Alfredo’s childhood was his excommunication from the green-grassed world of Little League baseball. The Elmjack baseball fields were four miles away from Alfredo’s house, and after Jose Sr.’s accident, and after the cars were sold, and after Lizette went to work at Remmelts Oculists, there wasn’t anyone around who could escort the eleven-year-old Alfredo to games. Those four miles loomed large, and Alfredo, like Pete Rose before him, found himself banned from organized baseball. The prohibition may have elicited less door slamming in the Batista household if Alfredo’s brother had not gotten his full Little League allotment. Or if people weren’t always talking about how good Alfredo’s brother was. The line drives he smashed! The backpedaling catches he made! Had Alfredo been allowed to stay in Little League all the way up to the Babe Ruth division, who’s to say he wouldn’t have matched, or maybe even surpassed, Jose Jr.’s talents? Given the extra Elmjack years, the extra games and practices, the tutelage of coaches and assistant coaches, the years-long encouragement of his mother in the bleachers, doing her crossword puzzles between innings—given all that, Alfredo’s arm might have finally bloomed and it could be him they talk about now when they talk about baseball. They’d say, Remember that time Alfredito threw out that kid at home plate? Ball didn’t even bounce. But that never happened. Alfredo never threw anyone out at home plate, and so, understandably, nobody talks about it. All because Alfredo was born too late. When he came into adolescence, the party was already over. The plastic cups had been stacked high, the radio unplugged, the ashtrays all dumped out.
Alfredo’s arm comes forward. Teeth gritted, he throws the Valium. A strike is the back of the dog’s gullet, but, of course, the story of Alfredo’s baseball-tossing career: impressive velocity, unfortunate aim. The pill bounces off a link in the fence and lands on the sidewalk outside the car lot. In the worst possible place. The fence prevents the Doberman from getting at the Valium, which lies on the sidewalk so close to the dog’s snapping jaws that Alfredo feels reluctant to go pick it up. Unreasonable? Alfredo admits the fence looks perfectly adequate, but stranger things have happened than a dog chewing through metal to chase a young Puerto Rican down the street.
“Do me a favor,” Alfredo says, pointing at the pill. “Go get that for me?”
Without taking a step forward, Winston says, “Sure. No problem. I’ll do that right away.”
Alfredo pulls out another Valium. He adjusts his trajectory, aims far and high. This time when he throws, he feels an icy tingling shoot down his shoulder all the way to his fingertips. The pill soars over the dog’s head. Impressive velocity—if it were a Frisbee and not a Valium, the dog might give pursuit. Instead, he gets low to the ground and growls.
“My turn,” Winston says.
“One more.”
“One more is going to turn into ten more. I want a throw while there’s still some pills left. And to be honest I feel like maybe you owe me.”
Alfredo wonders if in fifty years he and Winston will be sitting on a bench in Travers Park, fighting with liver-spotted hands over which one of them gets to toss Wonder bread to the pigeons. “If there’s an aspirin in there,” he says, handing Winston the bag, “save it for me.”
Winston’s fingers close around a Valium of his own. In an uncharacteristic display of self-confidence—as if to say I will need only one pill to perform this feat—he seals the plastic baggie and sticks it in his pocket. He tugs down on the bill of his Spider-Man cap. He adjusts his crotch. He’d probably spit too, if the Ecstasy hadn’t dried out his mouth. Winston takes a deep breath and a step forward and—apparently unconcerned with the pretenses of machismo—pitches the pill underhand. The Valium arcs. It spins. It squirts through an opening in the fence and hits the dog square on the snout.
On the people side of the fence, there is much cheering. Alfredo goes for a high five and Winston comes in for a hug and any potential awkwardness is bulldozed by the glory of the moment, like when Gary Carter leapt into Jesse Orosco’s arms. Somehow Winston and Alfredo do all things at once: hug, bump fists, high-five, slap each other’s backs.
On the dog side of the fence, the Doberman bends to the pill, which is rattling on the ground like a dropped dime. A tentative paw clamps down on top of the Valium. Everything is quiet. The dog lifts its paw and gives the pill a deep and solicitous sniff. Blecch. Disgusted by the pill, bored with Winston and Alfredo and everything else, the dog saunters toward the back of the lot, disappointed perhaps that it didn’t get to chew on somebody’s jugular, but eager, surely, to resume dancing.
“This shit ain’t meant to be,” Winston says sadly. “We’re gonna have to call people soon. I mean if this dogfight ain’t gonna happen, we’re gonna have to let everybody know. We’ve got heads coming out here from Staten Island.”
“Nobody’s canceling anything,” Alfredo says.
“Whatever happened to simple parties?” Winston says. “Whatever happened to getting somebody an ice cream cake?”
If only it were that easy. Go down to Carvel, cop a Cookie Puss cake or a Fudgie the Whale, and let Tariq blow out the candles. Punch him lightly on the shoulder and say, “Hey big bro, sorry I knocked up your girl.” Fuck that. Alfredo ain’t sorry. Alfredo, who feels guilty about everything, refuses to apologize for falling in love with Isabel. In the intracranial filing cabinet, the Winston folder from this night alone is thicker than the Tariq folder. Fuck that maniac. And even if Alfredo were sorry—which he ain’t, but even if he were—apologizing would make as big a difference as handshakes and ice cream. Power and violence. That’s the way it’s gonna have to be. Alfredo needs this dogfight, needs it to advertise his gangsterism. I have gotten too big to be slapped around without repercussions. It’s the LoJack sticker in the window of a sports car, the horns protruding from a bull’s head, the logo branded onto the surface of Ecstasy.
“Unless we going to all this trouble,” Winston says, “so you and Izzy can have a guard dog. That’s some shit I’d understand.”
With the Doberman dancing at the back of the lot, Winston apparently feels brave enough to approach the fence. He scoops up a pill of Valium, the only one he can reach, and slips it into his back pocket. He’s rolling on a double dose of X and God knows what else—a sleeping pill should come in handy at around six a.m., when he’s under the covers, grinding his teeth and staring up at the ceiling. Unlike the Doberman, Winston won’t hesitate to swallow the pill.
It occurs to Alfredo that the Doberman might not have been so eager to walk from the Valium if it had smelled like bacon. Or better yet, if it had tasted like bacon. “I’ve got an idea,” he says.
“I’m sure you do.”
“You wanna go for a ride?”
Winston laughs. “The ghetto car?”
The ghetto car is not an automobile of shabby or suspect value, a lemon with a busted window or broken carburetor. It has never coughed out foul smoke or dragged its muf
fler through the streets of Queens, because, strictly speaking, it doesn’t exist. It is, from bumper to bumper, an imaginary car.
Because of the hours Winston and Alfredo keep, their bellies rumble at inopportune times, when the only economical dining option is McDonald’s. But McDonald’s, late at night, locks all its doors for security reasons, keeping open only its drive-thru window. And to get food from this drive-thru window you absolutely, no exceptions, had to be in a car.
“No car. No food.”
Because Alfredo can’t afford a real automobile, used or otherwise, and because he doesn’t even know how to drive, all he’s got is the ghetto car.
Speaking into the McDonald’s intercom and disguising his voice, Alfredo orders a couple of McChickens for himself, a bottle of water for Winston, a Happy Meal for Christian Louis (Alfredo is collecting the toys), and a bacon cheeseburger for the Doberman pinscher at Allouez Preowned Used Cars Supercenter. A garbled intercom voice instructs him to drive forward. And so, as he did last night, and the night before that, and all the nights before that, Alfredo pulls up to the pickup window in a squatting position, arms extended and firmly locked in front of him, hands clutching an imaginary steering wheel. He rolls down the imaginary window. He asks Winston, sitting shotgun, to scavenge under the imaginary seats and look for imaginary change.
The acne-scarred attendant closes her eyes.
“You guys need to get a life,” she says.
“I’m sorry,” Alfredo says. He turns down the knob on the ghetto car’s radio. “I didn’t catch that. What’d you say?”
“No car,” she says. “No food.”
“I ask you for a one-time exception,” Alfredo says. “Give us this food tonight and we will never bother you again.”
“Rules,” the girl says.
“Rules?” Alfredo asks Winston. Winston shrugs. Alfredo turns to the girl and shakes his head: never heard of ’em, not familiar. But the girl doesn’t smirk or roll her eyes or even frown. She stands in her balcony and stares. “Please,” Alfredo says. “If nothing else, then just the bacon cheeseburger. I can see it back there. It’s already been made. You’re just going to throw it out.”