by Tariq Shah
Marcy shakes her head at me. “Bullets was not put down. He got loose.”
“I guess Vin never said specifically. I just assumed the cops had him in the pound.”
“It’s only a matter of time. Certainly by tomorrow. They’ll get him,” Marcy says.
“Where is Vin, by the way? He disappeared the minute we got in.”
“You know how he is,” Evelyn says. “Crowds make him panicky.” She rolls her eyes, and that cracks me up a little bit. Marcy gives a dreamy smile.
I get up from the bed. “I should go find him. I have to fly back tonight,” I say. “You want a light on?”
Marcy shakes her head. “I’m fine like this. My eyes are just so sore…”
“Good seeing you, Ant,” Evelyn says, leaning over, gripping my arm. “Now, if you don’t see him downstairs, try the Jawarski’s. He’s there all the time. We’re not fun enough for him anymore, I suppose.”
She moves to the rocking chair in the corner. Marcy says, “If you find him though, send him here. He’s got something I need.” Evelyn nods, gives her trembling hand a squeeze of support.
*
I wander down a silent, fresh-plowed lane, through the murk and Christmas lights hung from the alley gutters. Above them, the night sky is a dead television screen.
The Jawarskis were like a clan. Four or five brothers, couple sisters between them, each terrorizing us all in their own ways. They all ought to be grown and busy forming their own little broods by now.
The Jawarski home has the same drab-cream clapboard siding, that same ramshackle screen door that always thwacked me. I remember I never liked that house. But I was buds with Melvin for about a year back in junior high. He was second oldest of the litter. Until he turned on me that fall, I had a kind of immunity against their cruelty, or at least the worst manifestations of it. One of their favorite games was chasing unpopular kids up trees. Whoever kept them up there after nightfall won a point.
A rough gust rollercoasters just overhead, brings a dive bomb shriek like squealing children, then vanishes, a rogue wave I’m glad to have missed. The homes groan back into place, the cellophaned windows quit their rattle.
Vince is huddled in the little vestibule in front of their place, struggling to undo a cufflink as he waits to be let in.
“Oh, Christ. Buzz off, Ant.”
“Oh, hi, Vincent. What brings you here…”
“Why don’t you just go back to the house and I’ll catch up with you later?” He rips the sleeve open. “Hate these buttons…”
“There’s the Vince I know and love.”
“Get your head checked.”
The eyeball peeking past the deadbolt chain belongs to Mrs. Jawarski, I assume, but the gates swing open upon sight of Vince.
“Vinnie. How are you! C’mere. Hugs. I can’t tell you how sorry we are, ugh, it’s just god awful—come in, and who’s—?”
“This is Ant, my old neighbor.”
“Ant. Sure, I remember. You’re back. How’ve you been, oh, you get hugs too,” she says, coming in close. “I’m Margaret,” she adds.
So, okay.
A Friends re-run is on in the living room.
“Should we take our shoes off?” I ask.
“They don’t care about that,” Vince says.
“Sure, if you like,” she replies.
“We won’t be long, Mrs. Jawarski. I just came to meet up with Daymon,” he says.
“He’s out back in the garage since yesterday.”
“What’s he doing?” I ask, but Mrs. Jawarski just throws her hands in the air, shuffles into the pantry.
“Stop. Talking,” Vince says.
“So, Ant, what do you do for a living?” she calls.
I look to Vince. “Should I answer?” He only sucks his cheek and stares at the mottled off-white carpeting. There’s a little wild-haired Pomeranian eyeing me from a doorway down the hall.
“Why hello, Roxy!” she says. I hear her make smooching noises, but Roxy stays put. “Now—would either of you like a slice of pie? I got key lime,” she calls.
“None for me. I’m on medication,” I say, as Vince, with a stealth uncommon for him, sneaks toward the side door, fully cognizant of each creak in the floor and stepping around them. “I just had a—root canal.”
“Ugh,” Mrs. Jawarski says. “Terrible. I hope they gave you some good dope.”
“A little too good.”
She returns to the living room, carrying a wedge of key lime pie with a black plastic spoon stuck under it like a shovel.
“I want your dentist,” she says, and lowers herself into the Barcalounger in the corner, the plate and TV clicker in either hand, as though to show off the 8-bit Rudolph printed on her sweatshirt.
“Vince run off already?”
“I’ll go find him. Think he went out back.”
“Good luck with that. Oh, but do me a favor—tell my darling son to lower the volume on that goddamn stereo already. He’s had it on all day.”
I slip into the side alleyway leading behind the house, unhook the chain-link gate. Vince hears it squeak shut and scowls at me.
They have a backyard path of stone slabs arranged so that visitors can use it and not trample the lawn when going to the garage. But the grass is mostly frozen dirt now, and the stones only get about halfway to the garage before they sink too deep into the earth to be any good. Neither of us bother with it. Even were it not beyond saving, I get the sense that trampling on some withered Kentucky bluegrass is the least of our troubles.
There is a bastard noise bleeding out from behind the garage door. Like a dirt bike raping a leopard.
Vince bangs to be let in. I remember where I am and how little lawns matter. When I hear the barking, it all comes together.
“You punched a column. You hammered your hand. ‘Stupid of me.’”
The rattle of padlocks unlatching, the clamor of chains pulled free.
“Hell is this, Vince…?”
He turns to me, we’re nose-to-nose. Starts pointing his finger.
“You shoosh up now. And get inside with me. You’re up in my business.”
“Got the rabies shot, right?”
The garage door rises in a loud rush and I’m blinded by this rack of halogen floodlights aimed outward from the back corners, see a brilliant X after shutting my eyes. We freeze like caught burglars. But it’s just a kid voice rasping out behind the too-bright glare.
“I blanked man, sorry. My bad. Come on in.”
By then, it doesn’t really matter whether my eyes adjust, or whether I want them to.
*
Daymon brings the door down after us. He’s got the boombox on, some ghastly band, all brutal shrieks strafing over pounding sludge, too loud for the speakers pumping it out, but Daymon isn’t bothered, looking at us staring at the blood pattern on the cement floor. He falls back into his folding chair, smooths down his blond buzz cut.
“What’s with the blood, Daymon?” Vince says.
“How old are you?” I ask.
He’s nodding along to the noise, lazily untangling some jumper cables running along his workstation. A lawnmower is tarped in one corner, a few shelves sag with power tools, a weed-whacker, spare parts. A full-size fridge sits in the other corner, and next to it, that soot-dusted stereo, a pile of garden hoses, the trash cans, and lastly, a big old box, draped by a Garfield beach towel.
“I’m seventeen-and-a-half,” he says, picking at a rash along his upper lip and around his nostrils.
“How’s your brother, Melvin?”
“Melvin’s… Melvin, man, he don’t change…”
“It in there?” Vince says. When he doesn’t respond, Vince claps his hands at him. “Hey. Daymon. Bit of friendly advice: lay off the paint thinner. Better off sucking a muffler. What happened here?”
I’m just staring at the box in the corner. “Why is there blood all over the place.”
“Sorry about the loud music. Keeps snoops away. I’m over th
ese doom and gloom bummer jams,” he says, looking where we look. “And anyway, he’s quiet now.”
When Daymon cuts the sound I snap out of it. “This what you do now, Vin? Torture pets with the local teen psycho? I have problems?”
Daymon makes a move toward me, nimble and woozy motion, gets me in a half-nelson, like I’m twelve again. I didn’t see it coming. The strength of his hold jogs my memory of his brother, Carlo, the particular Jawarski bozo who tormented my class.
When I don’t put up a fight, he loses interest. Letting me go, he says, “It’s not nice to make fun of others. Dumb doctors are getting so stingy with painkillers. Dentists aren’t bad though. They like, sympathize with people in pain.”
He reaches into his mouth and roots around, extracts a set of upper dentures, gleaming with drool, and places it onto the Garfield towel. He does the same with the lower set, dropping it beside its partner. Then, like a viper, he bares his ruined gums at me. Only has a couple molars left.
“I’m not embarrassed either. It was worth a prescription.” Daymon casually wipes clean each set with the towel as he talks. “We’re all works in progress, Pop says. I am what I am. I know other guys that’ve done a whole lot worse. Girls too.”
Vince’s still transfixed by that box. He creeps toward it, kneels, then pauses.
“How’re you gonna do it?” Daymon says.
Vince lifts the towel. When he murmurs, “I’m slaughtering it,” his gaze strays not one inch from what he sees inside.
Daymon presses something into his hand, does the same to me.
“I had a idea, for like—a necklace. Be kind of like dog tags. Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. You know what I mean? Bullets too, now. Him and me are like brothers, now.”
The dry fang feels warm in my hand, sharpest where it broke. My flight leaves in two and a half hours.
*
Vince isn’t listening anymore. The kennel has him slack-jawed, draws his focus into its confines.
“I hate it. He was my bud, you know? We were friends,” Vince says. “I can’t stop squirming. That sounds weird. I know. It would to me, if one of you said it. I don’t care.”
“And such a fricking goof too. Dang—I’m making myself cry over here,” Daymon says. He lets out a deep breath. “This’ll make things right, Vino.”
“Nah… no, it won’t. It won’t right much. But that’s—what is that, Ant?—that’s immaterial. When disaster strikes. What do we do? We adjust the protocols. Close loopholes. Revise the response. Fix it good. So it can’t happen again,” Vince murmurs, tapping the kennel bars.
I watch as Daymon, nodding along to Vince’s shady wisdom, unscrews the cap off the red gasoline tank by the mower. He stuffs a dishrag down the neck and upends it, sloshes it around. Wringing out the cloth, he then clamps it over his nose and mouth, and his eyes roll back as he sucks in deep. I watch Daymon swoon, one hand blind-groping for the chair he tumbles into once it’s felt. His body slackens. It twitches one or two times.
I clear my throat, say, “Cops’ll put down Bullets, you know. They’ll close the loophole—”
“Quiet now, Ant.”
“Not like they’re gonna give the dog parole—”
“You still think I can’t handle my own. Call the cops, if you think that’s best. Go on.” He folds his hands, twiddles his thumbs, waiting. “Well?”
Outside, frustrated gusts rush and batter the metal garage door, demanding entry, as though they too sought shelter from elements of nature more dangerous than them.
Vince stirs, looks for his coat, then swipes the saw hung from a nail in the wall. “I’m taking your hack,” he says to Daymon, who is just now coming-to.
“…Think I’m gonna hang back, man. I don’t feel too good. Pretty sure Bullets took to it though. Dog’s tough,” Daymon says with a smile that collapses. He takes up his false teeth and struggles to fit them back in his jaw the right way.
“You’re unbelievable,” I say to Vince, who tsks and says, “Just get the car. Wouldn’t want you to miss your flight.” He lobs me his keys.
Mrs. Jawarski scrapes plates of some slop that looks like beef stroganoff into the trash outside and sees me bee-lining it to Vince’s car.
“What’s going on back there?” she calls.
I pretend I don’t hear, cutting back into the alley, jogging now to where we parked.
She comes down the deck steps into the yard, rewrapping her robe against the chill. I peer down the street at her watching me in front of the Cutlass. But there is a big problem. The keys aren’t fitting. The lock’s frozen solid.
“I said, what’s going on back there?” Mrs. Jawarski is next to me all of a sudden, poking me in the ribs.
“Oh, nothing,” I tell her. “Dude stuff, you know.”
She frowns. “Oh, nothing,” she parrots.
But I can smell the liquor on her breath. “I mean, they sent me to grab some booze down the street. But, look: the lock seems to be frozen!”
She squints at me, then the handle. “Gimme the keys. Let me try.” Handing them to her, she starts to fiddle.
Call the police. It’s there, right there on my tongue. Say it.
“Ugh. Come on. Some whisky should do the trick.” Taking me by the hand, she leads me back to her house.
*
From the living room’s bay window, they could almost be snow-globe figurines, Vince and Bullets, out back in the moon’s sorry milk, were it not for the pillowcase covering the pitbull’s head.
Sighting me, he taps the wristwatch he isn’t wearing.
Mrs. Jawarski pours Wild Turkey into a saucepan over the bathroom sink. Takes a glug herself before handing it over to me.
“Wait a minute,” she says. “Why not just take the bottle? Save you boys a trip.”
I’m already making for the door. “Oh that’s all right,” I say, balancing the pan of booze. “I think it’d be… a violation of our party ethics.”
“Nonsense, here, just wait one second…”
At that, a flagstone crashes in through the window. Glass flies in a lethal dazzle. Roxy goes berserk. The room’s heat is outmuscled, snuffed by a ludicrous, swirling cold that renders it condemned, defiled—not a home. I take off by instinct.
I’m running up the street as fast as I can without the saucepan splashing too much, not daring to look back. Everything is moving too fast, too too fast now. I’m thinking this is bad, I’m thinking what the hell am I doing? as I run, as first one, then three neighbors’ porches brighten, as a few watch me in their windows, phones in hand, and I’m breathless, and the answer refraining in my mind: I do not know.
The spill of whisky down the door makes the lock steam and softly hiss in the night. I pour some on the key too, and it works. The frozen door cracks free like ice from a tray. Fingers sticky with liquor, I get the car started and head ’round the block to the back alley, where Vince has the dog in a tight grip, slung over his shoulder.
“What the fuck was that?” I yell at him.
“You can’t do anything right. Not even the simplest thing.”
Vince and I get Bullets into the trunk. Another coughing fit seizes him, this one worse than the others, makes him double over.
Mrs. Jawarski is out in front of the sedan, flushed and frenetic in the headlights. “Who did that? I mean, god forbid, could’ve been killed—now what am I supposed to do?”
“Terrible, thoughtless,” Vince says. “Probably some teens. Go on in and call the police, though who knows if they’ll even come…”
“I just called ’em.”
“I can tarp up the frame tonight and get someone to replace it tomorrow.”
“I’m cold.”
“Daymon’s got a space heater.”
“Vincent, you threw it.” She is quivering and she is truly cross. Roxy is growling on the deck, bearing thumbtack fangs. And here come the neighbors, trudging forth over the snow-laden pavement in their heavy coats, slow as spacemen.
“Go back inside,
Mrs. Jawarski, I’m tellin’ ya. They might still be out there.”
I close the trunk carefully but that feels pointless now, with those words of his from before burrowing into my mind— Contusions of the lung. Contusions of the heart.
*
I know the place we’re going. It used to be a Girl Scout camp, then it burned down. Now the woods have taken over. The street degrades into potholes and blacktop chunks buckled by road salt and relentless wild grass. Just on the other side of the car door, dead flutes, blown by a raving band of currents, until Vince kills the engine, and they rest, as though some nonsense game of hide and seek were being played, whose rules changed at whim.
For a moment, all is still. The night is clear and sharpened by frozen air, the moon wide awake, as pocked and cratered as the paving. But the blue-silver clouds are carving through the sky with a haste that just looks off.
Vince parks near a railroad tie and a metal NO ENTRY sign on a chain, hung to keep vehicles out of the lifeless meadow spreading out into the snowy forest.
Vince elbows my shoulder and we go around to get the dog. Given the quiet of the woods, the gray farmland hiding, in its ripple, a silo here, a barn husk over there, it’s weird to know we aren’t more than a couple miles from home. On the horizon, I can see I-94, glittering pale gold.
“Shattered mouth or no, if we don’t pay attention, one of us may lose a valued piece of our anatomy when we open that trunk,” he says.
“We could just leave him in there, let nature take its course.”
Vince just shakes his head.
“We could leave him in there, go grab a beer. Booze and pills, is nothing better?”
But he isn’t having that. Vince wants to count down from three. We’ll pop it then, but when he does, and the trunk springs up, there is no movement, no sound, no pouncing killer. There is just a quietly moaning animal getting blood and slobber all over my duffel bag.
Vince gets him on a leash. Bullets has trouble getting up.
“Maybe we should carry him,” I say.
By way of response, he yanks the leash along, tells the dog, “Get moving.” And it does. We all do.
We crunch through packed snow whiskered by the stems of skinny fierce-willed brush, and long wooden stakes tasseled by neon orange strips flapping in the wind like headbands. We would make believe they were broadswords and would sword-fight and drive them into the earth like Excalibur when one of us won, back when we used to roam around these hills, this forest, pretending it was all ours and would be for all time.
