Dog Eat Dog (2 page)

Sully pushed me down into my seat. “Well, that went well,” he said. As soon as I sat down, the bell rang to get up. Eight thirty, and I was already totally wiped out.

I managed not to see Toy until lunchtime. When I did, as he approached my table in the caf with that long, slow stride, I heard something build like a tympani drum roll in my ears. It was my heart.

“Hey,” he said as he sat across from me and Sul. I said hey, then stuck a spoon in my mouth and started chewing it. At least it would keep me from swallowing my tongue. Toy stared down at me. I couldn’t see the eyes. I knew the angle of the hat by now, and the stare was withering me. Sully kept kicking my ankle, for laughs.

“My old lady said you were looking for me,” Toy said.

“Ya, I was, lookin’, I was lookin’, lookin’ for ya, Toy, I was lookin’,” I babbled, the spoon still in there.

Sully decided to help me out.

“So, how
is
your mom, Toy?”

“She’s none of your damn business, Sullivan. Thank you for asking.”

Sully didn’t help me anymore.

“Your date didn’t work out so well,” Toy said.

“Huh?” My hands were shaking, so I sat on them. My eyes were about to spill with fear tears.

“Your date. I heard about it. You went down in flames with Evelyn. Sorry to hear it. You, ah, regressed, I believe.”

I nodded. Nodded involuntarily with my whole jangly body.

“Are you sick?” Toy asked, tilting his head to get a better look. I shrugged.

“Anyway, you wanted to talk to me.”

“C-c-can we do it later, Toy?” I asked, excusing myself from the table.

“Not a problem,” was the last thing I heard before I fell. My knees buckled, my legs all water from nervous exhaustion. Toy rushed over just ahead of Sully to pick me up.

“I’m okay, I’m okay,” I said, and Toy let me go. “I think I’m gonna go see the nurse. Sully, you want to take me home?”

“I’ll catch up with you later,” Toy said, and it sounded to me like a line from an old gangster movie.

Sully hopped up enthusiastically, taking me by my elbow like I was an old person. I shook it off, he grabbed it again. I shook it off, he grabbed it again, laughing. “Finally,” he said, “finally, I get to see a benefit from being your caretaker.”

T
HE SULLIVANS SEEMED TO
like me better after I burned their house. They really adopted me after that. Anyway, I didn’t actually burn the place, just the one wall in the one room. My room. But not anymore.

I still spent a lot of time there, though. Every chance I got, slithering up the stairs to just sit on the floor and stare out the dormer window, kind of like a private church thing for myself.

“Yo, Buddha, you comin’ down to eat?” Sully called from the bottom of the stairs.

I pulled myself away reluctantly. I could stay up there for hours, pretending it was still mine, but I couldn’t miss meals with the Sullivans.

“I still don’t get this, Sully. Why am I treated better around here now?”

“It’s my mother. She can’t resist a cripple. She’s always putting up stray animals and loser relatives for weeks at a time. Every year on Labor Day, she gives, like, thousands of bucks to Jerry Lewis, the whole weekend, just keeps calling back and pledging more and more, until Dad has to yank her out to a movie and dinner. She’s a sucker, big heart stuff.”

Though there didn’t quite seem to be a compliment for me buried in there anywhere, I liked the explanation anyway. I could fill the injured animal role, if someone really wanted to fix me. I ate with them, like I did every night now, listening to small talk about people I mostly didn’t know. I listened to Mr. Sullivan rail on about all the idiots in the world, including, in great detail, my own family and myself, as if I wasn’t right there to hear it. He just didn’t care, which I admired.

Pot roast, mushy soft potatoes and carrots in cocoa-brown gravy. When I finished working my bread, you could have put the dish right back in the cupboard, it was so clean.

“Ah, clean plate club,” Mrs. Sullivan chirped.

“Duh, Ma,” Sully said.

I laughed. How stupid, how wonderful.

I went with the whole family into the living room. Mrs. Sullivan sat at one end of the couch. I sat next to her. Sully rushed up, wedged himself between us.

“You stay away from my mother, you animal,” he whispered in my ear.

“You are so low,” I said.

“What?” Mrs. Sullivan asked, smiling, as if this was a joke she would actually like to be let in on. I just shook my head.

Mr. Sullivan stretched out on the floor, flipped on the TV. “You’re in for a treat, Mick. It’s a very special cinematic event we’re going to be sharing with you here.”

The three of them started laughing at once. I was lost. Felt kind of eerie.

The film came on.
The Fighting Sullivans
. It was a based-on-fact World War II movie about five brothers who served on the same ship in the navy. In the end they all croak together except one.

“We always fight ta-gedda. We always fight ta-gedda,” Sully squawked, mimicking a character from the movie.

“A
giant
of a film,” Mr. Sullivan crowed. Within sixty seconds, he was snoring.

The movie was hysterically sappy and lame, but that wasn’t the point. They’d obviously done this a thousand times before, Sully trading off with his mother, spouting dialogue and laughing, Mr. Sullivan even wafting in and out of consciousness for the occasional remembered line. I watched them all as much as I did the movie, sneaking long looks at the sides of their faces. An hour into the movie, Mrs. Sullivan joined her husband in sleep, her face resting lightly in her palm, her elbow propped on the sofa arm.

Sully looked at me, which he hadn’t done until we were alone. “Goofy, huh?”

“Ya,” I said, with admiration.

“Well, it’s sort of official now, you’ve been adopted. You’ve been made an honorary Sullivan.”

“Ooooh,” I cracked, too stupid to act honest yet. “Oh,
that’ll
open some doors for me, huh?”

“Stop bein’ an asshole, Mick.”

He kept staring into me. Very un-Sully.

“Okay,” I said.

That was the good part of what came from my big weekend. Out of the fire, more or less. The Sullivans took me in. Took me deeper than before, and that was nice. Strange as hell, but nice. Who could figure? I couldn’t figure that. Family stuff, who could ever figure?

The not-so-good part was Toy pursuing me.

“You wanted to talk to me?” He was at my locker.

“Ya. But I gotta run, Toy.”

“You wanted to talk to me?” He was in gym, aiming a white leather ball at my head.

“Gotta run,” I said about a quarter-step too slowly. The gym teacher, who was also the school nurse, gave me an ice bag for my nose.

“You wanted to talk to me?” He was sitting in front of the superette, smoking a long thin cigar.

“Ya, but jeez, Toy, now I completely forgot what it was about. I’ll catch ya—”

“Now. You’ll catch me now, Mick.” He had a grip on the back of my shirt, pulling me down to sit on the milk crate next to his. He held up a cigar, and I took it.

“Acting pretty damn weird lately, Mick.”

I nodded, bobbing my head in and out of the smoke cloud that hovered in front of me. “
Feeling
pretty weird lately, Toy.”

“Hmmm?” he said coyly. “You mean, like, guilty?”

“Ahhh.” I inched my crate away as I spoke. “Maybe, maybe guilty is it, I don’t know. It’s a lot of things, feels like every kind of feeling in me all at once.” I watched him out of the corner of my eye to see if he knew, if he was guessing, if it was just coincidence. I could see nothing.

I was so scared, when I pulled the cigar out of my mouth I sneaked—for the first time in many years—a little tiny sign of the cross, drawn with my thumb tip across my lips. If I was going to be dead in a second, I wanted my grammar school God right there with me. Toy scared me in a lot of ways, more than Terry and his friends and their attack dogs and all the rest combined.

“Why’d you do that?” He’d caught it.

“I had a little tobacco spit on my lip, that’s all.”

“Funny shape for a spit,” he said.

We paused, smoked.

“What’s it about, do you suppose... your guiltiness?”

“I didn’t say I was guilty, exactly.”

“You done something you shouldn’t have? Something
bad
?” He exaggerated the word
bad
, mocking it, as if he didn’t believe in it.

“Nope,” I said, steely.

“Yes you did,” he said.

I waited. I even closed my eyes for it. The only good thing was that Toy was
so
tough that I’d probably be dead before I felt anything.

“I heard you set Sullivan’s house on fire. True?”

I let out a very, very loud
pheewww
sound, like the sound of a fire extinguisher. That was all he knew?

“Ya, ya,” I said happily. “Practically burned a whole wall down.”

“What are you, proud? I would have killed you. Did the old man kill you?”

“No. He threw me out, though, but then he let me back in.”

“He took you...? Mick, can I tell you that I don’t understand the way your neighborhood works
at all
? Can I tell you that? Myself, I’d have
killed
you. Would have torn your lungs right out if you did something like that in my house.”

I accidentally inhaled the cigar smoke. Coughing, coughing, hacking, I felt my whole head get flushed. My lungs felt like they were tearing, but at the moment it was good to feel them still in there.

“You all right?” Toy said, beating on my back hard.

I nodded, slowly regained my breath. The feeling of Toy’s big hand covering most of my back relaxed me, took away a lot of the fear. When I stopped being afraid of him, I felt a need to talk to him.

“I almost left, you know. I packed my bag and left the Sullivans’ without even knowing where I’d go. Just wanted to once and for all bolt from this town.”

He nodded. He relit his cigar.

“But I didn’t leave.”

“But you didn’t leave.” Toy said it as if there was no other possible end to that story like,
of course
I didn’t leave.

“Why didn’t I leave? I still don’t have a real answer to that. I look around and I can’t see why I’m here. So...?”

He nodded again, as if I had said something to agree with.

“You understand, I know it, Toy. Let’s talk about you, for example.”

“Let’s not,” he said with the cigar clenched in his teeth.

“No, really. You go on trips all the time. And you always come back.”

Very slowly he drew the cigar out of his mouth. “One time I won’t,” he said quietly.

“Where do you go, Toy, on your trips? Huh, where do you go?”

He stuck the cigar back in his mouth and talked around it again, turning away from me at the same time. “Mick, did I tell you a long time ago that it was none of your business where I go? I don’t remember, did I tell you that?”

“Ah, ya, I believe you did, now that you mention it.”

“Good, so I don’t have to tell you that now.”

“I guess you don’t.”

Toy stretched out, groaned, stood to go.

“Wait a minute,” I said, panicky. I needed to get something from him. Something. “The reason I asked is that I think maybe I should start by doing what you do, you know, just taking regular trips instead of leaving for good yet. Do you think?”

“I think you already take regular trips, is what I think.”

“Don’t say that. I’m straight now. I’m not wasting myself anymore.”

Toy put his hands on his hips and spat the stub of the cigar out in my direction. “Just like that?”

“Just like that. That was the first step, to not be a fuckup anymore. The next step is to be more like you. You just have it all together. I want that.”

“Okay, you want it?” He growled the words at me. “The story is that you are like me. I’m a fake, and so are you. Just because I don’t tell you things about myself doesn’t mean I’m not lying at the same time. And you, all you want, Mick, is to bingo-bingo, snap your fingers and change into something you think is cool. But you know it didn’t work. Dressing up like Ruben didn’t deliver you. Hanging with me, chasing Evelyn, that didn’t deliver you. Running away from here wasn’t going to deliver you either and at least you finally realized that, that you were just going to carry your crap along with you.

“Problem with you, Mick, is you think you’re a better guy by changing your clothes or your address. You think your disease is in the leaves, when it’s in the roots.”

I couldn’t look at him now, so I stared at his boots. Funny, when Carlo threw me out with no clothes on, I didn’t feel like I was naked in the street, but now? Now I felt naked in the street. I always figured this, that Toy knew a lot about a lot. I just never should have asked.

“Mick, don’t pout. That’s another thing you need to quit. Stop acting like the victim all the time. Get on with it finally, will you please? I’m happy to help you out, if I can, but it gets hard after awhile to be patient with you.”

I tried hard to stop pouting, but I could feel the face still there. It wouldn’t go away while Toy was in front of me.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Toy said, his timing as fine as always.

G
ET ON WITH IT
, Mick. Disease in my roots. Victim all the time. Just going to carry the crap with me. Wherever. Get on with it finally, will you please?

Finally, it was clear. Finally,
something
was clear to me. I had to kill the disease.

“Mick, phone,” Mr. Sullivan boomed. He shook his head.

“Family?” I asked. He nodded and grinned.

“I want you to come for dinner.” It was my mother.

“No.”

“Please? For me.”

“Um... no.”

“Mick, you cannot continue this way forever.”

I did know that. Finally. I had come to that conclusion. “Is he going to be there?”

“He really wants to see you, Mick. He says as much every single day.”

“I’m not coming, Ma.”

I could hear her fingers drumming on the telephone table. “Well... what if Terry wasn’t here? Would you come then?”