Dog Eat Dog

by Chris Lynch

  “It’ll be sweet,” he called after me. “Just like old times.”

  No Matter Where It’s Going

  I THOUGHT ABOUT TERRY while I slept. I woke up tense, dressed, rode the bus, opened up the O’Asis. Tense. After awhile I loosened up, did my rotten job, collected my pay envelope. Inside it, of course, was the bill from Ruben’s lunch that I had crumpled, pressed out flat again. And the amount had been deducted from my money.

  “Asshole,” I said. Taking the pen off the bar, I wrote a little note of my own on the envelope. “Forgot your tip. Ruben says gracias.” I laid the note on the bar with a dollar. Tense.

  “Hey boy,” I said, walking across the yard toward Duran. I stooped to meet him, but he stretched toward me, so stooping became pretty unnecessary. He butted me, rammed me with his head, to play. Sent me four steps backward and winded me, but made me laugh too. I opened the bag and hand-fed him the fat and fatty slices of pork roast that were gray from my mother’s cooking.

  As I watched him eat, I thought about it. It was still early. Why not?

  I unclipped his chain, and I talked to him in low easy humms. “There you go, guy,” I said, stroking the side of his head, stroking the thick, taut muscles of his neck. I leaned into him and got my face close to his ear. “There we go, boy. You want to go? Just for a short one now. Just for a stretch. But easy now, okay?”

  As if he understood clearly, he took his first long, direct strides. He was behaving himself fine, but he dragged me anyway. He didn’t even seem to notice.

  There was nobody on the street. We trotted. “Good boy, Duran. Atta boy, Duran,” I chanted, praying that I was somehow controlling him. A jogger passed on the other side of the street. She looked over, mouth hanging open. He noticed her too, running on this way while looking back that way. “Never mind her, Duran, there ya go, boy,” I said, and he forgot about her.

  We made it to the park without incident. The only hitch was the dragging. Duran knew the way, and clearly had no need for me, so he went at his own pace. I barely kept up as his speed increased the closer he got to the park. The instant he hit the running track that ovaled the whole field, he left me behind.

  The links of his chain ripped, 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8, through my fingers. I fell, stumbling to my knees, then looked at my raw hand. Then I looked back up to where Duran was. Loose.

  He stayed on the track. That was what he wanted. He wanted to run, and run and run, after all those hours of lying chained up in the small yard with his big long legs folded under him. And he was great at it. He had gone two hundred meters before my eye had even caught up to him, and from that spot exactly halfway across the field from me, you could not tell the difference between this animal and a racehorse.

  I felt it through the ground as he thundered past me starting his second lap. He ran the second lap faster than the first, the third even faster.

  I didn’t want to ride him. I just wanted to watch him. So I did. Through four and five and six beautiful laps. I sat there on the grass enjoying Duran’s exercise, being lightened by it, every bit as much as he must have been.

  Until, a hundred meters into his seventh circuit, he bolted. Like a train jumping the tracks, Duran took one long springing dive from the running surface into the trees and bushes at the edge of the park. I jumped up and ran to where he was snarling, snapping, thrashing around, and I stopped short when I got there. He had it, in his paws and jaws at the same time like a bear catching a salmon from a rapid.

  Whatever it was, there was nothing I could do for it now. I had to just let the dog finish. The way he went about it, biting and tearing and throwing pieces of whatever in all directions long after it was dead, it was like Duran had a personal thing against it. Finally, when there was nothing big enough left to bite at, Duran backed slowly out of the bushes, still sniffing and licking at the ground.

  I approached him easily, holding out my hand to him. At first he didn’t respond, but then he took a couple of steps my way and butted his head into my belly. I petted him, laid my hands on either side of his boxy rib cage. I felt the slight heaving, the punching of his thrilled heart. I felt it in him, then I felt it in me.

  Two boys appeared, coming down the hill at the far end of the field. They had a bat and baseball gloves, and a retriever dashing in circles around them and between their legs.

  “Come on, Duran,” I said, giving the chain a mighty tug. He didn’t budge, until I stopped pulling. Then he came along quietly as we went out the opposite way from the boys. I stopped using the chain altogether on the way home. It didn’t do any good anyway. I still held it, but I didn’t pull on it. Instead I just guided Duran the way cowboys do on TV when they are trying to get cattle into the corrals. I leaned into his shoulder to push him one way, I put my arm over the back of his neck to pull him the other way. I even wrapped my arms around his bullish head to steer him as if he did have horns. And he let me. It was fun and must have looked comical, but I loved it. I think Duran loved it too.

  When I returned to Evelyn’s to corral Duran, Toy was waiting.

  “Excellent!” I said.

  “Excellent? Mick, I’m here to warn you. The old man’s gonna kick your ass. Don’t you get it?”

  Now I got it. “Why...? Oh...” I said and started pacing, wringing my hands, flashing back on the hugeness of Carlo looming over me naked in his bed.

  “No, not because you tapped her,” Toy said.

  I ducked, actually raised my hands to my face, and gasped when Toy said it.

  He shook his head in disgust and disbelief. “Of course I know, fool. But Carlo doesn’t care about that. Not much, anyway. He’s pissed because you messed with his casa. You screwed with his control. Carlo is a certain kind of... macho.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  “You let her out, Mick. When you took her out to breakfast? You released her. You broke the hold, get it? You went into his house and set free his possession.”

  Hot shit, I thought with some pride, I did all that? I stared off, thinking once more about Felina.

  Toy caught me. “Forget it. She’s gone. She’s history. And you might be too.”

  “Come on,” I said, laughing a little desperately, “he won’t really...”

  “Mick, I figured I ought to tell you before I leave, that’s all. I’m just passing through this time but tomorrow morning I’m gone too.”

  “For real and for good?”

  Toy pointed to the street where a motorcycle was parked. It was a different bike, smaller, older, but still a Harley-Davidson. “He bought me that for a going-away present. After my mother left, he came home with that and said, ‘Happy birthday, boy. Ride it the hell on out of here.’”

  “You?” I said, stunned. “I thought you two were...”

  “He tried to mold me in his own image, but it didn’t take. We’ve got disagreeable life-styles.”

  “He seemed cool,” I said, only half-joking, “the couple of times we met.”

  Toy laughed at that. “Mick, you have a very black-and-white way of looking at things. This is good, this is bad, this is right, this is wrong, if I do A, then B will be fixed. Most stuff is more complicated than that, there’s a lot of gray area. In fact it’s mostly gray. Like my old man. Take away the beard, the drugs, the motorcycle, and the polygamy and you know what you’ve got? You’ve got your father.”

  “This is depressing,” I said, walking over to check out Toy’s bike.

  “Oh well,” Toy said, shrugging.

  I was crouching beside the bike when I looked up. “So, I don’t suppose you’ll be settling anyplace nearby? I mean, like, so you could still kind of keep some of the old life intact?”

  He walked past me and straddled the bike, nearly tipping me over. I stood and he looked straight down at his gas tank as he recited.

  “My heart is warm with the friends I make,

  And better friends I’ll not be knowing;

  Yet there isn’t a train I wouldn’t take,

  No
matter where it’s going.”

  After a pause, I said, “Couldn’t just say ‘gotta fly’ or something, huh, Toy?”

  There was another pause, a strange one, full of stuff. Finally I came out with it. “Maybe I should go too,” I said.

  He answered immediately, as if he was prepared for it. “I don’t think you’d like it where I’m going.”

  I looked all around. “Bet it’s better than here.”

  Toy turned and fixed me with his under-the-hat stare. He threw his leg back over the bike and took the couple of steps toward me. He looked like now he was going to clock me, maybe for what I did to his mother. Good, I deserved it. I closed my eyes.

  He kissed me. Barely touching my lips. Then so slightly, slipped me the tongue.

  When I opened my eyes again he was there, all straightened up, hands on his hips, looking down on me. He had tipped his hat back on his head, exposing those eyes, those impossibly huge, unbelievably innocent brown eyes that he never showed and that didn’t go along with anything else about him.

  “So, still want to go there?” he asked.

  I sat down on the curb, practically threw myself down, put my face in my hands. “That’s not a place,” I snapped angrily.

  “What is it then, Mick? A color? A flavor? A race? An illness?” He sliced me with the tone.

  I couldn’t come up with an answer.

  “Like I said, Mick, for you there are only black things, and white things.”

  I listened as the engine kicked over. By the time I looked up again he was gone.

  The Difference

  WHEN I GOT BACK to the Sullivans’ that night, Mr. Sullivan was waiting for me in the front room. He was sitting in his wing-back easy chair, with his gun in his lap.

  “Mick,” he called. “You had a visitor tonight.”

  “A big one?” I asked.

  “Looked like a bear with a leather cap.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Sullivan,” I said meekly.

  “I ran him off. He went to your folks’ place first. Your old man directed him here.”

  I covered my eyes with my hands. “I’m sorry, Mr. Sullivan,” I said again.

  “A fine guy, that father of yours.”

  “I know. You can shoot him if you want to.”

  “Ah, if only, boy. If only.”

  There, I thought, is a father. Sully’s the luckiest guy of us all.

  “I really am sorry, Mr. Sullivan. I appreciate everything you’ve done. I’m really, really sorry.”

  “I know you are, Mick,” he said with a sigh. “It ain’t even your fault. You can’t help it. It just seems to follow you.”

  I started up the stairs when it seemed like he’d said what he wanted to. “It does, Mr. Sullivan,” I said. “But I’m going to lose it.”

  “Hope so, Mick,” he said.

  I went right to the phone at the top of the stairs. I dialed Terry.

  “Tomorrow morning,” I said as soon as I heard his heavy, ignorant breathing. “You get Bobo and meet me. But it’s not gonna be a show. No spectators, no Bloody Sundays, no Augie. Five A.M. at the O’Asis. There’s room out back.”

  He listened quietly to it all. In the end he just hissed, “All right. It’ll be great ta have ya back again, brother.”

  I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t even consider it. I had this thought over and over: I must have been the first person ever to tongue kiss both a guy and the guy’s mother. Was there lower than me? Maybe I should lay one on Carlo too when he catches up to me, so he doesn’t feel left out.

  A year ago I would have been out with Terry and Augie and Baba and Danny and the brave fat Cormacs all together beating Toy’s ass.

  I couldn’t believe Mr. Sullivan was down there patrolling the lawn, harboring me instead of throwing me out there. Even though he probably half enjoyed it, he should have just cut me loose.

  I had to do it for him. It was four in the morning when I went down, quietly packed my duffel bag, and shook Sully awake.

  “I’m goin’, Sul,” I whispered.

  He didn’t open his eyes. “So go already,” he said.

  “No, I mean I’m really going this time. I’m not coming back after this morning. I’m going home.”

  He sat up, rubbing his eyes in the dark. “Really? You sure?”

  “Ya,” I said. “I’m taking care of everything this morning.”

  “I don’t like the sound of that,” he said. “You gonna be okay?”

  “Ya,” I said, though I had no idea. He was Sully, so he could see that.

  “You want me to come with you?” he said, throwing his blankets off.

  “Not necessary, Sul. But thanks.”

  “Thank god,” he said, and pulled the covers up around him again.

  I left him lying there, looking so comfortable. I stopped at the door and stared at him. “You have a good home, Sul.”

  “I know I do.”

  “I’m jealous of you.”

  “Line up with the rest of ’em, pal,” he said through the muffling of covers.

  Duran looked a little startled to see me so early. Then he started sniffing around and bumping me, looking for food. I hadn’t even thought about that, but it could be risky trying to rely on just our friendship alone. But it was best to keep him empty and mean, and let him empty the old man’s refrigerator when it was over.

  It was kind of sweet, walking along with him in the just breaking daylight. There was a roll to his step that felt lively and strong. It was all new to both of us, walking this way to the bus stop, and with nobody else around yet, I wasn’t even nervous.

  The only rider on the bus was asleep, and the driver didn’t even notice Duran, or else he just didn’t let on. The dog fitted himself into one double seat and I took the one behind him. As he slobbered out the window just like any regular dog would, I scratched his ear and talked to him.

  “You know, this really means a lot to me, what you’re going to do here.” He pulled his head in, looked at me, licked me with his sweaty brown tongue. “It won’t take you long, and I don’t think it’ll be too hard for ya... and I won’t ask ya to do it again, ever, I swear.” He did it again, the licking thing.

  We reached our stop and Duran was reluctant to get off. He loved the bus. “There’ll be another ride later, c’mon,” I said. And he came.

  There was no Terry outside the O’Asis, and no Bobo. When I put my key in the deadbolt, I found it already open.

  “How’d you get in here?” I said angrily as I pushed through the door. He sat with his feet up on a table.

  “Jesus, don’t ask me stupid questions,” he sneered.

  Then, as Duran ambled in behind me, the cockiness dropped from Terry’s face. “Holy shit,” he said, nearly tipping his chair over backward, catching himself on the table.

  That felt good, and I held on to it for a bit, folding my arms and leaning on Duran. “So where’s Bobo?” I asked.

  “He’s out back already,” Terry said, regaining his confidence quickly. “Bobo can’t wait. I don’t care how big your stupid spaniel dog is, Bobo’s gonna eat his ass out. ’Cause Bobo’s a superior animal.”

  Already, it wasn’t fun anymore.

  “Let’s get on with it,” I said.

  “Fuckin’ let’s,” Terry said.

  Duran and I followed Terry to the back door. With a dramatic flourish, he flung it open. There in the middle of the lot, Bobo lay with his chin in the dirt. He raised his head ponderously, looked at us, but showed nothing like emotion.

  I felt the rumbling of Duran’s growl. I turned to see him rigid, the wiry, three-inch hairs standing straight up from the back slope of his skull almost all the way to his stumpy tail. All the teeth showed on one side of his mouth and he was locked into a pose like a giant pointer. He was leaning into me hard.

  I looked back at Bobo, who slowly got to his feet. He looked at us, at Duran, and seemed to brace for something, but he didn’t snarl, didn’t get worked up. One ear looked about ready to fall of
f.

  There it was. Everything. In one thirty-second mangling of that pathetic chump of a burned-out alcoholic dog, I was going to finally have it all. Terry was going to be gone. Gone for good. And I was going to get to watch him lick dirt all the way out. Finally, I was king. King of the game. King of Terry’s game.

  Finally I saw it.

  King of the losers.

  “Close the door!” I shouted.

  “What?”

  “Shut the door,” I repeated. He did it. I started backing Duran away, across the bar, stroking and calming him. Terry followed us.

  “What’s your problem?” Terry spat.

  “It’s off. I’m out. He’s out,” I said.

  “Bullshit,” he screamed.

  “Ya, well I’m doing it. Come on, Duran, I’m taking you home.”

  “You owe me a fight, boy,” Terry said.

  “Screw.”

  “Ya, well you still lose it all. You owe me the money, and”—he drew it out long, smiled, pointed at me—“annnnd, you’re comin’ home ta live. Wit me. I knew ya’d be back. You was never goin’ nowhere.”

  I turned around, leaving Duran by the exit. I charged right up to Terry, stuck my finger in his face. “Screw,” I said. “I’m goin’ somewhere all right.”

  He snatched the hand I had in his face. He bent it back at the wrist, bringing me to my knees. “No, screw you,” he said. Then he raised his other hand and slapped me. His slaps were harder than punches, with the whipping of his long bony fingers, and he slapped me again, and again, three times, four times. I could not get up off my knees as Terry slapped my face hard, pummeling the same side over and over.

  “I should fuckin’ kill you,” he said. “Nobody’d fuckin’ care.” With those words he stopped slapping, held my arm straight up over my head, and kicked me high in the ribs with the toe of his work boot.

  I fell, balling up under the table. The next thing I heard was the crashing of tables and chairs and scratching of claws. And Terry’s full-lung scream.

  I looked up and Duran was on him, pinning him to the floor with two massive paws on Terry’s chest while biting, and yanking, on his arm.