Fall 2021 Contest Winner — Second Prize
Easy Prey
“Never mind the dog, beware of owner.”
You’ll see that stickered on streetside windows all over town, accompanied by a cartoon of a snub-nose revolver aimed at your face. Presumably, it’s to deter Jehovah’s Witnesses, snake oil salesmen, and that most vile of door-to-door supplicants, the local Girl Scouts troop. Thing is, guns don’t get loose from behind old picket fences. Guns don’t chase down unsuspecting passersby, taking hammerhead chunks out of their calves and thighs. There’s a robust underground dog-fighting circuit in my neighborhood. It’s not much of a secret, especially when your mom’s a vet tech and she sees the chewed-off ears, the raw lacerations, the black-jerky scar tissue and lopped-off tails on a regular basis. For my part, whenever I knock on a stranger’s door, I’m listening more for a bark, a low Baskervilles snarl, than I am the cock of a hammer, or that Hollywood shotgun scha-schlock.
I must’ve been sixteen at the time, walking down one of those gun-toting sidestreets on my way to my friend Chuy’s. I was just about to cross his lawn and ring the doorbell when a voice flagged me down. It came from a gray Volvo parked at the curb. I approached, trepidatious. The guy behind the wheel was a slick, stubbly type in a green bomber jacket with green and white striped cuffs. Forty to fifty I placed him.
“Yo,” he said. “How’s it going? You headed in there?”
“In where?” I said.
“In that house.” He pointed at Chuy’s.
I said what difference did it make, who the hell was he.
“Nobody. I’m Bruce. I’m just waiting on a friend.”
I said nothing, but for good measure I spit a gob of Kodiak juice. A fad I was going through at the time.
“Hey, you got the game on that thing?” He gestured at his ear to indicate my earbud.
“What game?”
“You know. The big game’s on today. My radio’s broken or . . .” He trailed off.
I was about to say I didn’t much follow sports, but it didn’t seem worth the effort, so I turned on my heels. He called me back right away. Somehow I knew he would. Was this guy trying to offload benzos or what? I didn’t get a chance to ask. The block lit up with blue and red flashers. A couple undercovers and a squad car peeled out of nowhere, boxing him in. I think I jumped ten feet back in a single bound, hands in the air, brown juice dribbling down my chin as my jaw hit the pavement.
It came out that Chuy’s dad, an HVAC technician named Gregorio Reynoso, had solicited a prostitute, and that Volvo Bruce was her pimp. Connie Reynoso, the disgraced wife, was away selling PartyLite candles at a condominium in Kenosha. A few days later, the pimp’s, the whore’s, and the solicitor’s mugshots appeared single-file in the paper. Gregorio, with his hangdog face and sweaty forelock, looked no more distinguished than his accomplices.
Chuy didn’t like to talk about the incident and I didn’t broach it. His coping mechanism was to smoke blunts by the backyard pool every day after school — more or less an established ritual anyway. About two weeks had passed since the arrest. We were supine in vinyl-strapped deck chairs, our eyes hidden behind sunglasses, when Chuy said, “You know a male duck, a drake or whatever — a mallard? — anyway, he puts it in and cums all in under a second? One third of a second I think it was . . . Isn’t that a trip? Like being shot.”
I said where’d you hear that.
He said on a science podcast, then laughed. “That ought to make my old man feel better. He can’t even get through a Ramones song. I know ʼcause when they get at it I crank the music to drown them out.”
Got at it, I almost reminded him. Past tense, unless Connie was going to be crazy enough to take the chump back after his jail stint. Instead I held my tongue, and sloughed off to the bathroom.
Here’s where things get confessional. I’m a snoop, particularly when it comes to medicine cabinets. If I’ve ever used your bathroom, rest assured I know what ointments you use and analgesics, what antifungals and antidepressants, what nasal sprays and hemorrhoid creams. The Reynoso household was exceedingly well medicated. Duloxetine. Vardenafil. Triazolam. Bethanechol. It was like reading off the major cities of some Asimov planet.
On my way back to the sliding glass door, I passed through the kitchen. There was Connie, leaned over the granite island scratching at a Sudoku puzzle. Even though I was blazed it would’ve felt weird not to acknowledge her, so we shot the shit about innocuous things like the high-school’s new running track — a sport I didn’t play — some of her favorite American Idol performances — a show I didn’t watch — and the skyrocketing cost of a gallon of milk — I was lactose intolerant.
“Where the hell you been?” Chuy asked when I came outside. His voice was groggy, monotone, like he was speaking from a dream.
“Talking to your mom.” My heart sort of broke for the bored and discarded paralegal doing puzzles alone in her kitchen, having to face the other moms at PTA meetings, doomed to become a cautionary tale among her married circle.
“You make a pass at her?” he asked.
“Hell no.” I reclaimed my chair.
He stretched in a way that made his ribs pop out like accordion bellows. “Too bad,” he said. “That might’ve cheered her up.”
I was walking home later, hearing the odd illicit rooster crow, passing the gap-tooth lots of demolished foreclosures, when the sound of screams caught my ear. I looked all over. Down the block, in one of the aforementioned lots, I saw a clot of people watching two dogs fight. The screams belonged to a woman trying to break them apart. I ran over, making out immediately that it wasn’t so much a fight as an attack. The prey was a medium-sized black mutt, maybe some lab in it, and the predator was a brindle pit bull, thick and stout like a redwood stump. It had the mutt pinned on its side and was burrowing its blood-flecked snout into the poor dog’s belly, like some huge matricidal pup trying to nurse.
The screaming woman, ostensibly the mutt’s owner, was in absolute hysterics. Everyone else, five or six onlookers gawking at the melee, may as well have been watching a Nat Geo documentary, they were so inert. One of them even gripped an aluminum baseball bat, a prop of good intent. I swiped it from his hands. He looked at me, alarmed, surly, jolted from a heroic fantasy. I walked over, raised the bat above my head, and envisioned crosshairs on the pit bull’s withers.
Then someone grabbed hold of the other end, trying and failing to snatch it away from me. I turned around, found myself playing tug-of-war with a leather-necked woman in one of those air-brushed wolf T-shirts. Her haircut evoked a meth-addled Farrah Fawcett, all hairspray and cotton candy. “Don’t you dare hurt my dog!” she rasped, like if a Virginia Slim could talk.
Things went on like that until a cruiser pulled up beside us. I let go of the bat. People started backing away. The mutt’s owner was entreated to step back too. Then both dogs were Maced. They whimpered and whined and my heart went out to the poor innocent lab who now had that chemical shit seeping into its open wounds. I was letting Farrah Fawcett tell her side of the story first, figuring I had nothing to worry about, when the half-attentive cop looked down at my sneakers and suddenly pointed. “That yours, son?”
I didn’t have to look down. There was an intuitive knot in my gut telling me I’d worn my fucking Levis with the hole in the pocket, and that the eighth I’d just bought from Chuy was at my feet. Damning as damning gets. I was cuffed and put in the cruiser, all of it feeling very ordinary. This wasn’t my first offense.
Farrah Fawcett smiled how I imagine the Libyans must’ve smiled when they found Gaddafi.
On a bench awaiting booking, I scanned a corkboard littered with PSAs about human trafficking, gas leaks, support groups for opioid addiction, et cetera. An old McGruff handbill from the Nineties chided that “Users are Losers.” My circulation was restricted by the cuffs and I was teary-eyed from some of the Mace vapors. Before long, a woman got seated next to me, also cuffed, though she wore the navy jumpsuit of county detention.
“Hey,” she said. “I’m Helen, what’s your name?” Like we were riding the bus on the first day of school.
I looked at her, didn’t even have my name out of my mouth before I realized I knew her, recognized her from somewhere. Her mugshot had appeared between Gregorio Reynoso and Volvo Bruce in the paper three weeks back.
“Getting processed,” she sang in a been-there-done-that, almost nostalgic kind of way.
“Guess so,” I said.
“What’d you do?”
“Possession,” I said. “And I tried to kill some cunt’s dog.”
Helen was straightening her bangs over her face, as if trying to pick something out, a dead bug or a seedpod. All she wanted to know was if this cunt owed me money. There was silence for a little while, then Helen gave a frustrated growl from deep in her chest. She began scanning up and down the hall. “Supposedly I got a court date sometime before Christmas.”
“That’s bureaucracy,” I said.
“Bureaucracy, shit. Plain rude is what it is.”
They came and took me away soon afterward. Fingerprints, health screening, questionnaire, all that jazz. Rising to my feet, I didn’t know what else to say, so I told Helen to take care of herself.
“God bless,” she answered, kissing two fingers and putting them in the air. Both hands of course, because of the cuffs. She still wore her hair over her face like a bridal veil, but I could tell she was smiling.
