Dog Eats Dog

by Iain Levison

  The bathroom looked like a slaughterhouse. He had splattered blood on the mirror, in the sink, on the toilet, all over the floor. His gasoline-drenched clothes lay in a pile.

  It felt good to be naked and alone. You were who you were when you were naked and alone. No need to pretend. You didn’t have to be a businessman, you didn’t have to be tougher than the next guy, you didn’t have to make anyone fear or respect you. He would rather be naked and bleeding in this bathtub than anywhere he had been in the last ten years. He was free.

  With a sigh, Dixon pulled himself up and looked in the mirror. He still wasn’t used to seeing himself without the beard and long hair. He looked younger, he thought. He looked young and scared and tired and pale and he was losing blood like a gut-shot steer.

  He heard Elias drop something outside the door. “I put some clothes there for you,” Elias said. “And some towels.”

  Dixon was too tired to answer. He turned the water on, adjusted the temperature, and stepped into the shower, gingerly keeping his wound away from the hot spray. Even the slightest trickle of water going into the wound was a shock of pain like he hadn’t felt before. Or at least for a long while. With the warm water beating down on his neck and shoulders, he looked at the wound for the first time and he could see the story behind it.

  A small hole started at his back, about five inches down from his shoulder blade. The bullet had never really gone in, but torn flesh all around as it had grazed his side right up near his bicep. Then there was more flesh tearing on the inside of the bicep, just a nasty mess, as if someone had decided to pound a hamburger with a claw hammer rather than throw it on a grill. Dixon figured that if he had been an inch to the right, and he had been holding his arm farther from his side, the bullet would have just passed between his arm and ribcage. Of course, that type of thinking was pointless. If he’d been an inch to the left it would have gone through his lung, or two inches to the right and it would have hit his arm dead on, puncturing his brachial artery or breaking the humerus.

  He got out of the shower, got the clothes and towels from outside the door, gingerly dried himself and began to dress. Elias had left him a pair of oversized blue sweat pants and an extra large white T-shirt with the words “Tiburn County Fair” emblazoned across the chest, with a colorful picture of a Ferris wheel. Probably the only things he had which would fit Dixon. They were about the same size, but Dixon had a lot more muscle, and doubted whether he could fit into any of Elias’s regular clothes.

  This was a crucial time, Dixon knew. He had left Elias alone for over an hour. When he opened the shower door, if there were no policemen in the living room, waiting for him, then The Deal had been made. He was confident that Elias would go for it, but you never knew for sure. Maybe the offer of a few thousand dollars had clinched it. People liked money. He draped an oversized beach towel over his shoulders, making sure the end of the towel covered his left hand, concealing his pistol, which had the safety off. If there were cops out there, he wasn’t going anywhere willingly.

  Dixon pulled the bathroom door open, peered out and listened. Silence. He walked down the stairs, one step at a time, a second between each step, taking in the sounds. Nothing. Then a rattling of a newspaper. Didn’t mean anything. When he hit the bottom stair, he turned and looked around into the living room. It was empty. Through the living room window, he could see that the sun was coming up.

  Elias White was sitting at the kitchen table, reading the newspaper. He nodded when he saw Dixon. “I put some coffee on,” Elias said. “You want some?”

  Dixon sat down gingerly in the seat across from him. The air in the kitchen was still heavy from the greasy smell of fried eggs, which, mixed with the coffee, reminded him of the diner where he had worked, years ago.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Coffee would be good.”

  4

  “I’ll tell you how you’re gonna get me all that shit I need. The A positive blood and painkillers and so on.”

  Elias shook his head. “I can’t do that. I don’t know anyone who does things like that.”

  “I’ll show you how.”

  “You’ll show me how? What’re you talking about? I can’t just walk into a convenience store and get those things. You need to take care of that yourself.”

  It was funny, Dixon thought, that this man, who was so persuadable when it came to sharing his house with a fugitive bank robber, was so resistant to performing simple tasks to help him. He understood the difference, though. Taking Dixon on as a temporary room-mate was a passive endeavor. Acquiring the help of a nurse, and getting controlled substances, was active. Once Elias agreed to something like this, he could no longer claim that he was a victim if the police ever got involved. More importantly, he couldn’t claim it to himself, either.

  Dixon reached into his laundry bag and took out a packet of freshly wrapped, hundred dollar bills. He broke the wrapping, counted off five bills and put them on the table. “You know any nurses?”

  Elias looked like he was thinking hard. “Not really.”

  “Bullshit. You work at a college, right?”

  “Yes. I’m a professor,” Elias said distinctly, as if Dixon had failed to grasp the grandeur of the job.

  “Well, don’t they have an infirmary there?”

  “Yes. But it’s a small one.”

  “I don’t give a fuck what size it is. There’s a nurse there, right?”

  “Yes, there’s a nurse there.”

  “Well give her these and tell her to get me the shit I asked for. Then tell her to come over and clean out my wound. And she’ll get the rest of this packet.” Dixon waved the hundreds around and slapped them down on the table.

  “She’s not that kind of nurse,” Elias said. Dixon was just staring at him, so he continued as if trying to explain something to a small child. “She’s a nice, Jamaican woman. She’s about forty-five or so. She hands out pills for headaches for the students and faculty. She doesn’t do things like this.”

  Dixon nodded. “She’s forty-five, huh?”

  Elias nodded. “Around there.”

  “And Jamaican.”

  “Yes. She’s Jamaican.”

  “So you know for a fact that forty-five-year-old Jamaican women don’t break the law if you offer them five grand?”

  Elias had thought that his rational argument was starting to win Dixon over. What the hell was this man thinking? He couldn’t go wandering around the college campus getting people to commit crimes for him. He was a college professor on his way to Harvard.

  “What age and nationality are we looking for?” Dixon asked. “Would a twenty-five-year-old American nurse be more likely to help me out? Or should we try older? Maybe a sixty-year-old Canadian. Do you know any sixty-year-old Canadian nurses? I hear they’re a walking crime spree . . .”

  “Look, you don’t have to be sarcastic,” Elias snapped. “I can’t do this. These people up here . . . I don’t know where you’re from, but people here like to . . .” He trailed off.

  “Like to what? Like to fuck underage girls?”

  “Fuck you.” Elias stopped, suddenly horrified by his own speech. He was expecting the gun to come out again, but Dixon just smiled.

  “It’ll be fun,” said Dixon. “You just wave the money. The money’ll do the talking for you.” He pushed the hundreds towards Elias. “Five grand. You offer her three and a half to start, then raise it up if she protests. What’s the big deal? I bet she’s got access to all that stuff in the infirmary. Everybody thinks like you do . . . nice Jamaican woman. I bet nobody even watches her. Christ, for all you know, she’s probably dealing pills out of that infirmary.”

  “No she isn’t,” Elias said firmly.

  Dixon looked at Elias and shook his head. “The world is full of vice, my friend. You think people look at you and think, hey, I bet that guy’s doing his neighbor’s underage daughter?”

  “Look,” Elias snapped. “She’s not underage. She’s seventeen. It just happened the one time,
yesterday. That’s it. It’s not this sick, seedy affair like you keep making it out to be.”

  “I’m just making a point,” Dixon said, smiling.

  Elias sighed. He was going to have to ask his college infirmary nurse to clean out a fugitive’s gunshot wound. Fear tightened his stomach at the thought of her refusal. He had a mental image of her running for the telephone to make the call that would ruin his carefully planned life. But there was something else mixed in with the fear. He had never done anything like this before.

  “Exciting, isn’t it?” said Dixon with a grin.

  “No,” Elias snapped, angry at having his thoughts read. “Risking my career is not exciting.”

  Dixon nodded. There was silence in the kitchen, then finally Dixon said, “It’s Saturday.” They both stared out the kitchen window and marveled for a moment at how the days of the week kept right on in sequence no matter the events in an individual life.

  “I’m tired,” Dixon said, and Elias sensed true exhaustion in his words, not just the physical aspects of sleep deprivation but a weariness with his life. This wasn’t a man who enjoyed running from the law. “I need some sleep.”

  Elias looked up. “Where do you want to sleep?”

  “How’s the basement?” It was perfect for Dixon. He had peered down there while Elias was reading the paper. It had one entrance, unfinished stone walls, offering all the protection of a prison cell without any of the drawbacks. He liked the fact that you had to go down creaky stairs to get down there, which would give him plenty of noise and reaction time in case Elias decided to kill him in his sleep. Maybe he’d find some empty cans and put them on the stairs.

  “I’m gonna go to sleep in the basement and you’re going to take care of this nurse thing for me, OK?”

  Elias shrugged. What else could he do? Besides, there was something about this gun-wielding maniac he was starting to trust. He seemed to have some kind of inner peace and confidence that his insane plans would actually work. Elias really did believe Dixon would leave in two weeks, and not kill him when the time came. If Dixon planned to kill him, why didn’t he do it last night while he was sleeping? Then again, maybe Dixon was waiting for him to get the nurse. Maybe as soon as the nurse left, it would be two quick shots to the head and that would be the end of Elias White, up-and-coming young professor with a recently finished paper on the class struggle in Germany between the wars.

  “I keep the money,” said Elias.

  “Say what?”

  “I keep the money bag until you leave. I hide it somewhere safe, as protection. I have no guarantee you’re not going to just kill me as soon as I get the nurse.”

  “So you’re going to get the nurse? That was easy.” Dixon smiled. “You can’t have the money.”

  “Well then I won’t get the nurse.”

  Dixon pulled the pistol out, and held it up. Elias froze. The look in Dixon’s eye was different from anything he had seen before. His expression was softer and more calm. Here it comes, he thought. Oh, Jesus, what a way to die. Why had he been thinking about trusting this homicidal maniac? He tried to move his mouth to tell Dixon it was OK, he’d get the nurse, but his mouth didn’t move. It was frozen shut, his jaw looking determined. His muscles had shut down, waiting for the bullet that was about to crash into his skull . . . Was this how his mother had died, quickly, one shot? Or had she been stabbed? Elias was suddenly gripped by grief, grief for his mother, grief for himself. Then he felt his muscles loosen up again, and he was about to start begging and screaming when Dixon smiled.

  “Tell you what. You get me the nurse, and I’ll give you the gun. But I keep the bullets . . . Jesus, son, you look as white as a ghost.”

  Dixon stared at him for a few more seconds, while Elias sat there feeling sheepish, and Elias could see Dixon piecing together the reason for Elias’s expression. He watched Dixon’s face as he gradually understood. A big grin spread across Dixon’s face, then finally he laughed, a long, loud baritone laugh stopped short by a convulsion of pain from the movement.

  Dixon winced hard and groaned. “Just get me the goddamned nurse, OK?”

  “OK,” Elias tried to say, but it just came out a whisper.

  Driving into school on his day off, Elias began to wonder about his life. He had been convinced his life had been about to end and now he was alive, smelling things, hearing things, driving. What if Dixon had shot him? What would it all have added up to? His joy in experiencing his senses was diminished by a nagging doubt that he had not done nearly as much as he could have with his life.

  He remembered his father’s funeral, and his determination that day to change everything, to get himself on the map of academia. That had been nine years ago. What had he accomplished since then? He had started dating Ann, a bright young woman who would do well at the academic gatherings he attended, but his own career had stalled. Still no tenure and he was thirty-five. He was becoming the same boring, unconstructive layabout his father had been, trying to speak knowledgeably in lectures about things he only pretended to care about to a roomful of students who would gaze out the window at the trees changing colors.

  His life was still going to waste. There was no part of German or American history that fired him up. There were, as educators claimed, no lessons to be learned. If humanity had learned such a great lesson from the Holocaust, why were the Cambodians involved in one of their own three decades later? Why were the Rwandans and Yugoslavs busy trying to butcher themselves to extinction in the 90s? His job was to put some kind of positive spin on studying history, as if reciting recorded facts about mass murder was in some way useful, as if it would ensure prevention of such madness in the future. Who was he kidding? Most of his students were nursing or computer-tech majors who had to take his course to fulfill an arts requirement – highly unlikely candidates to instigate genocide, and even if they were susceptible to behaving so savagely, Elias’s course would just give them ideas.

  He needed to get out of Tiburn. He needed to find a job with a future. He needed to get books and articles published and get tenure at a school people had heard of, instead of sitting around this one-horse New Hampshire shithole babbling nonsense to the local rich kids. He was almost glad that Dixon had come out of nowhere and waved a gun in his face. It was a jumpstart. It was going to get his life moving again. If the nurse called the police on him, he decided, it would be for the best. It would actually force him to leave town, to go and experience notoriety and respect in a place where it mattered.

  He pulled up outside the infirmary. He could see the light on, knew there was someone inside. The nurse had to be on duty until five on Saturdays for the kids who lived in the dorms. He opened the door and saw her sitting at the desk in the entrance hall, filling out forms.

  “Hi,” Elias said, trying to put some confidence in his voice.

  “Hello, Professor White,” the nurse said with a heavy Jamaican accent. She was wearing blue scrubs and looked very professional, not the type of person who would be interested in the deal he was going to propose. “What brings you here on a Saturday?”

  Elias patted the money in his pocket and realized he had nothing to say, hadn’t rehearsed an approach. He couldn’t just blurt out the request. He needed to lead up to it somehow. “Hi,” he said again.

  She was still sitting at her desk, looking up at him expectantly.

  “What’s your name?” he asked after what seemed to him to be an endless excruciating silence, but was in fact just a few seconds.

  “I am Nurse Davenport,” she said. She was still looking at him. “You are Professor White? We met last year. I gave you a flu shot.”

  Up until that moment Elias had completely forgotten about the flu shot. “Yes,” he said. “Thank you. I didn’t get the flu that winter.”

  “Those flu shots are very good,” Nurse Davenport said in her lilting accent, which made every word sound wise and thoughtful.

  “Yes,” Elias agreed quickly. “Very effective.”

 
Elias stood there for a few more seconds until finally Nurse Davenport, convinced he had just shown up to waste her time, turned her attention away from him and swiveled her chair over to a gray metal filing cabinet and began to pull a file from it. She swiveled the chair back and opened the file on her desk and began to look at it, pen in hand.

  “Have you ever treated a gunshot wound?” Elias asked.

  Nurse Davenport looked up patiently, and Elias was aware that had he been a student and not a professor, she would have told him she was busy and asked him to leave. But she nodded politely.

  “Yes, I have,” she said. “In Jamaica.”

  “People shoot each other a lot there, do they?” Elias was aware the question was idiotic, so he added, “I mean, I mean . . .”

  “Sometimes,” she said. “There are bad neighborhoods in Kingston. Shootings, stabbings. It can be crazy sometimes.”

  Silence again. But now Nurse Davenport was sensing there was something on Elias’s mind, and she gave him a pleasant smile.

  “Why you ask me this now, Professor White?”

  “Elias, please.”

  She nodded. “Why you come in here on a Saturday ask me about gunshot wounds? You got one?”

  “A friend of mine does,” Elias said. He knew she had only been joking, but his earnest response didn’t seem to surprise her.

  “But you don’t want to take him to the hospital, this friend?”

  “Wouldn’t be a good idea.”

  She nodded, understanding. This was going well. To make it go better, Elias added, “He wants to give you five thousand dollars if you can come over and, you know, take care of it.”