“I like it, I guess,” I said.
“Well,” he laughed, “maybe you could get a collection of your losses on DVD and watch ’em over and over before you go to bed every night.”
“Or maybe I could get a 115-pound girlfriend,” I said, “and beat the shit out of her to make me feel like a man.”
“Hey, fuck you, asshole.” A prominent vein in his neck throbbed. “Mind your business or you’re bound to get hurt.”
Calabreso straightened up and took a step toward me with his chest out and his eyes glaring. It probably scared the hell out of street guys, but stepping forward was a bad idea.
I threw a good straight jab with my right hand and it landed squarely on his nose. Fighters know the sound; it’s not a big “whack” like you hear in the movies. It’s more of a low, muffled crack, like when you crack your knuckles really good. The best part is, it really fuckin’ hurts and it makes your eyes tear up so you can’t see.
Instinctively, I followed the jab with a left cross, smashing both his hands and his nose this time. You can’t spend twenty years boxing and not let the cross follow the jab. The punches were automatic, like they couldn’t not come.
Calabreso writhed, moaning like a guy who hadn’t been hit before. I dropped a wicked body shot into his solar plexus. He let out a loud groan, grabbed his stomach, and fell, doubled over on the pavement. His face was covered in blood and he was rolling around on the pavement with one hand on his midsection and the other over his nose. That was probably enough, but then I remembered Sherrie-and a flash of the helplessness and fear she must have felt ran through me.
That was it.
“I wouldn’t mind this on a DVD, asshole,” I said, grabbing him by the neck and slamming his head into his gold-colored bumper. His big head made the sound of a pumpkin getting smashed and he fell backward behind the SUV. He was on his back; his face was a burgundy mess.
“Please, please…,” he said, in what the great philosopher Mike Tyson once called “womanly noises.”
“Fuck you,” I heard myself say, and I slammed him face first into the bumper again. He fell backwards onto the pavement.
“You know what, asshole?” I knelt with one knee on his chest and grabbed him by his silk T-shirt. “They’re gonna know inside that you beat a little girl. This is what your life is going to be like for the next few years.”
I took his cell phone out of his pocket. He was bleeding all over my jeans, my hands were covered with his blood, and he was gagging every now and then from the bleeding. I called AJ’s.
“AJ,” I said, “put Kel on.” Calabreso didn’t move under the pressure of my knee. Kelley picked up the phone.
“Kel?” I said. “I need you to arrest somebody for me.”
“What?”
“I happened across what I think is some stolen merchandise.” Calabreso groaned a little under my knee. “I’m on Allen, that alley around the corner from Cinderella’s. Oh, and the guy got banged up a little.”
“Duffy-are you fuckin’ nuts?”
“Kel-I think I’m going to get going,” I said. “I probably don’t want to be around here much longer. Can you do something official for me?”
I hung up. Calabreso was unconscious and wasn’t going anyplace for a while, but I didn’t want to take any chances. I hoisted him up fireman-style and loaded him into the driver’s seat behind the wheel. There was a roll of duct tape on the floor, so I taped his hands to the steering wheel and figured it was time to go. I closed the door to the back of his car and headed to the Eldorado. A set of parked headlights had appeared a couple hundred yards down the street. I didn’t know who or what it was, and I didn’t figure it was in my best interest to hang around and find out.
I gunned the Eldorado and headed to the Moody Blue as fast as I could. I turned up the eight-track just as Elvis was finishing up the glory hallelujahs in “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” It was the last part of a song he did called the “American Trilogy.”
We sang it together all the way home.
11
I was almost to the Moody Blue, with lots of adrenaline pumping through my veins, when I realized Al had been in there alone since I left for AJ’s. That meant that he was alone for the last seven or so hours.
I heard him start to howl and scratch the door as soon as I took the first step up the stairs to the front door. I opened the door and before I got it a quarter open, Al was through the door, jumping up on me, jumping off of me, spinning around, and then repeating this whole circuslike act. I inched my way into the trailer, and it looked like a clip from either the Discovery Channel’s feature on hurricane damage or Animal Planet’s special on neglected dogs living in squalor.
The house was littered with papers, the curtains were down off the windows, crushed Schlitz cans were strewn about the house and Al had chewed the fabric off two kitchen chairs. Apparently, after finishing off the sofa cushions he was bored. The place didn’t smell great, either, and I’ll spare the fine details, but let’s just say Al clearly has no need for added dietary fiber. But I would need to flip my mattress over and change the sheets.
I fed Al and took him for a walk down Route 9R. He needed the walk, and I needed to unwind a bit. I took a Schlitz along with me, though I was going to need a lot more than one to settle down. Al was happy to be out and got busy sniffing every foot of land we covered on our walk, stopping to give extra attention to any vertical object stuck into the ground.
I didn’t feel completely okay with what had just happened. I was okay with the first three punches because he had them coming for a couple of reasons. One reason was the abuse he’d been giving Sherrie and another reason was I had to hit him to subdue him, so he could be arrested. The last reason had more to do with street shit. I didn’t like him mocking my ability to fight and spreading his nose all over his face was something he was asking for by disrespecting me. Different jungles have different rules and he violated one of his own jungle’s rules. If you’re going to sell wolf tickets you have to be prepared for someone to cash one in once in a while.
Smashing his head into the bumper was an act of rage. I didn’t have to do it to protect myself or to make sure the cops would get him or even to make the point that he shouldn’t hit a young girl like Sherrie. It left him unconscious and maybe seriously hurt, and that was more than the situation called for. Maybe it was the bourbon, maybe it was Sherrie, or maybe I was getting my shit off from my own frustration. It didn’t feel completely right.
It probably is inconsistent with good social work practice as well, but I cared less about that. If I had followed protocol, Sherrie would have taken another beating and a lot of other useless bullshit would’ve gone on, not to help anyone, but to cover a lot of administrative ass. Of course, smashing someone’s head into a bumper probably isn’t the most acceptable therapeutic intervention for couples that aren’t getting along.
It also wasn’t fair to Kelley, who had to go clean up the situation. Clearly, he would have to face questions about how he knew about the situation and how he got tipped off. Kelley could finesse his way around all of that, but that wasn’t the point. He shouldn’t have to do that because his social-work friend wanted to play Robin Hood. I owed Kelley more than a drink.
Al finished sniffing and leaving his own biological calling card along Route 9R, and we headed to the Moody Blue. It wasn’t until that point that I realized my right hand had swollen up. Later, when I washed my hands I noticed I had scraped the skin on my first two knuckles. They were so covered in Calabreso’s blood that I just figured the blood wasn’t mine. I drank another Schlitz and sprayed as much lemon-scented deodorizer around the trailer as I could. Despite the fact that I just made my living space smell like lemony dog shit, I fell asleep hard with Al next to me.