Free Dogfight by Michael Knight Page A

family tradition. Learn the value of a dollar by working hard for it, that sort of thing. I’d drag myself home in the evenings, caked with filth, feeling drained empty, like I’d spent the day donating blood, and there my sister would be, fresh and blonde and lovely, stretched languorously on the couch in front of the television. She’d have on white tennis shorts and maybe still be wearing her bikini top. She spent her summer days reading by the pool, her nights out with one boy or another. She had tattooed a rose just below her belly button by applying a decal and letting the sun darken the skin around it.
    â€œGive me the fucking remote,” I’d say.
    â€œBlow me.”
    She was eighteen, off to the university in the fall. Fifty-one days, I’d tell myself, that’s all. It was usually evening by the time I got home and the last of the daylight would be slanting in through the banks of long windows, making everything look dreamy and slow. My sister would yawn and change the channel just to show me she could.
    â€œI’m gonna sit down now, Virginia, and take off my boots and socks,” I’d say. “You have until I am barefoot to hand it over or I will beat you like a rented mule.”
    She would smile pretty, adjust her position on the couch so she was facing me, draw her smooth knees up to her belly, get comfortable. She’d yell, “Mo-om,” stretching the word into two hair-raising syllables, “Mom, Ford’s acting tough again.”
    Gerald brought a monkey book to the shipyard, smuggled it in under his coveralls, and the two of us sat around on a break flipping through it. He was an older man, nearing fifty, his dark skin drawn tight over his features, worn to a blunt fineness. He had been working for my uncle almost twenty years. Wishbone lay on his back with his fingers linked on his chest, washed in the rectangle of light that fell through to us. He owned the traces of breeze that drifted down through the hatch. I had the book open across my knees, a droplight in one hand, my back against the bluish-white wall. Gerald was kneeling in front of me, watching for my reaction.
    â€œSee there?” he said. “See where it says about spider monkeys make the best pets?”
    He reached over the book and tapped a page, leaving a sweaty fingerprint. I flipped pages, looking for the passage that he wanted, past capuchins and Guerezas with their skunk coloring, past howler monkeys and macaques, until I came to the section on spider monkeys. I said, “Okay, I got it.”
    â€œRead it to me,” he said.
    I cleared my throat. “Spider monkey,
Ateles paniscus,
characterizedby slenderness and agility. They frequent, in small bands, the tallest forest trees, moving swiftly by astonishing leaps, sprawling out like spiders, and catching by their perfectly prehensile tails. Their faces are shaded by projecting hairs, blah, blah, blah, ten species between Brazil and central Mexico …” I skimmed along the page with the droplight. “Okay, here we go. They are mild, intelligent, and make interesting pets. There it is, Gerald.”
    I tried to hand him the book, but he pushed it back to me.
    â€œLook at the pitcher,” he said. “Look at those sad faces.”
    In the middle of the page was a close-up photograph of two baby spider monkeys. Gerald was right about their faces. They did look sad and maybe a little frightened, their wide eyes full of unvoiced expression, like human children, their hair mussed as if from sleep, their mouths turned down slightly in stubborn monkey frowns.
    â€œDon’t nobody got a monkey,” Gerald said.
    â€œMichael fucking Jackson got a monkey,” Wishbone said.
    We turned to look at him. He hadn’t moved, was still stretched in the light, legs straight as a corpse. I had thought he was asleep. Gerald said, “Michael Jackson’s nobody I know.”
    â€œMichael Jackson has