Dogfight, A Love Story

by Matt Burgess

  Tariq turns away from the ring, his face drained of color. He holds the leash in his hands and he’s fidgeting with it, wrapping it around one palm and then the other, snapping it tight. His lips are moving. He staggers backward, and Alfredo races toward him. He doesn’t know what’s happening, but his brother is coming apart in a way Alfredo’s never seen before. It seems as if he’s stopped breathing, and Alfredo needs to get to him, needs to blow air into his mouth. All bodily instinct, he pushes his way through the crowd, throws his elbows when necessary. Tariq jumps when Alfredo grabs hold of his shoulders. His vacant, dilated eyes stare into Alfredo’s face as if he no longer recognizes him.

  “This is twisted,” Tariq says. “This is all upside down.”

  Alfredo can barely hear him. The noise has exploded: Diana, victorious, crows inside the ring, while everyone else is pulsing, calling for a mop, a garbage bag, a bucket of soapy water, anything, anything at all to clean up this mess. Tariq’s eyelids are fluttering. His knees dip, and Alfredo needs to hold him upright. Tariq is shaking his head, moving his lips, but Alfredo can’t hear him. He grabs Tariq by the hand and pulls him through the crowd, toward the stairs, where it is quieter, and while at first Tariq resists, dragging his feet, soon Alfredo is not pulling his brother but getting pushed. Tariq puts his head down and forces Alfredo against the wall.

  Tariq grabs him by the waist. He squeezes hard, leaves purple finger bruises on the skin. Alfredo wants to tell him to stop, you’re hurting me, but he’s not sure he’d be heard. Tariq whimpers. His head snaps forward, smashes into Alfredo’s chin—an accident maybe, but Alfredo’s teeth click together so hard his ears pop. Tariq squeezes Alfredo’s arms, prods at his torso, and it occurs to Alfredo that his brother’s roving hands might be looking for an opening—something like an appendix scar—that he can split open and crawl into. He wants rights of possession, Alfredo thinks. He wants to take up residence. He wants to inhabit a body that never went to prison, never got cut up, never lost a girlfriend or a dog, a body without cause for grief.

  “You win,” Tariq says. His hands drop down to his sides. “Okay? You win. I give up. I’m crashing. You understand?”

  No, Alfredo does not. He does not understand. He tries to push his brother away, but he can’t extend his arms. Tariq’s in too close. He smells like Barbasol and Irish Spring. He hooks his chin over Alfredo’s shoulder, his bald head smooth and cool against Alfredo’s cheek. And there it is: the indent on the back of his brother’s neck. It opens up right in front of Alfredo, that soft pocket he’s always been tempted to fill. Maybe—who knows?—Alfredo has one too. How could he be sure he doesn’t? It’d be on the back of his neck, which he can’t see on his own, and he never thought to ask anyone else to look out for it. It could be a thing he carries with him all the time, a thing Isabel’s noticed but never mentioned.

  “The police are coming,” Alfredo whispers. He is unsure if what he’s doing is right, but he cannot help himself. He clinches his arms behind his brother’s back. “Go home, okay? Go upstairs into the store and leave out the front door. You’ll be safe, you understand? But you gotta go now. You gotta get out of here.”

  Blood trickles from Tariq’s nose. It is bright red, impressively so. Either he snorted some of that X, or he’s getting one of the stress-induced nosebleeds he was prone to as a child. Alfredo tries wiping at the blood with his thumb, but he ends up just smearing it across Tariq’s upper lip.

  “Pinch your nose,” Alfredo says. “Tilt your head back.” He wipes his bloody thumb off on Tariq’s shirt, before remembering that it’s actually his shirt. “Aw, shit.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Tilt your head back.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “It’s okay. Tilt your head back. You’re bleeding.”

  “No,” Tariq says. “That isn’t my blood.” He takes a step back and spreads his hands over the front of his jeans, where the denim looks discolored, almost rusted. “You’re an excellent noticer, but no, that’s not my blood. That’s Isabel’s.”

  “Jose,” Alfredo says softly.

  “She spit onto my crotch. It’s her blood. It isn’t mine. It isn’t mine at all.”

  Alfredo takes Tariq’s shirt in his fists. He tries to push him, but Tariq has him pinned against the wall.

  “And it’s dark down here,” he says. “And you still noticed. That’s real impressive, Dito.”

  “Is she alive?” It is the most miserable question he’s ever asked. He bites down on the insides of his cheeks, but it doesn’t work. He has burst into tears. He is afraid to breathe, afraid that if he opens his mouth any wider he will crack the world in two. “Jose? Is she alive?”

  “She’s at home,” he says. “In bed. With Mama, believe it or not.”

  “And are they alive?”

  “You think I’d kill my own mother?” he says. When Alfredo doesn’t answer, Tariq’s shoulders start trembling. He giggles. His eyes are bright and shining, his mood swinging toward elation. Alfredo understands that this shift in mood has nothing to do with the pills his brother swallowed. It is the violence brewing in his chest. “I don’t blame you,” Tariq says.

  People are looking at them now, if they haven’t been already.

  “It’s a disgusting thought,” Tariq says with a smile. “But I don’t blame you for thinking it. I hurt everything I love, right? I love Allah, I hurt Him. Took all those pills, that loathsome evil. I love Isabel, and then—”

  A strangled, desperate moan sweeps through Alfredo’s body. Backed up against the wall, he starts quivering. He hates himself. He needs to get away, run home through the streets. Tears drip off his glasses.

  “Stop that,” Tariq warns. “Stop crying right now.”

  Alfredo nods. He tries holding his breath. If he had a shirt on, he could dry his face. Instead, he bites into his cheeks again, harder this time.

  “I loved that dog,” Tariq says. He inches closer, so that there’s no space between them. “I loved that dog and now look at it. Look at this disaster.” He shakes his head, amused. “It’s like you’re the only one I haven’t hurt. What’s that supposed to mean? You’re so fucking smart—you tell me. What’s it mean? Because I don’t know. I can’t understand it, Dito.” He shoves a finger in Alfredo’s face. “You’re the one who broke the rules.”

  The blood above Tariq’s lip has hardened into a brown crusty streak. His breathing deepens. He is smiling, panting, and for Alfredo the potential advantages of being backed up against this wall—it’d protect his kidneys, keep him up on his feet—have all been obliterated. He needs to get away. But there’s no room for Alfredo to make a run for it, just as there’s no room for him to rear back and deliver a blow. An elbow to the chin might work, if Alfredo could get enough strength behind it. Or he could use his keys. That might work. He could take one of his keys and have it jutting out of his fist. But he can’t imagine himself doing it, not properly, not for real. He feels too weak. Blood surges to his temples.

  “Isabel broke the rules, too,” Tariq says. “But I had always been prepared to forgive her. That was the plan. The straight path. Isabel I had never intended to punish.”

  Alfredo sinks his fingers into the warm festering wound on his brother’s cheek. He hits bone, hits nerves. Tariq’s eyes widen in surprise. Lurching away, he screams. Loud enough to silence the dog in the corner. One long sustained head-clearing bell clap. He is bent over, one hand on his cheek, the other punching his thigh. When he turns back to the wall, Alfredo is gone.

  The haze has thickened. By now every one of Alfredo’s friends has turned away from the ring, away from the pit bull with its bowels coiled and steaming on the floor. They clot the center of the basement, these men. A dark mass of bodies, they seem to be standing one on top of the other, up to the ceiling and all of them shouting.

  Alfredo runs toward them, hoping to disappear. He bangs off one body and into another: a pile of flesh, heavily cologned. Baka. Has to be. Alfredo wants
to ask him if he has that .38 on him, tucked into his waistband, but there isn’t any time. He hears his brother coming behind him. Of course. They’re working on Tariq’s terms now. This is what he has always wanted: a fight. Alfredo reaches into his pockets for his keys, a weapon, pulling out loose change, dimes and nickels, a cell phone that goes skittering across the floor. His brother. His brother has the keys. Alfredo runs toward the pyramid of soup cans stacked neatly to the side of the ring. He grabs one off the top. It fits perfectly, as if made for his hand. When he turns around, he sees his brother sprinting toward him, his powerful arms swinging, his face dark and distorted.

  The thing to do is wait. If Alfredo throws the can, he’ll miss. He knows that. Impressive velocity, unfortunate aim. The thing to do is wait till Tariq gets close enough and then drive the can down into his face. Open up his forehead. Let the blood run into his eyes. But what Alfredo really wants to do, given the events of the last twenty-four hours, given that he was the one who failed Isabel, failed her a thousand times over, failed to not only protect her, his one responsibility in life, but actually facilitated her abuse, dropped Tariq off at home, on the doorstep, instead of at Budd’s Bar or Gianni’s Pizzeria or BQE Billiards or any one of the dozens of strip clubs on Queens Boulevard, volunteered his keys, neglected to call the house and warn her, left her exposed, shattered the life they imagined for themselves during round after round of late-night I Wish … because now nothing can ever be the same, not with this horrible thing between them, her mouth filling up with blood, his brother’s hands, Christian Louis cowering in the womb … given all that, what Alfredo really wants to do is take this can and smash himself in the face. His arms are shaking. He feels helpless and dizzy, drowning as always under a collision of self-berating thoughts and images and fantasies and reveries, and he needs to stop thinking, yes yes yes, he needs to stop thinking and listen to his body because while Alfredo wants to hurt his brother and hurt himself, all his body wants to do is go home. That’s all. Isabel is spitting up blood and Alfredo’s body wants to hold a cool glass of water to her lips.

  He runs. Turns his back to his brother and runs, a body in motion, in flight. Wind fills his ears. It comes up from nothing, this wind, comes leaping out of the smoke and stale air of the basement. The faster he runs, the louder it howls. He turns toward the mouth of the stairs. Gripping the soup can tightly—it’s part of his body now, no time to throw it away—he bounds up the steps three at a time. His brother comes storming behind him. It’s Tariq who’s howling, not the wind. He sounds close. Sounds exhilarated. Their feet pound the planks of the stairway, Tariq in sneakers, Alfredo in these horrible tractionless bowling shoes.

  Three steps from the top, he trips. He braces his fall with his arms out in front of him and the soup can explodes on impact, sprays chicken broth, a mini geyser, into his face. It goes up his nose, into his mouth. His jeans rip open at the knees.

  The men down in the basement cry out. Alfredo has fallen and his friends raise a collective groan—Oh!—their voices wincing with sympathy. But that’s all they’ll do. Facedown on the stairs, Alfredo knows there ain’t nobody coming to save him. The cries of the men down in the basement are shot through with pleasure. These men are spectators, not participants, and they have been waiting a long time for this reckoning.

  Tariq grabs Alfredo by the ankles and yanks him down the stairs. No place to go, no one to save him. Steps dig into Alfredo’s cheek, his ribs, the plastic temple of his eyeglasses. Tariq is humming. His hands radiate heat as they rub circles on Alfredo’s back, on the hunt for just the right spot. He punches Alfredo hard in the kidney. Stay quiet, stay still. An acknowledgment of pain will only frenzy Tariq, and besides, Alfredo’s afraid that if he opens his mouth to cry out, his brother will try to curb him: force him to bite down on a step before kicking in the back of his head. Tariq’s breath smells sweet, like chocolate. He hits Alfredo again in the kidney, scoops the air from his chest. Again Alfredo doesn’t cry out. He focuses on a cross-grained knot of wood in the step above him. When he’s hit a third time, his bladder fills up with blood, he feels a sticky warmth in his crotch, feels all the cords of his neck tightening, but he does not cry out. Tariq’s humming grows louder, darker. He grabs hold of Alfredo’s hair, hoists him up by the waist of his jeans, and this is the chance. Alfredo kicks out behind him, hits—what? The step underneath him? His brother’s knee? He doesn’t know. He kicks out and hits something hard and pushes off of it. Tariq’s hands claw at his back, at the twin nubs of his shoulder blades, but there’s no shirt to grab on to, and Alfredo rises up to his feet, up all the stairs, and he is a body again and he accelerates and he runs runs and oh Alfredo oh Alfredo, you sick bastard, you have gotten away.

  Light-headed, giddy with panic, he looks over his shoulder and smiles.

  Up in the store now, he flies down an aisle full of cleaning supplies, the shelves deep with detergent, disinfectants, bottles of bleach, three-packs of sponges. It’s dark. Alfredo’s shoes slap linoleum—level ground at last, a relief after the trip up the stairs. The men down in the basement can surely hear him rumbling above their heads, but they may as well not exist, there’s no sense thinking about them, there’s no sense thinking at all. How natural this feels! Running through a darkened store he’s known his whole life, his brother behind him. Alfredo craves to turn around again and look over his shoulder, but the heat on his neck tells him he shouldn’t.

  At the end of this aisle, he will have a choice of two exits. Two different ways out of here. He can either keep going straight, to an employees-only door—which will take him through Max’s railroad apartment, to a screen door in the back, to the tiny yard enclosed by a waist-high fence, which Alfredo will have to leap over just to get into an alleyway—or he can make an easy left out of this aisle and head toward the entrance at the front of the bodega. It’s no choice at all. The front doors will take him to the street. Three blocks from home. Closer to Isabel.

  Alfredo plants a hard foot to the right and turns left. Tariq’s momentum carries him forward. Bigger, stronger, he has a harder time slowing down. His body caroms off the beer fridge, spiders the glass. Alfredo considers waving good-bye, a little finger flutter off his hip, but it’d slow him down, the last thing he wants. Gotta get home. Out of the aisle and into a clearing, he dashes toward the front doors. This is it. If he makes it to the street, he’ll be gone. Impossible to catch. He’ll have backyards, the Alleyway, gypsy cabs, the Q32 bus. At intersections, he’ll have his choice of four different directions. And he’ll never get tired. Even with his kidney burning, he’ll fly all the way home.

  Bells jingle as the door opens up. Alfredo is still a few feet away and for a crazy half second he wonders if he’s done this with his mind. Maybe he’s so in tune with his body, he can manipulate the external world, telepathically swing open doors. No. Two men enter the store on a run, come barreling toward Alfredo and Tariq. With one man right behind the other, they even look like Alfredo and Tariq, except white and taller, with sports jerseys on, blue Mets and black Mets, Piazza and Piazza. The heavier of the two men, the one in the blue jersey, doesn’t seem to understand what’s happening yet. He runs behind his partner, as Tariq runs behind Alfredo, and realization reaches these stragglers on a delay. But the skinny white cop sees Alfredo at the same time as Alfredo sees him. Right away. His face tightens. His arm swings up to point a gun at Alfredo’s chest. “Hold it!” he shouts. “Stop right there!”

  Both cops are still far enough away that they might not recognize Alfredo as the kid from the donut shop. From across the darkened store, he wants to tell them not to worry, that they’re on the same side. But of course they are not on the same side. Alfredo doesn’t slow down. He runs right at the skinnier of the two cops, the one whose face is a gun barrel only. A toothless mouth. Alfredo goes low as he turns around, uses his hand on the floor to pivot. Three fingers streaking through dirt, as if he were caught on the base paths, between second and third. If the cops are far
enough away that they might not recognize him, then they’re far enough away that they might miss. And it’s not like they can shoot a suspect in the back, right? As he turns, Tariq wraps an arm around his waist, but Alfredo is too slippery, too fast and too free. He runs away from the cops and away from his brother, toward the employees-only door waiting for him behind the counter. Both policemen now, two voices, shouting, warning. Hold it right there! Stop right there! He runs past the deli case with its tubes of meat. Leaps over a stack of today’s papers, tied up in twine, their mastheads removed. He is afraid. He can’t swallow. He tastes the broth on his tongue. The section of the counter in front of him works on a hinge, lifts up for easy access. Alfredo slides under it. The doorknob turns nicely in his hand.

  When Alfredo accelerates, to tear through Max’s railroad apartment, he loses track of the cops. He can’t hear them anymore. The may be too slow, way behind, or they may have decided not to chase him, choosing instead to go down the stairs into the basement. But Alfredo can hear his brother. Tariq is panting, close behind. The apartment they sprint through is as narrow as a subway car, and dark too, darker than the inside of the store. Both men know where they’re going. They’ve been here before. It is any summer night in the late 1980s and Papi stands behind the counter in the store selling Lotto tickets and Mama pan-fries pork chops in the kitchen and because of some mischief—a water gun filled with urine, a mix-tape deribboned—Jose Jr. chases Alfredito under the plush wings of parrots, through a hallway, into the living room, and now the boys are everywhere at once, it is 1987, it is 1988, it is 1989, and the two dark-haired brothers are running, are asleep on the sofa bed, are playing War on the carpet, are eating single-sliced cheese straight out of the cellophane, are sitting in front of the television plastering He-Man stickers all over its screen. Alfredo wants to warn them—when Papi sees this he’s gonna bring the belt to your asses—but the children have already started to shimmer and fade.