Dogfight, A Love Story

by Matt Burgess

  Meanwhile, Roger Clemens enters the batter’s box. In Corona, Elmhurst, East Elmhurst, Jackson Heights, Cambria Heights, Astoria, Hollis, Glendale, LeFrak, Queensbridge, Jamaica, Rockaway, Fresh Meadows, Kew Gardens, Malba, Maspeth, Ditmars, Douglaston, Howard Beach, Beechhurst, Bellerose, Rosedale, Richmond Hill, Forest Hills, Floral Park, Ozone Park, Rego Park, College Point, Hunters Point, Willets Point, Breezy Point, Bay Terrace, Bayside, Sunnyside, Woodside, Woodhaven, Ravenswood, and Ridgewood, revenge-mongers lean forward in their seats. Beat cops on Thirty-seventh Avenue stare at a TV through the window of the Headz Ain’t Ready barbershop. In Whitestone, at a bowling alley, Baka watches the TV set up behind the bar; in Corona, Alex and Bam-Bam Hughes sit on their couch, an empty space between them; and in Elmhurst, the game plays on a television suspended above Vladimir Shifrin’s hospital bed. It ain’t all TVs, of course. There are the radio listeners: drivers stuck on the BQE and Grand Central Parkway, Con Ed employees, dishwashers and doormen working in Manhattan, a little boy on a sticky tar roof, Max Marshmallow behind the counter of his candy store. And at Shea Stadium? The hot dog vendors and peanut slingers do what they’ve explicitly been instructed not to do: they turn around and face the field. The fans have all been standing since the top of the third inning. They cheer the Mets and boo Clemens, but they’re holding back, these fans. They’re keeping a little something in their pockets, waiting for the release, the consummation of long-anticipated violence.

  The Mets pitcher throws at Clemens and misses. It happens that fast. The ball sails three feet behind him, lands in the dirt, and rolls to the backstop. That was it—their one chance. Piazza hangs his head while the umpire issues warnings. Clemens smirks. He tips his helmet at the pitcher, and an entire borough deflates.

  “Season’s over,” Jose says. “We’re done.”

  “It’s June,” Alfredo says. “There’s like a hundred games left.”

  “We’re done,” Jose says. The next pitch is a fastball right down the middle, which Clemens fouls off. “You see?” Jose says. He waves a disgusted hand at the television. “You see? We missed him, now we pitch to him, and the season’s all gone straight down the drain. You need confidence to play this game and we’ve lost all confidence. Aw Christ, Dito,” he says, as if Alfredo’s naïveté was not only obvious but blameworthy, responsible for the long stretch of winless baseball games in front of him. “Don’t you understand?”

  “Seasons don’t end in June, Papi, just because we missed hitting a pitcher in the ass.”

  “Don’t you understand, Dito?” Tariq says, perfectly mimicking their father’s Nuyorican accent. He scratches his dog behind the ears and smiles at Alfredo, who doesn’t know if his balls are getting busted here or if Tariq is winking at him over their father’s head. “You need confidence to play this game,” Tariq says.

  Jose squeezes Tariq’s hand and looks up into his face. “Here’s the problem,” he says, his voice dropping, and it seems to Alfredo that Jose is suddenly addressing Tariq not as a father addresses a son, but as if they were peers, two guys from the neighborhood, sitting across from each other at a dominos table, sipping on cans of Modelo and bullshitting about cars and sports and women and the perpetual disappointment of children. “The problem is Dito doesn’t know because he never actually played baseball.”

  “I played!” Alfredo says.

  “Yeah, but your wrists were always too thin,” Jose says.

  “What the hell does that mean? My wrists?” With every word, Alfredo’s voice rises, and he hates himself for it. At least Winston gives no indication that he’s seen or heard any of this. He lies in the recliner—at a safe remove from the dog—with his legs up, eyes closed, and mouth open, like a patient in traction. He snores loudly, crashing after a two-day-long drug binge. So as not to wake him up, Alfredo lowers his voice. “You’re ridiculous,” he tells his father. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “What are you getting so upset for?” Jose says. “Not everyone’s gonna be a top-dog ballplayer. You’re good at other stuff. What’s fifteen times seventy-three?”

  “How about this number?” Alfredo says. “Zero. The number of times you’ve seen me play baseball in your entire life. How many? Zero.”

  “What’s he getting so upset about?” Jose asks Tariq.

  “He was pretty good,” Tariq shrugs.

  “Thank you,” Alfredo says.

  “Sure,” Tariq says. Alfredo knows his brother has never actually seen him play an organized game of hardball either, but the two boys, when left alone in the house, used to play Wiffle ball. And that kinda counts, right? With a pillow on the sofa serving as the strike zone, big brother batted and pitched left handed, just to give little brother a chance. One time Alfredo hit a hanging curveball so hard he knocked three parrots off the ceiling.

  “He had a strong arm,” Tariq tells Jose. “And he could run, that’s for sure.”

  “Thank you,” Alfredo says.

  “You were no superstar either,” Jose tells Tariq. “You had the tools, sure. My genes. But not the work ethic. I’m sorry, but am I wrong? You weren’t lazy. I won’t say you were lazy, but you never really tried.” He holds his hand above his head, as if he were measuring off the height of baseball stardom. “You never pushed yourself hard enough to get to that next level.”

  “See,” Tariq says, “all these years, I didn’t know you was a baseball scout.”

  “And he knows all this—have you noticed?—without ever having seen us actually play in a game. Not one fucking time.”

  “No cursing,” Jose says. “It’s a sign of ignorance.” The two prime-of-life boys stand close to Jose, crowd him, look down on him in his wheelchair. On the television, Clemens has just gone down swinging. Still smirking, he struts back to the safety of the dugout. “Go get a bat,” Jose tells his sons. “You two think you’re so smart. Go get a bat and I’ll show you what’s what. I’ll strike out the both of you. Three pitches for Dito. And for you, my oldest, maybe four pitches. Maybe you foul one off. You understand? I’ll show you. Go get a bat.”

  If there was a bat in this apartment, Alfredo tells his father, Mama would’ve brained him with it a long time ago. Tariq starts laughing.

  “Go downstairs,” Jose says. “Go downstairs and grab that broom out of Pettolina’s fucking—excuse me—out of Pettolina’s hands, and bring it up here, and swing that. Okay? Swing and strike out with that. A broom handle. Because that’s what I had. I had a broom handle for a bat and a piece of cardboard for a glove, and I was a player. I walked the field with confidence.”

  “How about this?” Alfredo says. “How about we all go outside? Have a base-running contest.”

  “Ho shit!” Tariq says. He reaches out, laughing, and he and Alfredo slap palms.

  It’s been some time since Alfredo’s had an ally against the Axis of His Parents. There’s Isabel, of course, but she is by necessity a silent ally. She’s an outsider, an exile living abroad in this tyrannical nation-state, and while she can use the tools of cunning and subversion, she cannot outwardly criticize. Not without fear of having her visa revoked. But Tariq, on the other hand. Tariq is a sibling—check the DNA!—and siblings, like war vets, share the common ground of foxhole experience. He can fight back, strap on a helmet, get dirty. Over their father’s head, Tariq smiles at Alfredo, and Alfredo, with a jolt, realizes that a secret part of him has desperately missed having his big brother around.

  From the kitchen doorway, Isabel watches. She looks down to find her arms folded in front of her chest.

  “Papi, are they teasing you?” Lizette says. She squeezes past Isabel and comes into the living room. “Are you boys teasing him? Don’t you know it’s Father’s Day tomorrow? Tell them what you want, Jose. Tell them what you were telling me, you old pervert. Look at him. He won’t even acknowledge me. Your father, for Father’s Day, wants, as a gift, a sex machine. This is what he tells me. He wants a machine for sex, a strap-on penis.”

  “Not a strap
-on,” Jose says sourly. “A machine that straps onto your penis.”

  “Onto my penis?” Lizette says in mock horror.

  “How much it cost?” Tariq asks.

  “Thirty-nine ninety-nine,” Lizette says. “Or so he tells me. There’s an installment plan. They take all major credit cards.”

  “We’ll buy you two,” Alfredo says. “Case you wear out the first.”

  “My man goes, ‘We’ll buy two,’ ” Tariq says, laughing. “In case he wears out the first!”

  Again the boys slap palms, but this time they do it the way they used to: two quick pats, then a fist bump.

  “You got a name for that dog yet?” Alfredo says, but before Tariq can answer, Alfredo’s phone starts ringing. Baka’s number flashes across the screen. Not his name, just his number—Alfredo’s too paranoid to save a business contact to his phone book. What if the DEA were to get ahold of his cell?

  “Little brother’s been big pimpin’ since I was away!” Tariq says. “You blowing up, Dito. Another business call?”

  “Yeah,” Alfredo smiles. “I guess.”

  Tariq claps his brother on the shoulder. “You were always mad smart, Dito. I’d be telling people how my brother’s gonna be running shit one day. I’m serious. Don’t look over there. Look at me. You’re pulling down mad weight, am I right?”

  “I’m doing okay,” Alfredo says.

  “You wanna know something? I used to tell people that I’d be working for you one day. I’m being serious here. Man, look at me. You gotta bring me back into the fold, Dito. I wouldn’t even know where to start.”

  Tariq’s eyes are shining, set deep in a face with two mouths, the one he uses to smile at Alfredo, and the other mouth, the crueler one, sliced into his cheek. He has changed in these last couple of years. There is the scar of course, but also the bald head, hard as a razor, and the city of muscles under his shirt. This, Alfredo thinks, is a body capable of terrible power.

  Alfredo fiddles with the phone in his hands. He thinks of how differently things might’ve been had Curtis gone out last night with big brothers Alex and Bam-Bam.

  “You feel like coming with me somewhere?” he says. “I’d ask this guy”—he gestures to Winston snoring lightly in the recliner—“but … well, you know.”

  “Absolutely,” Tariq says. “Where we going?”

  “There’s dessert,” Lizette says nervously. “There’s ice cream in the freezer.”

  “Is it pork flavored?” Alfredo asks.

  “You’ve got some fucking mouth on you,” Tariq says, still smiling.

  “No cursing,” Jose says.

  “Chocolate,” Lizette says. “Chocolate ice cream. Your favorite. Right in the freezer. Come on.”

  Tariq punches Alfredo hard in the chest and then punches his own, creating an invisible cord between them. “Sorry, Mama,” he says. “We got moves to make.”

  Christian Louis has fashioned a knife out of something, some contraband he’s smuggled into Isabel’s body, and either he’s stabbing her uterine walls with the knife or the knife keeps slipping out of his teeny hands, but either way it hurts. She runs to the bathroom, locking the door behind her. She sits her bone-wearied body down on the toilet seat, and then jumps back up, as if something in the water leapt out and bit her. She rattles the doorknob. To be positive. To make sure. To double-check. But don’t worry, Isabel. It’s locked. Okay? The door is locked.

  9

  The Many Loves of Vladimir Shifrin

  She taught preschool in the city of Novorossiysk, right off the Black Sea, in the last-gasp days of the Soviet Union. She had long blond hair and played the acoustic guitar. Vladimir doesn’t remember her name, but she was, and always will be, the first.

  In the pictures he finger-painted of the two of them, they’d be holding each other’s stick-figured hands, or sitting behind the large bay window of a house, or standing on a yellow sun in insulated boots. While the other children napped, he feigned sleep on a mat near her desk. At snack time, he offered her sips from his milk cartons, which she politely declined, citing germs, citing the necessity of calcium for the building of healthy bones, but she always commended his willingness to share.

  One day Vladimir decided they should live together. As he got ready for school, he doused his hair with tomato juice. With his mother’s eye shadow, he painted a bold black circle around his eye. Mama didn’t ask. She lay perpetually in bed around this time, her body a battleground for poisons, chemo vs. cancer.

  Vladimir’s brother, Misha, a ninth grader, walked him to school that morning. Like Mama, Misha didn’t question the eye shadow or the tomato juice. Vladimir was a choknutiy—the familial odd duck destined, Misha thought, for great things. When they reached the preschool, Misha reluctantly let go of his little brother’s hand. He kissed him on the forehead. Asked him to please stay out of trouble.

  Vladimir went straightaway to the pretty blond teacher and told her he was being abused at home. Lookit. A black eye. Blood in my hair. Vladimir, whose theatrical skills were precociously pronounced, could cry on command, but he held back this time, thinking restraint would play better than hamming. Besides, he didn’t want his eye shadow to run.

  The teacher pressed his small body against hers. Vladimir thought she smelled like ripe tomatoes (although, more likely, he smelled like ripe tomatoes). She brought him into her office and sat him down in her chair. Her hands were shaking. She gave him construction paper and crayons. She told him to sit tight. She told him she needed to think. She needed to think this whole thing through.

  One shudders to imagine that her figurative blindness here—eye shadow and tomato juice, lady!—might be explained by the possibility that she herself had been abused as a child, and as a grown-up had dedicated her life to protecting the innocent bodies of children.

  “I’m afraid to go home,” Vladimir said.

  “Oh, you poor sweet thing.”

  Things were going well.

  After she left the office—she needed to think; she needed to make some calls—Vladimir drew pictures of the rainbow house they’d live in together. He’d miss his parents, obviously, but love requires certain sacrifices. He wouldn’t miss his brother, however, because—in Vladimir’s master plan—his brother was coming with him. Vladimir drew an extension off of the side of the house for Misha to sleep in.

  An hour later, the teacher (what was her name?) tiptoed back into the room, as if it were Vladimir’s office and not her own. A man trailed behind her, wearing dark pants and a flannel shirt. He looked like a carpenter, but he had the thick-bristled mustache of police inspectors around the world. The teacher put a hand on his chest, afraid, perhaps, that he might bolt at Vladimir and scoop him away.

  “Here he is, honey,” she said. “The boy.”

  Honey came forward, cracking his knuckles. He licked his thumb and rubbed a streak of eye shadow off of Vladimir’s face. He bent his nose to Vladimir’s hair.

  “Vegetables?” the man said. He smiled at the child and then smiled even wider at the teacher, with the easy condescension of a boyfriend. “I think what we have here is a young boy who likes to tell tales.”

  “Vladimir?” the teacher said.

  He had one card left to play. “My mom,” he said. “She’s sick.”

  Years and years later, well into the future—when Vladimir Shifrin is a paunch-bellied assistant professor of Slavic languages and literature at a small midwestern college—he will tell this anecdote in his lecture on Anton Pavlovich Chekhov’s short story “The Kiss,” using his own experience with early disillusioned love to segue to the end of Chekhov’s story:

  And the whole world—life itself seemed to Riabovich an inscrutable, aimless mystification … Raising his eyes from the stream and gazing at the sky, he recalled how Fate in the shape of an unknown woman had once caressed him; he recalled his summer fantasies and images—and his whole life seemed to him unnaturally thin and colorless and wretched…

  But this will be a bit of p
edagogical exaggeration on the part of Assistant Professor Shifrin, a lie, another tale told. Because when the pretty blond teacher sent him out of her office, he did not become unnaturally thin or colorless or wretched. He did not, as Riabovich did, cast himself upon his bed, wroth with his evil fate. No, Vladimir grew only hungrier for love. Not for the love of the teacher—with the short-term memory of children and romantics, he had moved on from her almost immediately. Instead Vladimir grew hungrier for the love of women he had never met, women whose faces he had never seen and whose names he did not yet know.

  Names like Jessica Yoffe and Tonya Valit and Marina Duvenskaya. Girls who lived in the apartment next door, who sat in front of him at school with little blond hairs on the backs of their necks. In the fourth grade, Vladimir had a crush on a girl named Elena, but Andrei (Vladimir’s best friend) also had a crush on her so Vladimir redirected his amorous energies toward Svetlana, but then Sergei (the class’s monstrous bully) laid claim to Svetlana, and so Vladimir was forced to back off. A love poem he’d written her (well, plagiarized actually) languished in his desk till the end of the school year, when a janitor threw it away, unread. In the fifth grade he asked Olga Guseva to the end-of-the-year dance. She accepted, which precipitated a burst of elation, followed by the sharp stabs of anxiety, for this would be Vladimir’s first date and he did not yet know how to dance. Then the blonder, more popular Anastasia Domani broke up with her boyfriend, and things really got complicated. An on-the-rebound Anastasia had her friends indicate to Vladimir’s friends—through a series of cryptic notes and whispered hints—that a Vladimir-Anastasia merger might be possible, and when the stock proved solid, he broke up with Olga and started dating Anastasia. Within days, however, Anastasia broke it off. When Vladimir re-asked Olga to the dance, she told him to get down on his knees and beg for it in front of the entire school. With his classmates watching him, jeering him, he dropped down to the ground, hands clasped in front of him. Oh where had his confidence gone!