THE SECOND DAY . . .
(Saturday, June 13, morning)
CÉCE:
My mother, Carmella
Vaccuccia, is insane. Would you name your daughter Céce, especially
when you know it means chickpea? You say it like chee-chee. Like
Vaccuccia isn’t bad enough. It means little cow.
Carmella just has to
go to Costco, because everybody needs sixty-two thousand rolls of
toilet paper and four assemble-it-yourself closets to store them,
all to save a nickel and a half, even though the closets never come
out right because they cheat you on the screws.
I tell her,
“Carmella, I have a bad feeling about this one, I
swear.”
“Babe, we’re
not gonna crash, I swear.”
We borrow Vic’s car,
more rust than ride. On the way back from Costco this
ninety-six-degree morning, the Vic-mobile’s air conditioner craps
out. Ma swerves to avoid hitting a sign that says AVOID SWERVING.
The tire blows, and she plows the wall.
I look at her with
slitted eyes.
She winks at me. “You
don’t have it.”
“I do.”
“It isn’t even
real, sister.”
“It is.”
ESP. Grumpy had it—my
grandfather. The gift skipped over Ma, so I bear the curse doubly,
I’m sure of it. For example, my neighbor’s cat Lola? Thing was
looking at me weird one day, and I thought to myself, That cat is
gonna die, and it did, squashed by a
Prius in silent mode. Swear to God. It was like a year and a half
later when chica became wheel grease, but still.
We pull out the
toilet paper, Ma’s smashed beer, everything covered in hand soap
and Heinz, to get to the jack and the slippery spare. Ma’s like me
with the big rack, bent over the tire to show her cleavage to the
world. This little chump in a Benz convertible yells out the
window, “Yo baby, you got some junk in that trunk,” which around
here means you have a big ass. He could be talking to either of us.
Trucks are about to cream us because there’s no shoulder for a
loser to swap her loser tire. Ma’s laughing. “Babe?”
“Yes, crazy
lady?”
“Life is gorgeous.”
That smile. Her pimp gold caps. She, like, dated this dentist once, I don’t even want to know.
The woman is a mental.
We bring the car back
to Vic. “Cannot tell you how sorry I am about the baked ketchup
stink,” Ma says.
Vic shrugs. “Don’t
sweat it.”
“It’s a potent scent,
Vic.”
“Potent is
good.”
“I’m gonna get the
crashed part fixed, babe.”
“Nah, leave it,” Vic
says. “Adds character. Anybody up for some Wiffle
ball?”
“Always,” Anthony
says. He’s working with us now at the Too. He grabs the bat and
heads for the alley.
Peeking out of his
back pocket is a picture of the American flag and that damned army
brochure he’s been thumbing the past few weeks. The recruiter
called the house the other day and left a message for him. I
deleted it.
I can hear them out
there, Ant and Vic, talking about it between pitches. “Should I do
it?” Anthony says.
“Family is the most
important thing,” Vic says, never mind Vic has no family except us.
He leaves out the I know what I know
and You need to do this. Because
Anthony doesn’t need to do this, and everybody knows this except
Anthony. Vic’s a vet. He did two tours in Vietnam.
“So, you’re saying I
shouldn’t do it, then?” Ant says.
“Whatever you do,
it’s the right decision,” Vic says.
“That’s not helping
me much,” Ant says.
“It isn’t meant to.”
Vic throws a moon ball, and Anthony creams it.
He better not do it.
Great harm will befall him. I will be the perpetrator. I
swear.
Lunch shift is hell.
The restaurant is seven thousand degrees because like Vic’s
so-called car, his dive joint isn’t hospitable to working
air-conditioning. Plus there’s my lip. I burned it on a slice and
it looks like the herp. Here I am walking up to the giant table
with all the cutie-pies from the fastpitch league. “For your
dressing, you want French, Russian, or creamy ranch?”
The guys are wincing
as they try not to look at my mouth.
I suck my lip to hide
it and head back to the kitchen to hang my order ticket. I nod to
this dude waiting for his take-out. “Howya doin’,
Derek?”
“Super, Céce,” he
says, but his eyes say, Except I just
completely lost my appetite at the sight of that pus-leaking
bubble on your lip.
Lunch shift ends, and
I’m sitting with my butt in the ice machine as I turn my crummy SAT
II bio workbook upside down to read the answer I got
wrong.
Anthony hangs his
apron as he swings out the back door.
“Where you going?” I
say.
“Buy running
shoes.”
“Running shoes? What’s that supposed to
mean?”
“Shoes you run
in.”
An hour and a half
later, we’re gearing up for dinner shift. Ant runs into the
kitchen, tying his apron. “I ship out in two weeks,” he says. Like
he won the mega on a quick pick.
“Thought you were
going out to buy running shoes?” I say.
“I did,” Ant
says.
“As you swung by the
recruiting station?”
“After.”
“My one and only
brother slips out between lunch and dinner shifts and signs an army
contract? How is this possible?
“Two weeks.” Ma nods.
She smiles and winks, which means inside she’s weeping. “No
college, huh, babe?”
“When I get
back.”
Except he’s not
coming back. I feel it. He’s going to
die over there.
He got into a good
school too, was supposed to start this fall, nice financial aid
package because 1.a., we’re broke, and 2.b., Anthony was an
all-state quarterback.
Ant nods to Vic.
“What do you think, Vic?”
Vic pats Anthony’s
shoulder. “Proud of you,” he sighs. He gets back to mumbling over
one of his stupid crosswords. “Prescient.”
My girl Marcy is
ready to slide out of her crappy polyester waitress skirt as she
drools over Anthony. “Army uniforms are hot,” she
says.
I go out of my way to
get her a job here, knowing full well she’s the suckiest waitress
alive after getting fired from two other places, and she pays me
back by macking on my brother, in front of me, no less? She was
voted eleventh-prettiest in our grade in a Facebook poll, never
lets anybody forget it, uses tanning spray daily because she has
this idea that orange skin will maintain her ranking. The sucky
waitress thing isn’t her fault, though. Her left arm is messed up
from this, like, freak childhood accident. She has enough nuts and
bolts in her elbow to open up a Lowe’s. You kind of need two arms
to be a rock star waitress, so we all cut her a ton of slack. Poor
Marcy. She always wears long sleeves. She’s like my only friend
who’s my age. One’s enough. I can barely stand myself at this
age.
Ant nods to me.
“Howya doin’, kid?”
“I hate
you.”
My brother is leaving
me alone with crazy Carmella to go get his ass shot off in the
desert. I need dessert. Cheesecake. Now. I sneak into the walk-in
fridge and hunker behind the Parmesan wheel and scarf a
slice.
The door opens, and
this guy comes in, kind of tall, clean cut, definitely
nice-looking, but there’s something wrong with him. He strikes me
as both wounded and perhaps a little dangerous. His eyes. He’s got
a dark sparkle working there. He sees me behind the Parmesan wheel,
and he freezes. I freeze too, cheesecake two inches from my
blistered mouth.
“Sorry,” he says. He
drops his eyes and backs up.
“Foh whah?” I say, a
plug of cheesecake in my mouth.
“Just need some
grated for the takeout.” Eyes on the floor.
I scoop some Parmesan
into a to-go cup and hand it to him. “New delivery
guy?”
He nods, but he won’t
look at me. “Hoping to get promoted to dishwasher.”
“But don’t delivery
guys make more money than dishwashers ?”
“I believe so,” he
says.
Wha? “Céce,” I say.
“I know,” he says.
“Tony told me.”
“You got a
name?”
“Yep.” Like five
seconds pass. “Sorry about that. Mack.” I nod. “Mack, I don’t have
herpes.”
“How’s that?” His
eyes flick to my mouth and then away.
“It’s a burn
blister.”
“I see,” he
says.
“Pizza.”
He nods, head down,
eyes to the side. “I’m real sorry for your pain.” He looks into my
eyes for a sliver of a second and then his eyes go back to the
floor and he backs out like a vampire stalking in
rewind.
Burn blister. Dude
wasn’t even looking anywhere near my lip. I’m an
idiot.
We’re in the
bathroom. I’m all about the Blistex and Marcy is doing her bit to
keep the eyeliner companies afloat. “See the new delivery guy?” I
say.
“He’s
weird.”
“He won’t look at
you.”
“He won’t
look at me,” Marcy says. “And what’s up
with the way he talks? You ask him a question, and there’s this
pause before he answers. I was like, ‘’Scuse me, but do you know
what time it is?’ And you know what my hero says? ‘Yep.’
”
“You ask him for the
time when we have a clock on every wall?”
“I was trying to get
him to sleep with me, Céce, duh. So I ask for clarification,
speaking big and slow for the lip reader crowd: ‘What, time, is,
it?’ And he pulls this cheap loser watch from his pocket—a
watch, like who wears watches
anymore?”
“He wasn’t wearing
it, you just said.”
“And he’s looking at
the watch, and it’s like ‘Well,’
pause, ‘it’s about twenty-seven minutes
past four. Or, no, wait,’ pause, ‘it’s
twenty-two past five.’ ”
“He’s
shy.”
“He’s slow. Either that or he’s huffing rubber
cement.”
“He totally looks
like Matt Dillon from The
Outsiders.”
“I know,” Marcy says.
“It’s criminal, his gorgeousness.
Thank God he’s
stupid. If he was hunky and smart? I’d
never have a chance.”
“Who says you have
one now?”
“He’s the type to
screw anything, trust me. Total player.”
“Here’s what I know
about him,” Ma says from the stall.
“He’s a nice guy.”
She comes out smiling, but you can tell she’s been
bawling.
I. Am going. To
kill. Anthony.
“How can you tell
he’s nice when he’s only working here for like thirty seconds, Mama
V.?” Marcy says. “For all we know, he could be dealing meth to
kindergartners, and the delivery boy thing is his cover
job.”
Ma rests her arm over
Marcy’s shoulders and kisses the Marce-arella’s fake tan forehead.
“He’s nice because Anthony says he’s nice.”
We wrap dinner shift,
and we’re cleaning up the kitchen. Ma wants to talk with Anthony at
the bar. “Mack?” Ant says, spinning a pizza. “Do me a solid, walk
my sis home?”
I roll my eyes. “I’m
fine.”
Mack is all about
polishing the sink nobody is ever going to see way behind the
dishwasher there. Freddy, our stoner dishwasher, did what he always
does: Freaked and disappeared just when the rush hit. Mack jumped
in and doubled on delivery, and he rocked it. He takes off his
apron and waits at the door, holding it open for me, looking down
at his sneakers.
Marcy struts by,
swinging her falsies. Mack doesn’t look. Marcy makes her fingers
into an L behind his back and mouths Looooser.
“You live around
here?”
“Yep,” he
says.
“I see.
Where?”
“Downhill.”
“I see. How do you
like Vic’s Too, as opposed to the now defunct Vic’s?”
“I like it,” he
says.
“Good.
Good.”
“Defunk prob’ly doesn’t mean what I think it means,
right? Deodorized?”
“Huh?”
“Nothin’.
Sorry.”
“For
what?”
He
shrugs.
“My mother thinks
you’re a really hard worker.”
No
reaction.
“She was singing your
praises to Vic.”
He gulps, eyeing the
cracks in the sidewalk. “Nice laugh your mom has.”
“She’s a wack job.
What school you go to?”
He frowns. “I
dropped.”
“Dropped
out?”
He nods.
“Oh.” I trip on a
sidewalk crack.
He catches my arm and
keeps me on my feet. Even now he won’t look at me.
“Thanks,” I
say.
“Yep.” He takes his
hands away fast. His hands are strong.
The hot breeze blows
back the trees, and overhead is this minor miracle. A bright light
arcs across the sky, but really slowly. I point it out through the
glare of the streetlights. “Slowest shooter ever.”
“It’s a satellite,”
the boy says. “Tony told me.” He’s tracking it. His eyes are big
and dark brown in the streetlights.
“You believe my
brother?” I say. “Signing up like that?”
“Your brother’s a
really good dude.”
“I’m gonna murder
him. You have kind of an accent.”
“Texas.”
“Just a little bit.
It’s nice, I mean. Sorry.” I put my hand on his arm the way I
always do to people when I want to fake sincerity, except with this
Mack, I find I am sincere: I do like
his accent, and I am sorry if I in any way hurt his feelings, as I
suspect they’ve been hurt enough. Yes, he’s wounded,
definitely.
He flinches at my
touch, not violently, but like when you collect sparks crossing the
carpet to pick up the empty beer can your loser mother left in the
middle of the floor. I take my hand away from Mack’s arm. This guy
thinks I’m a freak. I suck my lip to hide my pustule.
Dog. Pit bull.
Running at us.
I
freeze.
“He’s all right,”
Mack says.
I make a noise
somewhere between a screech and a moan and hide behind
Mack.
Mack goes “Tst!” and
the dog stops and cocks its head. “Wait,” he says, makes his voice
deeper to do it, says it quietly. “Sit.”
The dog
sits.
Mack flicks his hand,
and the dog trots off, wagging its tail.
I’m still shaking.
“How’d you do that?”
“He didn’t mean
anything but to say hello.”
“But how’d you make
him stop?”
“His ears were back
easy, and his eyes were soft.”
“Huh?”
“Nothin’.”
“Thanks.”
He shrugs, studies
his sneakers.
“Wow,” I
say.
“Nah,” he
says.
We walk, and after a
bit, I don’t feel the need to fill the quiet. I keep sneaking peeks
at him. First peek: nice face to frame those intense eyes, nose on
the big side. Second peek: nice hair, thick, keeps it short. Third
peek: good shape, skinny. Long legs.
I can’t help but
wonder what it would feel like to hold this boy’s
hand.
No. Friend material.
Not even. Why would he want anything to do with me? He’s totally
hot, could get somebody much better looking than me. Still, he
can’t even look at me? Gotta be the
lip.
We approach the
rotting, double-mortgaged vinyl-sider that is my abode. The
Vic-mobile is parked by the dead hydrant in front of our house. I
smell the hand soap and ketchup wafting out of the smashed trunk a
half block away. Ma and Vic are out on the porch. Vic slurps coffee
over a crossword and Ma sips her cheap beer. Carmella salutes us
with her tallboy. “C’mon in, Mack. I won’t mind if you sip half a
cup of beer. Just don’t tell your mother.”
Mack waits at the
curb. “Better get going,” he says.
“I have cornbread in
the kitchen,” Ma says. “You’ll love
it.”
“Totally burned,” I
whisper to him. “She has this idea that starting up a cornbread
business is going to get her out of insane credit card debt. We’re
in the trial stages.”
“Yeah, nah, I gotta
go.” He heads downhill.
Smack me, why don’t
you? I spin to Ma and Vic. “What’s wrong with that
kid?”
“He’s perfect,” Ma
says.
“Ten letters, second
is e, to make a net or network,” Vic
mumbles over his puzzle.
“Reticulate,” I
say.
“Atta girl.” Vic
licks his pencil and scribbles it in.
I downloaded this
vocabulary-builder thing for the gifted and talented test. You take
it over the summer. Two parts, multiple choice and essay. I’m no
genius, but when I’m not working I’m home studying, and I have a
ninetythree average, so I have a shot at the multiple choice. But
the essay scares me. You have to tell them about your gifts and
talents and goals. My only goal so far is not to end up like my
mother: never married, twice knocked up and ditched, alcoholic with
crippling bunions because at forty she’s been waiting tables at
Vic’s Too since she was my age. The only gift I have is ESP, but I
can’t write about that because people put you in the psycho slot if
you think that kind of thing is real. If you kill the G and T, you
can transfer to a rock star high school. That would get me into a
decent college and after that a half-decent suburb, which one I
don’t care, as long as it’s far away from here, preferably
something with off-street parking and mature shrubbery that screens
out the stinking world. I grab a sleeve of Oreos and go upstairs to
study. I have to find a gift or talent between now and that stupid
test.
That Mack dude is
gifted. I feel it in my gut. My ESP drives me insane.
(Saturday, June 13, late night)
MACK:
I stole looks. First
was her hair, long and loopy and pulled back. Second, she has the
prettiest face, open-like and uplooking. Third time I looked she
was studying that satellite and I saw her eyes, deep brown, almost
black. She has these little scars on her chin. I like that. When a
lady isn’t perfect, she’s a lot more perfect, I
believe.
I bet when you hold
hands with a girl that cool you wonder if it’s possible you’re
going to levitate like one of them monks I saw on a TV commercial
once, which don’t you wish that was real?
I head downhill and
cut along the highway, and of course they’re at it again. The dog
fighters. At the end of the alley. They got it going on in the back
of a van with the seats ripped out. I see through the back doors
left open. Men drinking forties and throwing cash and jawing into
their phones. And the dogs.
It’s not loud at all.
Pits don’t bark much. They duck and twist like Galveston lightning
till they clamp on at each other’s throat. They try to roll each
other, but neither dog goes over. They sway. Imagine slow dancing
with a bear trap locked on to you. The men kick the dogs and stick
them to make them madder. The dogs stay frozen like that, bound by
their teeth.
I’m running at that
van, tell you what, let them pop me. I reach into my pocket like
I’m heavy with a pistol. My other hand is up like it’s badged. “Yo,
freeze.”
The van jerks out of
its idle and squeals away. They kick the loser dog out the back
doors as they go. She’s gasping in a puddle of old rain and
mosquitoes and grease runoff from a leak in the
Dumpster.
I stroke the dog’s
muzzle. Her tongue hangs long in fast panting. Her head is heavy in
my arms. Her front left leg is cut. Pouch under her jaw too. Her
eyes are rolled back. If she dies, I’ll bury her in the park where
nobody can mess with her. Up in the hills, where if you slit your
eyes it’s like you aren’t even in the city.
I don’t understand
violence. I don’t understand why it’s got to be. And why does it
have to be in me? I get so mad sometimes I could cut the world at
the neck. A baby in a tenement cries out and cries on.
I pinch a sheet
hanging from a fire escape and make a sling of it and scoop the
dog. She’s forty pounds, just where they want them for fighting.
The small ones are the fastest. I see a lot of old scars. Going to
be hard to rehab her, get her so she doesn’t try to fight other
dogs.
Here I am huffing and
puffing along the highway overlook with this dog in a bloody sheet
sling. Yet another truck crashed on the blind bend of the on-ramp
just ahead, honking, fumes, feels like August instead of June.
Gluey. I don’t do real good in the humidity. Nobody does, but me
less than most. I get a little hair-trigger.
This dude guns up the
exit ramp in a Mercedes convertible, new, black pearl. He swings
hard into the gas station and near about clips my dog, not to
mention me.
I don’t say a thing,
but I must be giving him the eyes, because after he sizes me up as
trash, he flips me off, slow style, like what are you gonna do
about it? He does a double take on the bloody sling and the dog,
frowns, revs to the gas pump. MD plates.
I’m wrapped in blood,
and he leaves me? This man should not be a doctor. This man should
not be.
Everything gets real
quiet, like you mute the TV, see? Then there’s the hiss of radio
static. It comes on so bright and loud, I’m deaf and fighting
blindness.
I follow this doctor.
Nice clothes. Phone to his ear. He’s jawing all loud and proud like
rich folks do. But I don’t hear what he’s saying. I don’t hear a
thing but the hissing now. I’m grinding my teeth to keep from
roaring out. The street shakes.
The doc does a double
take on me, and I see in his eyes that he knows I’m going to cut
him. I look down. My knife is in my hand. Dog is dangling under my
arm, whimpering. I run my lock-blade tip over the doc’s sparkly
black paint job. I start at the back quarter panel, head toward the
driver’s-side door, toward him.
The Mercedes guns
away without gassing up.
The radio static
takes a while to fade. I walk a little, but my legs are weak. Have
to sit. Practically fall to the curb. I’m empty. I think about what
I almost did, and I want to be anybody else so bad. Being anger’s
slave is nowhere to be. I don’t know. That static. If it was a real
thing, like a piece of cancer, I would cut it out
myself.
The dog trembles on
me. Have to get her inside. That’s the thing about dogs: They take
your mind off everything. My legs are still shaking. I can’t carry
this girl home. And no way a cabbie will let me put a bloody dog
into his Chevy. I don’t have a phone. Somebody ripped the receiver
off the pay phone, and I have no quarters anyway, and nobody to
call. Except maybe Tony. You ever need me, I’m
there for you, day or night, he said to me once. But most
folks just say that.
I don’t know how long
it is before this dude pulls over. “You all right?”
“Fuck away from me,
man.” Dudes that pull over try to mess with me
sometimes.
“I bring peace,
friend,” he says. “God’s blessings.”
“You better drive on,
friend.” I side-eye him.
He’s staring real
hard into my eyes, and I guess I look as messed-up as I feel,
because he says, “Get in the car, and I’ll take you to the
hospital.”
“Leave. Me.
Be. Last time.”
“The dog. What
happened? Did it get hit?” He’s got the Jesus sticker on his bumper
and the cross hanging from the mirror.
“Just let me use your
phone, man.” I close my eyes. “Please.”
I can’t even get
myself up from sitting on the curb, and he has to get out of the
car to hand it to me. I pull the piece of takeout bag Tony wrote
his number on from my wallet. I keep it next to this old picture of
my mom. Her face is kind of worn off, but you can see what she was
like, that she was the goodness.
“Tone?”
“Mack?”
“Sorry to wake you,
man.”
“Nah, man, I’m—I was awake anyway. What’s up,
buddy?”
Tony comes with Vic’s
car. His hair is all flat on one side of his head and standing up
off the other. He had to be out cold after working that double
today, on his feet fourteen hours. He studies the dog, then me.
“Mack, it’s gonna be okay, buddy. I promise.” Puts his hand on my
shoulder. Then he makes to scoop the dog.
She gets growly, and
that snaps me out of feeling sorry for myself. “I got her.” I scoop
her and sit in the front seat. Tony runs the belt out for me to
take it. I strap me and my pittie girl in, and Tony drives us to
where I live.
Our spot is in the
basement. Old man is out at the bar. Left two radios going. One has
the ballgame loud. The other is on soft with old-style
music.
I turn them both
off.
Near-empty quart of
Boone’s Farm side-lies on the couch. I make to hide
it.
“Mack,” Tony says,
“forget the bottle. Let’s take care of the dog.”
I grab towels and
peroxide, cool water jug from the fridge. Tony carries that stuff.
My strength is back mostly, and I carry the dog. We head for the
roof. I have the keys to the service elevator. The old man is the
janitor of this big old tenement. Most of the tenants in here are
veterans and folks in rehab and sad nice folks like that. The kind
who don’t mind if you bring in a sick dog, even if it’s against the
rules of having no pets.
Elevator clunks Tony
and me and my pit bull girl up twelve flights. She’s panting crazy.
I check her paws—sweating. Means she’s terrified.
We walk the fire
stairs the last flight, to the roof. Tony takes a second to study
the view. You can see the park from up here, in the slots between
where the line-dried sheets jig. The pigeons scatter and resettle.
“They let you pet their heads with your thumb sometimes,” I
say.
“No, they let
you pet their heads.”
“Yo, Tony, man. Thank
you, man.”
“Thank you, brother.”
“For
what?”
“For this night. It’s
a gift.”
“How do you
mean?”
He doesn’t say. He
helps me get the dog inside the hutch—or that’s what I call it.
It’s the housing for the elevators, to protect the engines that
drive the cables. It’s cinderblock and of a fair size, maybe as big
as a two-room apartment. The engines are in the back, and there’s a
small janitor’s workshop in the front. I like to hunker here. Sleep
here sometimes too, especially after the old man comes in from a
mean drunk. I like the hum and whir of the elevator
cables.
I built a pen of
chicken wire scraps I found in a construction site. Okay, I pinched
them. But I had to, because I didn’t have money, and I needed the
wire, so that made it all right. It says you can do that in the
Bible. I fenced the whole roof five feet high with it. I recuperate
my dogs here. “When this one is good again, I’ll ask my dog-walking
customers if they know anybody looking for a nice pit bull. If she
lives,” I tell Tony.
“She’ll live, buddy.
With you taking care of her, I’m sure of it.”
“She’d be a good dog,
you know? For your moms maybe, while you’re away.”
“My moms, huh?” His
eyebrows go up and he smiles. “You like her, right?”
“She’s real
nice.”
“No, I mean do you
like her like her?”
“Your
moms?”
“Céce, bud. Yeah, I
can tell: You’re crushin’ on her.”
“What? Nah. Not that
I don’t like her. I like her, but not like I like her like her.”
“Why not?” Tone
says.
“I could never
disrespect you like that.”
“You’re funny, man.
Anyway, Céce’s terrified of dogs.”
“I kind of saw that.”
I tell him about the dog who came up to us on the way home. “But I
could fix her fear, you know? This dog here would be real good for
her.”
“Then I guess you’d
better try to get her to take the dog, right?” Tony pulls his phone
and holds it out to me. “Call her.”
“It’s two fifteen in
the morning—wait, ten after three.”
“I guarantee you
she’s awake, pretending she’s studying while she’s watching
Polar Express.” Tony starts to call,
but I clap his phone shut.
“Look, man, she’s got
to look a hell of a lot prettier than
she is now before I’m ready to make that call.”
“My sister or the
dog?”
“What? No no, your
sister, man. I mean your dog—my dog. This here
dog’s got to look as pretty as your
sister is what I’m
saying.”
“So you do think she’s pretty.”
“I’ll shut
up.”
“Don’t. It’s fun
watching you twist.”
“I need to rehab her
first, Tone, my Boo here.”
“Boo?”
“What I name all my
dogs, boy or girl. Tony man, sorry, man, I swear: When the dog’s
all mended and trained, then I’ll reach
out to Céce. You can’t rush these things.”
“Of course you can,”
he says. “That’s the best way, bud. Crash hard and fast. Nothing
like it.” He sighs and helps me wash my Boo. We brush her down with
a peroxide towel and lay her out on a clean blanket. I get into the
pen with her. Tony sits against the far wall. The moon is on him
when the clouds aren’t dunking it. “Man, she’s tough-lookin’
though, huh?” Tony says. “That big pit bull head?
Massive.”
“My favorite
kind.”
“Seriously?”
“I love pits the
most. They’re true. Don’t listen to what everybody says, that they
like to attack folks. You’ve got more of a chance of a golden
retriever turning on you.”
“Right.”
“Serious. Pits are
bred not to bite their handlers, especially in the heat of battle.
If you torture them and bring out the fight in them, they’ll be
dog-aggressive, sure, but even so, most always they stay
human-kind. You’ve got to go a long way into evil to turn a pit
against people. They forgive easy as rain falls.”
“I heard they cry
like people. Like they tear up.”
“No dogs cry tears. A
pit bull’s jaw doesn’t lock either. Tell you what,
though?”
“Tell me
what.”
“I seen pitties so
sad and soulful. You see this girl’s eyes, big and wondering? She
feels real deep. You know what this girl wants, the only thing? To
give and get love. Right, girl? Right Boo?”
“She’s cocking her
head there, huh? She likes that name.”
“Best thing about
pits is they take in the fun. They’re the clown of the dog world.
They have a ton of energy, which is why you need to exercise them a
bunch and train them strict, and I do too. I include training free
when I walk them.”
“How much you
charge?”
“Buck an
hour.”
“We need to get you a
business manager,” he says.
“That’s all folks
around here can afford. You string six dogs at once, you do all
right. Sometimes the walk lasts two hours too, because I’m having
so much fun I lose track of time.”
Tony nods. “I’ve
never seen you like this.”
“Like what?” I hate
when I let my softness show. Soft gets you killed.
“I think you need to
let me help you pay for this dog training class. Just let me
finish. As an investment, I’m talking. You’ll rock the class, start
your own business, and have a house-no-mortgage by the time you’re
forty.”
“And what would be
your end in all that?”
“The fun of seeing
the good guy win one.”
“The good guy, huh?”
I can’t figure out what he sees in me. He knows I been locked up.
Being around him, I almost feel like what he’s saying is true. That
maybe I could be somebody. “Tony, man, I’m sorry for taking up your
night like this, jawing your ear off.”
“Stop saying sorry.
I’m gonna run down to the bodega and grab us some
sodas.”
“I have Sprites in
that little cube fridge behind you there.”
Tony cracks us a
pair.
“Yo Tone, I’d
appreciate you not telling anybody about, like, what happened
tonight.”
“What, that you
almost got yourself killed running into a dogfight to save a
chewed-up pit bull?”
“I just don’t like
people knowing stuff about me, you know?”
He stares at me, and
after a bit he nods. “All right, kid. I won’t say anything.” He’s
looking out the window and laughing quiet.
“What’s
funny?”
He shrugs, and we’re
quiet for a while, and my mind drifts back to that doctor. The
knife in my hand. Mercedes gunning out of there. So close, though.
Rewind the night back a little more, to Céce. No. She’s too good to
be in my dreams. Her, her mother, Tony: all too good. I can’t
imagine Tony overseas. I won’t. They put a knife in his hand? He’s not made to use it. He’s made to lay
knives down.
My Boo girl rests her
big boxy head in my lap. She’s looking up at me, and I know what
she’s saying. The language of dogs is quiet. Tell you what, if
there weren’t any dogs on this planet, I would check out right
now.
I follow Tony’s eyes
out the hutch window. The sky is a mist with the stars trying to
poke through, like a razor rash on God’s gray face.