The Devil Is a Black Dog (11 page)

I wavered a bit on what to wear, finally deciding on my steel-tipped boots. I knew the weight would inhibit quick movement, but I also knew a kick with them could break a bone. I looked over my mini baseball bat as well. It had the words “wood conditioner for dark skin” burnt into it. Something stupid I got from a friend with the pledge that we would fuck up some gypsies. We laughed: we didn’t really know any gypsies. Finally I decided against bringing it because of the bouncers and police. It’s never good if they find things like this on you during an ID check.

Balint came over at nine that night wearing the same clothes as earlier. His hair was gelled back and he had taken out his earring. “Ready?” he asked, and lit two cigarettes while standing on the threshold. “One second,” I said, and told Dad, who was watching a war movie on TV, that I would be out late. Then I grabbed my leather jacket and left.

We went by foot to the Colosso. Along with the other clubs, it was at the opposite end of the city, out by the factories. We could see our breath in the air; it was a good twenty-minute walk. We didn’t say anything as we went. We always quieted down when we were about to fight.

There was already a crowd in front of the Colosso: high-schoolers, factory workers, folks from the nearby housing developments. Drum and bass poured from the open doors out onto the street. A strong smell of weed came from the cars, kids getting primed for the night. The girls were in heavy make-up and skimpy outfits, chatting away with the guys. Behind the disco, the last packed train of the night departed, the ground rumbling under our feet.

A few acquaintances invited us to smoke, but we passed them by. We didn’t stop for a single hit: we needed to keep our heads together. I already felt the music throbbing in my guts.

We paid the cover and hurried straight past the bouncer sitting at the door, cut across the crammed dance floor, and went over to the bar, where we ordered vodka Red Bulls.

“What do you think, will they be here?” I shouted to Balint.

“They’ll be here,” he said, leaning into to my ear. “They’re always here.”

“And when we see them?”

“We’ll fuck them up.”

“What’s that supposed to prove?”

“It’ll show that you can’t fuck with us.”

“Why is that so fucking important?”

“We don’t have many friends. It’s as though they fucked up you or me. You’d swing for me, right?”

“Yeah, but you wouldn’t have done something so stupid.”

“Of course not. But
if
I did something that stupid, you’d take them out, right? That’s why we’re friends.”

“Yes, most likely.”

“In friendship it doesn’t matter if your friend is stupid or not. It only matters that you stand by each other. It’s one of those things, like you never hit a woman.”

We waited at the bar for a bit longer looking through the crowd. There was a lot of commotion; the dance floor was packed. I watched the girls shake provocatively as they danced, the guys sipping their drinks and hitting on them. Sometimes a pair would stop dancing to make out, the guy holding her by the ass.

I didn’t notice when Balint took off; I just looked over to the side and realized he wasn’t there anymore. I ordered another drink and began to look for him in the crowd.

I spotted him standing on the other side of the dance floor. He was staring at a group of three guys sitting in a booth. They were bald, wearing bomber jackets and boots, and talking to two girls they knew. The girls, in miniskirts and with bad dye jobs, giggled at their jokes. One of the guys, looking six feet and two hundred pounds, stood up and took a girl to dance. He removed his jacket, revealing a white singlet. The tattoo was clearly visible. It was an abstract design that began at his neck and ran down to his hand. Balint looked over to me and nodded. I nodded back. I turned toward the bar and ordered a bottle of wine. The bartender asked what kind and I said the cheapest. He gave me a bottle and I asked for two glasses. I filled both full, and drank the rest from the bottle. I didn’t let Balint out of my sight for a moment.

Balint waited for the guy to begin to dance with the girl, then made his move. He used a well-worn trick—an old but good
one. He began toward the pair, and when he was alongside them he bumped the guy with the full force of his shoulder. I watched the two begin to gesticulate, the girl standing between them. I saw Balint point toward the exit. The boy, red in the face, nodded vehemently. They started for the door. His friends sitting in the booth stood and went after them. I grabbed the bottle and followed. I knew we would win; I felt it in my gut. At times like these we always win, because we never ride free. They wouldn’t even know what hit them. They weren’t prepared: they hadn’t shown up ready to be outnumbered, and they hadn’t been careful not to drink too much. They had no idea that we’d been waiting for them all night. A person who can measure the balance of power knows what to look out for, what kind of resistance or attack he can expect. It’s like riding a bicycle. It’s only hard starting out. But once you are used to it, you can get into a fight already having been told everything you need by the posture and the movements of your foes, and even by what they are wearing. Chaba simply hadn’t learned any of this.

But we had.

Because of the crowd it took me longer than I had counted on to find them. Outside, I cut across the parking lot and headed toward the embankment, where they were already getting into it. Balint and the guy stood shouting loudly at each other, grabbing each other’s clothing in a tangle of limbs. The guy’s two friends arrived as well. One began kicking Balint in the back, though it didn’t seem to faze him. Next, the other jumped Balint from the side, taking him to the ground. They were just about to surround him, to stomp on him a bit, when I arrived with my wine bottle. I ran toward them so my blow would have the greatest impact, and with the sole of my boot I kicked one in the spine, sending him flying a few yards. Without waiting for them to react I swung at the tattooed guy’s head with the bottle. It shattered against his
left temple, leaving just the jagged neck in my hand. He staggered backward a few yards, and then collapsed.

The third guy turned toward me. He spotted me starting for him with the piece of broken glass in my hand. Before he could charge me, Balint got him from behind, grabbed his neck, and clamped his head forward. It was a commando hold, one we had practiced in the school bathroom. After a few good seconds, the brain can’t get enough oxygen. There was terror in guy’s expression when he realized he wouldn’t be able to get free. He was on the ground in under ten seconds. Balint grinned at me. I saw his teeth were bloody. We heard the sound of the boy’s boots on the cement as he fled the scene.

We set on the guy with the tattoo. I kicked him twice to wake him up. He tucked into a fetal position, shouting, “Don’t hit me!” Balint also kicked him a few times, not sparing his head, because Balint wasn’t wearing his steel-tips. The boy’s face was a bloody mess. His nose was broken, and shards from the bottle left their mark on his cheek. Balint straddled his chest and began to beat him until he couldn’t speak. The hot blood steamed in the air. Balint got off him, fists covered in red. The guy was still breathing; we saw the rise and fall of his chest.

“Break his hand,” said Balint, panting. I jumped on the guy’s arm with all my strength. I lost my balance from the force of the blow and staggered backward.

“Sure it’s broken?” asked Balint, wiping the blood from his hand on the guy’s singlet.

“I don’t know. I didn’t hear the crack. They usually crack.”

“Take another shot.”

I took aim and kicked. No sound.

“Wait, I’ll lift his hand. Aim for the wrist, that will do it for sure.” I stepped back a few yards to wind up. Balint lifted the guy’s hand and held it in the air. I ran toward him and kicked. The steel tip hit exactly on his wrist and we heard the crack of
the bone. Balint let the hand drop and it fell, twisted, on the ground.

“Do you have your cell phone on you?” he asked, still panting. He spat some blood on the body.

“Sure.”

“Take a picture.”

It was dark out, but the phone light was enough to illuminate his face.

We arrived at the hospital around three the next day. On the way it occurred to us that we should bring a gift, so we stopped at a gas station convenience store and bought some chocolate. Balint’s hand was wrapped up, like always after a fight. He could hit correctly for the first few swings, but after that the madness took hold and he stopped paying attention.

We knew we couldn’t go near the disco for a few weeks because the paramedics had to file assault charges due to the great bodily harm we’d inflicted, but this didn’t bother us one bit. “We really gave them what they had coming to them,” Balint said in the elevator and patted me on the back. “We needed to.”

“They got what they had coming to them,” I said with a grin.

“Hell yeah.”

We arrived at the trauma ward. The same blonde as yesterday was at reception. She gestured that we could proceed. We strolled down the hall and opened the door. Chaba had company. His mother, a woman in her fifties with a red dye job, was standing over him. She was saying goodbye.

“Now here are your friends, darling,” she said, sounding touched. “Chaba said you come regularly. You really are good friends, really.” She said goodbye to her boy and left. She had afternoon work cleaning offices, on weekends too. There was no avoiding the two sloppy kisses she planted on our cheeks.

“Sorry for my mom. That’s just how she is,” said Chaba after her footsteps disappeared down the hallway. He was in better shape than yesterday. He could even sit up.

“No problem,” I said. “That’s just how mothers are.”

“When do they say you can return to school?” asked Balint.

“Four or five weeks.”

“That’s a fucking long time.”

“Yeah. I’ll be home schooled like the other fuck-ups, I think.”

“They got you good.”

“Yeah, real good.”

“Show him,” said Balint. I reached into my pocket and took out my phone. I clicked on the picture, and held it in front of Chaba’s face.

“Recognize this cocksucker?”

Chaba leaned toward the screen. He looked at the picture for a long while, and then shook his head.

“No. Never seen him before. Who is he?”

We stood looking at one another for a few moments.

“This is the cocksucker we messed up yesterday. Nothing more. Just some cocksucker,” said Balint wanly.

“You guys are hard. Fucking hard,” Chaba said and leaned back.

“Yeah,” I muttered. We said goodbye because we could see Chaba was tired.

We both kept quiet on the trip home; there was nothing we could say. We just smoked and stared ahead. Balint lived in a housing development outside of town. My parents’ flat was on the road that led there, so he walked me home.

“Okay, later,” he said, then carried on.

At nine he returned in a beat-up Golf he had borrowed from his older brother.

“I was thinking we could cruise down to Csorna,” he said, grinning as I opened the door.

“Why not?” I said. We got in the car.

On the way to Csorna—a small town an hour and a half west of the big city—we smoked a couple of joints. It was Saturday night and the club we always went to there was like a zoo. Balint got aggressively drunk at the bar, then picked out a group of six guys and got into it with them. He’d chosen them because there was no way we would win.

I hung my head and followed in the direction of the parking lot.

A
pickup truck was speeding along the dirt road, its wheels beating up dust. It slowed, and came to a stop. Two men opened the doors and stepped out of the vehicle. They stood side by side off the road.

“You’re not circumcised, huh?” said one. The man standing next to him, shorter by a head, finished up his business.

“No,” he answered and zipped his pants. He took out a cigarette and lit up. The other man also finished urinating, and squinted into the setting sun.

“Hey, how far can you piss?”

“I don’t know,” said the stocky one. He thought about it. “A few yards.” The weather had painted their blue fatigues gray. They both got back in the vehicle. They drove on in their white Mitsubishi, the bed in the back empty. In the cab, paper was scattered about and there was an empty cola bottle they used as an ashtray. From the rearview mirror hung a brown, plastic rosary that swung back and forth with the rhythm of the rocking vehicle. David was the name of the one asking questions. He sat in the
passenger seat, fumbling with a white, three-ring binder. When he got tired of it he dropped the binder into his lap and turned to his companion.

“What does it feel like?”

“What does
what
feel like?” responded François, his English laden with a thick French accent. François clutched the wheel and watched the road.

“What else? What’s it like to have a foreskin?”

“I don’t know, what’s the difference? If I had the chance, I would have had it removed,” said François, turning on the headlights. The dirt road flashed brown in the beams of light.

“Why would you want to get it done?”

“What’s it to you?”

“It’s just that I don’t know anybody with foreskin,” said David, smirking. “So why?”

“Because I couldn’t pull it back, that’s why.”

They went quiet for a bit; David fumbled with the binder, François watched the road. He looked over at the GPS by the wheel, checking where they were again. A red dot on the device showed the town’s location, a place that three days before had been burned to the ground by the local militia. The government forces had since beaten the militia back over the border, and the roads were once again safe to travel. Seventy-two people from the town had been killed.

“I hate doing this now,” grumbled François. “What’s wrong with morning?”

“In the morning the delegation came,” said David.

“And?”

“There needed to be a reception.”

“I don’t like going at night.”

“We’ll get it done in no time.”