muzzle on his paws, and Pepe did not raise his head but rolled his eyes up to look at
him as he passed, revealing a gruesome, blood-threaded crescent of white, and that
was when Sifkitz began to weep in the dream, understanding that all was lost.
Now he was in the garage. He could smell oil. He could smell old sweet grass. The
LawnBoy stood in the corner like a suburban god. He could see the vise clamped to
the work-table, old and dark and flecked with tiny splinters of wood. Next, a closet.
His girls’ ice-skates were piled on the floor, their laces as white as vanilla ice cream.
His tools hung from pegs on the walls, arranged neatly, mostly yard-tools, a bear for
working in his yard was
(Carlos. I am Carlos.)
On the top shelf, far out of the girls’ reach, was a .410 shotgun, not used for years,
nearly forgotten, and a box of shells so dark you could barely read the word
Winchester on the side, only you could read it, just enough, and that was when Sifkitz came to understand that he was being carried along in the brain of a potential suicide.
He strug gled furiously to either stop Carlos or escape him and could do neither, even
though he sensed his bed so near, just on the other side of the gauze that wrapped him
from head to foot.
Now he was at the vise again, and the .410 was clamped in the vise, and the box of
shells was on the work-table beside the vise, and here was a hacksaw, he was
hacksawing off the barrel of the shotgun because that would make it easier to do what
he had to do, and when he opened the box of shells there were two dozen of them, fat
green buggers with brass bottoms, and the sound the gun made when Carlos snapped
it closed wasn’t cling! but CLACK! and the taste in his mouth was oily and dusty,
oily on his tongue and dusty on the insides of his cheeks and his teeth, and his back
hurt, it hurt LAMF, that was how they had tagged abandoned buildings (and
sometimes ones that weren’t abandoned) when he was a teenager and running with
the Deacons in Po’-town, stood for LIKE A MOTHERFUCKER, and that was how
his back hurt, but now that he was laid off the benefits were gone, Jimmy Berkowitz
could no longer afford the bennies and so Carlos Martinez could no longer afford the
drugs that made the pain a little less, could no longer afford the chiropractor that made
the pain a little less, and the house-payments—ay, caramba, they used to say, joking,
but he sure wasn’t joking now, ay, caramba they were going to lose the house, less
than five years from the finish-line but they were going to lose it, si-si, señor, and it
was all that fuck Sifkitz’s fault, him with his fucking road-maintenance hobby, and
the curve of the trigger underneath his finger was like a crescent, like the unspeakable
crescent of his dog’s peering eye.
That was when Sifkitz woke up, sobbing and shaking, legs still in bed, head out and
almost touching the floor, hair hanging. He crawled all the way out of the bedroom
and started crawling across the main room to the easel under the skylight. Halfway
there he found himself able to walk.
The picture of the empty road was still on the easel, the better and more complete
version of the one downstairs on the alcove wall. He flung it away without a second
look and set up a piece of two-foot-by-two pressboard in its place. He seized the
nearest implement which would make a mark (this happened to be a UniBall Vision
Elite pen) and began to draw. He drew for hours. At one point (he remembered this
only vaguely) he needed to piss and could feel it running hot down his leg. The tears
didn’t stop until the picture was finished. Then, thankfully dry-eyed at last, he stood
back and looked at what he had done.
It was Carlos’s garage on an October afternoon. The dog, Pepe, stood in front of it