Dog Eat Dog (8 page)

He was the one. I knew all along he was the one. I would take it slowly, bring him along. There was no rush anyway; I felt no urgency, no panic, because it was so obvious that this was the one and that it was all going to come to an end soon enough.

My days then, sweaty, long, and secretive still, took on an odd, unexpected calmness. I had some kind of rhythm for the first time since school, Toy, and all that ended. I did my work, I visited the dog, and then I did other stuff. There was other stuff to do, now that I felt the Big One was coming along.

Slowly I gained some strength and some confidence, as if I were dipping into Baba’s steroids. The feeling came back in my fingers and toes, the numbness I’d been carrying around for weeks without noticing faded. And feelings came back elsewhere. It was very hot and humid.

Or maybe it was Toy being gone that brought back those feelings.

I checked to see that the motorcycle wasn’t parked outside, then I started throwing rocks. Ping, ping. Bang, I hit her window every time. Finally she came to the window, looked down and saw me, covered her eyes with her hand, and shook her head. Then she disappeared.

I was still out on the sidewalk looking up, uncertain what she was going to do, when she opened the front door.

“Come on, get in off my sidewalk,” she said, waving me in hurriedly.

My shockability had been pretty well eroded by this time, but when I followed Felina upstairs into the apartment, I was shocked. First was her smell. As I walked along behind her, she left me in a wake, a vapor trail of unwashed human smell. A person’s got to bathe regularly in steamy heat like this, and she clearly had not. To make it worse, every door and window in the place had been sealed shut and there wasn’t a fan or an air conditioner in sight.

The house was a wreck. Dirty clothes lined the floors and I stepped on a loaf of bread on the way to the kitchen. There I stood in the doorway as Felina approached the stove and stared at it as if she were looking under the hood of a hopelessly broken-down car. She picked up the tea kettle, shook it to feel its contents, smiled, and lit the burner.

“Ah, I’m sorry I haven’t called,” I said as I looked around the kitchen, at the sink mounded with dirty dishes, at the table mounded with possibly clean laundry.

She put her hand over her mouth and laughed. “That’s all right,” she said, and patted my cheek as she passed on her way to the living room. “You’re sweet.”

The living room was no better. She plopped herself down on the couch after sweeping a white takeout carton and an empty wine bottle onto the floor. The TV was already on. She waved me over, and I sat reluctantly next to her.

Barney the dinosaur was on the TV. She stared at it, but I could tell she wasn’t really looking.

“You want me to change that?” I asked.

“If you want to,” she said, shrugging. “It doesn’t much matter. I just keep it on for, you know, the sound of it. And the moving. It’s always on.”

The kettle screamed in the kitchen. I watched Felina some more, but there was no reaction to this either. I pointed toward the kitchen with my thumb.

“You want me to get that?” I asked.

She stood without answering, went out, and turned it off. She returned with no tea and sank back into the couch. Barney sang a song, his gang of kids sang the song. Felina sang the song too.

“If all the raindrops

were lemondrops and gumdrops

oh what a rain that would be

standing outside with my mouth open wide.”

She opened her mouth and let her tongue hang out like the rest of the kids, still singing,

“Ah, ah-ah-ah

ah-ah-ah

ah-ah-ah...”

When the song was over, Felina clapped for herself and started laughing. “Where did I learn
that
?”

Then she went blank again.

“Hey, I know,” I said after waiting in vain for her to say anything that made sense to me. “Why don’t we go out to breakfast? Ya, how ’bout to the diner? They have a corned beef hash over there, with an egg on top, and hash browns with crunchy onions, and a really thick chocolate milk...Pat’s Diner, that’s it. On me, okay, you could hop in the shower. ...” I hopped up and gestured toward the door, as if it had already been decided. I was anxious to get out.

She looked up and smiled at me sadly. “I don’t go out. You know that. Didn’t I tell you that? I don’t go out.”

“Ever?” I asked.

She shrugged. “It’s not... okay. It’s not okay, that I go out.”

It made me angry, both the situation and the fact that she was so calm about it. My hands balled into nervous fists, until I thought about Carlo and all his bulk and darkness. My fists uncurled.

“Well, what would happen if you just went out? Just for a little while?”

Felina shook her head no. She turned back to the TV, turned off the subject.

“Do you miss him?” she asked quietly.

I paused, as if I had to think about who she meant, even though I didn’t.

“You do miss him,” she said. “I’ll
bet
you do. I miss him too. Do you miss him the way
I
miss him?” There was so much sticky hot suggestion in the way she drawled out that
I
, that it made me squirm. “I bet you do. I bet you do miss him that way. It certainly is sad,” she whispered, her voice getting lower and lower so that I had to strain harder and closer to hear her.

I wanted to change the subject—not change it so much maybe as slant it differently. “You know where he is?” I asked, backing toward the door.

“You know better than that,” she said. She reached her hand into the pocket of her bathrobe, took something out, and popped it into her mouth. In the same motion she untied the sash. She seemed almost unaware of me then.

“Okay, so then, maybe another time,” I said. I turned the doorknob behind my back.

Felina snapped her head in my direction. She stood up, a little panicky. The robe hung open, but I tried not to notice. “Wait,” she said, and put her hand on the door. “I can do it. What the hell, right? Sit. You sit for a minute.”

She practically threw me onto the couch, then disappeared down the hall. I sat with Barney for an uneasy few minutes until she reappeared.

She had ignored my advice about showering, but she had made an effort. The great mass of her hair was still a chaotic and snarled and oily mess, but she had wrestled it into a giant meatloaf of an uncombed ponytail. She wore stonewashed shorts and a neon peach T-shirt that had a picture of a sailboat and a seagull and
HAMPTON BEACH, NEW HAMPSHIRE—SUMMER BETTER THAN OTHERS
printed in raised rubbery lettering across the chest. Except for being unclean and sleepy, she looked pretty beautiful. She wore a lot of bitter perfume. I was happy to be with her.

We didn’t talk at all. Felina smiled a lot as we walked the five blocks. She stared almost exclusively up at the sky, or out the window by our booth. She ordered everything I had mentioned—the hash, the egg, the chocolate milk—exactly the same way I had said it. As if it were a command. I ordered the same. People stared at us and the waitress seemed to wince whenever she came near, but I had a fine time, and the smile never left Felina’s face. Even when she briefly nodded off.

During the walk home, she would periodically close her eyes and bare her greenish face to the now blistering noon sun. I got a panic attack as we came nearer to her street, but it all washed away when we turned the corner and there was still no motorcycle. I would have gone all the way to the house with her anyway, but I was sure glad it didn’t come to that.

Felina didn’t even turn to look at me, lost and happy as she seemed to be, as I left her walking up her stairs. But that was okay.

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING
back there?” Evelyn called out her window, nearly giving me a stroke. I was in her backyard and her dog was eating boneless spareribs out of my hand.

I’d been at it for two weeks, feeding him, then patting him, finally talking to him. That was probably what gave me away, the talking.

“He
likes
you?” she said, standing amazed and barefoot on her back porch. “He doesn’t like
anybody
.”

“He likes me,” Ruben said, following his sister out through the screen door.

“He
hates
you,” she cracked.

“That’s a freakin’ lie,” Ruben said, brushing past her to march down the stairs. When he reached the third step, the dog started snarling. Ruben walked backward up onto the porch again.

“Well, I ain’t got no shoes on, so I can’t go into the yard right now, but I’ll show you all later. Freakin’ dog loves my ass.”

“He hates you because you neglect him,” Evelyn said matter-of-factly.

I patted the dog’s wide muscular head as he easily lapped up the last of the food. As he chewed, the muscles flexed on either side of the part that ran down the middle of his skull. I could fit both hands flat across that magnificent dome of his and feel his bite while he ate. And he let me.

“Atsa boy, boy,” I said, but he paid no attention.

“His name’s Duran,” Ruben said, “and he ain’t no boy.”

He was right about that, for sure. But that’s what I had been calling the dog all along, boy. Duran, though, was great. It fit the second I heard it. “Du-ran,” I repeated, and patted him, scratched the sides of his face, and looked into his beady one-black-one-green eyes.

“You the loneliest sombitch I ever seen,” Ruben laughed as he headed back into the house.

“Ya?” Evelyn called to him. “Bet he doesn’t have one of those blow-up dolls in his room...”

“Shut up, Juana,” he yelled. “That’s just a freakin’ joke.
Christo
, ain’t like I
do
nothin’ wid it.”

Ruben went up to put on his shoes and not do anything with his doll. Evelyn stood and watched me with the dog. He leaned into me, responding, rubbing his eyes across my chest. “You’re a pair,” she said, with some admiration.

“We are,” I answered, then I looked up. “You heard anything, from him?”

“Nada,”
she said flatly.

“Me neither. I talked to his mother though.”

Evelyn shook her head in a scolding way, clicked her tongue at me.

“Ya, well, she doesn’t know where he is either,” I said. “I guess it’s for good this time.”

She just shrugged. Ruben came bounding back out onto the porch. Duran growled, and I calmed him.

“I want to take him for a walk,” I said, hopping up, thinking this was a bright idea for a beautiful worthless summer day.

They both gasped, as if I said I wanted to throw open a nuclear reactor. “A walk?” Ruben said. “Where you gonna walk him? I take him down the freakin’ park once a night, after everybody else goes home, and he drags my ass all over the place. I can only just barely shove him back here in the yard, and I can only do that ’cause he knows Evelyn throws some food out here for him while we’re out. You can’t handle him, man, no way.”

He was serious, with his intense frown. He wasn’t just trying to run me down and un-man me like usual. He didn’t think what I wanted to do was possible. Then a dopey, distant smile opened his face up.

“He
is
fun, though,” Ruben said warmly. “You know he could
kill
my ass anytime he wants to, but he don’t. He just throws me around like I’m a freakin’ toy. An’ sometimes, when he’s in a good mood, I ride him.”

Evelyn looked disgusted with her brother, which was not unusual. “Ruben, you
ride
that poor animal?”

“Poor
nothin’
,” he said. “Lookit ’im. Freakin’ Duran’s half a horse. He loves to ride, no foolin’. He goes even faster when I’m on his back than when I ain’t. You know that track around the park? Four freakin’ hundred meters. He carried me around four laps one night last week, and he don’t wanna stop. Only reason we quit was that
I
was gettin’ sore.”

I could barely hide my enthusiasm. “Let’s take him out, let’s go, let’s go now.”

“No way, can’t do it. One, he don’t like me so good in the daytime—”

“Nobody does,” Evelyn shot.

“Two, they’s too much business goin’ on this time a day. Other dogs, peoples, et-freakin’-cetera. Duran gets hisself a little excited.
Loco.
Starts ta killin’ up stuff.”

“Please?” I begged, even more excited now.

Evelyn was way suspicious of me now. “What’s the big attraction, Mick? What’s the big thrill here? Could it be that you got used to the protection of walking around with one big stud and now that he’s gone you need another one?”

This was what made Evelyn so special, so exciting, so impossible to resist, the way she knew so much of a person’s inside stuff. And this was what made Evelyn so frightening, so maddening, so
necessary
to resist, the way she knew so much about a person’s inside stuff.

“Nooo,” I drawled, summoning up all my debate skills. And I left before she could do any more. Ruben followed me out of the yard.

“So, where you wanna go?” he asked brightly.

This wasn’t the partner I’d expected to be walking with. “No place. I think I’ll just walk home.”

“Okay,” Ruben said, walking right along with me. He took it as an invitation. So we walked together.

“You ever consider doing something with Duran?” I asked after we’d walked a bit.

“Doin’ what?”

“You know, he’s a lot of dog. It’s kind of a shame not to put his talents to use. You could make a lot of money—”

“Oh, he ain’t
that
fast.”

“No. Come on, you know what I’m talking about, Ruben. You should fight him.”

“Nah, he’d beat me easy.”

“Jesus. I don’t mean—”

“Man, I know what you mean. You so stupid, you think other people are stupid. I ain’t talkin’ about what you talkin’ about ’cause I don’t wanna talk about it. I told you before, my dog don’t fight for no money.”

This was bad, but I let it drop. He’d see, eventually. We got there, home, and I stopped short at the walkway. It was as if there was a force field there, or a checkpoint with armed guards. Sully’s nutty little hairless was barking like crazy from his condo, but that wasn’t it. Ruben went over to play with the dog, and they hit it right off. He turned back to look at me frozen on the sidewalk. “What?” he asked.