Dogfight, A Love Story

by Matt Burgess

  “I don’t think I’ve ever met a black guy named Pierre before,” Alfredo says.

  Pierre inflates his chest. “Funny story, actually—”

  “What is that?” Alfredo says. He leans in close to look at Pierre’s neck, where a red constellation of bumps blotches the skin. Like fingers, the bumps reach down the collar of his shirt. “What the fuck is wrong with your neck?”

  “My neck?”

  “Poison ivy,” Baka says, sounding impatient. “We gonna bullshit all night or are we gonna talk business?”

  “We do need to talk some business,” Tariq says.

  “Poison ivy?” Alfredo says.

  “Yeah, me and my boys? We was doing some graffiti shit over by the Maple Grove Cemetery, and we got into some bushes and whatnot, tagging this big—”

  “Are you kidding me?” Alfredo says. “That shit is contagious.”

  Pierre shakes his head. “I looked it up online. They said it wasn’t.” He looks to Baka for support. “Right? The Internet? They said it wasn’t catching.”

  Alfredo wipes his hand against the front of his shirt. “It’s contagious, man. That’s what poison ivy does.”

  “Don’t worry,” Pierre says.

  The kid, obviously, has no idea who he’s talking to. For the purposes of spatial efficiency, Alfredo’s neurological Department of Regret splits an office with the interrelated Department of Worry. They’ve got separate desks and filing cabinets but share the same frosted glass door. Many of Regret’s overcaffeinated staffers work freelance in Worry, almost all of them preferring the latter job as it requires the use of more creative faculties. They wear green visors and chew unlit cigars—there is no smoking in the brain, for obvious reasons—and they draft worries on triplicate forms, each worry, like each correct response on Jeopardy! phrased in the form of a question. For instance: What’s the incubation time on poison ivy? What are the dangers of exposing a pregnant woman to it? Did Pierre kill Curtis Hughes? Did he use a metal bat or a tire iron to compensate for the Alphabet Brother’s knockout fists? Did Curtis, at any point, think Pierre kinda looked like a younger version of himself, or do people not recognize that kind of thing?

  “The Internet said I’d be fine as long as I took a bath every day in tomato juice.”

  “That’s for skunks,” Alfredo says.

  “What is?” Pierre says.

  “Baths in tomato juice.”

  “Why would a skunk take a bath in tomato juice?”

  “See?” Baka says. “This is the guy who comes to me with ‘catastrophic imagination.’ Can you imagine?”

  “We need four ounces of cocaine,” Tariq says. He sits hunched over on the edge of the booth. Between his knees, his hands dangle in a way Alfredo finds disconcertingly nonthreatening. “Nothing stepped on,” Tariq says. “No filler. We want it by Tuesday at the latest. And we won’t pay more than seven hundred an ounce. Which is what? Twenty-eight hundred dollars? I get that math right, Alfredo?”

  No, Alfredo thinks. He sits in the swivel chair next to the computer keypad, away from the men in the booth. No, that math is not right. Well, okay, yes, the math is right, but the numbers are ludicrous. An ounce at seven hundred would be a pure gram cost of twenty-five, which is maybe what it costs off the boat when the shit comes into the country, but to demand those prices now, from Baka, in a bowling alley in Flushing? And what would he even do with that much coke? Cook it in Mama’s cast-iron frying pan, smooth out the bubbles with Mama’s butter knife, store it in Mama’s freezer till it hardened into crack rocks? Type in an ounce on a pusherman’s calculator and you get 168 rocks. Four ounces then makes 672. Sell that on the street for ten dollars a rock (well … let’s say fifteen a rock, considering Alfredo’s salesmanship), and you’ve got $10,080, or a profit of over seven G’s, which is probably how Tariq arrived at the original number, saying to himself, Boy, I’d sure like to make seven thousand dollars—how do I do that? Unless, of course, seven hundred an ounce was a reasonable price before Tariq went away, in which case Alfredo completely missed out on the porous-bordered heyday of drug dealing. If he were three years older and if he had the stones to sling rocks, Alfredo and Isabel would have their own apartment by now, with a flat-screen TV and a Sub-Zero refrigerator.

  From his sitting position, Baka lightly kicks the boot in Alfredo’s hand. “You’re clutching that thing like a teddy bear,” Baka says. “You didn’t want to let the nice shoe rental guy hold on to it?”

  “You kidding? I’m not gonna give that high school dropout both my boots.”

  “Aren’t you a high school dropout?” Baka says.

  “Yeah. And I’d steal somebody’s boots.”

  “He didn’t hear me?” Tariq asks Alfredo. Tariq won’t even look at Baka. “He didn’t hear me ask him for four ounces?”

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

  Baka smiles as he wags his finger in Alfredo’s face. With his free hand he waves over the waitress. She is a big-bottomed, middle-aged Latina. Alfredo’s never seen her before, which isn’t surprising considering Alfredo’s never seen any of the waitresses here more than once. Whitestone Lanes employs one server at a time, converting them into perpetual motion machines, bouncing them from one end of the bowling alley to the other, age accelerating their weary bodies. Alfredo imagines that when this particular waitress came to her job interview she was a long-legged teenaged bombshell—almost as pretty as his Isabel—and she got hired on the spot. That was probably a week ago. Within the hour she’ll have gray hair and arthritic knees.

  Baka orders a strawberry milk. Pierre gets nothing—he’s wandered off toward the ball rack—and Tariq doesn’t get anything either, which surprises Alfredo, considering Tariq didn’t eat any dinner. It’s like he doesn’t even know the waitress is here. As he stares down at his hands, his lips move silently.

  “What can I get you, sweetie?” the waitress says, and it takes Alfredo a moment to realize she’s talking to him. He orders a beer, and she asks for some ID.

  “I’ll have a Coke,” he says. She slips the nibbled pencil behind her ear and hustles away, toward another party in a different lane.

  “So what’s the story?” Pierre says. He hugs a giant black ball to his chest, his arms quivering with the effort. “We bowling, or what?”

  “I don’t think so,” Baka says. His voice softens. “I don’t know if the big bad Batista brothers have come here to play games.”

  “Are you serious? I already put everyone’s names on the computer!”

  “I know,” Baka says. “I know. But how about you go and bowl for everyone. Yeah? Take our turns for us. See who wins.”

  The three of them watch Pierre slink away to the lip of the lane. He spreads his feet wide and cradles the ball between his legs, as if it were an elephantine testicle. He pitches it down the lane, and the ball breaks left, dropping heavily into the gutter. The pins stand erect, unimpressed. Not that Pierre seems to care. He races back to the ball return machine. He scratches his neck as he stares into the machine’s black mouth, waiting for it to belch back what’s rightfully his.

  “We don’t need to go through you,” Tariq is telling Baka. “If you can’t pull down that much weight, we’ll go to somebody else. We came to you first as a favor.”

  “And I’m very, very flattered.” Baka pats Tariq’s knee. “Nice jeans. Expensive jeans.”

  “Maybe we’ve come into some dough,” Alfredo says. He lets his eyes drift toward the lockers.

  “Great,” Baka says. “You can pay me the money you owe me.” He squeezes Tariq’s shoulder, and Tariq winces under the contact. “What’d you guys do?” Baka says. “Take out an advance on your gambling winnings tonight? That’s a bad habit, let me tell you.”

  “What gambling winnings?” Tariq says.

  “The dogfight,” Baka says. He sounds surprised. “The party in your honor.”

  “Right, right,” Tariq says. “The party.”

  “See?” Baka says. “You
know everything. You’re so fucking smart.”

  Tariq mutters under his breath, something about insolence or indolence. Something about—Alfredo can’t be quite sure about this—rending the earth asunder.

  “I’m not so sure the party’s still on,” Alfredo says.

  Baka says, “The Alphabet Brothers—or at least the two that are still alive—they seem to think it’s still on.” He straightens the cuffs of his tracksuit. “I called them to offer condolences. You called them, right? To pay respects? No? Well that’s not very nice, Fredo. Funeral’s gonna be at Conway on Northern. Hope to see you there, God willing.” He smiles at Tariq. “Or Allah willing, am I right? Anyway, the ABC bros told me they’re still coming tonight. Apparently their dog was really Curtis’s dog, first and foremost. He was the one who fed it and picked up its shit. So they’re putting the pooch in the ring as a tribute to Curtis. I don’t really get it. My opinion? I think they’re grieving in an unhealthy way. They tell me they’ve got some aggression to work out.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Alfredo says. “They said that about me?”

  Baka’s cracked lips smile. “What do you mean?”

  Alfredo looks to his brother for help, but Tariq is staring off into space. Alfredo closes his eyes. He needs a quiet room. He needs to crawl into this ball return machine and follow its underground tunnels to the magmatic center of the earth. Once there, he can prop his feet up on some stalagmites and figure this whole thing out.

  The waitress puts a beer in Alfredo’s hand. Stubborn ice crystals cling to the bottle’s neck; the label has already started to peel off. Alfredo takes a long sip. The beer tastes cold and necessary. He wants to thank the woman who brought it, but having already dropped off the check and Baka’s strawberry milk, she’s disappeared.

  “That was nice of her,” Alfredo says.

  “That was,” Baka says. He takes the straw out of his milk glass and flicks it onto the ground. “People take a liking to you, Fredo. You ask Pierre what the fuck’s wrong with his neck, and he doesn’t even get mad. Tries to tell you a story. You steal your brother’s girlfriend, knock her up, and he doesn’t even look angry. Well, he looks a little angry, but he always looks like that. Oh, he’s looking real angry now. Yikes. What’s the matter? You didn’t know about Dito and Isabel? Course you did. You know everything.” Baka bends to his milk glass and slurps pink foam off the top. He tells Alfredo, “That waitress could’ve lost her job giving you that beer. But she liked you for some reason. You’ve got a way, I guess. Now here I am. About to do you a very, very foolish favor myself. I got you a present, a beautiful snub-nose thirty-eight revolver that’ll fit right in your waistband. A beautiful pistol. And you gotta take it. I already lost the receipt.”

  Alfredo never intended to be the kind of person who wants, much less needs, a gun. He looks over at Pierre, who bowls with perfect form: bent forward at the waist, left arm horizontal to his body, right leg tucked, head straight, fingers outstretched. The ball spins down the lane and knocks down all the pins but one. Up on the TV screen, an arrow points to Pierre’s name. When bowling for himself, Pierre knocks down nines; when bowling for anyone else, he throws gutters. In a contest in which he’s the only participant, Pierre cheats. He’s the kind of guy, Alfredo realizes, who’d bring a bat to a fistfight.

  “What do I need a gun for?” Alfredo says.

  “Why does anyone need a gun? Self-defense!” Baka spreads his legs wide apart, settling into his story. “The kid you put in the hospital yesterday? His brother calls me up. Asks me who I sell drugs to in East Elmhurst. I say, ‘Why?’ He says, ‘I’m looking for two black kids and a Puerto Rican.’ I say, ‘Jesus, you’re kidding. That’s everybody.’ He says, ‘One black kid hits like a motherfucker, the other one wears a Spider-Man hat.’ You notice how this guy fixates on the black people? I’d get upset—well, that’s not true. I do get upset, but what are you gonna do? I tell him one of the kids has gotta be a Hughes brother. And the other one is Winston, no doubt about it. I tell him Winston’s Haitian, not African American. But he doesn’t care. He wants to know about the Boricuan now. I tell him, ‘If Winston was there, the Puerto Rican’s gotta be Alfredo Batista. He’s a nice guy.’ See? I put in a good word for you. Well, maybe I didn’t. Who can remember? So then the guy says—”

  “This is the chemist we’re talking about?”

  “Chemist?” Baka says.

  “Winston told me the kid’s brother was a chemist.”

  “Winston told you?” Baka says.

  Oh God. Winston? Winston thinks the expressions are “nip it in the butt” and “one foul swoop” and “play it by year.” He says “eck cetera.” He once bet Alfredo money that the arcade prodigy in “Pinball Wizard” is a deaf, dumb, and black kid. He dropped out of high school in the eleventh grade, in the middle of midterms, when he opened up his exam booklet and discovered, with a sunken stomach, that he stayed up the night before studying the wrong subject. He told Alfredo that Boris was a chemist, that there was nothing to worry about, and Alfredo believed him because he wanted to believe him.

  “Who,” Alfredo asks, “is Vladimir’s brother?”

  “Mike Shifrin,” Baka says triumphantly. “He’s a drug dealer.”

  “I don’t know who that is.”

  “Well, when he woke up yesterday he’d never heard of you either. What a difference a day makes, huh?”

  “So call him up,” Alfredo says. “Call him up and tell him you won’t sell him any more drugs unless he backs off and leaves me alone.”

  “I don’t sell him drugs.”

  “He’s got your logo on his X.”

  “I got his logo on my X,” Baka says. “I buy drugs from him. Actually, I buy drugs from a guy in Chinatown, and he buys drugs from Mike Shifrin. This guy’s a Russian gangster. The real deal boss hog.”

  “This isn’t fair,” Alfredo says. He turns to Tariq. “I only hit the kid one time. I was getting the drugs for you. To give to you. I didn’t even hit him that hard.”

  “Where’s the gun at?” Tariq says.

  “Queensbridge,” Baka says. “The Ravenswood Houses. Pierre will drive you there. The both of you. Take you ten, fifteen minutes.”

  Alfredo peels the label off his beer bottle. “I don’t want to go to Queensbridge.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that,” Baka says. A foamy pink mustache lies slithered above his upper lip. “Queensbridge ain’t as bad as the rappers make it seem.”

  “You know where this Shifrin guy lives?” Tariq asks.

  “I’ll find out. But first things first. Go to Ravenswood and pick up the pistol. Afterwards, Pierre—who’s a very responsible driver, by the way—will drive you home. Save you a bus ride.” He turns his round, leonine face toward Alfredo. “I don’t give a shit that Curtis got merked. He was always too … brutish. But you? I like you, Fredo. You dance around shit. You crack jokes. You know how to flirt with my ass, which I’ve always appreciated. Know what I mean?”

  Alfredo doesn’t know anything. Maybe Pierre will drive him and his brother to Ravenswood, and they’ll park in front of a hydrant and run into the projects, and when the elevators don’t work, because they never work, the three of them will take the stairs, and it’ll be there, in a stairwell that smells like urine, that Pierre will open up their throats with a box cutter. Or maybe they never even get to the car in the first place. Maybe Pierre kills them in the dimly lit parking lot of Whitestone Lanes, and somebody reads about them in the paper and says what Alfredo said when he read about that poor kid from the Bronx: Oh shit, Whitestone Lanes—I’ve been there! Or maybe—who knows?—Baka isn’t setting him up. Maybe they really will go get a gun. But that won’t have anything to do with Alfredo being likable. If Alfredo kills Mike Shifrin, then a vacancy becomes available, and Baka gets to creep up the drug-dealing ladder. And if that’s what Baka wants, then maybe he made all this shit up. Maybe it’s just a story he told. But that can’t be right, Alfredo thinks. Mike Shifrin kil
ling Curtis Hughes and then coming after Alfredo has gotta be true. In a weird way, Alfredo wants it to be true. It confirms his original theory, corresponds exactly to his worldview: there are boogeymen out there, lurking in shadows, plotting attacks.

  If he gets killed, Isabel will never ever forgive him.

  “What about the money?” Alfredo says. He’s torn the beer label to bits. Little white pieces congregate on his T-shirt; the glue sticks to his fingers. “What about the five hundred I owe you? I’ve got an envelope.”

  “An envelope,” Baka says, smiling.

  “Yeah. I got your money in an envelope. Right over there. In one of them lockers. But listen, I’m not gonna give it to you unless you talk to this Shifrin guy. Okay? You gotta talk to this Shifrin guy, because if I get killed, how you gonna get your money, you see what I’m saying?”

  “Sunken costs,” Baka says. “I just won’t send flowers to your funeral.”

  “But the envelope,” Alfredo says.

  “What about it?” Baka says. “What am I gonna do with an envelope? My African pen pals don’t write back to me anymore. I pay all my bills online. The jerk-offs at the post office, they raise the price of stamps three fucking times a month. An envelope? Please, Fredo. That’s the last thing I need. Hey, Pierre, you don’t look so good. Too much bowling?”

  Pierre has wandered over. Having finished all forty frames, his arm hangs off his body as if wilted. He steals a big swallow of Baka’s strawberry milk, drinks straight from the glass. “What about the coke?” Tariq says.

  “Ah,” Baka says. “The coke.” He puts his arm around Tariq’s shoulders. “Forget about the insulting prices. Insulting prices can be negotiated. Forget about the fact that I think your business partner is going to be dead by Monday. I’m sorry. I’m not rooting for it, but come on, let’s be real. Forget that I don’t even think you have the three thousand dollars. Let me be real, my man. I ain’t getting you your coke because I think you’re going to be back in jail before I turn my fat ass around, and as a general rule I don’t sell drugs to gangsters on their way to jail. But hey, listen—thanks for thinking of me. It’s always nice to be considered. Now go to that big charitable drug dealer who can get you ounces at seven hundo, and go with my blessing, papi chulo. Thanks for coming down. Sorry you didn’t get to bowl. Pierre? Baby? Do me a favor and drive these assholes to Ravenswood.”