Dogfight, A Love Story

by Matt Burgess

  “You guys want to do something useful?” Lizette says.

  “Not really,” Alfredo says.

  “Move the table—pick it up so you don’t leave streaks on the floor—and place it, gently, in the middle of the kitchen.”

  That’s not right, Alfredo thinks. The table—flimsy, rectangle shaped, propped up on four thin metal legs—hugs the kitchen wall. That’s where it lives. When the family eats dinner together—which is every night, work schedules permitting—they sit on only three sides of the table, Lizette and Jose Sr. on opposite ends, Alfredo and Isabel next to each other. To move the table now is to change everything, is to block Jose’s access to the bathroom and bedrooms. But Isabel has already picked up her end, and Alfredo can’t have his seven months pregnant girlfriend schlepping furniture all by herself. Together, they wobble the table into the middle of the kitchen. Open on all four sides now, the table stands exposed. It seems to float. An island in the sky. Alfredo feels like he’s been dropped into some other family’s kitchen. Near the wall, on the linoleum floor, four clean little squares—where the table’s legs used to stand—stare up at him. “Is this permanent?” he asks.

  Lizette reaches into the hallway closet for the second time today. Earlier this morning she went in here to get a bath mat, to replace the one that had mysteriously gone missing. (“What bath mat?” Isabel had said under questioning.) This time, Lizette pulls out a gray metal folding chair.

  Jose Sr. wheels himself into the kitchen. He’d come in here to tell Alfredo the game’s about to start, but when he sees the obstruction in the middle of the kitchen he stops. “Whoa,” he says. He runs his hand along one end of this new, four-sided kitchen table. “What’s going on? Is this permanent?”

  Lizette sets the table, muttering to herself. She puts out the good forks, knives, and plates. Instead of the usual paper towels, she gets her nice cloth napkins, recently laundered.

  “We’re eating dinner now?” Jose says. “It’s one o’clock in the afternoon. The game’s starting.”

  “The chicken’s almost done,” Lizette says. “When the chicken’s done, we eat.”

  “But Junior—”

  “Tariq,” Alfredo corrects.

  “He’s not even here yet,” Jose tells Lizette.

  “Then we eat without him,” she says, and she has to keep her hands from flying to her hair. “Does anyone know where he is? Because I haven’t the faintest. And the tostones. I haven’t even started the tostones.”

  Isabel grins. “I can fry them.”

  “You know,” Lizette says. Her hands fold in prayer under her chin. “This is an awfully small kitchen.”

  The doorbell rings. Jose spins his chair around, and Lizette shoots past him into the living room. Almost immediately, however, she comes back and does something Alfredo hasn’t seen her do in a long time, months maybe, possibly even years: she gets behind her husband’s wheelchair and pushes it. Jose rolls, she steers, and the two of them move, together, toward the living room. The doorbell rings again.

  Isabel pulls her shirt down over her belly.

  “You ready?” Alfredo says.

  “It’s not too late.”

  “Oh no?” He moves closer, gives her a bright, brilliant smile. “Have I got anything stuck between my teeth?”

  “Is my breath bad enough?” she asks. Alfredo sticks the tip of his nose into her mouth. He sniffs her lips, and then, a rabbit in a lettuce patch, he canvasses her entire face, trying to get her to laugh, sniff-sniff-sniffing her cheeks, her forehead, her eyeballs. “Maybe I should suck on one of your mother’s sofrito cubes,” Isabel says. “Get my breath ass flavored.”

  “It’s not your fault you’re beautiful.”

  “There’s always the fire escape in your father’s room.”

  Alfredo smiles again, a less brilliant smile, a smile without teeth. He grabs Isabel’s hand, which feels surprisingly warm. Heat flows out of her body and into his. He leans toward the living room, dragging Isabel with him, and he wants to say something cool and reassuring, something confidence inspiring, but he doesn’t say anything. He gets distracted. His mother is screaming.

  “Don’t worry!” Tariq says. A dog—a pit bull!—lunges at Alfredo’s mother. Elbows out, Jose Sr. wheels away and bangs into the coffee table, upsetting a small vase of lilies. Stalks spill onto the floor. Again the pit bull lunges, and Tariq yanks on the leash. The dog’s front legs come up off the carpet. They flail at nothing, these legs, as if the dog were storming up a flight of invisible stairs. Lizette doesn’t step away because, it seems, it hasn’t yet occurred to her that she should. Her hands stick straight up in the air, her fingers splayed, her face bemused—a law-abiding citizen who finds herself suddenly, inexplicably, under arrest. Isabel holds her belly. In the corner of the living room, behind the front door, Winston—Winston?—looks down at the ground. He is hugging himself. Vase water drips onto the carpet. The dog growls at Lizette.

  “Put your hands down,” Tariq tells his mother. “You’re making him nervous.”

  Alfredo grabs a plush parrot off an end table and tosses it underhand—Winston style—into the rumpus. Like an overeager infielder, the dog tries to snatch it out of the air, but he closes his jaws too soon and misses. The parrot bounces off his freckled snout and skips across the floor. The dog chases after it, traps the bird’s beaked face under his paw. He dips his head over the parrot’s body, as if in mourning, and tears open its stomach. White bits of stuffing explode into the air.

  “You’re going to teach him bad habits,” Tariq tells Alfredo. The dog chews on the parrot, and when Tariq tries to pull it away, a wing comes off in his hand.

  “My God,” Lizette says. Her face is red, her forehead shines. She looks up, past the parrots on wires, at her cracked ceiling, where a tea-colored bubble of plaster sags down.

  Tariq gets down on the ground and wrestles the parrot away from the pit bull. The dog’s wet nose is matted with cottony stuffing. He licks Tariq’s face. Tariq pulls him close, blows air into his eyes, scratches him behind the ears. With the dog squirming, playfully nipping at earlobes, Tariq ties his leash to a leg of the sofa. They both seem to be laughing, sharing some private joke.

  “Hi, Winston,” Alfredo says.

  “Hello.”

  “I was worried you might be dead.”

  “No,” Winston says, sounding almost sorry to disappoint. “Hey—but my phone’s dead.” He reaches for the cell in his pocket—as if to prove his claim, as if he were presenting evidence before a judge—but Alfredo waves him off. No time for nonsense. The living room pulsates with noise, and Alfredo strains to hear everything at once: the dog growling, the Mets game blaring, Jose telling Tariq that their mama doesn’t care for dogs in the house, and Isabel—where’s Isabel?—hovering in the kitchen doorway, silent, speaking to no one.

  Lizette seizes Tariq’s chin. Her fingers flexed like a claw, she leads him away from both Jose and the dog. “Baby, what happened to your face?” she asks, sounding less concerned than annoyed, as if her son’s face were not his own but rather something she let him borrow, and now, years later—would you look at this?—he returns it with a deep scratch right down the middle. “That dog mangle your face, baby?”

  Tariq puts his arms around her. For a moment her head pulls away from the hug—fighting, straining to get a good look at her baby’s cheek—but eventually she slackens. She has waited too long for this. She rests her head against his chest.

  Over his mother’s shoulder, Tariq watches Isabel, who continues to hang suspended in the doorway, halfway between the kitchen and the living room. With his eyes on her she feels conscious of her feet, her hands, her awkward elbows. She presses her knees together. She wishes she didn’t have knees. She wishes she’d worn a long-sleeved shirt. She wishes the hair on her arms were darker, and more plentiful. She wishes … shhhhh. Curled up in Isabel’s ear, Christian Louis—God bless him—hums a cradlesong. The Internet taught her the lullaby, and she passed it on. Between s
tanzas, he says, At least, Mama, your feet are covered. Earlier this morning, Isabel put on socks with holes in them and then immediately changed into new ones, thinking ahead, knowing that in this moment, this first encounter, she would not want a toe exposed.

  With a final squeeze, Tariq releases his mother and moves toward Isabel. He comes at her as a gorilla might, sideways, in profile, showing her only one half—the clean half—of his face.

  Alfredo steps in front of him. He extends his hand, and Tariq slaps it away. Hard. He is smiling. He throws his arms around Alfredo’s body and holds him close—no handshakes here, no stiff, one-armed back-slapping. Not knowing how to react, Alfredo allows himself to be hugged, his arms frozen at his sides. Tariq smells like Papi, like sweat and Barbasol and peanuts and tattered old newspapers. In Alfredo’s ear, he makes low grunts of pleasure. Been a long time, he murmurs. Is that right? Been a long time? Been too long? Something like that. If Alfredo had gotten more sleep last night, then he might have heard what his brother said, and he might have zinged back with an appropriate reply. Tariq pulls him closer, tightens his grip, and when Alfredo feels the acceleration of his brother’s heartbeat, it occurs to him that if Tariq’s eyes are open, then he’s staring directly at Isabel.

  “All right,” Alfredo says, squirming to free himself. “Come on.”

  Tariq releases Alfredo and swims past him toward Isabel. She leans into the doorway and tries to look brave. Both Alfredo and his mother are rushing over. They flank Tariq as he stands in front of Isabel, his body listing to one side, his thumbs hooked through his belt loops in what seems to be a forced attempt to look casual. He stares down at her and she gamely stares back for as long as she can, but eventually her back stiffens and her eyes drop to the floor. He wets his lips before speaking.

  “You’re further along than I thought you’d be.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah,” he says, using her word, spitting it back at her. He reaches out and puts his hands on her stomach.

  Instinctively, Alfredo slaps them away. He feels the sting on his fingertips. In the far corner of the living room, the dog starts barking. Tariq turns to look at his brother.

  “Listen,” Alfredo says. He’s prepared no speech, no explanation. “Listen to me.”

  “I’m listening,” Tariq says.

  “Jose?” Lizette says. She pulls on the sleeve of his shirt. “Where’d this dog come from? What’re we going to do about this dog?”

  He ignores her. Still looking at Alfredo, he reaches out, places his hands back on Isabel’s stomach. “My nephew’s in here,” he says. “Or is it my niece? Let me tell you something. It feels like a boy, the way it’s kicking the shit out of my hands.”

  “It’s a boy,” Alfredo says.

  “Good work,” he says. “And what’s this boy’s name?”

  Alfredo shakes his head. He refuses to say the name out loud, afraid Tariq might somehow pollute it. “We don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?” Tariq says. “You gotta have a list of possibles at least. How about Alfredo Junior?”

  “We’ll consider it,” Isabel says. She takes his hands and forces them down to his sides. She backs away into the kitchen, and as she goes she pulls her shirt over her stomach. Tariq is beaming, almost panting. He takes a step forward to follow her, and Alfredo, who has to say something, says, “What happened to your face?”

  Tariq turns to him. Alfredo has a hard time maintaining eye contact and so he stares at the knot of Tariq’s Adam’s apple, at the little hairs encircling the collar of his shirt. Tariq says, “What do you think happened to my face?”

  “I don’t know,” Alfredo says. “You cut yourself shaving?”

  “Bingo,” Tariq says. “You got it. On the very first try. I cut myself shaving.”

  Lizette goes up on her tiptoes and kisses Tariq’s shoulder. “Are you hungry, baby? I made my rice.”

  “What do I win?” Alfredo says. “For guessing—on my very first try—about your mangled, fucked-up face?”

  “Alfredo,” Lizette hisses.

  “What do you want?” Tariq says. He tilts his chin toward the pit bull. “You want the dog? You want him, he’s yours. My gift to you.”

  Jose Sr. says, “Your mother doesn’t want dogs in the house.”

  “Oh would you lay off that already!” Lizette says.

  Alfredo steals a peek at his brother’s pit bull. Leashed to the sofa, the dog lies down with his stomach flat on the carpet. Alfredo is afraid of many things. He’s afraid of eating chocolate because he’s afraid of getting zits. He’s afraid of moving away from home. Every day, as he slips on his Timberlands, he’s afraid a mouse will be camped out at the bottom of one of his boots. He’s afraid of starting the crossword in the Daily News because he’s afraid he won’t be able to finish it. He’s afraid of not knowing. He doesn’t know what his best friend is doing here with his ex-con brother and a pit bull terrier, and he is afraid of asking for details and advertising his ignorance. He’s afraid he enables Winston’s drug addiction. He’s afraid of awkward silences and poisonous snakes and another terrorist attack in New York—but who isn’t afraid of those things? He’s afraid of his brother. He’s afraid of cars. He’s afraid of farms, in particular being trapped inside a silo with grain pouring down his throat—although he’s never actually seen a silo in person, or even been to a farm. Isabel takes three to four shits a day, and Alfredo contributes two dumps himself, and in all DNA likelihood Christian Louis will inherit this defecatory gene, and Alfredo worries he won’t be able to afford enough disposable diapers. He’s afraid he’ll be a cold, inattentive father, although Isabel assures him that the very fear guarantees he won’t be. He’s afraid he works too hard for too little gain. He’s afraid of being a nine-to-five schlub, a regular guy with modest dreams. He’s afraid of miscarriages. He won’t even say the word out loud. When separated from Isabel, he’s afraid of the sobbing sirens of ambulances. He’s afraid his father’s body—like the bodies of so many paraplegics—will confuse below-the-waist immobility for end-of-the-line mortality and just give out. When Alfredo thinks of the way he kicked Vladimir in the neck, Alfredo is afraid of himself. He’s afraid Vladimir—or someone Vladimir knows—killed Curtis Hughes. He’s afraid the bone-knuckled Alphabet Brothers—Alex and Bam-Bam—will blame him. He’s afraid of the head-tilted look Isabel gives him when he’s disappointed her. He might be afraid of the dark; it’s hard to tell around here, in a city where lights are constantly burning. He’s afraid that Isabel—and he knows he’s a fucking idiot for even thinking this—he’s afraid that Isabel will leave him for Tariq. He’s afraid of cats. Well, not all cats. Just one in particular, a soot-backed calico who stalks the alleyways at night, wherever Alfredo and Winston are getting stoned. Alfredo worries—in his paranoid, THC-addled state—that this cat might actually be Lizette, metamorphosed via some Santeria witchcraft for the purposes of keeping an emerald eye on her pot-smoking, misbehaving son. And dogs. Alfredo is afraid of dogs, especially this one. His eyes look like a man’s eyes, with plenty of white around the pupils. That’s what’s so scary. These eyes bulge in their sockets, as if they want out, as if they want to return to the human face from which they came.

  Wake up, Alfredo. This isn’t the time.

  While he was midreverie, his family agreed to make a mass movement toward the kitchen. Isabel’s already in there. Lizette drags a protesting Winston by the wrist, and Jose wheels behind them, complaining about supper’s ludicrous start time. Excluding the pit bull, only Tariq and Alfredo are left behind in the living room. They stand on opposite ends of the kitchen threshold, where the carpet gives way to linoleum.

  “After you,” Tariq says.

  Alfredo reaches down and pulls a long clear plastic strip off the back of Tariq’s jeans. The strip says Rocawear with the numbered measurements—34 X 30—repeating themselves all the way down to the bottom. Blue denim fuzzies float on the sticky side of the strip.

  “Oh,” Alfredo says.
“Did you want to keep this on there?”

  “See, I didn’t know.” His face softens, goes peaceful—an expression Alfredo recognizes as dangerous. Tariq reaches out and gives his brother’s shoulder a squeeze. “Case you haven’t heard, I’ve been away for a while. I don’t know nothing. I thought keeping tags on the jeans might be the new style.”

  “No,” Alfredo says. “It ain’t.”

  ———

  With considerable disappointment, Lizette realizes she’s going to have to skip the tostones and serve regular old bananas instead. She picked up some nice ripe ones at the store yesterday. She’ll peel them and leave them exposed on the perimeter of everyone’s plate. The tostones would’ve added a nice crispy texture to a meal full of mushies, but what’re you gonna do? She doesn’t have the time for tostones. She’d have to defrock the plantains, slice them, fry them, dip them, fry them again, blot them dry on paper towels, and sprinkle them with salt. If she made the tostones, she’d be up at the stove for whole minutes at a time, her back to her family like a substitute teacher writing the multiplication table on a blackboard, worried about the unseen class behind her, worried about spitballs and note passing and hell-raising young boys. Lizette peels ripe bananas instead of plantains, and she knows that already her meal has been tarnished. Already, things have begun to unravel.

  “This is where the table lives now?” Tariq says. “In the middle of the kitchen?”

  Jose wheels himself to the head of the table. To his right sits Isabel, and to her right sits Alfredo, both of them in their usual seats, where they can, if necessary, covertly hold hands. Winston sits opposite Alfredo. He plops down into the seat heavily, as if exhausted from a full day’s work of drug taking and Street Fighter II. With the spot at the table’s other end reserved for Mama, there’s only one chair left. Without complaint, Tariq sits down to the left of his father and across the table from Isabel.