The Dogs of Detroit

by Brad Felver

  Roman and I both turned to Mom, who hadn’t spoken so many words out loud in a year.

  “Those were rats,” she said, shaking her head at the memory. “We got them mixed up with cats a lot of times, that’s how big they were. Sunday nights, the owner would shut things down and send his workers on out to hunt with shotguns. They stalked around the scrapyard with these spotlights which caught the reflection of eyes, and all night we’d hear shotgun blasts and squeal with terror while we hid under the bed. In the morning, there’d be a pile of the carcasses by the entrance, and people had to drive past it to sell their scrap. Then the owner would douse that rat pile with diesel and burn them up, and that smoke drowned the whole neighborhood. Everyone had to close their windows. Then they all went back to work, and then Sunday night came around again, and they went out into the yard to hunt. It never ended.”

  The alley had gone quiet, no more burning rats. They lay down there, charred up like potatoes tossed in a fire.

  “When your father and I got married,” Mom said, “we were so happy to get out of that neighborhood and into this one.” With that, she turned and went back inside, and we didn’t see her again for almost a week. It wasn’t clear what she wanted us to take away from her story. That we were lucky? That she was sorry there were so many rats around? I think probably she was just talking, or trying to talk, the way people do sometimes.

  “The fuck was that?” Roman said.

  I shrugged.

  When Mom left, this thick, suffocating silence draped itself over us. Nothing moved or squealed. No shuffling or scampering, no fire. I was suddenly desperate for the smallest squeak, the tiniest indication that perhaps two of the rats were still eating or still mating. It wasn’t guilt exactly but a strange hollow feeling, and the vast hush that hung over the alley magnified everything. When you live in the middle of the city, quiet isn’t a concept that ever occurs to you, it’s white noise and shouts and honks all the time, and right then was the first time I’d ever noticed the quiet.

  I didn’t say much else to Roman after that. It was clear that he was satisfied, but something felt wrong to me, nagging like a stubbed toe. I collapsed onto our bed and closed my eyes and waited for the antenna in my brain to start picking up on the white noise of the city. It was there, but those screaming, burning rats toggled some switch, and I couldn’t hear any of it. Just dead silence that tried to swallow me in one huge gulp. Pretty soon, I would relax, find my regular breathing pattern, start hearing all shouts and honks, the vast hum of the city, and only then would it feel like things had slipped back to normal. Then I started hearing the rats again, their sad little cries, their claws on the asphalt, the same noises we’d dealt with for years, like my brain was punishing me for what we’d done.

  Roman came into bed soon, still breathing hard. I’m not sure if he’d been running some victory lap or if it was just the adrenaline of a mission accomplished. “Pretty badass,” he said.

  I pretended to be asleep, but he wasn’t buying it.

  He stripped down to his underwear and lay down next to me. “Must have been at least three dozen. Could have been more, won’t know until tomorrow. But man, it worked, like really fucking worked.”

  “Right,” I said. “It’s science.” All I could hear was the rats, louder than ever before. It’s an unmistakable sound.

  Roman’s breaths seemed to get louder and louder, each one rocking the entire bed. I wasn’t going to sleep anyway, but it bothered me.

  “Roman,” I said, “relax. Breathe.”

  “Can’t,” he said. “No way.”

  It was a strange sort of comedown he was dealing with right then, that lonely feeling that clings to you after you’ve accomplished something big and impressive. Now what? So the rats were gone? What would we do now, what would we hate now? What you don’t realize is that hatred is like any other addiction, and when it’s gone, you actually crave it. Without it, your world doesn’t make much sense.

  I hung in a dreamy state, not quite awake but not asleep either, until Dad came into our room after second whistle. “What did you boys do?” That’s how I realized that the noises weren’t in my head. They were back, little rat zombies. You don’t get rid of rats, not ever. Maybe that’s what Mom was trying to tell us.

  We walked out to the fire escape.

  “Jesus,” Roman said, “what the hell?” meaning the sound of them all like a big rat army marching on the South Bronx.

  We looked down into the darkness for a few minutes, hoping our eyes would adjust, but it was too dark. Dad shined a flashlight down then, a crummy one he rented from Old Irish, and we could see them all over the place, their flashing little eyes, more rats than ever, and what they were doing was eating their scorched little cousins, just devouring them. All that free protein, no way they’d waste it. No sentiment for a rat.

  “Are they—?” Roman asked.

  “Jesus,” I said.

  Dad peeked over the rail, down into the eerie half light of the alley. He didn’t say anything or make any faces, just stared.

  Roman turned the flashlight off and slumped down, just totally defeated. He’d used science. How could this happen?

  And that was it. What I never told Roman, probably because I didn’t quite realize it until years later, when I had my own kids and we lived over in Brooklyn Heights, is that I was glad the rats came back. For me, it was like stabilizing a wobbly orbit, like we needed their weight in our world to stay on track. They belonged somehow, and hating them belonged too. Hate something long enough, and that becomes the reason you hate it.

  We stopped hunting the rats and finished out the school year. Roman got quieter, stopped stealing bikes and fighting so much. When August came, he decided he wouldn’t go back to school, and pretty soon he took over Dad’s job on first whistle, and Dad moved to second whistle. After that, life sped up, almost like we’d been searching for the on-ramp to the freeway, and then once we found it, we just set the cruise and went mile after mile without giving it any thought.

  I went upstate for college. I studied engineering and worked in the dining hall and studiously avoided stories about home. In four years, I only came back once. When people asked, I just told them I was from the city. Roman never called, and even when I called him he never really said how things were going. Sometimes he’d mention the marines, but whenever I pushed him to go see a recruiter, he would just say, Yeah, I’ll have to do that soon, but he never did. I wanted him to get away like I did, less for him and more for me. I was the prisoner who escapes by standing on his cellmate’s shoulders.

  There was a lake not far from campus, and it had a big stock of steelheads in it, so I took up fishing there. I knew a guy with a car and a fishing rod, and he let me borrow both, no rental fees. This was real nature, not a park surrounded by concrete, not the East River, which had the consistency of vegetable soup. Fishing is more like not doing something than it is like doing something. Your vision blurs and time slows and you hear the whir of nature all around, millions of unconnected sounds merging into something almost coherent. I’d sit there for hours, the heat of the sun on my shoulders until it just cooked me red, and I think I craved that sunburn, the way it would pulse and tingle as I lay in bed at night. It was the silence of waiting that I liked. Of course it was. I think we constantly try to recreate important moments, and we constantly fail at it. I was probably waiting there for the echo of that night with the rats, that final reverberation, just waiting for it to rebound through all the quiet, but it never did. It just hung there, like a suspended chord with no resolution in sight. I’d think about home, Roman and Dad passing each other on the way to work, but it wouldn’t seem real, not in the middle of all that nature, and I eventually had to accept that I’d become just like Old Irish: it wasn’t my rat problem either.

  Then I started dating a girl from Clinton Hill, and we got serious enough to stop using condoms. That was a fresh feeling, nothing quite like it. She started asking questions about home and fam
ily. One night when we were drunk, I started telling her about Roman. I told her about the bikes he’d steal and the fights he’d pick and about Old Irish, and then I told her about the rats, the whole story, which I’d never told anyone else, and all she said was, Well, just thank God you’re here now, as if I’d escaped from some concentration camp. I should have set her straight, but I didn’t. We got married a few years later and moved near her family in Brooklyn.

  Mom drowned in the bathtub during my last semester, or that was what Dad told everyone. I came home for the funeral, my first time since leaving, and I stepped off the train, and I could just feel the Bronx all around me, the noises and smells. We go off and change, but home always waits for us. Stay away long enough, though, and it starts to feel like returning to the scene of a crime.

  I walked the length of the platform slowly, taking it all in. Dad was at the other end, just on the other side of the gate. He was squatting against the column, unshaven, wearing his dirty white jumpsuit, and I thought, That’s awfully nice of him to come meet me at the station right now. His hair was grayer than I remembered, and he’d lost weight, and as I drew closer, I realized it was actually Roman. He had that hundred-mile stare to him, no telling how old he even was anymore, could have gone twenty years in either direction. The world seemed to have burned a hole straight through him while I was away. I stopped walking. For the first time in years, everything seemed to slow down again. I thought about that lake and the trout breaking the surface of the water, the silence, and I wanted to escape to there, all that quiet, because in ten seconds I was going to hug my brother and pull away, and then we’d be looking at each other, and I’d have to say something, but I had no idea what that would be.

  Hide-and-Seek

  What I do on Friday afternoons especially around the holidays is I take the bus out to the airport and have some drinks. I can sit at the bar with a Wild Turkey and pretend I’m flying to Fort Lauderdale for a weekend of nooky on a beach with a professional cheerleader named Traci. When people ask, that’s just what I tell them. Traci can do the splits, you know, and she can do them anywhere! Two or three drinks, and I’m on that beach, and Traci is reading Mademoiselle in the lounger next to me. We’re drinking rum out of coconuts and trying decide which is bluer, the sky or the water, and right then we have a good laugh because I just fondled her yum-yums and made that old-fashioned horn noise.

  That guy has the life, people think. Got his shit together, all right. Probably some kind of banker or politician. Traci is one lucky broad.

  And that’s what I do. Always did have a good imagination.

  Then, just the other day, I’m sitting in a bar right near the security lines, and I’m pretty well into my routine. That’s when my brother Warren sits down at the other end of the bar. My real-life brother! He’s wearing a suit jacket and carrying one of those little bags that’s made just for computers. It’s been ten years at least since we’ve talked, probably more than that. Who keeps track of these things?

  Our eyes meet two or three times before he connects that it’s me, it’s his brother sitting at the other end. “Jesus,” he says. “Johnny?” and I say, “Yep. It’s me, and it’s you too.” He grabs his little computer purse and his drink, and he moves next to me. He eyes me for a minute, like this is just too impossible. He takes a drink. Then he reaches his hand out, and I shake it.

  “So what the hell anyway?”

  “Business,” I say and twist my glass around, which breaks apart the cocktail napkin. “Slammed these days. Real busy.”

  “That’s good, that’s good. Busy is good.”

  “Cheers to that,” I say and we raise our glasses but only a couple inches. “Business for you too?”

  “No,” he says. “Not for once. Off to Aruba for the week.”

  “Wow,” I say and then sit there trying to remember if Aruba is Mediterranean or Caribbean and if Caribbean is the one by Italy or the one with Jamaica.

  He waves down the bartender. “Put them both on mine,” he says. Then he turns back to me and says, “Yeah, so Aruba. Meeting a friend there. She went a couple days ago, but I couldn’t get away. Clients everywhere you look. You know how it gets.”

  “Clients,” I say and shake my head the way people do. I’m suddenly aware of my fat, callused hands, all cracked open from working a tow truck in winter. I’m not sure who she is. He either got married or divorced about seven years ago; I heard that from someone. So it could be his old lady, or he could have himself a Traci.

  Truth is, my brother and me, we always hated each other. To begin with, you need to know that Peter, our other brother, he died when we were still kids. Nobody ever really got over that. Peter and I shared a room, but since we didn’t have space in the apartment to stow his bed, and since Mom and Dad wouldn’t sell it to some idiot stranger, they left it in our bedroom, like the carcass of some big dumb animal. Then Mom and Dad got divorced, and I thought that would be the end of my dead brother’s bed, but Dad took it to his new place down in Dorchester and made me sleep in it every other weekend. Warren got a brand new futon. “You deserve it,” Warren kept saying. “You killed Peter,” which is absolutely not what happened. It was a car accident.

  I’m sitting there thinking about Peter and about his bed and Warren’s futon. I’m ignoring whatever Warren is saying about Aruba. “You killed Peter, you little shitbird,” he told me. “You wanted your own room, so you killed him.” He kept saying that; years he said it. Hear that enough, and you start to believe it. All the mean older brother stuff he did like handcuffing me to bike racks or taking a big wet dump in my church loafers, but saying that was the worst.

  “So are you living in the same place now?” he asks, meaning that basement craphole over in Eastie, the one that smelled so bad when it rained, like hydraulic cement and wet collie. He came over for a minute after Mom’s or Dad’s funeral, I don’t remember which.

  I drink the rest of my drink and push it toward the edge. I figure if he’s buying. I tell him no, that I’m moving to Beacon Hill soon, thinking of buying a place there as soon as I can find one with twelve-foot ceilings.

  “Sounds like things are really coming together.” He shoots his cuffs then so that he can check his watch, and his cuff links are these old brass things, tarnished. It looks like something was painted on them, maybe a frosted cupcake or a hyena, but it’s worn off. If he wants to make a big show of things like that, shooting his cuffs like Whitey Bulger, he needs to spring for some new ones.

  Warren’s cell phone rings, and I can tell he wants to answer, but it seems impolite, me being right there. “Go ahead,” I say, and he does. He walks over to the big windows overlooking the tarmac and covers his other ear. I watch him for a minute, and then I order us a couple of shots. “Crown Special Reserve,” I tell the bartender. “My brother’s favorite. Make them doubles.” She brings them, and I shoot mine right away, and I’m reaching for the other one when the bartender turns my way and sees me and gets this suspicious look on her face, like maybe I’m some sort of lying kidnapper with mean sex fetishes. She keeps looking over in my direction, won’t turn away, and then Warren comes back and says, “What’s this?” and I say, “She brought us a couple on the house.” I wink and make a moaning sort of sex face so he gets the idea.

  Peter died at Christmas. I begged Dad to get a real tree like they had in It’s a Wonderful Life. For once, he listened to me. We took the station wagon to this place way down on the South Shore. We had to rent a saw for a dollar extra, which pissed Mom off since we had one back at home. We stomped through these long lines of trees, playing hide-and-seek. Peter and me kept being the hiders, and for once we were winning. It was so dark and there were so many trees that you could hide and then circle back to a new spot. Warren got real mad about how hard we were to find, so every time he found one of us, he tackled us. Then Peter and me tackled him back one time, and Warren gut-punched me, and I cried, and Dad yelled at us, and that was the end of hide-and-seek. That’s who Warr
en always was, the kind of brother who knew how to throw a punch but not how to take one. But man, if I didn’t think about punching him back that whole ride home, catching him unawares while he sat next to me. Sometimes I still pretend we never tackled Warren that night, which means it would have taken us couple minutes longer at the Christmas tree place, and what happened next never actually happened at all.

  On the way back home the tree shifted loose from the roof and fell into the other lane and another car swerved right into us, which killed Peter and nobody else. He got rushed to the hospital and they did surgery on him, but it didn’t work. Mom crumpled to the floor and bawled like somebody was torturing her until the nurse came out and walked her to a separate room. Dad just got real quiet and stared at the wall for an hour, even when the doctor came out and asked him to sign some forms that made Peter officially dead. It seemed like he didn’t even breathe or blink.

  The tree got tossed on the side of the road, but the day after Peter’s funeral, Dad went back to the site with our saw and carved it up into foot-long chunks. He made me go with him to help, but he wouldn’t say a word, wouldn’t even look at me. For the next couple years, he sat on his front porch and whittled those chunks down into nothing, just shavings that stuck to the soles of our shoes. We’d track them back home to Mom’s, where she yelled at us for being such messy boys, but when we told her what the shavings were, she cried and said, “Your father.”

  Warren and me drink in silence and watch people. There’s this family of five trying to go through security, but the kids are running around, playing space ninja or something, and saying Kapow! at each other, and the mom looks like she’s about ready to start throwing punches at whoever gets close enough. I’m feeling pretty drunk. It seems like everything is whirring around, people and sounds and even the smells from the coffee stand next to us, all of it blending together. I can feel everything all at once. After a while, Warren says, “It really has been too long. We shouldn’t be like that.”