Free Blood Relations by Chris Lynch Page B

the stairs as Ruben went into an inspired fit of snarling and yowling and hurling himself against the door. I hopped the fence, passed the Mary and flamingo statues, and snuck around to the back door, hoping Evelyn could possibly hear the knock before her brother White Fang cut it off. But just as I turned the corner in back, I was blasted backward by a growl so low and nasty I didn’t hear it, I felt it under my feet.
    A dog. They had a dog, a real dog, a massive black dog on a chain with a spiked collar, a dog too mean even to bark for fear that victims wouldn’t get close enough for mangling. He curled one lip at me as he growled, a red pulpy piece of something hanging off a lower front tooth while the rest of the pulpy red something—maybe it was a rabbit or a cat or a smaller dog—lay a few feet away at the entrance to its tar-papered dog shed.
    I backed out of the yard, watching the beast, my whole body shaking.
    “Whatchu think, I be lyin’ ’bout my dog?” Cruz laughed from the porch as I passed. “I don’t know what you was thinkin’ that you could jus’ come on over here an’ y’know, have your way an’ shit...”
    I walked away as quickly as I could, with my legs still rubbery from the dog scare. I didn’t even look at Ruben.
    “Hey, where you goin? I thought we was gonna do somethin?”
    I didn’t answer.
    “Hey, I’m talkin’ to you!” he yelled, trying to sound tough. In the next breath, though, he sounded like a little boy. “Where’s the hat I gave you...? Hey... I was just playin’...”
    I couldn’t play. Maybe later I could play but not now. I had, had, I had to have someplace I could go. I wasn’t sure if there was such a place for me, but I did know there was a place that took in everybody.
    I didn’t feel so foreign this time, as I cruised the skanky streets on the east side of the school, past the neighborhoods that belonged to somebody else, down down deeper toward the bay, to that mongrel patchwork of a subcity for nowhere people. I felt kind of right when I got down to the fish-packing plants and slanty apartment houses of Toy’s world.
    “Is he here?” I asked hopefully, tentatively, though I somehow already knew that he wasn’t.
    “What are you talking about?” Felina asked wearily, sagging against the door frame. “It’s the weekend. He isn’t here on the weekend. This is the ghost house once Friday comes.”
    “I’m sorry...” I said, already wishing I hadn’t come.
    Everything was making me weak, draining me of life. Terry and Augie and Bunky and Bobo and Ballantine at nine. Sully-who-loves-me’s house. Ruben’s nightmare dog. Felina and her tired voice and her big black hollow eyes. I felt as sapped as Felina looked.
    “Do you like coffee?” she asked, like the recorded time and temperature voice on the phone.
    “I like coffee.”
    “Would you like some, coffee?”
    “I would like some. Coffee.”
    I went in there, and up, up the stairs behind Felina. Into the house at the end of the world. I followed her, like I figured I was supposed to, not talking, as we passed through the living room where I met her that first time. But I didn’t want to think about that. I followed her down a hallway so narrow that the knuckles of both of my hands brushed the walls as I walked. With a three-foot lead, Felina reached into doorways and yanked each door shut, two on the right, one on the left, before I could see in. “Wasn’t expecting company,” she said. “You understand.”
    In the kitchen, she pointed to a chair. I sat in it, an orange vinyl-covered swiveler on big ball casters. Three more like it surrounded the circular brown Formica table. The room felt small, maybe because of the grapefruit-size roses on the grease-bubbled wallpaper that seemed to be closing in from every direction.
    “So,” she said, stirring coffee in a saucepan on the stove top. “Why are you here?”
    I hadn’t expected that. What had I expected?
    “Toy, right?” I said