Vin got outside and the sudden cool air and silence was such a relief that he let out a gasp.
He stepped onto the sidewalk and crossed the street, looking at the cramped houses that lined the area.
Once he could've named everyone who lived in each of them: the
Danetellos
, the Martinis, the
Ganuccis
, and the
Rorigans
.
He'd play stickball here with the rest of the kids, got into fights up the alley.
The month he learned to drive he picked up his first lay, Jennie Bishop, right at the end of the road, and took her a mile down to the pier.
It had been a reckless, mad night that ended with the challenge of manhood.
Maybe it had proven to be too great an ordeal.
Vin walked back to his place but didn't want to go in yet.
There wasn't anything for him inside.
Not even a goldfish.
Nothing that needed his attention or affection.
No work that had to be taken care of.
No real hobbies to consume the hours.
No family left.
Most of his friends had moved out of state, looking for cheaper family housing down south or out west.
The neighborhood had some kind of a pull on him tonight.
You knew you were in trouble when you were this close to going through your high school yearbook and calling your old girlfriends.
How sad was that.
He walked down the block past the house where he grew up and stared at the bedroom window that used to be his. A soft breeze drifted against his throat and he realized with a strangely immense yet common dread that he was as cliché as every other man approaching middle age.
It doesn't take much to crowd you out of your own house.
When you were married it was the wife and her sister and mother and their busybody klatch.
Later on it was the letters and endless phone calls and visits from her lawyer.
The front door rattling in its frame from the fists of collection agencies, the pricks serving summonses.
Then the drinking buddies, the clinging one-night stands who didn't realize the night was over.
He had all kinds of ghosts packed into his closets, and suddenly Vin backed up off the sidewalk, turned around, and had to fight to quell the desperate need to see that waitress again.
It was utterly stupid.
The old man folly that had gotten hold of his father at the end was already at work on him.
He wandered aimlessly through the neighborhood for about an hour, trying to work off the anxiety.
Instead, it had grown until he was on fire with it.
His steps and body were driven forward.
He moved in the direction of the
titty
bar wondering what new screw-up he was headed for this time.
By now he was almost jogging, and he heard the murmurs of a mob before he saw them.
Then the flashing lights lending a peculiar glow to the street, flaring up against the nearby houses where people leaned over their windowsills.
Dozens had gathered in front of the bar.
Two cruisers were parked head to head at the curb.
They already had the crime scene tape strung around the door, the blue barricades blocking the sidewalk off.
The waitress, four dancers with flimsy robes on, and a muscle-bound guy who must've been Charlie the bouncer were all congregated by the police cars.
They each took a turn talking with the cops.
Vin slid through the throng, which was already beginning to fracture as folks broke away into the darkness.
Eventually he saw his chance and cut towards the waitress.
She let out a small moan when he touched her on the shoulder, then took his hand when she saw it was him.
"What happened?" he asked.
"Jesus, you just missed it."
Her voice was heavy with emotion, and he saw she'd been crying.
"It started two minutes after you walked out."
"Those three shithead jocks?"
"They started getting rougher with the blind man, shoving him, trying to get him drunk."
Vin thought back to the old guy who had looked as if his lips had been welded together, saying something quiet that Vin didn't catch.
That frail chest heaving.
"He'd had enough of their games."
"The dog growled and one of them spit beer at it.
The blind man got mad and used his cane, waving it around, swinging at them.
All three of those bastards started beating him up, got him on the floor and were kicking him, and the dog went crazy.
It jumped and got one of the boys by the throat and killed him.
Chomped on the wrist of the other.
It almost took his hand off.
The guy was spurting all over.
He was bleeding out.
It happened so fast it still doesn't seem real.
I feel sort of high, you know?"
Tears welled in her eyes but didn't fall.
"Charlie came back and tried to tie a tourniquet on him but it didn't do much good.
I called an ambulance.
The third kid was screaming and kept kicking the blind man."
"Christ," Vin said, picturing it all, putting the names to the kids again, still identifying them with Del, Philly, and Bent.
She started to tremble and then the shakes got worse.
He took her by the shoulders trying to lend her whatever he could.
"He got into a fight with Charlie and Charlie broke his jaw.
The ambulance took both the boys away but I think that one, with the hand, is probably dead."
"Goddamn."
He couldn't say anything more.
The back of his neck was wet and icy with sweat.
He was aware of feeling a certain amount of both horror and pride.
Thinking about the dog and going, good for you, boy.
Vin had no idea what that said about himself.
Maybe he just hated everybody younger than him.
"The blind guy had a fractured skull, they said.
He was having a seizure when they took him out."
Vin had known there was something foreboding about those guys, about the situation brewing, but he'd never imagined anything like this.
She actually came into his arms then, and he held her, trying not to show how startled he was. He tightened his grip as she wept.
She struggled to get the words out.
"They took the seeing eye dog away to the pound.
He was so calm afterwards, just sitting there, his tail flicking a little.
Three big dog catchers came up on him with these poles with wire at the end and lassoed him around the throat.
He was crying and whining, and the three of them practically strangled him and threw him into the back of their truck."
Pricks like that, they always had to move in threes.
"The pound is only nine or ten blocks from here, down over from Ocean Boulevard."
She looked at him, the tears streaming on her cheeks, and he felt, for a second, very young again.
"I know it's stupid but I want to help him," she said.
"It wasn't the dog's fault.
It shouldn't be killed.
Do you think we should go there?"
"The cops are going to want to talk to you again."
"I already told them everything twice."
"They'll ask again with something like this."
Two kids dead, an old man possibly dying, but when it came down to it, he only cared about the girl's smile and the dog.
Perhaps because he felt that, somehow, they were the only innocents here.
Even the blind guy had been calling down his own trouble, drinking with the jocks and taking as much shit from them as he did.
Hadn't he felt the charged possibility of violence from the start, the way Vin had?
"I'll go see what I can do," he told her.
She grinned at him, and the world seemed to be filled with a little extra potential once more.
We all need a private mission to perform, a reason to take the next step.
Easing his hand up, he touched the side of her face.
She leaned in for a second and stirred against his him, and he almost kissed her forehead but didn't, and then the cops called her back over and she went.
Okay, Vin thought, let's go to the pound.
It was over on a cul-de-sac down by the beach, near the crumbling boardwalk and condemned pier.
Vin started moving faster, until he was jogging again.
When he was a kid his parents used to take him down here to go swimming.
They'd build sand castles and his father would make sounds like the seagulls, his voice echoing among the dunes.
You couldn't do anything in these waters anymore.
Too much sewage and factory waste.
Soon he was flat out sprinting.
It took five minutes and he wasn't even winded by the time he turned the corner into the cul-de-sac.
Not too bad for an old man.
He checked his watch and stopped short.
Jesus, it was almost 4:30am.
But the lights were on in the pound, and a cruiser was parked in the street out front.
No sign of the three dog catchers.
Vin walked up to the front glass doors, tried them and found them unlocked.
He stepped inside.
A cop stood there talking with a pregnant woman who'd obviously been roused from bed.
Is that how they handled things like this?
Nobody had to sign any papers, they just woke up whoever was in charge and they put the animal to sleep right then?
Vin didn't even know how they did it.
Gas?
A lethal shot?
Furnace?
Dogs whined in the back room.
The cop moved to meet Vin, already looking pissed off.
He was hardly older than the jocks in the bar last night.
He said, "Who the hell are you?"
Putting him in his place right from the start.
Keeping him in the box even though he hadn't so much as taken a step out of it.
That's how they all did it to you.
It wore down the skin of your soul until you were nothing but exposed nerve.
"It wasn't the German Shepherd's fault," Vin said.
The officer pulled a face.
"I asked who you were."
"I was in that strip joint earlier tonight."
"Were you a witness to the attack?"
Which one?
The kids on the old man, or the dog on the kids?
"No, but I saw those boys getting out of hand.
They were giving the blind guy trouble.
The German Shepherd–"
"It killed one of them, did you know that?
Another lost his hand.
He's undergoing major surgery over at St. Mary's.
He might die."
"Look, the seeing eye dog was trying to protect its master.
You didn't hurt it yet, did you?"
The cop gave him an expression of disdain, staring at Vin with his lips curling and his chin pulling back like there was a bad smell.
Vin wasn't sure anybody had ever given him such a look of disgust before.
Not even trying to understand, not listening at all.
Talking about the kids, but not saying a word about the old blind man.
How was he?
Was he still alive?
The pregnant kennel worker remained silent but seething.
She walked around Vin and went to the door, opened it so the cop could push Vin back outside.
It was as if they had rehearsed this many times before, like they'd been waiting for him, tonight and perhaps for all his life.
The officer laid a hand on Vin's shoulder, gripped him hard, and tried to turn him around.
Getting up too close.
Shoving.
"Quit pushing me, kid," Vin said.