The Good Boy (36 page)

Above the first street sign, Joel spots a blue-box police camera. Boxes like this are supposed to act as “patrol” in rough areas—although the film is used only for evidence, which means cops don’t watch the footage unless there’s been a crime. Still, a block that has a blue box is no place to hang around.

Butchie doesn’t know what the boxes are for but he doesn’t seem too thrilled about the neighborhood, either; he doesn’t stop to sniff at all, just looks back at Joel once in a while to whine.

“Ay, hijo de puta!”
an Hispanic man yells at what’s under the hood of his broken-down pickup truck across the way, his clothes oil stained.

Behind him, two young boys kick a soccer ball in the street. It’s as good a place as any; there is concrete from curb to house, and only the occasional tree tries to hold its own inside a crumbling brick planter.

Joel leads Butchie past a street-side bedroom window where a statue of Mary is adorned with beads and prayers handwritten in Spanish, and the word that comes to Joel’s mind is
subura,
the Latin term for the district where poor, lawless Romans lived during the ancient empire.

Ahead, the El runs over the street, trains snarling past one another, and Butchie puts the brakes on—probably thunder flashbacks. An alley runs under the tracks, bloodred rust stains running down the bridge piers; everything else is covered in a colorless grime, like some kind of sci-fi underworld.

Joel coaxes Butchie under the bridge, where he imagines the garbage cans are set afire, come nighttime. “It’s okay,” he says, trying to convince himself, too.

Past the tracks, plastic grocery bags are tied to the top lines of iron fences, strange decorations. When he stops to investigate, Joel discovers an even more peculiar feature of the row houses here: behind the fences, downstairs, there are front yards. Like dugouts.

In one yard, a patch of grass grows around a birdbath and a blue plastic push-and-ride kid car that has been tipped on its side, wheels cracked. Another yard looks more like a storage area, rainwater pooled on a white tarp that partially covers a set of furniture. The next has L-shaped iron-railed steps running down to a door, like a basement apartment; the window’s curtain is a bedsheet.

At the corner, a grocery called La Potosina advertises ice cream, eggs, and school supplies. Joel can think of at least a hundred and one ways to spend the last bit of their cash—school supplies not one of them—but he’d sure like to see what else the market offers.

He’s daydreaming about lemonade and Snickers when Butchie pulls toward the street to angle around half-dozen empty forty-ounce beer bottles left on the sidewalk, blocking the walkway to someone’s front door.

And that someone could very well be the leather-skinned man in the cowboy hat who’s on his way up the walk.

The usual act-natural rules would be for Joel and Butchie to get out of the way, and that’s because naturally, when you’re trying not to be noticed, you don’t want to annoy anybody. The problem is, this man already looks annoyed, and when Joel pulls Butchie aside the man shifts course, his boot-steps heavy and certain and headed straight for them—right up until he gets a good look at Butchie and stops, leash-distance.

“¿Y ahora vienes a tratar de corretiarme con el perro del diablo?”
It sounds like a question, but Joel understands only the word that means dog—

“Perro?”
which he repeats like a question.

“A mi no me importa quien reclama esta esquina,”
the man says, moving around them like a rodeo rider would a crazy horse, his eyes black with rage.
“Ésta es mi casa. No me iré de este lugar.”

Butchie backs up to keep the barking man in front of him; Joel doubles up on the leash.

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” Joel says, and he realizes this is how Butchie must feel when people try to tell him stuff: he might know a word here or there, but he forms the gist from the tone, or the person’s expression.

“¡Puedes amar al diablo pero él no más te usa, discípulos ignorantes!”

The man picks up a beer bottle; Joel only realizes what he’s going to do with it when he winds up and whips it at them.

Butchie lurches forward as Joel pulls him back; the threat is real now, and so is the dog’s impulse to stop it. The bottle hits the street a foot from where Butchie’s front paws claw at the pavement. He goes wild.

“Fuss!”
Joel commands; the dog won’t get away from him this time. He uses all his weight, his butt nearly touching the ground as he backs up, a step at a time.

The man throws another bottle and glass smashes on the street in front of them.
“No me asustan,”
he yells.
“Todos ustedes son bestias.”

Butchie starts to bark back and Joel can’t get him to move though they’re in the middle of the street and there’s a car coming around the corner. Joel puts a hand up to warn the driver and falls, knees skinned, and it makes him mad—mad enough to find the strength to get Butchie by the collar and pull him to the curb.

The car stops. It’s a maroon two-door with gold wheels and a stereo system that makes the whole back end shake. The driver is a man, and he is alone. He wears a canary-yellow bandana and his eyes are set close, a marsupial’s.

The man throwing bottles quits barking. So does Butchie.

The driver rolls down the window and turns down the music. He looks over at Joel, a half squint like he’s due an explanation, and Joel thinks he should give him one but then a bottle hits not two feet from the front of the car’s hood and the driver parks right there, middle of the street.

He gets out of the car, takes off the bandana, and winds it around his fist. He’s not a big man but he is all muscle: the white T-shirt under his Detroit Tigers jersey fits like plastic wrap and his jeans hang on his hipbones below the V-cut of his waist.

The glass crunches under his bright white sneakers as he makes his way toward the man in the cowboy hat. He says,
“Tiene los huevos de un toro, viejo.”
The tone sounds confrontational.

The driver glances at Joel, who has no explanation; it’s impossible for him to say it’s a misunderstanding when they don’t understand each other in the first place.

The driver turns back to the cowboy and says,
“¿Va a limpiar eso, o le pongo a limpiarlo?”
and then he reaches for the back of his waistband, finding his gun.

That’s when Joel decides they’d better get the hell out of there.

They run, Butchie matching his pace past a tavern called El Aguaje where another old cowboy stands in the doorway with a bottle of beer, shielding his eyes from the light of day. Butchie doesn’t see the man right away, and the startle revs the dog’s engines: he could run for miles, light-speed. Joel, on the other hand, can hardly keep up; he’s sucking air. He’s got to stop.

At the next alley, Joel turns off and they move in past four garages to take cover behind a row of bloated garbage cans and they are sitting there, both of them panting, when a teenage girl about Mike’s age appears in a garage doorway across the way. She has a pink-swaddled baby in her arms and a little boy hanging on her leg. She doesn’t appear to have a vehicle or to be on her way anywhere. Her eyes are brown and blank, like Joel and Butch are no surprise. The baby cries.

Heavy bass echoes from the maroon car as it crawls past the alley. The girl looks at Joel; he’s pretty sure everybody understands
no,
and so he mouths the word. Still, she sends the boy out to the street.

Pretty soon the boy comes back, the car following. The driver stops and kills the music.

“Hola,”
he says to Joel and he sounds friendly.
“¿Que barrio tiras?”

Butchie comes around in front of Joel and sits, on guard. Joel says, “I don’t understand you.”

“Where you from,
pandillero?
”

“I’m from here.”

“You’re not from
here,
bro.”

“Chicago,” Joel clarifies.

The girl comes around the front of the car and stands there, bouncing the baby. The little boy is there, too, her other leg. Butchie cocks his head, watching them.

The driver asks, “You and your dog lost?”

“No,” Joel says. “I have a map.”

“That map don’t tell you you’re in Oaktown, does it.”

“No.”

“Probably don’t tell you these are the Satan Disciples’ streets, neither.”

“No.”

“Ay, Carmelita, he look like a gangsta to you?”

The girl mouths
no
at Joel, same as he had before.

Joel says, “I’m not a gangster.”

“Well, ’sokay then, bro. I got no problem with you. But old man Gonzales? He thinks you’re one of us. Says you and your dog are putting in work for the SDs. I tried to talk to him. Told him I never seen you before. But he don’t ever believe anything I say. He’s calling the cops right now.”

“I don’t want the cops to find us,” Joel says; they’re so close to the courthouse.

“You don’t have to explain to me,” the driver says. “You want to come by my house, lie low for a little while?”

Joel is surprised by the offer. He looks at Carmelita: no help. He thinks of the driver’s gun.

“Thanks, but we have to go home.”

“So then the question is, bro, do you want to stop off at my place, or do a night in county? ’Cause cops looking for a white boy and a dog around here won’t have much problem picking out you two, know what I’m saying?”

He’s speaking English, sure, but Joel still doesn’t understand. “I didn’t do anything.”

“Ay, bro, in this hood, that don’t matter.”

The baby starts to cry again but Carmelita keeps bouncing her, blank-eyed; the boy is sitting between her legs now, tugging at the flared hem of her otherwise tight jeans.

Butchie looks back at Joel; he doesn’t know what to make of it, either.

“Where’s your house?” Joel asks.

“A block or so. Come on,” he says, a jerk of his chin, “you can put the dog in the back.”

“I’m not supposed to ride with strangers.”

“If I tell you my name is Agapito, am I still a stranger?”

Joel looks down at his shoes, the orange Cheetos stains. He’s made some dumb mistakes on this trip. No way he’s getting in that car.

“Ay,” Agapito says, “’sokay, bro. I don’t need hair all over my seats. Just follow me, okay?” He turns up his music, puts the car in Reverse, and backs out of the alley.

Joel gets up, and he thinks about stopping to ask Carmelita if the cops are really going to come, or if it’s safe to go to Agapito’s house, but she already sold him out once. He ropes Butchie and they follow the car.

On the street, it turns out Agapito was telling the truth since he parks in front of a two-story house on the other side of 24th Street. With both coasts clear, Joel skips Butchie over there.

Agapito arms the car’s alarm, a triple chirp, crosses the walk, and descends a flight of steps to where a basement unit is crudely sketched by a wood door and a draped window. A square of concrete is supposed to be the patio.

Agapito knocks on the door, a hammer fist, but nobody answers. When he turns and sees Joel and Butchie at the top of the steps he says, “
Ven abajo.
Come on.”

Joel leads the dog downstairs and immediately feels trapped. The fence rises up and around them, jail bars. When Butchie reaches the patio, he paces.

Agapito knocks again and says, “Nobody’s home.”

“I didn’t see any cops.” Hesitant, Joel puts one foot up on the first step out of there, Butchie a step ahead. “I think we’ll be okay.”

“Hang on, bro,” Agapito says. “This is my sister’s place. I didn’t want to freak her out, leaving the dog down here without telling her. We can’t bring him upstairs to my place cause
mi madrastra
has a Chihuahua. Moco. Fierce little fucker.”

“What’s
madrasta?
” Joel asks, knowing he mixed up the word.

“Ay,
madrastra
. She’s my mom.”

Joel stops on the first step. How bad can this be? Agapito, his sister, his mom, and a place to hide—why does he feel scared?

It must be the gun. Agapito was quick to draw on Mr. Gonzales. He was fearless.

But Joel’s dad carries a gun, and he is fearless, too—and there’s nothing scary about his dad at all.

“What’s wrong, bro?”

“Nothing,” Joel lies.

“I didn’t mean to freak you out about the cops. I just know, from experience, ay? Better to lie low, especially because you got the dog—what’d you say his name is?”

“Butch,” he says, “and I’m Joel,” because he’s not Agapito’s brother.

“Bootch.”
Agapito’s full lips pucker on the
o.
“That’s
marimacho en Español.
Looks like a strong dog. A stud. And a fighter—the way he wanted to get at Gonzales? Shit. That old man is lucky you didn’t let him loose.”

“He’s trained to neutralize danger,” Joel says, pride there.

“Trained, ay? Like a boxer?”

Like a police dog,
Joel thinks, but he doesn’t think Agapito would appreciate that fact. “Well trained,” he says.

“Is he a purebred?”

“A mix. Belgian Malinois and German shepherd.”

“He’s badass is what he is. Come here,
marimacho,
let me have a look at you.”

Butchie sits. He doesn’t seem to understand Agapito’s request, or why Joel isn’t following him up the steps.

Agapito puts his hand in through the fence rails for Butchie to sniff. The dog resists, nose in the air.

“Look at the big balls on you, Bootch.” Agapito scratches the dog’s chest, looks back at Joel. “You want something to eat, bro? Bring him down. Tie him up.”

Butchie climbs another step: maybe he does understand, and he doesn’t want to be tied up.

“Maybe we should both wait here,” Joel says.

“Serious, bro? You act like I want to kidnap you or something and I’m just being nice. Anyway if I take you, what the hell am I going to do with this big fucking dog that could tear my face off?”

“I’d rather stay,” Joel says.

“Okay, bro. Suit yourself.” Agapito rounds the rail and climbs the steps over Butchie. At the top, he rests his palms on the fence. “But you’re going to miss the menudo.
Mi madrastra
makes it on Sundays. And homemade tortillas, frijoles—so good—sit at her table, bro, and you won’t even care about getting home.”