Brad Felver - The Dogs of Detroit

“Roman,” I said, “relax. Breathe.”

“Can’t,” he said. “No way.”

It was a strange sort of comedown he was dealing with right then, that lonely feeling that clings to you after you’ve accomplished something big and impressive. Now what? So the rats were gone? What would we do now, what would we hate now? What you don’t realize is that hatred is like any other addiction, and when it’s gone, you actually crave it. Without it, your world doesn’t make much sense.

I hung in a dreamy state, not quite awake but not asleep either, until Dad came into our room after second whistle. “What did you boys do?” That’s how I realized that the noises weren’t in my head. They were back, little rat zombies. You don’t get rid of rats, not ever. Maybe that’s what Mom was trying to tell us.

We walked out to the fire escape.

“Jesus,” Roman said, “what the hell?” meaning the sound of them all like a big rat army marching on the South Bronx.

We looked down into the darkness for a few minutes, hoping our eyes would adjust, but it was too dark. Dad shined a flashlight down then, a crummy one he rented from Old Irish, and we could see them all over the place, their flashing little eyes, more rats than ever, and what they were doing was eating their scorched little cousins, just devouring them. All that free protein, no way they’d waste it. No sentiment for a rat.

“Are they—?” Roman asked.

“Jesus,” I said.

Dad peeked over the rail, down into the eerie half light of the alley. He didn’t say anything or make any faces, just stared.

Roman turned the flashlight off and slumped down, just totally defeated. He’d used science. How could this happen?

And that was it. What I never told Roman, probably because I didn’t quite realize it until years later, when I had my own kids and we lived over in Brooklyn Heights, is that I was glad the rats came back. For me, it was like stabilizing a wobbly orbit, like we needed their weight in our world to stay on track. They belonged somehow, and hating them belonged too. Hate something long enough, and that becomes the reason you hate it.

We stopped hunting the rats and finished out the school year. Roman got quieter, stopped stealing bikes and fighting so much. When August came, he decided he wouldn’t go back to school, and pretty soon he took over Dad’s job on first whistle, and Dad moved to second whistle. After that, life sped up, almost like we’d been searching for the on-ramp to the freeway, and then once we found it, we just set the cruise and went mile after mile without giving it any thought.

I went upstate for college. I studied engineering and worked in the dining hall and studiously avoided stories about home. In four years, I only came back once. When people asked, I just told them I was from the city. Roman never called, and even when I called him he never really said how things were going. Sometimes he’d mention the marines, but whenever I pushed him to go see a recruiter, he would just say, Yeah, I’ll have to do that soon , but he never did. I wanted him to get away like I did, less for him and more for me. I was the prisoner who escapes by standing on his cellmate’s shoulders.

There was a lake not far from campus, and it had a big stock of steelheads in it, so I took up fishing there. I knew a guy with a car and a fishing rod, and he let me borrow both, no rental fees. This was real nature, not a park surrounded by concrete, not the East River, which had the consistency of vegetable soup. Fishing is more like not doing something than it is like doing something. Your vision blurs and time slows and you hear the whir of nature all around, millions of unconnected sounds merging into something almost coherent. I’d sit there for hours, the heat of the sun on my shoulders until it just cooked me red, and I think I craved that sunburn, the way it would pulse and tingle as I lay in bed at night. It was the silence of waiting that I liked. Of course it was. I think we constantly try to recreate important moments, and we constantly fail at it. I was probably waiting there for the echo of that night with the rats, that final reverberation, just waiting for it to rebound through all the quiet, but it never did. It just hung there, like a suspended chord with no resolution in sight. I’d think about home, Roman and Dad passing each other on the way to work, but it wouldn’t seem real, not in the middle of all that nature, and I eventually had to accept that I’d become just like Old Irish: it wasn’t my rat problem either.

Then I started dating a girl from Clinton Hill, and we got serious enough to stop using condoms. That was a fresh feeling, nothing quite like it. She started asking questions about home and family. One night when we were drunk, I started telling her about Roman. I told her about the bikes he’d steal and the fights he’d pick and about Old Irish, and then I told her about the rats, the whole story, which I’d never told anyone else, and all she said was, Well, just thank God you’re here now , as if I’d escaped from some concentration camp. I should have set her straight, but I didn’t. We got married a few years later and moved near her family in Brooklyn.

Mom drowned in the bathtub during my last semester, or that was what Dad told everyone. I came home for the funeral, my first time since leaving, and I stepped off the train, and I could just feel the Bronx all around me, the noises and smells. We go off and change, but home always waits for us. Stay away long enough, though, and it starts to feel like returning to the scene of a crime.

I walked the length of the platform slowly, taking it all in. Dad was at the other end, just on the other side of the gate. He was squatting against the column, unshaven, wearing his dirty white jumpsuit, and I thought, That’s awfully nice of him to come meet me at the station right now . His hair was grayer than I remembered, and he’d lost weight, and as I drew closer, I realized it was actually Roman. He had that hundred-mile stare to him, no telling how old he even was anymore, could have gone twenty years in either direction. The world seemed to have burned a hole straight through him while I was away. I stopped walking. For the first time in years, everything seemed to slow down again. I thought about that lake and the trout breaking the surface of the water, the silence, and I wanted to escape to there, all that quiet, because in ten seconds I was going to hug my brother and pull away, and then we’d be looking at each other, and I’d have to say something, but I had no idea what that would be.

What I do on Friday afternoons especially around the holidays is I take the bus out to the airport and have some drinks. I can sit at the bar with a Wild Turkey and pretend I’m flying to Fort Lauderdale for a weekend of nooky on a beach with a professional cheerleader named Traci. When people ask, that’s just what I tell them. Traci can do the splits, you know, and she can do them anywhere ! Two or three drinks, and I’m on that beach, and Traci is reading Mademoiselle in the lounger next to me. We’re drinking rum out of coconuts and trying decide which is bluer, the sky or the water, and right then we have a good laugh because I just fondled her yum-yums and made that old-fashioned horn noise.

That guy has the life , people think. Got his shit together, all right. Probably some kind of banker or politician. Traci is one lucky broad .

And that’s what I do. Always did have a good imagination.

Then, just the other day, I’m sitting in a bar right near the security lines, and I’m pretty well into my routine. That’s when my brother Warren sits down at the other end of the bar. My real-life brother! He’s wearing a suit jacket and carrying one of those little bags that’s made just for computers. It’s been ten years at least since we’ve talked, probably more than that. Who keeps track of these things?