The Dogs of Detroit

by Brad Felver

  In the Walls

  Frank and me, we can hang some goddamn drywall. Cut, lift, push screws. Repeat. Frank can eyeball-measure to within a quarter inch, and I can drive six screws before you clear your throat. I know the guys who come in and mud the joints get all the credit, everybody nowadays thinks drywall mudders are artists, and maybe they are the way the good ones could hide a damn hematoma with joint compound. Drywall mudders get the credit for making it all pretty, for hiding the mistakes, but Frank and me, we make the walls.

  But then Frank gets canned. Our boss, Stanley, accuses him of stealing something he didn’t steal, which happens more than you’d think. It’s kind of like code for We found some Mexicans to do your job.

  Stanley, who’s actually just our real boss’s kid, asks me, Do I know anything about a missing pneumatic hammer?

  I tell him, No, I don’t anything about that, which I don’t.

  Then he says to me, Hey, by the way, do you know where Frank’s keys are? I need to move his truck because he parked me in.

  I point him over to Frank’s lunch cooler, not thinking much about it. But then at the end of the day, Stanley calls Frank outside and points into his truck and asks him, Hey, Frank, how did this pneumatic hammer get in your truck? You stealing from us, then, Frank? Then he shit-cans Frank, and I feel like a huge dumb idiot.

  Frank doesn’t make a scene or anything, I think because he’s just so damn confused. He’s young, never gotten fired before. He goes real calm, real deliberate in his movements, and all I can think is that’s how crazy bad guys in the movies always act before they stab somebody in the dick with a samurai sword. But Frank just says, Okay, right, and leaves, and we all go back to work.

  So later that night, Frank comes over, and we start drinking some, and before long, we head back to the site. It’s this giant castle in the burbs with a three-car garage and travertine tiles all over. Everything’s stainless steel or granite or Zapatero hardwood floors reclaimed from the Panama Canal. It’s dark when we get there, we can’t see much with flashlights in our mouths, but we don’t want to draw attention.

  Frank pulls out a cordless Makita with this tiny, 1/16-inch bit and chucks it tight. Then he goes around to all air compressors, popping these holes in the undersides of the tanks. No one will ever see them, but they’ll get pissed something fierce when their tanks don’t carry any pressure.

  Then he squats in a bare stud wall, unbuckles his coveralls, perches there, and boy does he push. His face turns this hot red while he grimaces, and then he grunts like he’s trying to bench-press a double-wide, and then there’s the plop, and damn hell, it just clogs my nose up with crap-stink. I can’t get away from it. Come on, he says, meaning we need to hurry up and hang some drywall around it to lock in the stink and keep anybody from finding it. Which we do.

  Then it’s on to the joint compound, the five-gallon tubs, jerking off into it. He’s drunk and cackling now. He puts a mixer bit into the drill and churns the whole bucket up. Look, he says. You can’t tell where Frank-juice stops and the mud starts! And he thinks this is just the funniest thing ever, that these yuppies are going to have a house with so much Frank in the walls. Doesn’t matter how many walls we put up, they aren’t getting rid of Frank.

  At some point I almost tell Frank how it was kind of my fault, that I didn’t mean it, but I’m still awful sorry. I don’t say anything though because it won’t change this whole shitpile of a situation. Doesn’t matter how or why that shitpile gets in your house, you just have to deal with it. I’m older, I got replaced twice last year, but Frank hasn’t. He’s a young kid, likes to drink light beer and think about those girls he went to high school with but never got to see naked. It’s a crummy feeling, getting canned, and all you can think of for the first couple days is how to get even. But work always turns up for guys like us. People are always going to want walls in their houses.

  Frank starts hauling the double sheets of drywall then, four-by-eight sheets, out to his truck. Come on, he says. So I start helping him load them even though I don’t really want to. It means tomorrow, when I go to work, I’ll have to answer some questions. But I can just blame everything on teenagers, which is what you’re supposed to do in my business when something goes missing.

  We steal a dozen sheets and drive away, and Frank is feeling pretty great, some from the beer but some from all the getting even. A sheet of drywall only costs about four bucks, but right now they feel more valuable. Frank laughs to himself the whole ride home like we just stole the Mona Lisa or something.

  When we get back to my place, Frank wants to unload it all there. I don’t have the space, he says, which is true. He lives in an apartment about the size of a paper sack. So we stack them all in my TV room. We have one more beer and sit on the couch looking at them, not really saying much.

  I wonder how Stanley got in my truck, Frank says then.

  I feel myself clench up, but I don’t say anything.

  You have any idea?

  I shake my head, no, and take a big drink of my beer.

  Well, Frank says and then doesn’t finish whatever he wanted to say. He gets up and stumbles toward the door. Guess I’ll see you tomorrow, he says and leaves. Thing is, though, I won’t see him tomorrow.

  I flip on the TV and have one last beer, but I can’t see the left side of the tube because the drywall is blocking it. There’s this guy yelling at somebody, and I think it’s probably his wife, but I can’t be sure. He’s just going nutso on her, calling her whore and skank. He’s unloading, calling her shit-brain and twat. But then she starts yelling back, and it’s the weirdest thing. It’s like the drywall is talking. It’s a woman’s voice, but all I see is drywall. She calls him a liar and a dirty cheat and a bunch of other mean stuff. It’s pretty annoying the way the drywall blocks her face, but I just close my eyes and figure to hell with it. I’ll move it in the morning.

  The next day I have three new Mexicans that I have to start training on how to hang drywall fast and proper. One of them’s named Jesus and the other two aren’t. They catch on quick and don’t ask stupid questions, but they don’t say jokes the way Frank did. Later in the day, the boss’s kid pulls me aside and asks, Didn’t we have more drywall than this? And what’s with that weird crap smell? But this time I play dumb. Probably some no-good teenagers, I tell him.

  Out of the Bronx

  We hunted the rats because we were so poor.

  Years later and I can still see them bolting out from that dumpster at the end of the alley, dozens of rats, squealing and scurrying. They’re on fire. Roman and I are watching from the fire escape four stories up, these burning rats darting all over the place and yelping. “Burn harder, you rat-fucks!” Roman screams. He has this deranged look in his eyes, like a boxer who just got knocked out and is coming to. It’s dark out, so it’s almost pretty, all these burning rats scampering in every direction, like a meteor shower in the alley, and I almost say so but I decide not to. Instead, we just watch, open-mouthed, two young kids in awe of this cosmic power we’ve just unleashed.

  The rats came from this pub on the garden level, which our landlord owned. We called him Old Irish because he had this thick brogue which sounded like a different language. Dad said that his skin was so pale it smelled like potatoes. That was Dad’s one joke, which he told whenever Old Irish knocked on the door and said he had to raise the rent again. His pub served a Guinness and black pudding breakfast, that’s it, and Old Irish made it all on site every morning, and so every afternoon, right before he closed up the kitchen, he tossed out a trash bag full of leftovers into the alley, a mixture of congealed blood, torn casings, and suet drippings, which is like Oreo cheesecake for rats. Old Irish didn’t live in the building, so it wasn’t his rat problem.

  Dad threatened to call the health inspector one time after Roman woke up in the middle of the night with a rat gnawing at a scab on his knee. Old Irish stepped close, pointed a fat finger in Dad’s face. “You’re so cheesed about rats, maybe
you should move to Brooklyn with the fancies.” Dad got real quiet and just walked away. Mom was already sick then, never even got out of bed anymore and always had that hollow-eyed look, like a porcelain doll. Dad couldn’t risk eviction, and Old Irish knew it.

  He made his tenants rent everything: the refrigerator, the kitchen table, light bulbs, the plunger. We couldn’t afford to buy our own, but we couldn’t do without. Old Irish knew exactly how to get people on the hook, and he knew how to keep them there, flopping around in the shallows. “It’s not like he was always rich,” Dad told me one time. “I don’t know why he has to treat us like that.” Dad was a kind little man, and the thing about being kind is that if you don’t surround yourself with other kind people, you get exploited constantly. I think on it now, and I can’t imagine the humiliation Dad must have suffered, negotiating a ten-minute rental of a toilet augur, all because he had two young boys who ate too many grape-jellied meatballs at the school picnic.

  For the longest time, Mom had worked first whistle and Dad worked second, which meant one of them was always gone, and one of them was always asleep. Which meant Roman and I did whatever we wanted with the understanding that we didn’t have any money for bail or hospitals. But then Mom got depressed all of a sudden and wouldn’t leave the apartment, so Dad started covering her shifts too. His boss told him that maybe Roman or I could slide into the job when we turned sixteen if Dad worked it for a quarter rate until then. Dad was one of those guys you’d see on the train wearing a dirty white jumpsuit, elbows on knees, not making eye contact with anyone, just bushed out because of the way his life ended up.

  All of this made us easy prey, which turned me quiet and submissive like Dad. But it made Roman mean. He wanted to get even. He stole bikes from the Catholic school up the street and rode them straight down to the East River, jumping off at the last second and letting them glide on into the water without a sound. He picked fights before the other kids even had a chance to hassle him, always aiming for the nose because, he said, he liked to see rich kids cry. Some kids are poor but don’t ever know it because everyone else is poor too. We knew. Bottom of the food chain poor, and the way the food chain works is there’s a pecking order, you can hunt anything below you, and the only thing below us was the rats.

  Jesus, the rats. They were everywhere, always just eating and chirruping their little mating calls, mating constantly, quick and violent, always making more rats like it was the most ruthless sort of addiction imaginable. It all had something to do with the way the sewers had been dug out, too shallow, lots of sewage that wouldn’t fully drain, and it attracted rats. Rumor was that for every human in the South Bronx, there were two rats. You’d think we were safe because we lived up on the fourth floor, but we weren’t. They climbed up through the walls, especially when it got cold out. You could hear them at night, clawing at the plaster and chirruping. We set traps, killing one or two at a time, which was like shooting a tank with a pellet gun. What we needed was needed more firepower, a full-out rat jihad.

  Then one Friday afternoon, Roman showed up with a canister of potassium permanganate and a jug of antifreeze.

  “What the hell?” I asked.

  “Motherfucking napalm,” he said.

  “Bullshit. Where’d you get all that?”

  Turns out potassium permanganate is just a chemical people use to clean out wells and cisterns. Mix it with antifreeze and you’ve got trouble. As he explained it, I remembered Roman’s uncharacteristic interest in a lesson at school. It was about the moon landing, how NASA engineers developed this hypergolic engine that mixed two chemicals, and poof, the engine lit right there in the middle of space. No oxygen necessary.

  “What if someone happened to mix both chemicals?” Roman had asked. “You know, just for yucks.”

  “I imagine it would be very bad, Roman,” our teacher said.

  “Fuckin’-A, it would,” Roman said and grinned that mischievous hyena grin of his. He could already see it.

  We sat on the fire escape all afternoon, looking down at the back door of Old Irish’s pub, waiting for him to toss out the sausage slop. Roman got this calm look on his face, like he was in a trance, like you hear about guys getting just after some jungle firefight.

  “So how will we—” I started to ask, but Roman cut me off.

  “It’ll work,” he said. “It’s science.”

  Truth is, the antifreeze probably would have killed them on its own, but that lacked style. Food chain: we outranked the rats, so we reserved the right to humiliate them.

  Dad stopped home for a few minutes in between first and second whistle to check on Mom and get an apple for supper. He went into the bedroom to see her, and then he popped his head out the window. He hadn’t shaved in a couple days, which made him seem older and weaker. “You boys want me to make you some eggs?”

  “No, thanks,” I said. “We’ll eat later.”

  “Roman?” Dad said, but Roman didn’t seem to hear him.

  “Love you boys,” he said and squeezed my shoulder.

  “What if they don’t eat it?” I asked later, even though we both knew it was a stupid question. Rats will eat anything. A rat will eat beef so rancid it’s turned blue. A rat will chew through PVC pipe just to get at the raw sewage inside. Imagine the most disgusting thing possible, and rats will eat it.

  Roman just kept glaring down at that door like a sniper waiting on his mark.

  Finally, it burst open and the trash bag came flying out. It plopped on the asphalt next to the dumpster, but Old Irish didn’t even bother to come out and move it.

  “We’re up,” Roman said.

  We sat at the kitchen table with the sausage slop, separating it into two trash bags. In one bag Roman poured a heap of potassium permanganate, which was these little purple crystals about the size of shucked sunflower seeds. In the other bag I poured the antifreeze, almost the whole gallon. “Now mix,” he said, and we dug our hands into the bags. I mixed the one with the antifreeze, and it felt like a bag full of eyeballs and mud. “Keep to your side,” Roman said.

  Mom poked her head out the bedroom door. She looked exhausted but also like she had just woken up. “Boys, what’s that smell?”

  “Just a little science homework,” Roman said. “Go back to bed.”

  “Just be careful now,” Mom said and disappeared again.

  Roman finished mixing up his bag and looked over at me. “Let’s pick it up.”

  “When do you think mom is going to get better?” I asked. She just sort of vanished from us one day. That was the hardest part. Nothing specific seemed to trigger it. She just quit, which I think we both took to mean we did something wrong even if we wouldn’t admit it to each other.

  Roman walked over to the sink to scrub his hands. “Never. But there’s nothing wrong with her in the first place.”

  I didn’t agree with that, but Roman seemed so strong and mean right then that I didn’t want to say so.

  “Fucked in the head. No fixing that.”

  “Well, Dad thinks—”

  “Dad’s on his own now.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Out of juice. Kaput. Car with a dead battery.”

  None of it seemed right to me. What could make a person just quit like that?

  We went out onto the fire escape again. Roman tossed the first bag over the rail, the one with the potassium permanganate. I was getting ready to toss my bag over when he grabbed my arm. “Be patient.”

  The rats came. We couldn’t see them, too dark, but we could hear them tearing through the plastic bag, ruffling like it was caught up in the wind. And they chirruped their angry little mating chirrups while they ate the sausage slop and potassium permanganate. They really will eat anything.

  We looked down, unblinking, even though there was nothing to see. It was like standing in the middle of a field when it’s blackout dark, no moon, and the wind is blowing. All that movement which seems to be coming from nowhere and everywhere all at once. You feel t
his awesome sort of power the world has, which also makes you feel small and weak.

  When the sound died down and Roman was satisfied that they’d eaten up the first batch, he pointed to me, and I tossed the second bag over. I don’t know what I expected, but time seemed to slow as we waited. The rats ate and chirruped, still as hungry and horny as ever. I could see small sliver of Roman’s face in that light, and he just stared, didn’t move or blink, just stared down at the alley. When the noise stopped again, nothing happened, and I was about to start asking him questions that were really more accusations, and that’s when the little poofs of fire started, and before long they were all over the alley, gliding around like a hundred Japanese lanterns. They squealed these pathetic little squeals, more distinct and pathetic than their usual chirrups. Nothing quite so helpless as an animal in pain, even a rat.

  Roman laughed like a madman. “Burn harder, you rat-fucks! Welcome to the Bronx!”

  And they did burn. They scampered and wailed and burned, and we watched, mouths open at what we had done, what we were now capable of, each of us feeling some new power that had not existed in the world until that moment, not for us anyway.

  “Would’ve worked better,” Roman said, “if we added a third part, diesel fuel or kerosene, something like that to sustain the burn.” I hadn’t realized until that moment how much time Roman had spent researching.

  Mom opened the window. She looked down into the alley with us, confused like she usually was, more probably, but then she said, “My God. It’s so pretty I could cry,” which was the strange sort of thing she was always saying. She hugged her body as if she was cold even though it was normal Bronx September, which meant everything felt like armpit.

  Then she started talking. “When I was a little girl,” she said, “you know we lived over on Whittier Street, right next to that scrapyard. It was the dustiest, smelliest place I’ve ever been. They were supposed to stop working at ten p.m., but they never did. The owner installed these huge sodium lights, and they worked all night through. All the diesel fumes and rust smell. All that screeching metal and shouting. No quiet way to crush a car.”