Dogfight, A Love Story

by Matt Burgess

  “Be right back,” Alfredo says, but Isabel’s heard that shit before.

  At first Alfredo thought it might only be his block that lost power—wouldn’t that be just his luck?—but as he walks through Corona he sees one defunct traffic light after another. The one-family homes are dark. The three-family homes are dark. The churrascarias, the botánicas, the farmacias, the eyebrow threaders, the pizza parlors, the liquor stores, the auto body shops, the Seoul Glass Emporium—they’ve all gone dark. In every storefront window, neon signs have turned gray, veins without blood. The whole neighborhood’s been knocked out. Who knows? Maybe the whole borough. Alfredo feels surrounded not by buildings but by the molted skin of buildings. Queens, for the first time in his life, looks exhausted.

  He stops at the corner of Northern and Junction boulevards. His arms are tired. His boxers stick to his thighs. It is here, at this intersection, that his new home, Corona, becomes his old home, Jackson Heights. Out in the street, halfway between those two worlds, a silver-haired black guy directs traffic. He wears an ill-fitting marine uniform and blows on a cheap plastic whistle. Instead of a baton, he wields an empty water bottle, and yet the cars respond, braking when he tells them to brake, speeding up when he lets them. He blows his whistle at Alfredo, invites him across the street.

  Without any red lights, Alfredo could drive for miles and miles, his foot on the gas the entire time. He could drive clean out of New York and into a new life in a new state, a state with electricity. Not that he has a car. Or even knows how to drive.

  As he crosses the street, he gets close enough to the ex-marine to see the gravy spotting his sleeve. He asks the guy what’s going on—What’s the story?—and the guy’s answer is simple.

  “End of the world.”

  Alfredo walks into Jackson Heights. The people he passes—the dog walkers, the butchers outside their shops, the Dominican dudes on milk crates—they all smile and nod, as if to say, Here we go again. For a little under two years, they’ve been waiting for something like this. And now that it’s here, in the form of a blackout, snipping their reading lamps, cutting off their telenovelas and subway lines, New Yorkers resort to one of their oldest fail-safes: aggressive indifference. A shrug of the shoulders. A smile and a nod. When the apocalypse arrives, when a door opens in the sky and God’s throne appears sparkling like jasper, and the seven angels blow seven trumpets, and fire devours the armies of Satan, the good people of New York will stick their heads out their windows and say, Eh.

  “You better drink plenty of water,” an old white lady tells him. She’s coming out of the supermarket, pushing her own cart, smelling strongly of vinegar. She wraps her dry hand around his wrist. “This kind of heat?” she says, shaking her head sadly. “You better stay hydrated.”

  “Do you know what’s going on?” he asks.

  “What’s going on?” she says.

  “No, I’m asking. What’s going on? What happened to the power?”

  “I haven’t got the foggiest,” she says. She jerks her head behind her, toward Manhattan. “But I know it’s out. Everywhere. Even in the City. And you better drink plenty of water.”

  “I will,” Alfredo says. “I promise.” He loves this old lady a little bit, wants to escort her home, make sure she gets there in one piece, but he knows if he offered, he’d just end up spooking her. He keeps walking. He thinks of that poor bastard Brian Schwartz, the college boy whose shift started when Alfredo’s ended. If that old lady is right, if the power went out in Manhattan, then Brian’s probably stuck in the elevator, his hands pressed to the walls. Man oh man, like being buried alive.

  Alfredo misses his brother. It sneaks up on him sometimes, all the time, Brian Schwartz in an elevator, Jose Batista Jr., in the Cavalry Cemetery, and the grief of it, the weight of it, sits on Alfredo’s chest like a brick. He can’t stop it from coming. Despite everything, Alfredo misses his brother and he does not know what kind of man that makes him.

  But, strangely, the farther he walks into his old neighborhood, their old neighborhood, the less he thinks about it. He knows of course that thinking about not thinking about it is a kind of thinking about it, but Jackson Heights, even blacked out, hums with distractions.

  Up ahead, a mob of purple-shirted day campers encircle a fire hydrant. It is the most tempting hydrant for miles around. Without any arms, without even the thalidomide stumps of your average fireplug, the hydrant looks particularly defenseless, naked almost, and yet it is kept safe, perpetually closed, unfairly benefiting from the Mafioso-like protection of a red-bricked firehouse one block away. The children’s shirts are soaked through from some earlier, easier escapade. Their hair is wet, their sneakers squishy. One of the boys crouches down in front of the hydrant and fondles its lone breast. If he has a wrench, Alfredo can’t see it. But maybe kids these days don’t need the brute instruments of Alfredo’s youth. Maybe this kid has charm, maybe he can sweet-talk the water out of the pump. The boy is watched, but everyone on this block, on all these blocks, is watched. Behind him, in sidewalk beach chairs outside a travel agency, dark-skinned men mumble words of encouragement. It feels good, Alfredo thinks, to be back in Jackson Heights. Purple, shiny, huddled close together, the children look like a cluster of grapes, and rather than puncture their group, Alfredo steps into the street and goes around. In a parked car, with the windows rolled up, an Indian family of four shares a bucket of fried chicken. You won’t see that in Corona. Things seem more alive here, more colorful. Although that might not be fair. It’s possible that Alfredo, in his new neighborhood, hasn’t been looking hard enough. He hasn’t been to the Lemon Ice King of Corona, for instance, hasn’t even gone to Flushing Meadows Park to check out the Unisphere. But are the pigeons’ eyes in Corona this red? Does the Corona air smell of baked bread, of melted cheese?

  Alfredo finds himself, midreverie, on a problematic stretch of sidewalk. Set halfway down this row of stores, like a decaying tooth, lurks Gianni’s Pizza. At this time of day, it’s probably full of Alfredo’s old friends, some of whom spent time with him in lockup last June before the PDs got everyone’s cases thrown out of court. Warrantless search, Your Honor! Alfredo wants to see those guys, and he doesn’t want to see those guys. As he slows down, he catches his reflection in a ninety-nine-cent store. He hates turning around in the middle of the street—it always makes him feel like an asshole—but what else can he do? For the benefit of those who might be looking, he comes to a complete stop, makes a tsk sound and throws his head back with exaggerated frustration, as if he forgot to turn the oven off, the iron off, as if he left an important piece of classified microfilm in the wrong titanium suitcase. He spins around on his heel. Goes the way he came. As he passes the Indian family, he keeps his head down, makes a left on Northern Boulevard. By doing so, he travels, as he always meant to travel, in the opposite direction of his parents’ place.

  He sets up shop in front of the Alleyway. The Laundromat has closed its doors for the night, but the nail salon stays open. Whether this is the Rapture or Osama bin Laden, some ladies still be needing their manis and pedis. Across the street the Koreans who bought the candy store struggle to pull down their security gate. Worried about looters, and rightfully so. Alfredo, who is feeling good, happy to be here, hollers at the Koreans. Tells them the security gate is electricity powered and won’t be budging anytime soon. They throw their hands up, as if swatting at flies, and then go back to pulling on their gate. Whatever. That’s their business. They’re trying to close, but Alfredo’s just getting started. Opportunity’s knocked. Alfredo spreads the candles in a half circle around his feet, as if he were warding off evil spirits. He positions pillars with pillars, votives with votives. Like the Statue of Liberty, he hoists a torch in the air.

  “Get ’em while you still can, folks. Gonna be dark for a hot minute. Get your candles. Blackout special. Five-dollar candles. Get your candles here. Bring home some light. To your husbands and wives. Five dollars a candle. Five dollars apiece. Buy four, get o
ne free. Five dollars, five dollars, five dollars. Need all the light you can get, folks. Gonna get bad tonight. Terrorists coming to kill us. What do you say? Five dollars. Get your light right here. Queens prices. Can’t beat ’em. Five dollars apiece. Get your light. Gonna need some light. Selling it here. Stay out of the dark. Everybody needs some light. Five dollars apiece. Talking about light, folks. Light for sale. Light!”

  A few hours later, with the sun turning orange behind her head, Isabel finally tracks down her man. She shifts the baby in her arms, checks his diaper for softness. When Alfredo sees them walking toward him, he laces his hands behind his head, probably thinking it makes him look casual, like an awfully cool dude lounging on a beach blanket, but really he looks like a man preparing himself to be arrested.

  “How much for the whole thing?” Isabel says.

  “That’s a lot of candles,” he says.

  “I thought maybe I’d get a family discount.” Christian Louis yanks on her ponytail, as if he were ringing a bell. “I thought maybe since they were my fucking candles—”

  “Hey!” Alfredo says, and tilts his head toward the baby.

  “Are you serious?” she says. “Are you seriously telling me what I can and cannot say?”

  Alfredo watches a taper candle roll away from him, all on its own, and get stuck in the space between sidewalk panels.

  “You see my parents?” he says.

  She did. She tried waiting at home, lasted a full ninety minutes, but when the apartment shadows thickened, she scooped up Christian Louis and bolted out the door. When they got to Babysitters R Us, Lizette clapped her hands together, squealed with abuela delight. She had birthday presents, she had noisemakers, she had party hats, she had some nice ripe bananas she could fry up … but what she did not have, what she hadn’t even seen today, was a five-foot six-inch flat-assed Puerto Rican pendejo. To get out of the house, Isabel practically had to peel Lizette’s fingers off Christian Louis. She begged them not to go. Talked about the blackout of seventy-seven. Said it wasn’t safe for a mother and her young child to be out on the streets when the sun went down. But Isabel—how stupid of her—thought Alfredo might be in some kind of trouble.

  “I want to say I’m surprised,” she says. “I want to be surprised. But you know what?”

  “I was gonna replace all the candles I sold,” he says. He sounds excited. “But that’s not all I was gonna do. I was gonna buy Christian Louis a chair for his new table. The sickest chair they had. I was gonna take you out for a romantic dinner, just me and you. Do it right, you know. Get us back on track. I was gonna pay off some of the Visa bill.”

  “And how many candles you sell so far?”

  He shrugs, deflated. “It’s not the busiest block.”

  “Maybe you’re not the best salesman,” she says.

  Christian Louis turns red. His birthmark glows. He’s been up for too long, overstimulated, feeding off Mama’s fury, and now he squirms in her arms, moments away from a crankfest explosion. She didn’t bring the stroller because she wanted Christian Louis up against her chest, wanted to feel, through his skin, the thump-thump of his heartbeat. She’s regretting her sentimentality. She gives him her house keys, which he sticks under his tongue. Happy birthday! Face soured, he chucks the keys into the street, and then, of course, unavoidably: the wrath.

  “Shh,” Alfredo says. He comes closer to rub Christian Louis’s back. “You see him toss them keys?” Alfredo asks softly. “Little man’s gonna be a strikeout king.”

  “You can’t be leaving us anymore,” she says. The baby still wails between them, mouth open, his enraged face tilted toward the red-slatted rooftops. Birds bend the branches of a tree. They perch themselves on streetlamps and telephone poles, under air conditioners and awnings, their bright avian eyes turned to the street. “You hear me?” Isabel says.

  “I’m out here for us,” Alfredo says.

  “You want to do us a favor? Stop leaving.”

  “A guy came up to me,” Alfredo says, looking her in the face. “White guy. I tried to sell him a candle, and he called me a piece of trash. Got in my space. Said I was exploiting something or another, you know? I thought he was going to kill me. A big guy. Then I thought that maybe he’d been sent to kill me, you know? Someone my brother knew. Someone Shifrin knew. I think about this shit all the time. This guy’s in my face and I’m like this is it. Here we go.”

  “And did he?”

  “Did he kill me?” Alfredo says. He looks down at his work shoes, his work pants, his work shirt, as if he wants to make certain before he answers. “No,” he says.

  “There you are,” Isabel says.

  “Here I am.”

  “So I’m pregnant,” she says. She looks up at the sky. “You think we’ll see stars tonight?”

  Alfredo leans against the brick wall behind him. He doesn’t collapse against the wall or fall against it as if he’d been punched in the chest. He does it calmly, bends his body to the bricks. He puts his hands deep down into his pockets.

  “I think it’s a boy,” she says. She’s not certain. This new baby hasn’t started whispering secrets in her ear yet, but she feels inside of her a decidedly masculine presence. She imagines him—a quarter of an inch long, half the size of her pinky nail—stretching his legs out in front of him, hands plunged in pockets, trying to look casual as the uterine walls around him expand. “You want a little brother?” she asks Christian Louis. “You want a little bro to boss around?”

  “I don’t think I can handle this,” Alfredo says.

  She misunderstands him. When Alfredo says he can’t handle this, he means he feels unqualified to handle this in a moral sense. He considers himself a corrupt human being—the things he’s done, the things he thinks—a man unfit to raise one boy, much less two. In the last year, each folder in his intracranial filing cabinet has been tagged with the ass-reaming rebuke And you’re supposed to be a father? He can’t face more stickers on his files, stickers emblazoned with this unborn baby’s name.

  But Isabel thinks he’s talking about money. She thinks he means they can’t raise two children on his elevator boy’s salary. And so when he says he can’t handle this, she says, “Sure we can.” She has him hold the baby, positions his arms so that they provide an acceptable sling of support. She asks, “How much you selling these candles for?”

  “Five dollars,” he says.

  She rolls her eyes. She stoops over to pick up her house keys and the candle that fell between sidewalk panels.

  “I’m keeping this one,” she says, and slips the candle into her back pocket. “This one came to me.”

  Christian Louis seizes his father’s finger and clamps down hard. Isabel turns away from them. She walks to the lip of the curb, where the sidewalk meets the street. People come and go, fanning themselves with takeout menus. Right around here, just up the block in fact, her mother the puta is probably in her recliner, halfway through a pre-evening nap, a white tube sock draped over her eyes. In just a moment Isabel will start hawking candles—the finest candles in Queens—for the low low blackout special price of ten bucks apiece. And eventually, when night falls and the streets darken, her voice will begin to falter. And when that happens, Alfredo will put their child in her arms, and the two of them will stand close together and take turns calling out prices. But first, before all that, while her voice is still strong, Isabel is going to scream. Her mother is sleeping and Isabel wants to wake that bitch up. She wants to see pigeons scatter and curtains flutter, wants glass to break, wants to drown out her baby’s crying, wants to knock butterflies out of the air and ice cream out of cones and buttons off of shirts, wants ears to bleed and buildings to crumble, wants to feel the tingle, the rattle, the streets catching fire. Get ready. She takes a deep breath, cups her hands to her mouth.

 

 

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