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“No, suh,” she replied, shaking her head quickly.
“T’ank you,” he said. He turned the dog in a circle and walked it back to his Buick, making a snicking sound behind his teeth.
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I HAD JUST LEFT Bello’s house when I got the dispatcher’s call. I hit the siren and the flasher and headed down Loreauville Road, cane fields and horse farms and clumps of live oaks racing past me.
THE AIR-CONDITIONING UNIT in Bello’s Buick was turned up full blast as he approached the corner that had always served as a secondary home for Monarch and his friends. Bello’s dog sat on the front seat, its yellow eyes looking dully out the window, its choke chain dripping like ice from its neck. The frigid interior of the Buick, with its deep leather seats and clean smell, digital instrument panels, and silent power train, seemed a galaxy away from the dusty, superheated, and litter-strewn environment on the corner. A black kid drinking from a quart bottle of ale eyeballed Bello’s car, waiting to see if the driver would roll down the window, indicating he wanted to make a buy.
Bello slowed the Buick against the curb, the white orb of sun suddenly disappearing behind the massive canopy of the shade tree. He turned off the ignition, cracked the windows, and waited for his eyes to adjust to the change in light before he got out of the car. Bello had never had a cautionary sense about people of color, and had never thought of them, at least individually, as a viable challenge to his authority as a white man. In the past, they had always done what he told them. That’s the way it was. If they believed otherwise, a phone call to an employer or a manager of rental properties could bring about a level of religious conversion that even a beating could not.
But something had changed at the corner. The gangbangers were there, as always, playing cards, drinking soda pop or beer, or taking turns at the weight set, their hair matted down with black silk scarfs, even in the heat; but they seemed disconnected from Monarch, in the same way that candle moths lose their flight pattern when their light source is removed. Monarch and his cousin, a yardman who looked like he was made from coat-hanger wire, were eating spearmint sno-balls with tiny wood spoons at a plank table under the tree. The yardman’s paint-skinned truck, garden tools bungee-corded to the sides, was parked in the background. Monarch was wearing jeans and old tennis shoes and a colorless denim shirt, the sleeves scissored off at the armpits. He looked at the spangled sunlight bouncing off the windshield of Bello’s Buick but gave no indication he recognized the man behind the wheel.
A bare-chested black kid, not over seventeen, his shirt wadded up and hanging from his back pocket, tapped on Bello’s window. His arms were without muscular tone, soft, his chin grown with fuzz that looked like black thread. Bello smiled when he rolled down the window. “Yeah?” Bello said.
“Want some weed?” the kid asked.
“That’s not what I had in mind,” Bello replied.
“You name it, I got it, man,” the kid said, his arm propped on the roof, exposing his armpit. He gazed nonchalantly down the street.
“You gonna hook me up wit’ some cooze?” Bello said.
“There’s a lady or two I can introduce you to.”
“I got a special one in mind,” Bello said, squinting up at him.
“Yeah?”
“Your mama. She still working rough trade?”
The black kid kept his gaze averted and did not look back at him. “Why you want to do that, man?” he said.
“’Cause you put your fucking hand on my car,” Bello said. Then he opened the door and stepped out into the heat. “Want to meet my dog?”
“No, suh,” the boy said, stepping back, lifting his hands in front of him. “T’ought you was someone else, suh.”
Bello snapped his fingers softly and the rottweiler dropped to the asphalt behind him. Bello closed the car door and picked up the animal’s leash. Everyone on the corner was staring at him now, everyone except Monarch Little, who continued eating his sno-ball with his tiny wood spoon, digging out the last grains of spearmint-flavored ice from the bottom of the cone.
Bello stepped up on the curb. The wind puffed the oak tree overhead, and tiny yellow leaves drifted down into the shade. Monarch’s cousin rose from the table and walked to a trash barrel by his truck and dropped his empty sno-ball cone inside. The cousin’s strap overalls looked made from rags, the weave almost washed out of the fabric. His facial expression was bladed, filled with cautionary lights.
“Been t’inking about me?” Bello said to Monarch.
“Don’t know who you are. Ain’t interested, either,” Monarch replied.
“You fixing to find out. You should have stayed in jail, yeah.”
Monarch seemed to think a long time before he spoke. “I ain’t did it. That dog ain’t gonna make me say I did, either. The people on this corner ain’t gonna hurt you, so you ain’t got to be afraid. But don’t come down here no more t’reatening people wit’ dogs, no.”
“My son was gonna be a doctor. You took that from me,” Bello said.
Monarch waved an index finger back and forth. “I ain’t took nothing from you. Do what you gonna do. But you better look around you. This ain’t your pond. Now, I’m walking away from here. I don’t want no trouble.”
Monarch got up from the table, a net of sunlight and shadow sliding over his skin.
That’s when Bello unsnapped the leash from the rottweiler’s choke chain and said, “Sic le neg!”
The dog took only two bounds before it was airborne and aimed right at Monarch’s chest. Monarch twisted away and wrapped his arms across his face, waiting for the dog’s teeth to sink into his flesh. Instead, he felt a suck of air past his head and heard metal whang on bone. Then the dog’s great weight bounced off him, and when he opened his eyes, the dog lay in the dust, its body quivering, its fur split across the crown of its skull.
