The Good Boy (14 page)

Joel’s heart sinks nearly into his guts. Could this be his Boo Radley? Or is the car just a coincidence?

MIZZ REDBONE
stops and backs up to park in front of the fire hydrant planted in dead grass between the street and the hedge-lined sidewalk right across from the Fowlers’ backyard. The driver emerges wearing an unzipped hoodie with $
O
and
LID
printed on either side in white letters. His passenger’s hoodie is plain, his afro natural. Another boy gets out from the back and offers a hand to a fourth, who walks with a limp. All of them are black. None of them looks like the man he remembers.

The boys cross the street and then the car alarm goes
wit-wit
and as soon as they disappear around the corner, Joel leads Butchie across the street, casual, just a kid walking his dog into the alley that backs up against the Fowlers’ garage.

The fence runs straight to the neighbor’s garage, sealing off the yard completely. Joel squeezes between two city recycling cans, Butchie behind him, to look through the fence slats, but thick bushes in the yard block his view.

Part of him wishes he’d left Butchie at home, because there’s a utility pole that would mean easy access to the neighbor’s garage roof, and nobody’d ever see Joel up there, Tomorrowland. He can’t leave the dog alone here, though—it’d make them both too nervous.

If he can’t go up, they’ve got to go around. He leads Butchie on to the neighbor’s where a chain-link fence with a fork-latched gate protects a strip of a yard and a black-windowed house. He hopes nobody’s home.

He’s worked up a sweat so he shoves his jacket into his backpack. Then he flips the gate’s ford latch and sends Butchie in, recon for an alarm, a light, a guard dog—any motion detector. Once the dog has sniffed around without incident Joel follows, taking up the leash and falling back into the shadows in front of the garage.

“Platz,”
he tells Butchie, and goes to ground with him. The grass is cold, near frost; Joel feels the chill through his shirtsleeves as he leads the dog on a covert crawl to where the garage meets the Fowlers’ fence. Slats of light draw lines on the lawn, marking various vantage points. Joel picks the first one.

In his limited view, party kids swipe past, snapshots. Aaron Northcutt carries wood to the fire; Linda Lee dances in and out of sight wearing a giant cowboy hat. Joel sees John-Wayne Wexler, too, but no Zack and more important, no Mike.

He pulls the leash handle up to the crook of his elbow and moves to another slat. Butchie paces behind him, the leash swinging.

This view shows Danny Sanchez, one foot against the street-side fence, a cigarette in his mouth while he drums on his legs, an anxious beat. A group of boys mills around him, all spitting and squawking like birds, though there’s no apparent pecking order. The music is too loud to hear what they’re saying but Joel imagines they speak in clipped code, like Zack Fowler’s tweets.

Butchie jerks back, unexpected, and knocks Joel off his knees; “Hey!” Joel complains, the weight of his pack putting him on his butt.
“Hier! Sitzen.”
When Butch comes over and sits, Joel doubles up on the leash for better control.

Back in the yard, Joel finds John-Wayne against the fence where Danny had been, and just then Zack Fowler comes into view. Mizz Redbone’s driver follows, his hoodie zipped so the white letters spell
$OLID
. All the others clear the way like some general has just come in on his horse.

John-Wayne hands Zack a plastic baggie and hooks his fingers in his belt loops. Zack unrolls the baggie, baby-blue pills dotting its bottom corners. He smiles like a salesman and shows the bag to the driver, who says something that makes Zack laugh, except nobody else laughs, so apparently it isn’t funny.

Then it’s really apparently not funny because the driver lifts his
$OLID
hoodie to reveal a gun stuffed into the waistband of his boxer shorts, the waistband of his jeans riding much lower, at his thighs. And then, like it was a signal, the other Mizz Redbone boys appear, backup.

Zack backs away, both hands up, and he says something over his shoulder to John-Wayne, prompting him to go up to the house. One of the Redbone backups takes Danny’s position at the fence and looks left and right a bunch of times like he’s about to cross a busy street; his mouth half open, braces glint like diamonds as he turns his head.

Joel waits there with them, drawn in, tense. Zack looks nervous, and that scares Joel more than the boy with the gun because Zack’s supposed to be the bad guy and he isn’t acting like it at all. His smile is sheepish and when he finds a cigarette in his pocket and lights up, it seems like his first time.

After Zack takes a few awkward drags Danny comes back out from the house and he acts like he’s in fast-forward, the way his hands and his mouth are going. Still, Zack seems relieved, and the Redbone boys all seem to agree with whatever Danny is telling them.

He produces a glass tube, some kind of pipe with a bulb on the end. He offers it to the boy in the $
OLID
hoodie, who passes, but the boy who limps steps up and takes a hit and then his knees bend and his smile cracks and travels to the others, ignition.

Danny takes the pipe back and drops something into it and then Butchie tugs the leash again.

“What is it, boy?” Joel asks, but before he turns to find out, Mike comes out of the house.

She’s got Linda Lee’s cowboy hat in hand and she seems disoriented, as though she’s out of time with the music. The black makeup has run from her eyes, like she’s been crying, except the pink in her cheeks suggests laughter instead. The rest of her is a mess: her hair curled and sweaty and her shirt pulled down too often, out of shape now, to cover her own shape. Maybe she’d been dancing. Joel hopes that’s it: the samba.

Danny is the one who sees her first and he starts toward her and that’s when Joel starts back around to the street—he needs a plan, and fast, because there’s no way Mike’s smoking that stuff, let alone running into those Redbone boys.

As they exit the alley and approach the street-side gate, Joel looks for something—anything—he can lob over the fence; if he can break through the imaginary ceiling in there, maybe Mike will look up and see there’s a way out.

He spots a plastic bottle cap in the gutter and hopes there’s a bottle to go with it somewhere, but then Butchie suddenly goes nutso: he darts back and forward again, hackles up, his nose working so hard Joel imagines he can smell the stars.

“Butch?” Joel grips the leash with both hands and tries to work his way toward the traffic handle, to pull Butchie close, but then the dog comes back, the sudden slack putting Joel on his knees, the pavement.

“Stop!” he commands, but Butchie doesn’t listen; he drags Joel toward the fence, the sidewalk grabbing his shirt, tearing skin. “I said stop!” he cries, rolling, trying to right himself.

The dog whips his head violently but Joel holds on until Butchie comes back again and the leash tethers, then burns, through his hand.

“Butchie!” Joel yells as the dog runs to the gate, and then he leaps, and is over, and gone.

Ceiling shattered.

Someone says, “What the—”

And someone else, “Jesus, look—”

And then a boy’s awful scream.

Butchie starts barking. Barking like mad.

Until the gunshot.

And then, “Oh—”

“Oh no—”

“Oh my god—”

“Butchie!” Joel yells again and he doesn’t care who hears.
“Hier,
here
, heeere!”
Joel looks up, but can’t see over: the sky is black.

And then Joel starts to run. Starts, but runs into
MIZZ REDBONE
, then misses the curb, falls to his knees, hands down in the dead grass. Then crawls, past the fire hydrant, the sidewalk, the waist-high hedge, its sharp thorns. Pushes through them. Has to.

And then he is on his back in someone else’s yard, the backpack beneath him contorting his spine, and who knows why but he thinks of Roadkill, the stupid game, and how he might as well really be dead. What has he done?

The party’s electronica drones on over the sound of far-off sirens curling toward the neighborhood as car engines start, doors slam, voices carry on the wind. Kids clear out. Witnesses escape.

And overhead, the stars pop and then blur, on the spin without Joel because he is paralyzed there, his feet still caught in the hedge, his world stopped: Butchie. Gone.

The
wit-wit
of Mizz Redbone’s alarm comes next, her boys talking over one another:

“Help me get Lil Cee in here.”

“What happened … Dezz?”

“That dog fucked you up, yo.”

“Where he go?”

“How the fuck I know?”

“I can drive. You got the keys?”

“What that cop kid try to pull?”

“I think we was set up.”

“We should jack that shit.”

“You crazy? You shot that boy—”

“He was aimed at the dog.”

“Cee is right. We find out where that cop kid live, jack that our own selves.”

“Where he go?”

“We ain’t got time to look for no dog, Cee. Cops coming.”

“Where we go?”

“Take us by Grandma’s.”

“Ditch the piece, yo.”

“There he is! Motherfuck—give me the gun!”

And then Joel feels Butchie lick his face and it’s like he’s brought back to life and he opens his eyes and untangles his feet from the hedge and reaches out but Butchie backs off, defensive, a growl.

“He right here!” someone says from other side of the hedge, and then the boy is there above Joel, and he is not wearing braces but a mouth grille, long metallic fangs all across the front.

“You see his eyes?” he asks, about Butch. He doesn’t see Joel. “Gimme the— I’ma kill the motherfucker,” he tells the driver, who comes up behind him. His teeth catch his lip when he says, “Euthanize.”

And then, in the space of a second, Joel looks over at Butchie and Butchie looks at him—he barks,
come on
—and Joel rolls, gets on his knees and to his feet and goes. And Butchie is right there with him, leash trailing.

One of the boys says, “Wait—you see that kid—”

But then gunshots go
pop! pop!
and Joel’s heart does the same. He rounds the corner, Butchie with him, and they jump another set of hedges and they’ve got to run now; they’re on the run.

9

“I guess this is good night,” Rima says, clicking her near-empty beer bottle with Pete’s when the main house lights go out, dim exit signs on either side of the balcony bar matching Pete’s mood. They’re the last ones here, Warren having tipped his final Jack and Coke back in one smooth, thirsty swallow.

“I wouldn’t say good.” Pete hears the slow, burbling trance music piped in through the vents from the four
A.M.
bar in the basement and thinks about paying the two bucks’ cover to go down, have a real drink, disappear for a little bit longer.

“What’s up, Petey? You’re usually such a dick.” Rima is joking, of course, but she’s also right.

He finishes his beer, tells her, “Ja’Kobe White filed a civil suit against me.”

“No shit? That’s the—that’s the guy’s brother, the dead guy? The one dead guy.”

“Yes. The one.”

She climbs up on the bar top, lets her legs dangle. “What’d you do? I mean, allegedly?”

“Harassment, excessive force, wrongful arrest.”

“Wow. That’s unlike you. What says Flip Flipowitz?”

“Philip Politz,” Pete corrects her, and not for the first time, or the fifteenth. “Mr. Politz is no longer representing me. This time it’s Ann Marie Byers.”

“Doesn’t have the same ring to it.” She swings her legs in and out, her shoes’ rubber soles bouncing. “What’s she say, then, ol’ Ann Marie?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t called her back.”

“Of course you haven’t. You’re as bad as Willie Webb.”

“The manatee?”

“My gentle manatee.” Ri volunteers as a mentor for the probation department; she helps teen parolees who want out of gang life. She calls them manatees instead of mentees because she equates parole to releasing big, oblivious mammals from captivity into dangerous waters. They’re mostly young men, but they all respect her because she doesn’t take shit and she doesn’t give it, either.

“What’d Willie do?”

“Got himself a job at Radio Shack. He’s real good with technology and he keeps spending his check on games and whatever, and so he isn’t making rent, which he’s been hiding from me by hiding from me.”

“At least he isn’t stealing.”

“Aw, come on, Petey, Willie Webb wouldn’t do me like that.” Rima puts her hand on the top of his head. “Seriously. What now? For you and yours?”

He feels like he could tell her every last detail; he wishes she didn’t put the good voodoo on him, too. He bats her hand away, fixes what he knows is going thin up top, says, “Everything that’s been indefinitely temporary becomes permanently undone.”

“You mean Sarah?”

“Of course Sarah. She hates me.”

“She blames you,” Rima says, a soft correction.

Pete rounds the circular bar to the hinged lift-top and ducks underneath. He goes into the ice bin—the bartenders always leave enough to keep a few extra beers cold—and gets one more for himself. He figures Rima will say no but asks, “You want?”

“To know about Sarah, yes.” She reaches over, takes the beer.

“You know what it’s like? It’s like, one day the world got too big for her, and now she has to blow everything out of proportion just to make it fit.”

“She’s still grieving.”

“Yeah, I know. Anyway.” He takes the first sip of his new, cold beer. He means to change the subject, to ask Ri about her latest crush. Instead, he remembers a late-spring dawn, out on the back deck of the old house, the bench swing where he found Sarah nursing Joel. Pete can still hear her cooing at the mourning doves. Her voice had been so delicate; a morning star twinkling. She had so much love.

But then. And then. And then.

He says, “I miss the house, too.”

“Of course you do. You were there for years. The kids? Shit. So many memories.”