All the Dead Yale Men (10 page)

Citron had a house in Braintree, which was a sort of second-or even third-tier suburb at the end of the Boston subway line. The house had one story with some dead grass in the front yard and a tree that produced some apples every year that fell onto the hard earth and which the kids in the neighborhood used in their Wham-O slingshots to hit cars that went down the street. Of course, the people who got hit, some of them with broken windows, called the cops, and the cops went to Citron's house.

The pit bull Citron bought to take care of the problem was called Blackie, and the dog weighed about ninety pounds, and every now and then the scent of a woman's perfume, the gait of a teenager who sulked in the street, the sound of a car that wouldn't start set him off. For instance, a woman with the wrong perfume came along and Blackie, after a silent but fast brooding, made a run for her. He hit the end of his chain and was lifted into the air like a pig being thrown into a vat. Citron didn't care about the women so much, but he took this as a demonstration of what Blackie could do if those kids showed up with their Wham-Os. Of course, when Citron wasn't around the kids did show up, and they peppered Blackie with the other stunted fruit they found in the neighborhood. It just made Blackie even meaner than before.

Still, when Blackie took a flying, rear-end-first leap at someone, Citron brought out a ball of raw hamburger and fed it to the dog and said, “Good dog. Yeah. Good dog.” Blackie bit Citron in the eyebrow once when he was doing this, but this only made Citron fonder of the dog, since the scar in his brow made him look, as he told Sally Sunshine, “more cool.”

Citron owned the house next door to his, and it was a smaller, more dreary version of his own: the dirt was a little harder in the summer, the mud deeper in the spring, and a couple of the windows were cracked and fixed with Scotch tape, not to
mention the hardwood floor had come loose and been fixed with toothpaste.

Citron let Sally have the house at a somewhat reduced rate. This way, he got her to work for less, and he didn't do that badly on the rent. When she complained about the plumbing or the floor, he'd say, “Bitch, bitch, bitch. Why, that's all I ever hear. How about the taxes I pay? How about the furnace repairman? Jesus.” Then he knocked on Sally's head and said, “Is anyone home?”

Sally said, “If you touch me, I'll kill you.”

So, Sally began to work for Citron. She put in long hours, trimmed and cut and remade hairstyles, and she did the other things that Citron pushed her way, like the wax jobs, which Sally did with a sound like tape being torn from a cardboard box, although every now and then Citron, just to keep the upper hand, would say that Sally had done a lousy “full sphinx,” and that he had had to “clean it up.”

Sally looked at him at these times and said, “It was a good, slick job. Are you saying I don't give good wax? I give great wax.”

“I'm talking about the crevices,” he said.

“I get all the crevices. Some you don't even know about,” she said.

“I know all about crevices,” he said. “Front and back. You've got to think about the back.”

“I think about it,” said Sally.

Still, Sally was good with her scissors, and her layer cuts were known as far away as Boston. Women came in and waited for her, more than for Citron, and they liked her advice about romantic problems. And if a woman considered getting a tattoo, Sally said, “Listen, kiddo, life forces you to make so many irrevocable decisions, you want to keep them down to a minimum.”

Citron cashed out on Saturday nights.

At the end of the first month, Sally stayed then, even when
Citron had told her to leave. She did the arithmetic, which she knew anyway, since she had been keeping track of just how much money she was bringing in.

“I think I'd like a bigger cut,” said Sally.

“Not yet,” said Citron. “You're still on trial.”

“Me?” said Sally. “I'm more than doubling what you're making. They come to see me, not you. That's a fact.”

“What about the house?” said Citron. “I give you a break there, don't I?”

“I want a bigger cut,” said Sally. “Twenty percent more. No, make that twenty-five percent more.”

“Oh,” said Citron. “A regular teamster I've got here.”

“I could start a place of my own,” said Sally.

Citron put a rubber band around the cash with a deposit slip.

“Don't even think about it,” said Citron. “I've got friends. You know that? No-teeth, tattooed ex-cons. You want to talk to them?”

“I'm thinking about it right now,” said Sally.

Sally's diary said she got a mutt from the pound. I am guessing that the dog was her only luxury, since as nearly as anyone could tell, she lived alone, saved her money, although she used some for cocaine and painkillers, which she took with a shot of brandy. At least that's the impression her diary left. She liked to go to the movies, and I am sure she had a desire to go to Hollywood, but she was smart enough to know what she would get if she tried. Her friends, mostly women who worked at other hair salons or who folded clothes at department stores, said that she loved her dog, that she even bought steak for the creature. She sat in the kitchen, after a couple of Vicodin and a slug of brandy, and watched him eat with tears in her eyes.

The mutt got out every now and then and went next door. It strained, trembling with the effort, crapping just beyond Blackie's reach.

One afternoon, a Monday when the Citron Modèle Beauty and Nail Salon was closed, the mutt got out the back door.

Old women lived in this neighborhood, transplanted, I guess, from Sicily or Portugal, and they dressed in black and wore shawls when they came out of their houses, emerging from the shadows of their sad interiors to do their shopping, which they brought home in small carts with wheels, the squeaking of which haunted the neighborhood. They came out and stood together, in a group, having no need to talk, since they all knew what they were waiting for, just as their mothers had in those shadows of small towns in Sicily: trouble of the usual kind, violence, retribution, which all added up to a kind of restrained relief.

Sally's dog came up to the property line and, on this morning, it went into Blackie's realm. Blackie picked up his ears, his eyes a little rheumy. Sally's dog turned and strained, its rear end toward Blackie. Blackie caught Sally's dog in his jaws and shook his head from side to side, then opened his mouth to get a better killing grip, but Sally's dog ran back for the property line, one leg dragging a little. Blackie hit the end of his chain. Sally's dog whined at the back door.

Citron's door opened with an angry smash and then he crossed that urine-scented, hard-packed earth.

Sally slept nude, but she woke and went to the kitchen window. Blackie was on his back, feet in the air as he gasped, and her dog bled from its back. Citron put his hands on his hips and lifted his head so that his chin pointed at Sally's house, daring her to come out. Sally went through the door and picked up her dog. She carried it up to the property line and offered it to Citron, as though the dog were evidence of Citron's cruelty, his exploitation of her, his cheating her out of the profits, the skimming of the money from her tips, the surcharge on the lotions
and creams, the dyes and bleaches. The false accusations about the wax jobs.

One of the women in black said, “
Guarda
. Look. She shaves.”

“Get some clothes on,” said Citron. “I am a respectable citizen.”

“What?” said Sally. “A man who charges more than he should? Who won't be fair?”

“What did you say?” said Citron.

“You heard me,” said Sally. “You and that ghastly dog.”

“Get some clothes on,” said Citron.

“What are you going to do about my dog?” she said.

“You heard me,” said Citron.

Sally went into the house, where she put on a pair of blue jeans and a tee shirt, took some money from the jar on the kitchen counter where she kept her tips, went outside into the smoky air, and waited for the cab she had called.

The vet stitched up the wound, put on a bandage, gave the dog a shot, and then Sally brought the dog home. She took the bill and walked across the yard. She stopped in front of Blackie, who looked up with that ominous silence, as he always had before making that lunge.

Sally knocked on Citron's door. Citron answered and she said, “Here. This is yours.” He looked at the bill, crumpled it up, and stuck it into the top of Sally's tee shirt.

“I told you if you touched me I'd kill you,” said Sally.

Then he went inside and closed the door.

Of course, it wasn't just the dog, but the money, too. Each Saturday night, Sally said with a growing sense of certainty (now far beyond a threat) that she could open a place of her own. Citron knew that she'd take the new customers she brought in and probably half of his, too. Then he'd have to face those guys who came on a weekly basis to pick up the interest.

Sally continued to work at Citron's and then came home to feed her dog. Sometimes when she looked out the window, where Blackie waited at the property line, or as close as he could get to it, his enormous pink tongue hanging out in the sultry heat of a fall afternoon.

Sally had a regular cab driver who drove her from Citron's salon, and one night she asked the cab driver to come into her house. He put his hand down in front of Sally's dog, as though to make friends, and when the dog got up and limped and showed its bandage with a bloodstain in the middle, the cab driver said, “What's wrong with it?”

She just shrugged.

“Do you like dogs?” she said.

“They're OK,” he said. “I've got a python. Its name is Dilly. Eats like you wouldn't believe. One gulp.”

The cab driver swallowed. It was a good imitation of a python, eyes bulging to get something down rather than choking. At least that's the way we thought it happened after we talked to Sally's friends, the other women who worked in salons in Boston, and after we read her diary. After we talked to the cab driver, too.

Sally asked the cab driver if he would give her some help, and the cab driver, a man of about fifty, overweight, covered with tattoos, said, “Sure, what's your pleasure?”

“Can you read?” she said.

“As well as the next guy,” he said.

Sally wrote a script right there, and then she got out her tape recorder and sat the cab driver down, gave him a drink of brandy, and asked him to read it. He did so, in a halting, bumbling way, but she kept after him until he got it right. Then she gave him fifty dollars, thanked him, and put him out the door.

At night, she sat with her dog in her lap, the stiff bandage under her fingers, her mood increasing with the warmth of the
painkiller perfectly enhanced by the brandy. She turned on the tape. Outside, on the other side of the yard in a purplish light from the street lamp, Blackie went back and forth, always a little less than the absolute limit of his chain, as though inviting Sally to come a little closer. The cab driver's voice came into the room, seeming friendlier, more intense, more like the voice of Antonio Banderas than anyone else. He said, “Look, I know how much you are bringing in. I admit I am skimming you thirty to forty percent. Not counting the dyes and lotions. So, we've got to put this right. I owe you ten or fifteen thousand, but we'll have to figure that out later. I can't do much about that. But things can change from now on. We'll split everything fifty-fifty, after expenses, and each year I'll give you ten percent of the business. How about that? Shake on it?”

So, she sat, in that glow of warmth, imbued with that heat of perfect justice, or what seemed like perfect justice to her, and while suspended in this miasma, this cloud of sensation, which was just as warm as flesh under the covers, she made plans.

Sally went up to the corner and bought some hamburger and some d-CON, and mixed the two together, then made little balls, which she put into the freezer until they were firm enough to throw into the yard next door. And when they were just right, she stood on the back porch, just a concrete stoop with a wrought iron railing, and threw one into the yard where Blackie spent his days. She started with just one.

In the morning, though, Blackie was still there, looking a little less than chipper, but still growling at the mailman who came by the cracked sidewalk and reached over the farthest radius of Blackie's operation and stuck into Citron's mailbox the bills for water and electricity and the catalogues for plastic surgery, mousse, and conditioner, the promotional cans of spray and advertisements for scissors that came “direct from Paris, France.”

When she came home from work, stiff and sweaty, she didn't take a shower. She removed three balls of half-frozen hamburger from the refrigerator and tossed them into the yard, and then she took a shower with the water as hot as she could stand it, angry, at the end, when it ran out.

The next night she added another ball of hamburger and then another, all of them gone in the morning, and so she guessed that she could try five at one time and that Blackie would eat them all before the effect of the d-CON made him uneasy enough to stop. She changed the dressing on her dog's wound as she looked out the window. She didn't care what happened, according to her diary, and that all she wanted was justice, a fair percentage for the take at Citron's salon (although Citron, obviously trying to cut a deal, asked for a smaller bite of her tips), just as she hoped that truth would find a way to adjust the outrages it revealed.