Dogfight, A Love Story

by Matt Burgess

  Lizette finishes the final preparations. She pours the red bean stew into the chicken and rice pot, and with a large wooden spoon she turns everything over. It pleases her to mix it all up, to acquaint the different food items with one another before they make the long dark journey through her family’s digestive tracts. She sets the pot down in the middle of the table, on top of the Post. The pot’s heat and moisture warp the paper’s cover photograph: the swollen, guilty, apologetic mug of New York’s Catholic archbishop. His Excellency might not object to this sizzling pot on his face if he were actually in this kitchen, if he could smell the oregano and chopped cilantro and puffs of paprika. Much to Lizette’s satisfaction, the people around her table take deep, appreciative sniffs. No one speaks. Taking turns, they all help themselves to food, except for the perpetually sedentary Jose, whose plate is prepared by Alfredo and passed down.

  “Hey, Isabel,” Jose whispers. “You interested in this baseball game?”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “Well, what I’m saying is, if you’re not interested one way or the other, how about we switch seats. Cause look—you got a view where you can see straight into the living room.”

  Lizette, whose hearing is uncanny, particularly when Jose whispers, says, “This isn’t a bar, you know. You don’t sit down and watch a game on TV. You sit down and eat dinner.”

  As if to demonstrate, Winston shoves a forkful of food into his face. Rice—a consistent problem for him—dribbles out of his mouth and gets stuck to his chin. His jaw seems to be working independently from the rest of his face.

  “First of all,” Jose says, turning away from the boy, “people don’t eat dinner at one o’clock in the afternoon. Okay? Second, I’m not trying to watch a game. I’m trying to watch an at-bat.”

  A couple of years ago, during a subway series game, the Yankees’ ace pitcher, Roger Clemens, beaned the Mets’ superstar slugger, Mike Piazza, right in the melon. Piazza is Italian and good-looking and wildly popular in Queens, and Mets fans claimed the beaning was intentional, Piazza having had significant statistical success against Clemens. Yankee fans called Mets fans overdramatic crybabies. The debate intensified in game two of the 2000 World Series, Mets vs. Yankees, under the lights in the Bronx, with Clemens facing Piazza again. Clemens threw an inside fastball, and Piazza swung, making poor contact. His bat broke—no big deal, happens all the time, but a chunk of wood made its way toward the mound, and in a fit of teeth-gritted rage, Clemens picked up the shard and threw it at Piazza. An on-the-field confrontation ensued, which is rare in World Series play, but then again so is bat throwing. Clemens pointed menacingly at Piazza, who had to be restrained by his teammates. Mets fans lost their perpetually aggrieved minds; their team lost the game, and then, unfairly, the series. The injustice of it all!

  But now. Now Clemens is coming to Shea. And in a National League ballpark, without the protection of the designated hitter rule, Clemens will have to slither into the batter’s box and hit for himself. Many in Queens expect a tit-for-tat head beaning; more than one Mets fan hopes Clemens will be killed.

  Jose Sr. doesn’t hold an intense, personal grudge against Clemens, but he does know that the Mets season—and in effect the satisfaction he might wring out of the upcoming summer months—all rides on this one at-bat. Whether or not the Mets plunk Clemens, whether or not he goes down to the dirt with a baseball-sized bruise on his ample rear end, will determine whether or not the Mets return to the playoffs. Simple as that. And so Jose doesn’t want to hear about this at-bat secondhand, as it seems he must experience so much else in his life. He needs to see the at-bat live, as it happens. If his legs still worked, he’d be at the ballpark, just to avoid the televisual delay. He’d buy a ticket in the upper deck and he’d sneak down to the blue seats in later innings. He’d be part of a crowd. He’d stand for the wave. When it came time to cheer Let’s … go … Mets, Jose would be stomping his feet.

  “So, if you don’t mind switching,” he asks Isabel.

  “You want my seat?” Alfredo says.

  “From where you’re at, you can see into the living room, but you can’t see the TV. I scoped it already. All you can see is parrots, and what do I need to look at parrots for? Listen,” he tells Lizette, who grips the edges of her plate. “I don’t need to switch seats with Isabel. I could always ask her for updates every couple of minutes. Who’s pitching? Who’s up? What inning is it? Where’s Piazza? Where’s Clemens? Of course I’ll have to give her a physical description of Clemens so she’ll know who I’m talking about. But if I could just sit there, my dear, if I could just move two feet to the right, I won’t have to bother nobody, not my lovely daughter-in-law, not my lovely wife. I could keep one eye on the game, one eye on this fine-smelling chicken you prepared, and who knows—every now and again I might drop in a line of sparkling, dazzling conversation.”

  “You know,” Lizette says, half admiringly, “you’re a real piece of work.”

  Jose and Isabel switch places. Alfredo watches her get up and drag her chair to the head of the table, next to Tariq. As if suddenly shy, Tariq won’t even look at her. He fiddles with the wristband of his watch.

  Inside Alfredo’s pocket, his phone begins to ring. He’d turned the volume up last night, when he thought Winston might call, or the police somehow, with news of Winston’s murder, and Alfredo forgot, this morning, to set it back to vibrate. It rings now like a bell clapper, sounding the alarm of his anxiety. With Winston and Isabel already here at the table, the most likely caller is Baka, Alfredo’s connect—and if this is Baka, he’s probably calling about the money Alfredo owes him, or the infinity-branded X he may have sold Vladimir Shifrin, or (brrrrrring, brrrrrring) he might be calling with the intent to lure Alfredo out of the house, as he may have lured Curtis Hughes last night. Alfredo wishes he could talk to the fat fuck. Not over the phone, but in person, to look him in the eye and get the info he needs.

  “Your phone,” Lizette says. “It’s ringing. At the dinner table.”

  “Sorry,” he says as he silences the phone in his pocket. Of course there’s a pit bull in the living room, devouring parrots—but so what? That’s fun. That’s hilarious. But Alfredo’s phone ringing at the dinner table? God forbid! And God forbid Isabel gets to sit where she wants to sit. She stares at her plate of food. Although she shows no outward signs—her jaw stays rigid, her cheeks don’t pucker—Alfredo knows she is grinding her teeth. “It’s business,” Alfredo says. “The call, I mean.”

  “Can we get this show on the road?” Jose says. Except for Winston, who’s got a mouthful of chicken, no one has eaten anything yet. “Who’s the youngest here?”

  “I am,” Alfredo says. Two months younger than Winston, a full year younger than Isabel. And so, the responsibility falls to him. “Bless us, O Lord, and these Thy gifts which through Thy bounty we are about to receive.” Usually, when giving grace, Alfredo stuccos the words together like an auctioneer. But today he enunciates. He watches Isabel, who could not be farther away, and he watches his Muslim brother, whose eyes are closed and whose head is politely bowed. “Through Christ our Lord,” Alfredo says. “Amen.”

  Winston swallows heavily. All around him forks and knives meet plates. They get together, say clackety-clack. Winston, however, puts down his utensils. He’s mortified. Is this what families do? They say grace before dinner? In 2002, for fuck’s sake? It never even occurred to Winston that he should wait. At home it’s just him and his ma dukes; they never eat together, and they most definitely do not pray together. Oh shit—just thinking about it makes his throat go tight. He takes a sip of water, but it’s lukewarm, and so all of a sudden he’s up at the freezer, searching for ice cubes. As the cold air blasts his face, it occurs to Winston that this too is rude, rooting in someone else’s freezer without asking permission. He mixed ketamine and coke earlier today, and now his heart is trying to sneak out of the house, shoulder its way through the bars of Winston’s rib cage and leap clean out of his chest. Winston
’s got to give the bag of scrips in his pocket back to Alfredo. He’s got to quit drugs tomorrow. The uppers and downers have jumbled his brain, stolen his appetite. Maybe Winston has even taken drugs he doesn’t remember taking, some hallucinogens perhaps, some magic mushrooms. I must be trippin’ balls, he thinks, because as he sits back down in his seat he realizes his water, with the ice cubes floating in it, has fucking turned green.

  Lizette turns away from Winston, shaking her head. Best to ignore it. “I was going to make an avocado salad,” she announces to the table. “But the Koreans are charging three dollars apiece. Has anyone heard of such a thing? Three dollars for an avocado?”

  Tariq hasn’t eaten anything yet. He moves his fork around his plate, flipping over grains of yellow rice, a forty-niner prospector separating silt from gold. He spears an oil-rimmed brown square of meat and lifts it up to his eyes. “Mama, what’s in this rice?”

  “It’s my rice,” she says.

  “Yeah, but is there any pork in it?”

  “A little ham. For flavor.”

  “Oh,” Tariq says.

  “Oh,” Lizette says, suddenly understanding. “Oh, honey. Can’t you pick around it?”

  Tariq pushes the plate away from him. He closes his eyes and little vertical lines form between the brows. Little frustrated folds of skin. His face flushes, and it looks to Alfredo as if Tariq is holding his breath, counting down from one thousand.

  “It’s delicious, Mama,” Alfredo says. He talks with his mouth full of chicken and rice and red bean stew. “You don’t know what you’re missing, big brother. Right, Dad? Right? Papi.”

  “Huh?” Jose says. He looks around the table, unsure of whom to address. He settles on Winston, the guest, the only one not staring his way, the only one who doesn’t seem to expect anything from him. “Bottom of the second,” Jose says. “One out. We’re getting close.”

  “The food,” Alfredo says. “What do you think of the food?”

  Jose leans back in his wheelchair and pats the sides of his stomach. “Best meal of my life.” He says this every night. “A new standard, Ma.”

  “That’s what I’m saying,” Alfredo tells his brother. “You sure you don’t wanna try it? I’m telling you, you can’t even taste the ham.”

  Tariq stands. He seems to lose his balance for a moment and has to brace his hand flat against the table. He smiles, as if to communicate to everyone that there’s no cause for alarm. Keep moving, he seems to tell them. Go about your business. Nothing to see here. He scrapes the food off his plate and dumps it back into the communal pot. A chicken leg plops down heavily, causing red sauce to splash out of the pot and onto Lizette’s floral-patterned tablecloth. Tariq doesn’t seem to notice. He drags his fork over the plate long after it seems necessary, and it makes a terrible sound, a nasal squeak, as if one of them, either the fork or the plate, were crying out in pain.

  “You want my banana?” Alfredo says. “It hasn’t even touched the ham. I swear.”

  Tariq sits down. He crosses his fork and knife over his plate, making an X, and he pushes the whole thing away with the palm of his hand. “That’s nice of you to offer,” he says. “But no thank you.”

  Lizette asks if she can fix something else for him. A tuna fish sandwich maybe. Or a plate of macaroni. He doesn’t answer. He sits in his seat, his lips moving silently, as if he were casting a spell or chanting a prayer. Lizette tries asking why it took him so long to come home this morning. Did he see some people he knows? Drop in on some old friends?

  “What friends?” Alfredo says.

  “Did you see, uhm …,” Lizette trails off. She wants to keep the table talk impersonal. She wants to keep long-harbored grievances out of the air, and so, in an attempt at conversational misdirection, she tries to get everyone to talk about the people they know, the friends they all have in common. She wants to give and receive benign updates on mutual acquaintances. Is so-and-so still living at home? Did his mother ever get that kitchen repainted? The problem, however, is the Batistas don’t have any mutual acquaintances. Alfredo’s right. What friends does Junior have? And it’s not just him. Jose doesn’t leave the house, Isabel’s a veritable orphan, and Lizette’s coworkers don’t run in the same circles as Alfredo’s deadbeat cronies. But wait!

  “Did you see Ear Man,” Lizette says suddenly, happily. “When you were walking up the block, did you see his new shirt?”

  Of course! The neighborhood crazies! Everyone knows them, right? Lizette performs for her son, fills in the gaps of his knowledge. They took away the bench in front of the post office, she explains, and so now all the bums have scattered like pigeons. Popeye—remember him?—he smokes his Parliaments now out of a hole in his neck. The legless alky and the teenaged Rasta who panhandles while listening to a Discman have switched spots, panhandling in front of Baskin-Robbins and the Jewish Center, respectively. And the Flying Nun? Surely Junior must remember her. That woman who painted her face white and screamed at all the children? Well, she all but disappeared. Got knocked up, Lizette explains. Raped in one of the Woodside homeless shelters.

  “Who’d wanna rape her?” Tariq asks.

  “How’s Gio and Conrad?” Alfredo asks. “You talk to them at all?”

  “Far as I know,” Tariq says, “they’re still incarcerated.”

  Above the table floats a heavy cloud of familial silence. For a few long moments, no one speaks. Isabel takes wolfish bites of her chicken, some of which is for her, some of which is for Christian Louis. She’s never met Conrad or Gio, but she’s heard the rumors. Not at the beauty parlor or in the stalls of the girls’ bathroom, but on the streets. Dropped a dime on his brother, people said. Just to get at a girl. Isabel’s never asked Alfredo if the rumors are true, because she knows he wouldn’t lie to her, and she hasn’t yet decided which answer she’d rather hear.

  On top of the table Tariq’s hand lies close to hers. The dinner conversation has fragmented: Alfredo and Winston are talking about someone they both know, while Lizette asks Jose what he wants for Father’s Day. No one sees Tariq’s hand moving closer. No one bears witness. Isabel forgot how big his hand is, how heavily it used to weigh on her own. Dark wires of hairs uncurl from his knuckles. She thinks that if all he wants is her hand, then she’ll give it to him. No problem. She’ll grab her knife and saw her arm off at the wrist.

  “It’s bad, I know,” he whispers. He turns his cheek to her. The skin around the gash is puffed up, a pair of pink ropes knotted at the ends. “But I’ve heard that some women like scars.”

  Under the table his other hand moves between her legs. He prods the fabric of her sweatpants, the cotton of her underwear. She looks across the length of the table at Alfredo, who appears distracted, still talking to Winston. Just turn your head, Alfredo. Just turn your head and see what’s happening, but of course he doesn’t notice because no one ever notices, no one ever notices anything. She stares at the network of flowers printed on the tablecloth. She knows that if she stays here and deals with it and lets Tariq paw her, then eventually it’ll be over. He tugs on her pubic hair, and a breathless Isabel jumps out of her body. She sits up on the counter, next to the stove. Legs dangling, she watches her body, that girl Isabel, at the head of the table. The body goes completely still. The body drops a fork, which clatters against her plate, but no one bothers to care. The body grabs hold of Jose Sr.’s arm (oh good for you, girl) and shakes it. In a voice that sounds like Isabel’s but is somehow calmer, stronger, the body says, “The game, Papi. The game, the game.”

  “The game!” Jose says. He squints into the living room. “Clemens—he’s on deck!”

  Alfredo stands and so does Isabel. She shoots out of her seat so suddenly that her chair tips over and crashes to the floor.

  “Be careful!” Lizette shouts, and Winston’s head snaps forward as if he’s just been jolted awake. In the living room, the dog starts barking.

  “He’s on deck!” Jose says. Alfredo races to the back of his father’s wheelchair,
as if he wants to stake his claim as the favorite son. They slide out of the kitchen, Jose grinning, Alfredo hunched over, his head bobbing, looking like a jockey on a horse. Behind them, Winston stomps his heavy feet and Tariq trails, as if he were stalking the three men in front of him. On his way out of the kitchen, he loses his balance and bangs into the doorframe.

  Left alone in the kitchen, Isabel and Lizette stare at each other across the length of the table. In the living room, the dog continues to bark. The television plays at a riotous volume.

  “What do you think he wants?” Lizette says.

  Before Isabel can ask what she means, the downstairs neighbor, Mr. Pettolina, starts banging on his ceiling with a wooden broom handle. Bang, bang, bang, bang. He’s complaining about the shouting, the barking, Winston’s heavy footsteps, the toppled-over chair, the ubiquitous smell of sofrito in the hallways, his shitty court stenographer job, the wife who left him seven years ago. He raps at the ceiling, his small white teeth presumably gritted.

  “Oh for fuck’s sake,” Lizette says.

  Bang bang, says the broom handle.

  “Shut up!” Lizette screams. She grabs the table for leverage and kicks down at the floor with the heel of her foot. Her hair flies. Her leg goes up and down. When the banging continues, when it becomes obvious there’s no way to stop it, she collapses into her chair. Her chest heaves. She looks miserable. “I should’ve made the tostones,” she tells Isabel. “You think he wants a sandwich?”

  Isabel grabs the sides of her stomach to remind Christian Louis that his mama’s still here. The broom’s vibrations rise up out of the floor and tingle the bottoms of her feet. Mr. Pettolina must be really mad. She imagines him down there. He hits the ceiling so hard the plaster must be coming loose. White dust drifts down onto his face, into his hair, coats the tips of his long, delicate eyelashes.