Brad Felver - The Dogs of Detroit

And then the hand on your shoulder, twisting you around. You know it’s the meaty paw of Mick Sligo. You know what you must do. As he spins you around, you twist into position, left in front of right, scissored, and by the time you’re face to face with the lumbering Neanderthal, you’re already into your swing. The world slows for that first punch. You must enjoy this because everything seems to speed up from there. But for now, it blurs, and you are swinging, torquing your hips into him, and your middle knuckle connects square with Mick Sligo’s temple. He drops into a heap. Just instantly drops. There is no pause, no wail of pain, no wobbles like a Jenga tower. You punch, he drops. He does not move. He lies there like an oversized trash bag full of yard waste.

For a moment, all will go quiet. The crowd will stare at Mick Sligo, wondering if he will get up and take his revenge on you. It was not supposed to happen this way, even you know this, and the onlookers seem confused. But Mick Sligo does not get up.

You’ll probably want to stand over him at this point, spread your legs, and puff your chest like a marauding Spartan. You’ve certainly earned the right. But you should also know that such an action is perhaps the start of something else entirely. This is the last thing you need to know about throwing a punch: it’s addictive. Once you learn how to do it, you want to do it often. The desire to throw a punch will soon overtake its rare necessity. You feel it already, don’t you? You’ll feel it from now on, during every conversation, like a pistol burning to be loosed from its holster.

Bev and me, we’re cooking up some unicorn stew in a trash can and punching each other. We have a sign and everything, silver spray paint on plywood, so any other craphead kids know what we’re doing. Do Not Disturb! it says, Making Unicorn Stew . It’s boiling hot outside, and we don’t want to deal with their interruptions and stupid questions, like, “Did you know that my dad killed a bigger unicorn than you did?” or “Did you use a regular gun or a plasma laser to kill the unicorn?” or “You should have made unicorn ice cream,” which isn’t even a question at all.

The stew has other things in it besides unicorns. Like potatoes, because without potatoes it’d be soup, not stew. Also Fruit Roll-Ups and tartar sauce because it does need some seasoning. Bev steals all of it from the store, and we have to tell her dad that right away, so he knows we didn’t spend any of his money. He’s already pretty sore about me staying with them while my dad is out driving his truck. He glares at me during dinner, and all I can do is stare at his big brown mustache and think about how tough it makes him look. He says I eat too much, but I always make sure to eat a little less than Bev does. “We don’t have money for you little piss-heads to be wasting it on your dumb piss-head games,” he’ll say about our unicorn stew. But then Bev will promise him that we didn’t pay for anything. We boosted it all from the packie. The problem is that Bev’s dad doesn’t usually believe people, so he might still get rough. He might still thwack our knees with the little flashlight he carries on his belt.

We drop in the ingredients, and then we punch each other. “Potato incoming!” I shout and then sock her in the shoulder. Lemon-Lime Kool-Aid incoming! she shouts and hits me in the thigh. Pepperoni log!—punch. Creamed corn!—punch. We go on like this for a long time until the trash can is pretty full. We keep adding water from the garden hose. It’s so hot out we’re both sweating like crazy people. It’s that wet sort of heat, the kind that makes it hard to breathe. I want to peel my sweaty shirt off, but I don’t because Bev has to keep hers on, Bev being a girl.

The reason we punch each other is to make bruises. Bev gets them from her dad, who doesn’t like cigarette smoke or C-minuses for spelling “besiege” wrong. He mostly leaves me alone, but I get my bruises from seventh-graders, soccer players with shaggy bowl cuts, who wait for me in the little hallway by the cafeteria and don’t think I should have red hair or pigeon-toes unless I want to be a major league faggot. Bev and me are only in the fifth grade, and we can’t do much about it. So we make new bruises on each other, and they mix in with the old ones, and then we don’t know where any of them came from. Bev’s a head taller than I am, like most of the girls in our grade, and she hits hard, but I don’t admit this or complain about her sharp knuckle punches because I’m the one getting the better bruises, after all.

Bev’s mom is sitting in her broken car, on the street, smoking and listening to the Sox game. I think she’s watching over us too. It has to be about a million degrees inside that car, but there she is. Bev’s dad won’t have smoke in the house since he says he wants to quit, and what Bev’s dad says goes. He works across the river at the Necco Wafer factory and always smells extra sweet, like he maybe has a bunch of cotton candy in his pockets. Sometimes he’ll bring home a sack of little heart-shaped candies, the ones rich kids put in Valentine’s Day cards. But he has the crummy, messed up ones with mistakes in the lettering where the machine marked them all wrong or off-center or something. I guess they can’t sell those, so he steals some and brings them home. Most say dumb crap. Don’t even look like real words. Some are kind of close— Luove yo, Cute tie, So Buel! You have to use your imagination. My favorite was one that was probably supposed to say Love Bird but ended up all mashed and crooked, so it looked kind of like Lve Tird . Bev likes the one we found last year. We think it was supposed to be two different hearts that said Be Good and Lover Boy , but they got blended somehow and so it sort of looks like God Lover !

Mostly, though, we just eat the little candies up until our stomachs are all bloated, like we drank way too much root beer. Then we shoot the rest at each other with slingshots and call each other love turd and God-lover. Little heart bullets, and boy, do they leave marks.

So Bev’s mom sits in the car and smokes and listens to the Sox game, even though it’s hot enough to make your face melt off. And the Sox are almost definitely losing again. We can hear that grumbly radio voice echo every time the other team knocks a hit. Sometimes she looks over at us and shakes her head, probably thinking that we should be making broccoli casserole instead of unicorn stew.

Walter Sullivan rides by on his ten-speed. He lives two streets over in a first floor place with a yard. It’s a new house. There was this humongous fire here a few years ago, destroyed all kinds of crap. People like Walter Sullivan got new houses out of it. But a lot of other people just moved away from Chelsea. I don’t blame them for that. Our house was mostly okay, but a couple blocks away—total burnout. Still lots of houses people haven’t really rebuilt on or even cleaned up too good. All this charcoaled crap in big heaps, and I guess no one really has money to do anything about. So Bev and me like to scrounge around and find cool junk that didn’t burn, like huge bolts and spigots that we can pretend are guns. We paint charcoal mustaches on each other, try to get them as big as we can. Then we scowl and shoot at each other and try to die in the most convincing sort of way. Sometimes we just sit on the curb with our mustaches and act angry about adult stuff, like taxes and cigarettes and indigestion.

Walter Sullivan stares at our unicorn stew sign. He got popular last year because his parents got divorced, and his dad started buying him lots of great stuff, like ten-speeds and kites and gummy worms. Sometimes, when it’s really hot, Bev and me will go over Walter’s house and do his big sprinkler, but mostly we don’t. Mostly we like to be on our own.