Dogfight, A Love Story

by Matt Burgess

  The train had come, the E express. The doors had opened, the commuters had stepped off.

  “So,” Vladimir said. Down by his hips, his hands opened and closed, grabbing at nothing. “I guess I’ll see you.”

  She smiled and ran up the stairs.

  By any objective criterion, it wasn’t the world’s greatest kiss. But don’t tell Vladimir that. Or do. Tell him that kissing, like most things, only gets better with practice. Tell him that and see what happens. Because as the E express lurched toward Manhattan, Vladimir could barely keep his feet on the ground. If he was to jump—just a little hop, that’s all—Vladimir would’ve smashed through the ceiling of the train car, through the tunnels, past the rats, past the mole men and Morlocks, up and into the East River that separates Queens from Manhattan, and once in that murky black-green water, he would’ve whooped it up, scissor-kicking his legs, using his hands to high-five the steroidal fins of radioactive fish.

  He wanted to tell his brother so bad. Despite all of Misha’s money, they still shared a room, and only two, maybe three feet of space separated their twin beds. That night, with the lights turned off, Vladimir tried to find the courage to tell his brother that only a few hours previous he went underground and stood on a subway platform, and while trains whistled behind his back, he kissed a girl for the very first time. But Vladimir felt afraid. He worried Misha might find the confession too intimate, too feminine; he worried Misha might think it took Vladimir too long to nab his first kiss; he worried Misha might ask the color of Vicki’s skin. Because while she wasn’t Black, she was black, and Vladimir knew that would disappoint. And if Misha asked, Vladimir couldn’t lie. He could steal from his brother and think the occasional evil thought about him, but he couldn’t lie to him, not even in the dark. Nor could he disappoint him. So he didn’t say anything. He went to bed burdened. He didn’t tell his tale and somehow that made the kiss less real.

  But Vladimir tells Misha now. He lies in a different bed, a hospital bed, with injuries consistent with blunt force trauma, as if Vladimir had been in an automobile accident or beaten with a pipe: cracked ribs, unfairly on both sides of the cage; a bruised sternum; a shattered bone in his left hand from trying to defend himself; and, worst of all, a broken jaw the doctors had to wire shut. He’ll have to eat smoothies for months, but at least he can still talk. In a voice that sounds strange to him—slower, deeper, more distant—Vladimir tells his brother everything: about the kiss, the E-beeper, the Air Jordans, the cloudy features of their mother. Talking with a wired jaw doesn’t hurt so bad, but crying does, and his whole body shakes from the effort of trying to stop.

  Misha climbs into bed with him. A ponytailed nurse appears in the door, but Misha waves her away. He puts his arms around his brother’s body. He collects the hospital gown, that flimsy thing, in his fists. He wants to spoon Vladimir. He wants to feel the delicate wings of his shoulder blades. But there are doctor’s orders. With broken ribs, Vladimir must lie flat on his back.

  “Shh,” Misha says. “I love you. Okay? You’re my brother. I love you.”

  Later in life, when Vladimir thinks of his brother—which will be every single day—he will often think of this moment. He will be pouring a cup of bitter coffee in the faculty lounge and all of a sudden he’ll feel the ghost arms of his brother take hold of his body.

  “You can never do anything wrong,” Misha says. “Do you understand? We’ll invite this girl over for dinner. Would you like that?”

  “I won’t be able to kiss her anymore,” he says. Because he can barely open his mouth, the words come out muffled. “She won’t even want to kiss me like this.”

  To keep himself from squeezing tighter, Misha lets go. His hands—still damp from a recent scrubbing—hover above Vladimir’s body, unsure of where to touch down. Where do you put them? When your brother’s ribs are broken and his chest is bruised, when he can hardly breathe, when his jaw is wired shut and his hand bandaged, where do you put your hands? What can you do that won’t make the pain worse? Misha rubs the inside of Vladimir’s elbow. He pours all his love into this one spot on his brother’s body, and for everything else, for the rest of the world and the people in it, he feels only an unspeakable rage.

  10

  The Department of Worry

  Alfredo and Tariq push through the bowling alley’s heavy glass doors, and an air pocket pushes back, as if the building doesn’t want them here. That’s fine. Alfredo doesn’t want to be here either. The carpet smells like cigarettes and chicken grease. Balls strike pins with the thunderous monotony of a roadside chain gang pulverizing rocks. And these balls don’t glow in the dark, as they would at a schmancy Manhattan bowling alley. There is no dark here. Every bulb in every socket burns brightly, giving off the creepy orange gleam of fast-food heat lamps, and at each lane, under the pressure of these orange lights, the same painful tableau is enacted: men, women, and children, whether they’re here on a second date or for a league game or a birthday party, whether they’ve picked up a strike or a gutter or some quantity of pins between the two, all the bowlers having bowled their balls and registered their scores, turn around now and make the exceedingly awkward walk back to their parties. The bowlers seem to wither under the scrutiny of observation. They have been watched, their roll judged, and now, not knowing what to do with their hands or where to put their eyes, not knowing how to act, these bowlers perform, and, of course, they perform disingenuously. They shrug. They pump fists. Overwhelmed with panic, they convert their thumbs and index fingers into pistols, take aim, and fire, kapow kapow, some of these poor unfortunate souls going so far as to raise their fingertips to their lips and blow out invisible wisps of smoke. Alfredo, painfully self-conscious himself, hates to see others collapsing under the strain of painful self-consciousness. This is what happens, he thinks, when management leaves on the lights.

  Tariq points to a lane in the back. “There’s Baka,” he says.

  Like Alfredo, Baka is a self-conscious paranoiac, but unlike Alfredo, he wasn’t born that way. An athletic child, Baka dominated Elmjack baseball. He stole bases standing up, spiraled footballs at eleven, drove his mother crazy with in-house ball playing and kitchen wind sprints and room-to-room dribbling, employed a patient, monotonous handball style, forcing no issues, striking no killers, simply keeping the ball in play from baseline to baseline until lung-scorched opponents gave up midpoint to bend over and take hold of their knees. And then at fifteen years old, he was diagnosed with Cushing’s syndrome. A rare endocrine disorder, it caused his adrenal fight-or-flight mechanism to behave erratically. Even worse for young Baka, the Cushing’s inflated his body to 250 pounds. Although increasingly unlikely, an athletic career remained technically, theoretically possible. At sixteen, he weighed more than 300 pounds. At twenty-eight, he no longer bothers with scales. Baka is centrally obese, which is to say the Cushing’s has expanded his trunk and face while sparing his limbs. Which is to say he looks like a big black lion. He sweats too much. He bruises easily. Fatty pads layer the back of his neck, giving him a buffalo hump. And as is understandable for a man who once hoped to play center field for the Mets but can now no longer fit in the stadium seats, Baka has taken on an air of cynicism. He knows that bad things—missed beanballs, double-crossing business partners, terrorist attacks, nonhereditary endocrine disorders—suddenly poof into existence. And so he acts accordingly. To minimize risk, he doesn’t go to drug dealers’ houses, nor does he have drug dealers come to his. Instead, he prefers to meet in large public spaces, and because his competitive spirit remains, those large public spaces tend to be pool halls, pubs with dartboards, arcades with skee ball, bowling alleys like Whitestone Lanes. A couple of years ago, in the dimly lit parking lot out front, an upper-level drug dealer from the Bronx got himself shot in the head; Baka may or may not have been the executioner, but the very possibility tightens Alfredo’s scrotum.

  “Pretend you don’t see him,” Alfredo says.

  “Yeah right,” Tariq says.
“Look at the size of him.”

  A young black kid, the latest protégé, rests a hand on Baka’s considerable shoulder. They stare at Alfredo, and Alfredo stares back. He crinkles his eyes. He squints past them, watches an attendant scuttle out to the no-man’s-land of the pins, watches a curly haired white girl bounce a ball off the bumpers. With his head moving like a sprinkler, Alfredo scans the lanes to Baka’s right, lane 37, lane 38, lane 39, all the way to the end of the bowling alley. When he finishes, he turns and gives Tariq a big vaudeville shrug.

  “You don’t see him? He’s right over—”

  “Hold up,” Alfredo says, flipping open his cell phone. He lowers his brother’s arm. “Don’t look at him. Look at me.”

  “You’re calling him?”

  “Not really.” Alfredo keeps the phone on his ear for as long as it would take another phone to ring a few times and click into voice mail. “I don’t want him to know we’ve seen him already. So I’m pretending to call him.”

  “Put your finger in your other ear,” Tariq says. “It’ll look more authentic that way.”

  After Alfredo hangs up the phone, he leads his brother to the shoe rental counter, where a white guy stands sentry on an elevated platform like a pharmacist. Alfredo asks him how much it costs to rent a locker.

  “Fifty dollars for the year.”

  “Well, come on now,” Alfredo says. He has a whopping two hundred dollars—the entirety of his life savings—at the bottom of his sock, but he ain’t about to blow a fourth of it on a bowling alley locker. “How much for a one-day rental?” he asks. To keep himself sharp, Alfredo does the math himself: if the rate remained constant, a locker should cost a little less than fourteen pennies a day.

  “We don’t rent lockers by the day,” the man says. He avoids eye contact, as if the news he’s delivering is too terrible to bear. He picks up a shoe and sprays disinfectant into its insides. “We only have yearly rentals, I’m afraid. And that’s fifty dollars. Like I was telling you.”

  “Where they at then? I wanna check them out before I throw down fifty dollars.”

  The man leans his head out over the counter, revealing a scalp freshly mobilized with hair plugs. Each troop of implanted hair stands at attention, as if these were the first awkward days of boot camp. He points to a row of lockers that are close to Baka’s lane but, thankfully, not too close.

  As they make their way toward the lockers, Alfredo whips a white envelope out of his pocket. He flourishes it, as a magician might flourish a tricolored hanky. At a waist-level locker, he kneels down and his head dips close to his brother’s body. Tariq smells clean, overwhelmingly so. Before they left, he took a “quick shower” that turned into a ninety-minute shower, where, judging by the smell of him, he must’ve used a full bar of soap. Plus a couple spritzes of Alfredo’s cologne. Which is kind of flattering actually. When he asked to borrow a shirt, an XL Mecca tee, Alfredo was happy to lend it. He kneels down by the lockers, smelling his brother, looking at his shirt, and Alfredo feels a surge of love rise into his chest. He didn’t invite this feeling, and yet here it is, flooding him. He pushes the envelope through a slit on the locker door.

  “How you gonna get it back out?” Tariq says.

  “I’m not really worried about it,” Alfredo says. “It’s empty.” They’re walking back to the shoe rental counter. “I owe Baka five hundred bucks, but it ain’t like I’ve got that kind of money.”

  Tariq stops walking. “You don’t have five hundred bucks?”

  “No, no, no, no, no. What I mean is that I’m not gonna hand over that kind of money to a fat fuck like Baka just because he asked me to. But I think he might start some shit—”

  “Because of the money you owe him.”

  “Over some other shit actually. But if he thinks I’ve got his cash in one of them lockers, then that’ll check him. Know what I mean? He won’t start any shit till he gets his money.”

  “Oh,” Tariq says, nodding his head. “Well, I hope you got a Plan B.”

  Alfredo tells the white guy behind the counter that he ain’t interested in them raggedy-ass lockers, but he would like to rent some bowling shoes. He requests a pair of size tens (he’s actually a size nine, but he doesn’t like anyone to know that, not even a potentially sympathetic stranger with hair plugs), and as is New York bowling alley policy, the man asks for Alfredo’s Timberlands. He needs to keep them behind the counter as collateral against theft.

  “You’re kidding,” Alfredo says. The bowling shoes sport a dizzying design of red leather squares alternating with tan leather squares. The heels are frayed, the laces blackened with dirt. Even the insoles have gone missing. Nothing will separate Alfredo’s feet from fungus but the thin cotton of his athletic socks. So as to ensure he won’t steal these ridiculous bowling shoes, Alfredo has to relinquish his prized pair of Timberland boots.

  “Well, I guess we only need to hold on to one,” the man says. He offers a boot back, which Alfredo gladly accepts. “And you, sir? What size do you need?”

  “I ain’t wearing them shoes,” Tariq says.

  The man looks down at Tariq’s prison-issue Converses. “I’m sorry, sir. But I’m afraid you can’t bowl in sneakers.”

  “What do you mean, you’re ‘afraid’?” Tariq says. “Seriously. Explain that to me. You’re afraid of what?” When the man doesn’t say anything, when he just turns around and sticks Alfredo’s boot in the cubbyhole, Tariq says, “You think you’re a big deal? Standing up on your platform?”

  Alfredo pulls his brother away. He wants Baka to see Tariq while he’s like this, combustible. Alfredo figures that at some point in the last two and a half years, Tariq took down the pictures of Isabel he had taped to his cell’s wall, and while Alfredo doesn’t fool himself into thinking Tariq removed those photos calmly—he imagines Tariq vented his spleen on some poor inmate, as he vented his spleen just now on that poor shoe-rental guy—but after some quiet, religious reflection, it’s possible Tariq decided that blood is indeed thicker than water. Right? There’s gotta be something to that effect in the Qur’an. But Alfredo doubts there’s anything in that holy book protecting overweight drug dealers.

  As they approach Baka, Alfredo throws up his hand as if seeing him for the first time. Out of the corner of his mouth, he tells Tariq, “Try to look intimidating.”

  “Ah,” he says. “I’m the Plan B.”

  When they get within earshot, Baka says, “Maybe we oughtta get you a new pair of glasses.” He lounges in a leather booth skirting the perimeter of the lane. As befits his standing as a gentleman of leisure, he wears a tracksuit, and as befits the tracksuit wearer, his default mode is ball busting. “If you need new glasses—which, let me tell you, you obviously do—I can hook you up. I know a lady, works at an optomalamadingdong shop. She can get you a sick discount. Little Puerto Rican lady. Tell her I sent you when you go. Drop my name.”

  “I tried calling you,” Alfredo says.

  “Negatory. Didn’t get a call.”

  “Let me see your phone.”

  “You don’t believe me?” Baka says. Tariq has taken a seat next to Baka on the booth, and Baka has to turn his body to talk to him. “I’d know, right? Believe me—when your brother calls, it’s like an event around here. I write it down in my diary. Like a lunar eclipse, you know what I’m saying? Does not happen every day, am I right? Most definitely does not happen twice a day. Unless he needs something. Then, yeah, sure—I’ll get a call. But he never calls just for friendship. And if I call him? Start leaving messages, which I never like to do? And then these messages start getting more and more frantic as I get more and more crazed? Forget it. I might as well be the girl with acne on the night of the prom. I start to get offended, if you know what I mean.”

  “Maybe he’s trying to offend you,” Tariq says.

  “Maybe he is.” Baka shakes his head mournfully. “It occurs to me. In my darker moments. The worst is when I worry that something’s happened to him. Pierre here—have you met Pie
rre?” He gestures to the young black kid sitting in a chair with his back to them. The kid scratches his neck and enters names on the lane’s computer keypad; either maliciously or not, he’s spelled “Alfredo” as “Alfraido.” “Pierre,” Baka says, “tells me I’ve got a catastrophic imagination. You’ve heard of this? Catastrophic imagination? Me either. Which is cause for alarm, right? Because I start worrying where Pierre’s heard this shit. In a fucking book? Impossible. And then, Jesus, don’t get me started—I get to worrying if Pierre is smarter than I am. Which is a scary thought. Just wait till you talk to him. I’m up nights. I mean, I’m up nights anyway, but I’m bugging out over this, and the point is that all this bugging out over catastrophic imaginations is I guess a pretty good indicator that I actually have a catastrophic imagination, and so when I call and call and don’t hear from your brother, I start to think, Aw Christ, oh no, maybe the big Dito got himself hurt somehow.”

  “Why would you think that?” Alfredo says.

  “How you doing, by the way?” Baka asks Tariq. “Good to be home? Good to have you back, let me say that much. You look good. Hitting the weights, that’s obvious. Let me tell you something—you go to prison strong, you come home stronger. It’s like a supervillain factory, am I right? Of course I wouldn’t know. Anyway, you look good. Other than the cheek, which is infected by the way. That’s some shit I do know about. Pierre, baby. Get over here. You’re being very, very rude.”

  With his wiry arms and bony hands, Pierre looks a bit like a young Curtis Hughes. If Alfredo had to bet, he’d put the kid at sixteen years old. Maybe even younger. He’s much taller than Alfredo, and by the looks of his oversized feet, he’s only going to get bigger. He probably wakes up every morning with stretch marks on his shoulders and new coils of hair on his chest, probably outgrows his clothes every three months. Which is why he’s got to invest in shirts like the one he’s got on: a long white tee that comes to an end a few inches above his knees. Across the chest is a picture of Al Pacino, a Technicolor still frame from Scarface. Alfredo’s never seen the movie—who’s got the time?—but he’s watched enough rap videos and heard more than enough impressions to be at least familiar with the scene on the shirt. An orange tulip of gunfire blossoms from the tip of an enormous gun, and Pacino, like Baka, tenders introductions: Say hello to my little friend. Alfredo and Pierre slap palms.