Brad Felver - The Dogs of Detroit

“Now that’s the spirit!” The biker grabs a marker from next to the cash register. He goes over to the wall and finds the one empty spot in between all the other sample tattoos. Got his back to Harlow and Tuber and the old fella, so they can’t see what he’s drawing till after he’s done, but it don’t take him long, and when he moves away, it’s a big black swastika he drew. No mistaking it. “Now, I ain’t the artist I’m betting you are,” he says, “but that’s the rough cut of it.”

“Sir,” the old tattoo fella says, but Christ, what’s he supposed to do? It’s like he knows he’s fucked deep, but he can’t just go on and do it without complaining some. Folks have swastika tattoos, I guess, but it don’t seem right what they make somebody else draw it on them. But the old fella says, “Okay, then, go ahead and set down in that chair and I’ll get things ready.”

“Oh, it ain’t for me,” the biker says. “I don’t care for tattoos, myself. Ruin my complexion.” He runs a hand through his beard. “No, I want it for this one here, the smart one.” He points at Harlow.

“Sir—”

“Now, friend,” he says, “let’s not get on repeating ourselves. We know what’s in the front pocket, and we know what I want, so let’s just get on with it.”

The old tattoo fella’s all jammed up, no doubt about that. He looks over at Harlow, his face drooping like a hungry dog, probably trying to apologize a thousand different ways without saying nothing out loud. But then Harlow, to that boy’s credit, he rips his shirt off, his ribcage poking through his skin, and he walks over to the chair and sets on down.

“Goddamn, if I wasn’t right!” the biker says. “You are smart.”

The old tattoo man sets things up and goes to work, and it don’t take him but half an hour to mark Harlow up with the swastika. It’s thick and dark, and it covers up the whole left side of his chest. Harlow, he don’t make a goddamned sound, that’s the story I heard anyways. His whole life he’s been the loudmouth, always telling folks how he’d do this or he’d do that, how he pulls so much cooch that don’t even get the clap no more, how he’s the toughest son of a bitch around, but right then he just takes it, quiet and almost dignified. “Damn, son,” the biker says, “that can’t feel good now.” But Harlow don’t say boo, and the old biker don’t push it like he done before.

That’s the end of the story as most people in town learned it, but there’s more to it I heard years later when I came back to the states for a reunion and I run into Harlow’s sister. I was always sweet on her but never had the stones to talk to her until after I was safe and married. Turns out Harlow and Tuber head off to basic a couple months later and then over to Vietnam a couple months after that. They end up in different units, but they try to talk when they can. It’s Tuber what makes a real show of himself as a tunnel rat. I guess he’s just fearless, like he knows he was engineered just for it. Got a whole process. Every hole and bunker they come across, Tuber strips down to his skivvies and takes just a flashlight and a .45. Sometimes he’s gone a long time, but he eventually comes back and calls it clear, meaning there wasn’t nothing down there or there was but now there ain’t. Then he packs the hole with explosives and they set off. Tuber earns medals and commendations and all that. Harlow’s sister tells me all about it, like she remembers all the details all these years after, which seems strange, but I guess ain’t seeing as what Tuber done for her brother next.

It’s Harlow what dies first, takes one from a sniper outside Kien Long. Here’s the part what really sticks to me, though. Harlow gets shipped back stateside to get buried back in Ohio, and when Tuber hears about all this he loses it. His CO won’t give him leave, not even after everything he done in them tunnels, not even for his cousin being dead, his cousin who was Tuber’s best friend. So Tuber goes AWOL. Somehow he manages to get back stateside, and the night before Harlow’s funeral, he breaks into the funeral parlor, jamming that .45 into the mortician’s temple. “I’m needing you to do this on the pronto,” Tuber says to him, and the mortician don’t do much for protest. He sets Harlow’s body up on the table and helps Tuber strip him out of his new suit, all so Tuber can take a razor blade to his cousin’s chest and carve out that swastika, seeing as I guess he couldn’t stand the thought of him getting buried with that still there.

The cops show up, and he don’t make no big scene out of it. He goes quiet, even gives the mortician his .45, like he knew it was coming. Turns out it weren’t even loaded. He gets charged with carving up a corpse and burglary and assault, which sends him inside for a few years. Worst part? Army finds out he gone AWOL and broke into the funeral home, they discharge him too, dishonorable after all he done. Harlow’s sister says Tuber gets the final papers his first week inside. “Did you write him? I ask, and she says, “Yeah, I wrote him most every week,” which is what I was hoping for.

“That’s good,” I say. “You always was a good sister.”

I lean in a little closer so we can whisper through the loud music. I set my drink next to hers, rims almost touching. That’s when she looks at me pretty mean, and I know what’s coming, I been waiting on it. “How long you lived in Windsor anyway?”

“Long time now,” I say, and when she don’t respond, I say, “You know how things was.”

“Yeah,” she says. “I guess I do.”

We chat about the old days for a few more minutes, and then she says she needs to go to the bathroom, and I don’t see her after that. It’s funny what you remember and what you tell people about. Always seems like you end up telling the wrong stories or telling the right stories the wrong way. Never can seem to get it right, and besides, nobody ever hears you all the way through anyhow.

Nights, when Polk cannot hunt the dogs, he instead attacks his father. He has grown to crave the hot pain spreading over his face, the bulging of his knuckles when they connect with bone. His father fights back just enough. They roll around on the floor, struggling and grunting, sneaking in shots to the ribs and the temples. When they tire, they each collapse, wheezing, moaning. They rub their flushed faces and lick away the blood pooling on their gums and retreat to their corners. No resentment or words, as if they are not punching each other, not exactly. A narcotic hunger being fed, one which brings no joy but rather is a conduit for torment.

After their fights they lay there, panting, blinking back tears, and only then does Polk confide in his father. He lists off the revenges he wants to take on the universe. He imagines the worst things possible: toddler coffins, flayed penguins, pipe bombs in convents, napalm in orphanages. He hates himself for it, his selfishness, his appetite for sloppy justice. Always he ends up wondering the same thing: Does God hate me more than I hate God?

His father reaches for Polk’s hand, but Polk pulls away. No touching unless it is to create violence. “Patience,” his father says. “We must learn grief.”

After school, Polk hunts. He ranges across the urban wilderness of the East Side, ducks through the cutting winds off Saint Clair. He lugs a Winchester bolt action by the barrel, dragging the stock on the ground, leaving a crease in the snow. He tracks dog prints through the industrial fields, through the brambled grasses and split concrete and begrimed snow. Through decomposing warehouses and manufacturing cathedrals which nature has reclaimed. Hundreds of deserted acres. These are wild dogs he kills, no longer bear any trace of domestication. Few people left, but the dogs—thousands of dogs, abandoned during this great human exodus. There is no Atticus Finch to blast the rabies from them, no little girl to drag them home by the scruff to her father and say May we please? As all else crumbles, the dogs remain.