Dog Eat Dog (3 page)

“I might. Are you saying he won’t be there?”

She hesitated. “I’m saying that, yes. Will you come?”

I got a little morbid thrill out of the thought of going back there. But also, I had a need, a condition that needed treating.

“I’ll be there.”

Half an idea. When I got myself together for dinner at my parents’ house, I did it the way I did everything, with half an idea. I knew I wanted to look good, to look like I was successful and not needy, but I didn’t know what I wanted to look like. I knew I wanted to stuff it in Terry’s nose, that I got some of what I got from him, but I didn’t want to come in wearing the evidence. So I didn’t wear any of the clothes I stole from him, but I went clothes shopping with the money I stole from him.

I stood at the door wearing shiny black Doc Martens, the ugliest footwear of all time, but an item they could all recognize. I wore a red silk shirt buttoned to the collar, brown Levi’s 554 baggies, a huge black satin baseball jacket, and matching Chicago White Sox cap. Tiny oval sunglasses that barely blacked out my eyes.

My father answered the bell.

“Told ya he’d wind up selling drugs,” he called over his shoulder to Ma.

She slapped him on the shoulder. “Mick, you look very sharp,” she said, and gave me a quick shoulder hug. She took my jacket, hat, and glasses as I sat at the table. I hadn’t even warmed the chair yet when she started serving. She buzzed nervously around, rushing to the kitchen and back, slapping mushy vegetables, mushy mashed potatoes, mushy boiled ham onto plates. “You look very healthy, you look very nice,” she jabbered.

“You look very pimp,” Terry said, winging his leg over the back of a chair.

“Ma!” I called as she disappeared into the kitchen.

“Keep your voice down,” Dad growled as he started peeling beers off the ring. “That what they do over Sullivans’? Scream at each other like animals?”

I waved my beer away. Terry snatched it up, nodding, his mouth already overflowing with food.

“You coming home yet, or what?” Dad asked.

“We got no room for him,” Terry answered.

Ma sneaked up on her chair, slipped into it under my glare. “Of course we have room for him,” she said. “We will always have room for him.”

“Ya,” I said. “Not that I’m coming back, but of course you have
room
for me.
My room,
remember?”

Terry shook his head gleefully. He started talking,
then
put meat in his mouth, without slowing down. “Uh-uh. Dog lives in there now.”

I stared at my mother some more. When she wouldn’t stop averting her eyes, I just spoke up. “I thought he wasn’t going to be here,” I said.

“Why shouldn’t he be here?” Dad barked. “He
lives
here. Gettin’ awful snotty there, Mick, lately.” His voice trailed as he bore down on his food. “Goddamn Sullivan.”

“Ya, Jesus, kid, don’t be such a piss now,” Terry said. Terry was having a fine time. “Dontcha even want to know his name?”

“Ma?” I said, trying to address my original question.

“Please, Mick,” she whispered, trying not to answer it.

“Ma,” I said more forcefully.

“Mick, I am his mother. Why can’t you understand that? I’m his mother just like I’m yours. You might see yourselves as being two very different creatures, but I cannot. I might just as well cleave myself in two, as pretend even for a minute that I have one of you and not the other. It may not make any sense at all to you, but I just haven’t got a better explanation than that.”

She couldn’t have been more right, about me not being able to see it. And from the barely contained laugh rumbling in Terry’s throat, this was one of the few things we agreed on. But Ma did manage to shut me up with it.

“And
that
is why you have to come home,” Dad said. “You’re killing your mother.” He refreshed his palate with a full beer.

“What about Mickey?” Terry said to Dad. Then he tipped a glance to me. “His name’s Mickey. I named him for you, you ungrateful sonofabitch.”

“Build a doghouse out back,” Dad said. “’Cause he can’t have run of the house.”

Terry turned to me again. “That okay with you, bro? You won’t mind living in a doghouse? We can get you some curtains and a rug. ...”

“No thanks, Ma,” I said. “I’m set now. Really I am.”

She looked down now and played with her food. Her terrible sloppy overcooked food that she always made unless she burned it. I didn’t miss the food, but I could live with it, no problem. She was hurting, I could finally see, and I was surprised by that. Somewhere inside, I was pleased by that. As I looked at her, I understood I was hurting too, and I was
most
surprised by that. I would be back, I wanted to tell her, but not till Terry was out of the picture. I wasn’t here because of him, and I couldn’t accept that anymore.

There was nothing really left to say. Ma brought me there for that one conversation, and we were no good at anything like natural give-and-take. Dad didn’t particularly care whether I was at his table or not, as long as I didn’t get between him and the refreshments. All that was left, creepily enough, was the Terry dance. He stared, he bit, he drank, he slobbered, he wiped his mouth on his sleeve. He smirked at me, he winked, he coughed little pieces of food so they landed on my plate. I looked back at him, not shying away like I used to. We set it all up right there across the table, without words. A bull and a bullfighter, or just a bull and another bull. We had a date. I was either coming over to the other side, or else. ...

“Ma, supper was great,” Terry said as he got up. “We gotta go now.”

“We?” she asked,

He looked down at me. “Ya.”

Ma looked to me, her face questioning.

“Ya,” I said firmly.

“We’re gonna take Mickey for a walk.”

Ma looked both hopeful and afraid, even more confused about all this than I was. Dad just waved his fork at us. “You two don’t make no sense at all.”

I waited on the porch while he retrieved the dog, a brown shepherd-Doberman monstrosity. It strained at the leash, wheezing in the choke chain as it pulled harder and harder, strangling itself. I hopped up and walked backward down the stairs, as I was the thing it was trying to reach.

They were perfect for each other, and the beast calmed right down when Terry addressed it. “Ain’t he beautiful?” he said sincerely, making goo-goo eyes at the dog, bending down to kiss him on the mouth. It was the closest I’d ever seen Terry come to something like love.

“No,” I said, because the animal was not beautiful. He was big, in a clumsy, retarded way, and still growing. He looked strong and dangerous and about to fall over all at the same time. Some of his hair was short and some of it was long, like a mange pattern, and all of it was orange, like Terry’s. He had a very pointy face.

“Gotta get y’self a dog, Mick. Gotta.”

“Don’t gotta,” I said, in his stupid voice.

He shook his head at me, waved me to start walking. “You don’t understand nothin’, man, dogs is where it’s at today. A guy’s dog is who he is. Dog can
be
you, y’know? Like, let’s face it, mosta your white guys, they can’t fight no more, life’s been too good to them, what with bein’ lucky enough ta be born white and all. So they’re soft. Like you. Niggers are stronger, spics are faster, and even the gooks and the heebs—people ya used ta be able ta count on—now even they’ll stick ya in a damn heartbeat. You get a blade, they get a machete. You get a nine millimeter, they get a Uzi. It just don’t pay.”

“No, it don’t.”

“You’re gettin’ wise wit me, boy, but you still don’t get it. This is, like, the wave of the future, where the dogs do the fightin’. Your dog is special. You train him, you raise him, maybe you even breed him perfect, till your dog is like a dog version of yourself. Cunnin’. Mean. Smarter than all the other dogs. Then he does all your killin’ for ya, and you don’t gotta get your head knocked at all, ’cause now it’s the best
dog-
man, the sharpest, that winds up on top and everybody else can just kiss my ass.”

I was stunned. I could not recall Terry ever before stringing together three sentences on one subject without forgetting what he started to say. He had clearly been working on this.

“What do you get out of all this, Terry?”

He slapped his dog on the back of the head, out of anger at me. “You’re so stupid, Mick. You’re so ignorant. It puts things back the way they belong. It puts us back in
position
, y’know. The future of warfare. It’s high fuckin’ tech.”

Terry’s snapping at me got his dog agitated. He started straining again to get at me.

“No, Mickey,” Terry yelled, yanking the chain, letting it go slack, then snapping it tight again.

“Let him smell your hand,” Terry said, talking to me the same way he talked to the dog. “No, no, no, turn it palm
up
. You want it to be a stump?”

I let the dog smell me. His lip curled in a snarl as he did. I froze.

Three or four long whiffs later, Mickey decided. His ears, which had been lying back flat on his head, stood up. The hair on his long curved horse neck smoothed out too. He stood at attention beside Terry, which seemed for him to be a relaxed state.

Terry smiled. “See? He likes ya. ’Cause ya smell like me. He can smell that, your insides, that they smell like mine. Dogs know the real stuff.”

I didn’t take the bait. “Where are we going?” I asked calmly.

“Are you just bein’ stupid on purpose, or have you been gone that long?”

When we strolled into Bloody Sundays, we were showered with
whoo-whoo-whoos
as if Terry had the world’s finest woman on his arm. “Looky look,” Danny said as I took a stool beside Terry. No one even seemed to notice the dog. The bartender slapped two pints of Guinness in front of us, laughing. “You can take the boyo out of the Bloody, but you can’t take the Bloody...”

I immediately took my beer and placed it on the floor in front of the dog, who inhaled it.

“Hey. Don’t do that again,” Terry said. “He has a problem.”

“Where’s Augie?” one of the big fat Cormacs asked Terry, adding, “Hey, Mick,” as if he’d just seen me yesterday.

“I ain’t seen him,” Terry said. “He’ll be here. Spooks show yet?”

Cormac laughed. “Think maybe you could tell if they was here or not, bro?” He gestured around the room full of puffy round faces in various grades of white and pink.

Terry laughed too. Then he gave me the rundown.

“Nigs from Mattapan, Jamaicans, are bringin’ by their hot shit dog tonight, stupid shits. Gonna get his ass
whipped
tonight, for sure.”

I leaned back, away from him. I pointed at Mickey the dog. “Your dog’s here to fight, Terry?”

“Nah, he’s just here to watch, he ain’t ready yet. I want him to learn a few things. It’s Bobo. These fools heard about him and came lookin’ for a match. Word’s spreadin’ all around the goddamn city about how Bobo’s thirty and 0. Like gunfighters, they’re poppin’ up all over.”

This made Terry suddenly giggle hysterically. “We’re gettin’ stinkin’ rich on it.
And
we get to put certain ignorant, cocky sonsofbitches in their places at the same time. Heh. Bobo’s enjoyin’ the shit out of it too.”

I stared at Terry as he chugged heartily on his drink, slapping the bar for more while the first one was still on his lips. Staring blankly had no impact on Terry, so I was forced to talk to him.

“This is what you do now? For fun?”

“Yup. You’ll see. It’s a fuckin’ unbelievable rush when it happens. Like nothin’ else. My favorite part is watchin’ the faces of the assholes who own the loser dog. They just about die. I been lookin’ forward to these Jamaicans, boy. ...I swear, I might cream myself when it happens. You’ll see. You can’t resist it.”

“I think I probably can resist it, thanks.”

He clearly didn’t think that was possible, grinning sagely as he picked up his glass. He was sure we shared this animal lust on some deep level. I wanted to kill him with my bare hands, open his jugular with my own teeth. But that didn’t exactly seem like the way to prove him wrong.

“He could lose, you know,” I said, trying to derail him.

“Don’t be stupid,” he said. “Bobo? Never happen. For sure not tonight. Jamaicans love Dobermans, while your regular American spooks prefer Rottweilers. Good, mean dogs, the Dobermans, lotsa heart, but not enough body. They ain’t big enough to take on the beasts, and they’re too ballsy to quit. So”—he shrugged—“when they don’t win, they get shredded. Kay-ser-fuckin’-ra, ser-ra.”

The eight Jamaican men filed in behind their dog—a Doberman, all right—like a military outfit. Mirror sunglasses, rigid posture, expressionless. Mickey stood up and started barking, snarly and wild barking. The Doberman didn’t even look, maybe couldn’t turn because of his owner’s grip. Four men took spots at the bar, four more standing behind. They drank double rums and beers. Terry picked up the tab, nodding and smiling a ratty thin smile across the bar. The owner of the dog nodded and said something to the bartender, who pointed to the back door. They all filed out to the fenced-in lot in back of the building.

Slowly, others began slipping out there. The Cormacs went, and Danny, and ten of the other regulars. Terry looked at his watch. “Where is he?” Danny asked nervously.

One of the Jamaicans came in, walked up to Terry. “Time,” he said.

“Five minutes,” Terry said.

Ten minutes passed. The Doberman’s owner came in. “What?” he said, holding out two upturned palms as if he was waiting for rain.

“Late,” Terry said.

“Lose,” the man said.

“Bullshit.”

“Chickenshit. No show, money go. Too damn bad, mon.”

“Just give us some time,” Terry said.

“Got no time for you,” the man said. He took a look around the bar, sniffed disgustedly. “Did have time, wouldn’t waste it here anaway.” Then he looked down, pointed at Mickey. “What wrong wit him?”

Terry looked down, surprised. “Him? No, not him. He’s not—”

“Shit,” the man said, miming as if to slap Terry’s face back and forth. “Give me my damn money, boy.”

Terry’s face went scarlet. He sat on the stool for a half minute without so much as blinking. All activity in the bar—even sipping—stopped.