The Dogs of Detroit

by Brad Felver

  I was better, but Charley was tougher. I was a full head taller and still growing. But Charley was short and skinny and hadn’t grown an inch since he was fourteen and never would. Still, even his measured attacks were ferocious. His eyes yellowed as if infected with some jungle disease. The primal nature of it all seemed to satisfy something in him—a stripped-down exercise that determined who would survive.

  We spent weeks at the edge of our backyard, down in the bowled-out depression, where we used the wrought-iron fence of the cemetery as one rope and landscaping timbers as the others. It was our training camp. What we were training for wasn’t clear, but we would be ready, prepared for any kind of attack from bears or Arabs or imposing fathers. When we went to school, we wore the bruises and cuts like badges, and when the other kids asked us what had happened we shrugged them off and smirked like they were stupid shits, nudges, all of them. Our muscles went taut as we sweated out the pudding cups and grape sodas, and Charley began to resemble one of our skinned cats—all rib cage and pale flesh and sinewy muscle clinging to an undersized skeleton. Our arms lengthened from the constant torque, our joints loosening up. I twisted my hips like my father told me, bobbed my head, weaved around Charley’s haymakers, and dropped a stiff jab or full overhand right often enough that it was clear I was in charge, that Charley was the nudge.

  “New game,” Charley said when he had tired of straight boxing that he clearly wasn’t winning. He dropped a two-by-eight onto the ground and walked it like a plank. “Get on.”

  We threw leather on the two-by-eight. If you accidentally stepped off, the other guy got a free shot to the body. If you got knocked off, it meant a free shot to the face. If you stepped off on your own, which almost never happened, you got punched in the dick.

  Charley rarely backed up. He liked to swim in deep, taking shots to the nose, hoping to land a bare knuckle on my ribs. But I pawed at him with my longer arms, keeping him at a distance, waited for him to commit so that I could belt him with an overhand right.

  We threw leather in the dark, that being most of the time in Cut Bank. Either we had short winter days, or the mountains blocked the sun. The light on the back porch was far away from our ring, and by the time it filtered down, it was pale. But through it, we could see each other’s eyes, Charley’s always flickering like a predator.

  When winter landed early, we pulled on our Carhartt chore coats, steam funneling from our heads, and we threw more leather. The padding in the gloves went hard with the cold, and felt like cinder block slamming on our temples. Our free hands struck harder too, like frozen T-bones, though to punch with the bare hand in the cold hurt more than the damage it delivered. We slipped from frost on the board often, and the free shots piled up. Still, neither of us stepped off the board on purpose, knowing that a free shot to our frozen, shriveled dicks in that kind of cold might just jam the whole package up into our small intestines and truly turn us into nudges.

  In March of the year we turned sixteen, when we’d been throwing the leather for more than a year, Charley got himself kicked out of school.

  I arrived halfway through, never saw how it started. All the versions had him standing in the locker bay between classes, his arm hanging from Carla Depusio, a thoroughly unattractive girl who wore tight shirts and lived down the street. This was around the time I’d nailed Charley with a bare-hand left cross that sliced through his eye. The eyeball bulged out, and the cracked cut refused to close in the cold, just seeped a tea-colored liquid, and so he resembled some menacing mugger, always eyeball-fucking you.

  From there, things went cloudy. Everyone claimed to have seen it firsthand, that it was the craziest shit they’d ever seen. The guys tended to claim Charley was a bad dude, a fucking hero. That dude could skin a bear with a spoon, they said. The girls shook their heads and said it didn’t matter—he was an animal who belonged in the wild.

  Max Woods, a nice enough kid who lived in a two-story with vinyl siding and wore braces and started as a forward on the basketball team, told Charley to leave Carla alone. Some versions had him asking like a nice boy, being chivalrous, saving the young girl from the wolf. Other versions, though, had him demanding, looming over Charley to his full six-foot-plus. However it started, Max ended up raising his fists, and Charley went berserk. He hit Max six times before anyone knew what was happening. I got there just in time to see him timber Max and then pounce on him, dropping fists and elbows, mauling him until he was punching a bloody stump for a face, and through the shouts and moans what rose was the sound of Charley thumping on Max, like the dull thud of a rubber mallet pounding on a decomposing log. He kept punching. Teeth clinked onto the floor and his braces broke loose and jammed through his lips, hung there like dental floss. Carla tried to pull him off, and he backfisted her in the temple. When Charley finally stood up, his knees a dark purple red, Max Woods had swallowed two teeth the doctors had to wait for him to shit out.

  Charley never bothered to tell me his full version. He merely claimed that the bitch had it coming, though I never knew who exactly he meant. “Besides,” he said, “school is for nudges.” It was fine; he needed to train. He was going for the gold gloves now. He’d tasted combat blood, and he needed more. Maybe he’d go box in the marines too. But his ego outgrew his muscles. Charley was a tough kid, but he was no pugilist.

  My father thumped Charley when he found out. He wasn’t an educated kind of man, but his kids didn’t need to be getting booted out of school. Just because we were near-on the border didn’t mean we had to act like some bear-poaching Canadians who belonged up in Sweet Grass.

  Charley told him to piss off, go bully his own son. I wanted to step in between them, act logical for once, but there was no way for my father to get his justice and Charley to avoid being a nudge. We all knew the rules to these games.

  My father thumped him more then, got really rough. He tossed Charley up against the cemetery fence, kicked in his ribs. He picked up one of our jousting brooms and caned his back while Charley writhed on the frozen ground. “Should I still piss off?” my father said.

  Charley coughed. “Shit, yes, you should.”

  The thumping continued with steel-toes to the gut and hard, loud slaps to the face, slaps that left red hand-shaped splotches. Charley pulled himself up by the fence, wobbled there, waiting for my father to keep hitting him. Eventually, my father quit. He threw his hands in the air, grunted, and stomped off to the house, as if defeated because Charley outlasted him.

  So Charley stayed home and ate bologna sandwiches with extra mustard while I went to school and tried to earn Bs from teachers who shot me dirty looks like I was some sort of accomplice. But then Charley told me that if he was going to train proper, he needed someone to spar with. I resisted at first, having a bit more fear of authority than he did, but I agreed to stay home a couple days a week and train with him.

  We stole Starla’s couch cushions and taped them around an aspen for a heavy-bag. When our bare hands broke open from scraping too much, we doused them in snow and switched places. When we’d punched all the stuffing from the cushions, I stole new ones from the school library and tied them up as replacements.

  Starla peeked her head out the back door one morning and watched us on the two-by-eight for a minute. She looked over to her cushions wrapped around the tree. “You boys should probably get to school,” she said.

  Charley looked up at her without moving. “Piss off,” he said. “We are at school.” Then he turned back to me, and we threw the leather.

  She stayed inside after that, watching her soap operas and smoking her menthols.

  With no school to punctuate our leather throwing or our new games, Charley started to run wild. He disappeared for longer stretches and returned with scratches on his face and painful looking limps. He talked back to Starla more when my father wasn’t around. And at night, when we used to sit in our room and debate our scenarios, he shadowboxed in the foggy backyard light, the tombstones of the cemetery rising up behind
him like giant obelisks with long shadows that pointed toward the forest.

  One morning, I woke and looked out the window to see him hopping tombstones. He jumped from one to the other without touching the ground like some sinister slackliner who’d lost his rope.

  “New game,” he told me. “Something I can play while you’re at school or sleeping away your life like a nudge.”

  “Charley,” I said and stayed on our side of the fence.

  “Don’t go puss on me now, Jack,” he said. “Go get the gloves, we’ll throw the leather like this. None of your dodging nonsense this way.”

  He grinned. I told him I didn’t think so.

  “What’s with you?” he said. “You’re going soft on me.”

  I told him to piss off, and I walked back to the house to get ready for school.

  That night at dinner, I could tell he was still angry with me. I’d broken our pact, drawn a line in the sand that said I’d gone far enough and he was on his own. He clanked dishes together, slopped his cream chicken down so it splattered, and slammed his glass down every time he drank. My father was still gone, working late that night, and Charley knew he was the only man around.

  “Would you please settle down?” Starla asked and exhaled her cigarette. “You’ll break my dishes that way.”

  “Piss off,” Charley said and glared at his plate.

  We sat quietly for a while again, an angry, awkward silence.

  Then Starla said, “I saw you out in that cemetery this morning. You need to stay out of there.”

  “Or what?” Charley said very quickly, too quickly.

  “Your father’s buried out there. It’s not some place for you to practice acting like a jumping frog.”

  “I should’ve left a fat boot print on his grave,” Charley said. “I’ll make sure to do that tomorrow.”

  Then Starla stood up and smacked Charley in the face. It cracked loudly, but it couldn’t have hurt much. It was more of a gesture than a punishment and felt like a piece of theater, something Starla had planned for so long that when she finally did, it seemed forced.

  For a moment Charley was too stunned to do anything. He took short, shallow breaths and touched his face. And then he leapt across the table, scattered the dishes onto the floor and toppled the chairs, and started whaling on his mother. He went off, thumped on her until she was a bloody, moaning pile of human, her cigarette still somehow clamped in her jaw, still smoking. When I finally managed to pull him off, she made no movements, just moaned as the smoke rose from her as if she were starting to cremate.

  Charley stared down at her and then looked up at me. His breathing quickened as if he just realized what he’d done and what that meant when my father got home. “Shit!” he said. He shuffled off, grabbed his Winchester and his pack, and disappeared through the cemetery and into the woods.

  I carried Starla over to the couch, laid her down, covered her with an old afghan so she’d stay warm while she squinted at her soap operas. I found myself tending to her, even lighting her cigarettes, somehow proud of her for what she’d done because she must have known how Charley would react.

  “That’s it,” my father said when he got home that night, and he didn’t speak about it anymore. I was scared for Charley, and I kept my eyes peeled for vultures, wondering if perhaps that was the better way to go.

  When Charley emerged six days later, gaunt and pale, he looked like some extinct species rediscovered. He picked his way through the cemetery and hopped the low fence. My father and I had been in the backyard, pulling icicles from the moldy soffit, and Charley must have seen us, waited until we were outside. He carried his father’s Winchester on one shoulder, the chamber levered open, and on the other hung the rusty linkages of chain.

  My father slowly unlatched his thick leather belt and stripped it out of his Carhartts. It was a menacing image, a Cut Bank knight drawing his sword, and I knew Charley was in for it. But he strode right past us as if indifferent to our existence, and I saw the dangling jaws of a grizzly trap hanging over his shoulder.

  Charley disappeared into the garage and emerged with his hatchet. He pried open the jaw of the trap and set the trigger. He stepped away, looped the chain links around the cemetery fence, and latched the steel carabiner. Then he dropped our two-by-eight in front of the trap, like a plank descending into the leviathan’s throat. He stepped on, right in front of the trap, waited.

  My father and I stared. Neither of us moved.

  Charley raised his little fists. “New game,” he said.

  Still we didn’t move.

  He shuffled back, his heel bumping the trap. “Get on, Jack,” he said.

  My father looked to me, motioned toward the two-by-eight with the hand that held his dangling belt, folded over onto itself. I hesitated, not knowing if I was doing my father’s bidding or Charley’s.

  “Don’t be a nudge,” Charley said.

  I stepped on. Charley glared at me like I was the enemy, like I was prey. His bloodshot eyes bulged. We had no leather, just our cracked, frozen fists. We all knew how it would end, knew that Charley couldn’t out-box me.

  Charley attacked, came at me, and I bent my lead knee and snapped a jab. I pawed at him, didn’t let him inside. He slipped off the frozen board and I cracked him in the ribs. He came at me again, and I caught him with a straight right, flattened his nose, and it started to pour blood into his mouth. I waited on him to attack.

  “Come on!” he said. “Come at me. Don’t be a nudge!” He had to breathe through his mouth and spit the blood onto the snow.

  I pushed forward, swaying as I dropped lefts to the face and rights to the body, and Charley fell back. His heel pushed onto the trap again, nudged it back. He stood there, covered up his bloody face, and I sliced through his arms with an uppercut to his open jaw.

  When he fell back, his right leg stomped into the bear trap as if on purpose, and the teeth sliced into him without a sound. No crack or thud, just the soft whisper of a fillet knife being thrown into wet sand. Charley fell immediately. It sliced and he fell like a switch had been tripped. He wailed, yelled out the kind of pitiful shriek normally reserved for the far reaches of the wilderness.

  My father and I didn’t move. We knew his leg was broken, that he’d limp from now on. Charley howled and clutched the cemetery fence. I’m sure all my father saw was justice stolen from him again. A pathetic kid cuffed to a bear clamp, crying for his mother. But I saw more than that. I saw a mean kid who had sacked a trap from a bear’s clutches, and for a long time I stood in between Charley and my father and didn’t move to help while he moaned and fought his way up the fence like a wild animal thrashing against his shackles.

  Evolution of the Mule

  There is drought here, always drought. For ten years it has cemented the earth into a vast cracked slab, horizon to horizon. There is no more prairie grass, only towering squalls of topsoil that lurch across the land like hulking phantoms, vengeful and clumsy. There is the long quiet, the desperate wait for rain.

  Nights, the boy, Wiley, lies next to his sister on their cot in the kitchen and listens to the pattering on the tin roof, wishing it were rain but knowing it is only a blowing mimic of dirt rain. He will scrape it from the windowpanes in the morning, from the pits between his toes, from his eyeballs, which are always scratched red. He is a slight, towheaded child, nearly fourteen but so quiet he seems younger. He carries his shoes as often as he wears them and always remembers to leave the last sip of water in his cup for Helen, his sister. She is the ornery one, two years younger and likely to kick his shins just before a foot race.

  From the lone bedroom room barks the rough animal sounds, the uncle atop their mother, his sister. Wiley tries not to picture it, his uncle’s unshaven face, his mother’s clenched cheeks, but the groans rattle through the walls. Even the smell reaches him, the reek of hot sweat and body oil, of the uncle loosing himself into her and then collapsing. In the morning, the mother will emerge first, always, and she will wa
ke Wiley and then Helen with gentle rubs on their backs and shoulders. Time to see the sun, my peacocks, she says to them. Her eyes are sunken and empty, as if their sockets are a size too large.

  The father is dead eight years now, smallpox, and they have lived with the uncle this whole time. He has a long, snouty face, all nose and Adam’s apple and heavy stubble. He is a harsh man, hateful of all who draw too near, to Wiley most of all. He works the farm quickly with slipshod fixes, leaving sloppy hammer dents and cockeyed fence posts. He reads poorly and neglects the almanac planting schedules, and the yields suffer. He insists on strict replanting each year, and the parched soil slowly turns to charcoal. When he is angry, he boxes Wiley’s ears red, and if the boy cries out, he shims a screwdriver under the boy’s thumbnail. You must be strong for this world, he says, as if his cruelties are lessons on manhood. He shows Wiley his own thumbs; the dark stains beneath his nails also bulge as if enormous splinters need exhumed. He gawks at Helen in a way that none of them are able to ignore. Wiley is far too scrawny to intervene.

  They are beggars squatting on his lifeless land. It is all scalded, its minerals devoured by the wind. Sixty-two acres suitable for planting, most far above the water table. Only the barnyard well reaches it, a narrow socket plunging down to the cold water that they are told to ration. The water is more important than your blood, the uncle reminds them often. No irrigation trenches, and so they plant sweet sorghum and broom corn, both hardy plants with tiny finger roots, and this gives them grain and sugar stalks.

  The mother helps harvest bushels of the red grains, flours much into a sorghum porridge and sometimes a dense flatbread. The sweet stalks his uncle feeds into the mule-driven press for the sugar. The mule is his most valued possession because, like all of its kind, it is sterile. When it dies, there is no replacement. He boils the sugar down into blackstrap molasses. Half of this syrup they send west to Denver for quick profits. The other half is distilled into a dark rum that he casks and displays on the front porch with a sign: Fresh Sorghum Rum, $6/gallon. The salesmen and grain haulers passing through on their way to Denver slowly bleed the cask, fill water jugs and coffee cans, which are sold for a quarter extra. If the rum has not sold by winter, the uncle loads it onto the ancient Hudson and drives the length of the county, stays gone several days, stopping at each door to hock it for firewood and seeds and oil to last them through winter. He takes with him all but a dozen matches, much of the flour, even the children’s shoes. His family must not flee. The mule he leaves behind, and Wiley is to feed it before breakfast, before dinner.