Dogfight, A Love Story

by Matt Burgess

  “What shitty weather, huh?” Winston says, looking out the front door. His breath leaves circles of fog on the glass. “Least it held off for the Mets game, I guess.”

  Alfredo takes the shoebox off the counter and brings it to Winston as fast as he can. He trades him, as they used to trade Marvel cards: the box for the beer can.

  “Wait here five minutes,” Alfredo says. “Then go across the street. Run across the street, actually.” Five minutes should give Mike Shifrin, if he’s even out there, enough time to check his phone, read a text message, cross the street, turn the corner, duck into the alley, and head toward the back of the candy store. Five minutes should be plenty of time. “Go over to that parked Impala,” Alfredo says, tapping a finger on the glass of the door. “There are three DTs inside. Tell them the dog’s here. Okay? And that they should make moves ASAP. Tell them to go around to the back of the store. The back of the store. You got it? Okay? Repeat all that back to me.”

  “There are three DTs across the street?” Winston says.

  “They’re here for my brother.”

  “Oh,” Winston says. For the first time he looks down at the box in his hands. “Wow. Okay. And you want me to give them this money?”

  Alfredo’s head sags. It is only by an extraordinary effort of will that he keeps it from falling off his neck and rolling, eyes open, down Max Marshmallow’s shiny linoleum floor.

  “I want you to wait here for five minutes,” Alfredo says. “Tell the police to come to the back of the store. The back. Then I want you to take that money and run home. Hide it under your bed.” He tries to smile. “Stash it next to your dirty DVDs.”

  “This is our friends’ money.”

  “What’s the matter?” His hand sinks into the soft dough of Winston’s shoulder. “You don’t trust me?”

  “I don’t want to get into trouble.”

  “Winston, you’ll be in trouble if you stay.”

  “That’s not what I mean.” He stares into the shoebox, frowning. “I can’t hold this down. You know what I mean? I’ll spend it all on drugs.”

  “You’re quitting tomorrow,” Alfredo says gently.

  “I’ll kill myself. I appreciate your faith in me. I really do. But you give me this money and I will die. Straight up. I’ll spend every cent. I’ll keep going till my heart bursts.”

  “All I need you to do is hold it down for twenty-four hours,” Alfredo says. He considers the last twenty-four hours, how much can change in so short a time. “If you haven’t heard from me by tomorrow, go over to my parents’ place. Give the whole box to Isabel.”

  Max calls out Alfredo’s name. He moves toward them through the dark, his voice terribly frayed, warbled at the edges.

  “Change of plans,” Alfredo whispers. He stands so close to Winston that the shoebox is pressed against both of their stomachs. “Tell the DTs the dog ain’t here yet. They need to wait five minutes. Understand what I mean? Go now and tell them. They wait five minutes and then they come around to the back.”

  That should still work. As long as the cops catch Shifrin in the yard, Alfredo should be okay. If Shifrin has a gun on him—and why wouldn’t he, if he’s the O.G. Baka claims?—then he’ll get collared on illegal possession of a firearm. Three and a half years, minimum. One problem solved. Then the cops go down into the basement and arrest everyone else, including Alfredo. Cost of doing business, as Baka might say. Everyone will spend a night, maybe two, in lockup, and then they’ll all be back on the street. Except Tariq, who will have violated his parole—I will not behave in such manner as to violate the provisions of any law to which I am subject, which provide for a penalty of imprisonment. Problem number two: solved. Of course there might be complications—Max might lose his store, Shifrin might open fire on the police, Alex and Bam-Bam might miss Curtis’s funeral, Jose Sr. might not get a Father’s Day present—but no plan is perfect. This is as good as Alfredo can do. By Monday night at the latest, he’ll be home with Isabel, kissing her ears, telling her, I got rid of him, I took care of it, I did it all for you. Plus they’ll have a nice $1,800 for the Christian Louis birthday fund.

  “Please don’t make me do this,” Winston says.

  “Hello?” Max cries out. “Alfredo?”

  “Coming!” Alfredo says. He takes off Winston’s cap and puts it on his own head. The Saturday night outfit he never expected to wear: stolen bowling shoes, yesterday’s jeans, silk teddy bear boxer shorts, no shirt, a Spider-Man cap that falls down to his eyes. “How do I look?” he asks.

  “You look stupid,” Winston says. He runs his hand through the alopecia quilt of his scalp, as he does whenever his head is exposed.

  “Imagine how stupid you look in this thing.”

  When Winston reaches for the hat, Alfredo pulls his head back.

  “I need it,” Winston says. “It’s raining.”

  “You’ll be running so fast, you can’t get wet.”

  “It’s my trademark,” he says.

  “I know, but not tonight, okay?” He turns Winston around so he faces the door. Across the street, there might be a man who wants to kill Winston as badly as he wants to kill Alfredo. In an ideal world, Alfredo gives this man his five minutes to go around to the back of the candy store. But with Max Marshmallow’s voice getting closer, coming up the aisle behind them, Alfredo does not have that kind of time. This is not an ideal world. This is this world, and in this world Alfredo pushes Winston out the door and into the street.

  “Run,” Alfredo whispers.

  Maybe Winston can’t hear him. He hugs the box to his chest. He pokes his head out from under the awning and looks both ways down the street. Toward Manhattan, toward Flushing. Alfredo punches the glass door with the side of his fist, and Winston takes off. Or at least tries to. He runs with the out-of-water coordination of a seal, the shoebox tucked under his jiggling fin. From high school, from P.E. classes, from relay races demarcated by orange cones, Alfredo knows what’s coming and already he feels a bodily unease. Winston runs into the street. With the rain coming down hard, he splashes through puddles, his head on a swivel. He looks discombobulated, as if he’s been dropped off in a foreign country hostile to his own. He snags his foot on an invisible tripwire, and his free arm shoots out for balance. Here we go. Tangled feet. Windmilling arms. Alfredo presses his face to the door, the glass cool against his forehead. He watches Winston crash into Marc Franschetta’s souped-up Camaro, parked three cars behind the DT’s Impala. The alarm goes off. The honk-honk-honk, oo-woo-oo-woo that Alfredo, and every other New Yorker, knows by heart. The Camaro’s blue headlights flash in rhythm to the alarm, the car a dance party all to itself. Alfredo can’t be sure about this—it’s hard to see—but it looks like the cops have slumped down in their seats, as if they were uncomfortable being on the other end of these lights and this siren. Despite his fall, Winston has held on to the box. But he looks terribly vulnerable out there, marooned in the middle of the street.

  “Alfredo!” Max calls out.

  Alfredo turns away from the door and meets Max halfway down the beer aisle, where forties and six-packs sit befogged in humming, buzzing refrigerators. The fridges are backlit, the beers individually glowing. It is the only light in the store—except for the red eye of the smoke detector—and both Max and Alfredo draw near it.

  “Let me hold on to the key,” Max says.

  “The key?”

  “The key,” Max says. In his agitation, he grabs hold of the closest thing—the refrigerator door handle—for support. “The little yellow register key on the counter. Next to the till.”

  “Right,” Alfredo says.

  “Well, let me get it.”

  Alfredo wants to press his face against this old man’s chest. Even with his shirt off, bare-chested, exposed, Alfredo feels comfortable in front of Max. He is a good twenty years older than Jose Sr., but in a different life, a life in which Alfredo was born Jewish and white in, say, 1962, then this old geezer could’ve been Alfredo’s father. Alfre
do’s name would be Saul, or something like that. He’d live in an alternate New York, where the Mets beat the Yankees in 2000, where Estes plunked Clemens, where the Twin Towers still stand, if not both then maybe one. As Alfredo nears the crisis of his life, he can’t help but think of these hypothetical worlds, existing somewhere in some corner of the universe. He never kicked Vladimir in the throat. Jose Sr. never sold the store. Alfredo never brought this trouble into Max’s basement.

  “If you leave now, you can say we broke in. You can say you never knew anything, you were never even here. I’ll back that up.”

  “You made a jerk out of me,” Max says, his mouth emptied out. Alfredo imagines he swallowed the last marshmallow, and it slid all gooey down his old turkey throat. “You made a jerk out of me in my own store.”

  “You wanted to play gangster,” Alfredo says softly.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You wanted to play gangster,” Alfredo says, the reservoir of his sympathy containing only so much. “You wanted to play gangster—this is what you get.”

  “I’ll call the police if I have to.”

  Alfredo puts the beer can in one of Max’s hands, the Spider-Man cap in the other. “I’d let you use my phone,” he says, stepping around him. “But the battery’s dead.”

  Misha Shifrin jogs toward the back of the bodega. He is smiling, pleased to have all this rain pouring out of the sky. Water splatters the pavement, drips off the brim of his hat. Black, straight-billed, the hat belongs to Vladimir, and Misha wears it tonight, as he did last night, for good luck. As he nears the fence-enclosed yard, he pulls on a pair of rubber gloves. He isn’t worried about leaving behind fingerprints—the rain will wash everything away—no, what Misha’s worried about is gunpowder particles staining his hands. The police can test for that kind of thing, and while there’s some debate as to whether or not it’s admissible, it is certainly incriminating. With the gloves snapped tight around his wrists, Misha hops over the fence. Lands in the yard with a muddy squish.

  The moon reveals only half its face. It hangs suspended at last quarter, and in its weak light the grass looks more yellow than green, dying if not already dead. Misha squats down in a corner of the yard, where a garden hose lies snaked between paint cans. There are no trees. No room for ball playing. A chipped ceramic pot has filled up with water. This is, he thinks, as good a place as any. From his corner of the yard, he watches the door, his grip tight on a Baby Glock 26.

  He squats there long enough for his calves to cramp and for his brown leather oxfords to sink into the mud. Five hundred dollars these shoes cost him. He put them on this morning without thinking, distracted by phone calls and emails and the Today show and the kettle screaming on the stovetop. When he shifts his weight, the ground sucks at his feet. He’ll have to incinerate the shoes when he gets home, along with the gloves. Unbelievable. Five hundred fucking dollars. He fishes a protein bar from his pants pocket, and, reluctant to loosen his grip on the gun, he opens the packaging with his teeth. A bit of wrapper comes loose in his mouth and he spits it into the grass. The protein bar smells like peanut butter and maple syrup and disappears in three bites. He smacks his lips. He is thirsty now but not at all tempted to open his mouth and let the rain fall onto his tongue. Too much acidic content. Particulates. Carcinogens. Toothy tumors eager to congregate on the underside of his lungs.

  With his free hand, he searches the grass in front of him. Looking for that tiny bit of wrapper. Stupid. He imagines police investigators finding it, looking up dental records, matching the marks on the wrapper to the teeth in his head. Not that he has any dental records in the States—but still, it isn’t worth the risk to leave the wrapper behind, just as it wasn’t worth the risk for that gorilla Baka to have sent him a text message. An electronic record of conspiracy. Stored forever in some AT&T supercomputer. Misha considers it his own fault for dealing with those kinds of people in the first place.

  Less than a block away, a car alarm goes off. Misha keeps his head down. Tries to make himself as small as possible. With that car alarm blaring, lights might turn on in the houses around him. Faces might come to windows. Someone—unlikely, but possible—might call the police. Misha takes his hand off the gun, tries to wipe his gloves dry against the front of his pants. He considers getting out of here right now, taking a cab to the Okeanos bathhouse in Midtown, trying again tomorrow—but there will always be car alarms, Misha, there will always be bad, sinking feelings, and as your deadbeat alky father used to say, Kto ne riskuyet tot ne pyot shampanskoe, or, poorly translated, Who doesn’t make risks doesn’t drink the champagne.

  The car alarm changes registers, the horn blaring now, ank-ank-ank-ank, growing louder, more insistent, and maybe that’s why Misha doesn’t hear the Spanish kid running up the alleyway until it’s almost too late.

  The kid vaults over the fence. Where Misha had landed on both feet, the kid slips. He falls hard to the ground. Mud splatters his cheap-looking Knicks jersey.

  Misha comes out of his crouch. He needs to get close. He’ll have one shot before neighbors reach for phones, and then he’ll have to take off running. He got lucky with the rain, but he can’t expect a peal of thunder to cover the gunshot. The kid is rubbing his hip where he fell. He looks surprised to see Misha coming toward him, just as Vlad must’ve looked surprised when this coward kicked him in the throat. Misha stands over him, close enough to read the name on his jersey—“Starks”—and now that he’s this close, he realizes that the kid is not a kid at all, but a grown man, which is surprising, sure, but it’ll make all of this easier. Misha raises his gun, ready to blow the jaw off this cocksucker’s face.

  Misha is shot through the chest. His mouth fills up with something warm and watery and without taste. He hears more gunshots. Maybe two. Maybe one plus its echo. He doesn’t remember firing. The gun is still in his hand, he thinks, but he can’t be sure because he can’t lift his head off the ground to check. His feet feel like wax. Rain strikes the rusted-over lids of paint cans, and it sounds like a wooden finger tapping on wood. Drenched, the hat constricts around his head. He wants to wiggle out from under it, but he can’t get anything to move. He wants to spit out whatever liquid is filling his mouth, but he can’t remember how.

  Earlier. Alfredo is walking down the stairs, having just given Max the Spider-Man hat and the beer can. He takes the steps one at a time, his hand on the wooden railing. The basement’s light swallows him up to his waist. He needs to delay this dogfight till the DTs show up, which—knuckles rapping on the railing—should just be a little bit longer. This is what he’ll do: he’ll tell the goons down in the basement that before the fight can begin, the dogs need to be wiped down with towels and water. To make sure their coats haven’t been covered in poisons. Procedure, he’ll say. Hey—that’s not bad. That should work. Alfredo is feeling good, feeling the intoxicating brew of manipulating all the players, but when he comes off the last step and enters the basement, his stomach lurches. Of course. How foolish of him. No one ever waits. No one’s ever patient. The show has started without him.

  Inside the ring, the older brothers—Alex Hughes, Tariq Batista—heat up their dogs. The soup cans have been collected and stacked neatly off to the side. Alex holds Diana by the scruff of her neck. She drags him toward the center line, that silver strip of duct tape, and if his sneakers squeak, it goes unheard, swallowed by the barking of the dogs, which is louder than ever. Too loud, Alfredo thinks. Noise trips up the stairs, up the ladder, slips through the cellar doors and runs down the sidewalk. The cops, if they have ears on their heads, will surely be able to hear the barking. And if not the barking, the cheering. Alfredo needs to stop this. He has a deal with the cops. More important: this is not part of his plan. But what can he do? His body won’t allow him to step into the ring—all collars and leashes have been removed—and there isn’t an inch of space in the crowd in front of him. Alfredo’s friends and half friends surround the ring, closing around it like a noose. He goes up on his tipt
oes to see his brother gripping the dog by the sleek engine of its neck. Tariq moves his lips quickly and purposefully, as if working some kind of enchantment. Sweat drips from his chin, and Alfredo, unthinkingly sympathetic, wipes at his own. Tariq kisses his dog on the top of his head, between the ears—and like an irritated teenager, the dog struggles to get away. They inch closer to the center line. The pit leans forward on powerful legs, lips peeled back from gums. On the other side of the line, Diana tries to bite at his face. The crowd constricts even tighter, which Alfredo didn’t think possible. As he takes a step forward, so do the dogs. Right up to the center line. Their noses almost touching. Alex and Tariq struggle to pull them apart and drag them into their respective corners. It is in this moment, with the magnetism between the animals at its strongest, that the handlers let go.

  Afterward, when thinking back on this night, everyone down here will remember the crack of initial contact. The way the dogs, both of them airborne, collided in the center of the ring. The way the bone of one dog’s skull smashed into the bone of the other dog’s skull.

  The pit bull’s head hangs at an awkward angle to the rest of his body. As if he wants to get a good look at his tail but can’t muster the energy. This isn’t fair, Alfredo wants to shout. He looks to his brother, who stands outside the ring, one foot on a box, arms folded in front of his chest. This is not fair! When the dogs collided in midair, the pit bull snapped something in his spine. Look at his neck. Look at how he can’t defend himself as Diana bites into his face. Blood slides down his freckled nose. Thick black drops drip onto Max’s floor. When Alfredo imagined this happening, he imagined the dogs barking and the crowd hushed, but it is the other way around. Everyone is screaming; the dogs are silent. Diana hoists her front legs over the pit bull’s head. He escapes the clinch, goes low, his body turned sideways, his ribs protruding, his head dragging across the floor. She goes high, tears a chunk from the tip of his ear. She bites his face again. His lower lip swings loose from his mouth. It looks chewed on. It looks like it’s been tied up with butcher string. Diana splits his nose. She mauls his face, which turns pink and red, with a little yellow between the eyes. When he limps away into a corner of the ring, toward Tariq, she follows. Without a yelp or a whimper, he sinks down onto his back. He shows her the white of his stomach, the animal kingdom’s universal signal of submission. She bends her face to his stomach and disembowels him.