by Matt Burgess
“Did something happen to Alfredo?”
Tariq would sigh if he had the energy. “At least ask it right,” he says. “Don’t ask if something happened to Alfredo. Ask if I happened to Alfredo. You see what I mean? Ask if he’s not here with you because of something I did to him.”
She’s crying now and it makes him want to slap her face. “Did you hurt him?” she says.
“Who?”
“Alfredo.”
“Try again. Do it right.”
“Did you hurt Alfredo?”
“No I did not. But thank you for asking me so directly.”
The dog follows Tariq into the bathroom. Not exactly his first choice—he’d rather have Isabel behind him, with a big fluffy towel wrapped around her body—but hey, whatever, it’s nice to have the company. The dog’s paws click on the tiles as he makes his way toward the toilet bowl. It sounds like a typewriter without paper, the keys striking an empty roll. He looks over at Tariq—what kind of rules are we dealing with here?—before plunging his face into the toilet and drinking its water. Tariq thinks he should probably yell at the dog, but the little beast is probably mad thirsty, and besides, Tariq’s got his own problems to manage. He stares at his cheek in the mirror. What a mess. With a wad of wetted toilet paper, he dabs at the little eggies of pus embedded around the gash. Maybe if Isabel doesn’t get too close, she won’t see anything … but that’s ridiculous and he knows it. Girl’s a first-class noticer, just like himself.
Blood dribbles out of his nose. It’s all this stress. He’s been bugging out over appearances, over money, over trying to set everything up perfectly, trying to make all the right moves, and it’s too much, he wants to scream, he wants to smash his face against the mirror. He grips the handles of the sink. Leaves little comets of blood all over the family’s face towel. Don’t worry, he tells himself. Calm down. So you got blood on the towel? So what? Mama does laundry on the regs and it’s not like you got hepatitis or HIV or some other junkyard shit. Right, doggy?
The dog doesn’t answer. Like a little explorer, he steps into the bathtub. His paws go click, clack. Click, clack.
Tariq walks out of the bathroom and into an apartment blazing with light. Every switch has been flipped, every lamp turned on. Bulbs shine in the kitchen and in the hallway and especially in the living room, where he finds Isabel haloed, scrutinizing a cordless phone. She’s stopped crying and it looks to him as if her face has taken on an erotic intensity.
“You sweet little innocent girl,” he says. He sits down next to her on the couch, takes her flaccid hand in his. As he stares at her fingers, he imagines a world without razor blades, a world where Isabel would surely be the hairiest woman alive. He used to hound her about it all the time, teasing her until she started shaving her legs every day and waxing her forearms and upper lip and privates. She’d even Bic her fingers, so that when he held her hand he’d feel between her knuckles a dark gunpowder of stubble. Now, however, that powder explodes out of the skin. It feels wonderfully soft under his thumb, and for the life of him he can’t understand why he ever asked her to shave.
“His phone’s going straight to voice mail,” she says. She won’t look at him. The rental magazines lie next to her on the sofa in a humiliatingly small pile. “If you know where he is—”
“He went to go see a girl,” Tariq says. “You happy now? That’s all I know.”
“Just tell me the truth. Please. I promise I won’t be mad at you.”
“Does this kind of thing happen a lot? Does he usually not come home until late at night?”
She pulls her hand away from him.
“Here’s my question,” Tariq says. “If he’s working all the time—look at me. If he’s working all the time, then where’s all the money? You know what I mean, Izzy? Where’s the money at? Why you two still living with my parents?”
“He has to take care of your father,” she says.
“Or does my father take care of you? Is he the babysitter? Does he stay up with you all night till your hardworking man comes home? Come on. This has to have occurred to you. If it was just the two of you in your own apartment, you’d be staying up all night by yourself. Without any distractions. And then maybe you’d get to wondering what that boyfriend of yours is up to. Maybe you’d open your eyes.”
The dog totters into the living room with his head slumped, as if he were ashamed to be interrupting them. And rightfully so! Tariq flies off the couch and backs the whimpering dog into the kitchen. While he’s up, he decides to turn off all these romance-murdering lights. It’s been a long time since he’s been able to do this. Because of him, because of his hand on a switch, Con Edison’s power meters are quivering. In control, reluctant to stop, he flips the switch in the kitchen on and off. Up on the ceiling, his mother’s decorative light covering, an insect crematorium, glows and then darkens.
On his way out of the kitchen he turns off the hallway light and then all the lamps in the living room so that only the television’s bluey glow remains. While he was gone, Isabel maxed out the volume and changed the channel to a sports highlight show, a program she apparently thought might interest him. He turns it off.
“What happened to Winston?” he asks. He’s whispering; under this burden of darkness he feels chastised into lowering his voice. “Did he go home?”
“Yes.”
“Did you ask him to stick around? Were you worried I might come home alone?”
“What do you want me to say?”
“Why didn’t you go somewhere? You gotta have someplace you could’ve gone. The movie theater, maybe? See? I remember. You could’ve gone to the movie theater, but you know what I think? I think maybe you wanted to be here when I came home. Maybe you knew I’d be showing up all by my lonesome.”
“No,” she says. “I never thought you’d be alone.”
“Well, guess what?”
He kneels down on the carpet in front of her. She lifts her chin, stares into the empty space above his head. She can’t see, he realizes. She can’t see a thing and maybe she thinks he can’t either, but he can, he can, his eyes have been institutionally adjusted to the dark. He sees everything: the outline of her jaw, the bulge of her stomach, her thighs pressed together, her hands bunching the fabric of her sweatpants. Her breath thickens as he peels off her socks. Innocent girl. She smells like the soil that anchors a potted plant. He grabs her sweatpants by the waist, and because she’s still holding on, bunching the fabric, when he pulls them off, her body comes toward him. Her face hovers above his. Her legs feel cold and rough. His hands find the lanyards of brutalized skin, where the kitchen knife tore up her calves. You see? There are no secrets. His hands creep up, toward her thighs. Bruises dapple the skin. So fast, as always. Back in the day, he’d pull off her pants in the backseat of his van and he’d see his blue thumbprints all over her body and he’d be amazed, proud of his passion, that this was something he did just by squeezing and grabbing and pinching.
When he pulls down her white cotton panties, he finds underneath them another pair of white cotton panties. Isabel, he thinks. You are an odd bird. He pulls down the second pair, halfway expecting a third, but instead he uncovers the rich dark thicket of her pubic hair. No shaving here, it seems. But that’s fine with him. That’s even better. He leaves both pairs of panties tangled around her knees. He drinks the air coming out of her mouth.
She goes limp on the couch. Her bones have turned to soup and in order to reanimate her, to bring her back into her body, Tariq sticks her hand down the front of his pants. She screams. Her neck tightens as she calls out for help, bellows the name of his mother. Lizette! Lizette! He covers her mouth with his hand. He wants to tell her that Love will deliver her this instant from herself, and he wishes she’d understand that he is Love, her custodian and witness, sending his soul forward in order to save her from all of this, from his brother, from his parents, from this apartment strung with parrots and given to wickedness, from a life of mediocrity, bewilderment
, the fire that is closed in, the spider’s flimsiest of houses, the crack of doom, the stone-hurling wind. She bites the fleshy web of his palm, but he can always push down harder. The wings of her nostrils expand. A violent trembling swims to the surface of her face.
Outside the window, cars wash by, their headlights bleaching the walls. Tariq lifts his hand and Isabel calls out for Lizette. And so it’s here we go again. One more time. His hand reclamped on her mouth.
He tells her to unbutton his jeans. He wishes he had a belt she could unbuckle, just to delay delay delay, but that’s life. Fishkill didn’t give him a belt, and besides, he’s running out of time. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out the beeper. He tries to slide off its plastic top, but he can’t manage it with only one free hand. For leverage, he pins the beeper under his chin and yanks on it. But it won’t budge. He tries using his teeth, which doesn’t work either. Isabel’s fingers hang limp at his waist. He bangs the beeper against the carpeted floor, and then against the sofa’s metal leg. He’s banging and banging, a steel driver swinging his hammer, and a loud crash comes out of the kitchen—it sounds like pots getting thrown to the floor—and Tariq wonders if he’s made this happen, if his banging in the living room created this unseen clattering in the kitchen.
The beeper cracks open. Little round pills spill across the carpet. He picks one up and wants Isabel to swallow it, but that requires taking his hand off her mouth, which gives her another opportunity to cry for help, but he tells her that if she does, he’s going to drag her naked out of this apartment and throw her down four fucking flights of stairs.
Eyes narrowed, her face takes on a desperate, animalistic craving. He slips the pill between her lips, but she spits it back out at him. Her nails dig into his neck. Bewildered, waiting for Love to deliver him this instant from himself, he hits her in the mouth. Blood seeps between her teeth, fills the fold of her fat lower lip. This too she spits out. She sprays her blood all over the crotch of his jeans.
He rips open the front of her shirt, something he never wanted to do. Her breasts hang out, heavy and dark-nippled. Faint blue veins striate the skin. Below these breasts bulges a monstrous stomach, its button popped out like the knob to a door. And for the child behind this door, floating upside down in foul, contaminated juices, the Book says:
He is fully knowledgeable of you as He produced you from the earth, and since you were a foetus in your mother’s womb. So do not assert your goodness.
Tariq pushes down on her stomach. He has the sense that someone is watching him, but of course someone is watching him. Someone is always watching. He’s crying. He can’t believe it. Sobs clog his airway. He chews on the collar of his shirt. He gives up. He hates everything. Okay? He hates everything.
“You don’t want to hurt me here,” she says, trying to push his hands off her stomach. Tears leak out of her eyes, as if she just walked into a howling February wind. But her voice is steady. “Do you understand? You don’t want to hurt me here.”
He pushes down harder on her stomach. If he tried to penetrate her now, with this wilted dick of his, the head and shaft would double back on itself and flop down uselessly between his legs.
“You don’t want to hurt him,” she says. She whispers this, hisses it into his ear with the spirit of dizziness. “You want to hurt me. You want to hit my face. Do you understand? You want to make me as ugly as you are.”
“Stop it.”
“You’re a faggot,” she says. “You hear me? You’re a pathetic faggot. Look at you. Look at how ugly you are. Who cut your cheek open? Your boyfriend? Your boyfriend cut your cheek open, you little fag?”
It takes three blows in the exact same spot—the bulging cheekbone, just below her right eye—before she cries out in pain. He backs away, trips over the air mattress. Something stirs inside of him. He takes a handful of pills off the carpet and gnashes them between his teeth. He watches her breathe.
She doesn’t call out for help, but Jose does. Behind his closed door, spread out on the bed, or maybe crawling across the floor, burning his elbows on the carpet, Jose screams out the name of his wife.
He hurries to the bathroom—the apartment’s smallest, calmest place—and on his way there, passing through the kitchen, he finds the trash can turned over. The black garbage bag has been ripped open, its contents spilled out across the floor. The dog gnaws on a chicken carcass. Tariq tries to pet him, but he moves away angrily. Too busy, too hungry. As the dog rips meat from bone, the carcass’s jellied husk slides across the tiles.
The bathroom smells terrible. Tariq thinks that it’s him, something foul and terrible oozing out of his body, but when he pulls back the shower curtain, he sees that the dog took a shit in the tub. One more mess to clean up. He pumps liquid hand soap on the pile of shit. While the bath runs, he sits on the edge of the tub and listens to the water rushing out of the faucet. He reads the label on the hand soap. Lavender Blossom. Delicately scented. List of ingredients. Directions for use. When he finishes reading the label, he starts over and reads it again.
When he gets out of the bathroom, he sees his mother standing at the kitchen counter. Keeping her back to him, she drops frozen sofrito cubes into a small pink hand towel. Down by her feet, the dog chews on a chicken bone in the midst of an entire day’s worth of garbage: yellow grains of rice, batteries, a shampoo bottle, cucumber peels, coffee grounds, a water-damaged issue of Entertainment Weekly, a moldy tomato, bread crusts, crumpled Lotto tickets, sections of the Post, a dented can of Goya beans, a near-full package of Oreo cookies. A brown liquid oozes out of the garbage bag and streams across the linoleum.
“I’m sorry, Mama. I’ll fix this.”
She twists off the top of the hand towel. With its belly sagged down with cubes, it looks like a pink Chinese dumpling. She carries it into what is now considered her room, where Isabel lies on the bottom bunk, her hair on the pillow, her face turned to the wall. She doesn’t roll over when Lizette hands her the towel. Lizette whispers something in Spanish—something Tariq can’t quite hear—and pulls the covers over Isabel’s shoulders.
When his mother comes back out into the hallway, she seems to have trouble looking at him. She squints. Her sleep mask hangs from a ribbon around her neck. He wants to tell her, again, that he’s sorry. He wants to ask her about mops and brooms and vacuums and paper towels and spray bottles of disinfectant.
“The dog’s gonna choke on that bone,” she says. “It’ll shatter and get stuck in his throat.”
She goes back into her room, closing the door behind her. Somewhere in this world there is a factory, Tariq thinks, and this factory only makes doors designed to be slammed in his face. The phone is ringing.
An hour later. Maybe more. The phone is ringing. His brother. He tells Tariq to come down to Papi’s old store right away. Use the alleyways, he says. Come in through the bodega’s back door. He speaks rudely, which is just like him. Unappreciative of the danger he’s in. Tariq hangs up.
The phone is ringing. It rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings. He snaps off the antenna. He pulls the cord from the wall.
12
Dogfight
Alfredo runs upstairs into the candy store, cops three cigars, runs back down into the basement, and, with a nervous grin, distributes those cigars, as if this were a dress rehearsal
for Christian Louis’s world premiere. Here. Take one. Take one. The cigars—cheap, thin, black—are called Dutch Masters and they should only cost $1.25, maybe $1.50, but Max, who’s in an incredibly pissy mood tonight, has been selling them for two fucking dollars apiece. And Alfredo’s been buying them anyway. What else is he gonna do? Dutch Masters come with an extra layer of skin, a tobacco leaf rolled around the stogie, which makes them harder to roll, which makes them the preferred apparatus of the weed-smoking connoisseurs down in this basement. He hands the cigars to K-Lo, Jossie, and Timmy P., the three nimble-fingered experts. Each one sticks the entire Dutch in his mouth and coats it with saliva, gets that tobacco dermis moist and removable. If Dutch Masters came with balls, these dudes would be fondling them, but no one makes that easy comparison, or at least no one says it out loud, because these dudes—like the Rembrandts and Vermeers from whom the cigar gets its name—are artistes. (Fancy-pants pronunciation preferred.) Besides, there ain’t no reason to be thinking dirty thoughts. No reason to get all negative. There’s weed to be smoked! Each expert peels off his tobacco leaf and hands it to somebody else—Marc Franschetta, Jeff Hernandez, Billy Fitzgerald—apprentices who cup the leaf in their hands and breathe on it heavily, keeping it soft and pliable for the rewrap. Next up: splitting the stogies’ spines. Penknives work nicely here, as do the tips of scissors, but K-Lo, Jossie, and Timmy P. all use their extra-long pinky nails. Tobacco guts get dumped onto the floor, which, Alfredo thinks, Max ain’t gonna appreciate. Weed is broken up. Stems and seeds removed. Each expert stuffs their Dutch full of herb, rolls it tight, and—yo, let me get that skin back—wraps it back up. Now here’s the hard part. K-Lo, Jossie, and Timmy P. start saying, No, no, no, no and Hold up, hold up because the men down here—Rick Sprinkle who sells perfume knockoffs on the street, Paulie Guns who sells heroin, Sean Lau who escorts escorts, Virgin Light whose real name no one remembers, Rhino who’s recently come into some opium, Forest Hills David, Soft-Core Jonas, Lee who came all the way out here from Staten Island, Winston, Alex Hughes, Bam-Bam Hughes, the ghost of Curtis Hughes, even the apprentices Marc, Jeff, and Billy—all converge on the Dutch Masters. But the Dutches ain’t ready. Still moist, if prematurely smoked, they would droop like wet noodles. Back up, people. Back up. Everybody’s gonna have to be patient, an attribute—a virtue, if you ask Alfredo—that’s been in short supply thus far.