Cogan's Trade (15 page)

“Now the next thing I got to do,” Russell said, “I got to get that phenobarb into them dogs. ‘This’s kind of tricky,’ he tells me. ‘You got to take the water away from them by five o’clock, because them dogs, after the oil goes through them they’ll drink it all, and then we’ll fuckin’
drown
in dogpiss. The trouble is, the last time
I did this we give them the phenobarb about five, before we take the water away from them, and we really gave them a lot, because the time before that we didn’t give them enough and they got inna car and they all hadda nice nap and then it’s a fuckin’ madhouse. So the last time we give them too much and they’re all woozy, we get them to the guy, and we didn’t get nothing for them, the dogs’re sick and all the rest of it. I don’t want no more of that shit. I don’t want them dogs raising hell all the way down and I don’t want them bumping into things, we get down there, either. Give the little ones, half a grain. A grain if they’re lively. The big ones a couple grains, and if they’re, if there’s any of them that’re still jumping round, hit ’em again. With the water. Then take the water back. Take some bread and make it in little balls and stick another half a grain in that and give them it around eleven or so, and that oughta do it.’

“I said to him,” Russell said, “I said: ‘Kenny, I thought I was supposed to sleep all day. How’m I gonna sleep, I’m doing all them things?’ And he tells me. ‘Take a little dog dope.’ So I ask him, he’s gettin’ dough offa these dogs, how come I got to do all the work? ‘Well,’ he says, ‘I got to do something.’

“He’s worse’n fuckin’ Squirrel for making out off guys,” Russell said. “He shows up, right around midnight, he’s got three more dogs. I’m busting my ass all day, getting dogs ready, Kenny’s out gettin’ more dogs. I said: ‘For Christ sake, Kenny, that’s’—we already sold some of the dogs to this guy down the North End? Poodles. We had three poodles and he give us a buck and a half apiece on them. Which isn’t bad—‘that’s sixteen dogs we got, mine and yours.’ He’s got this Caddy limo. Took the back seat out and he had a lot of old
blankets all the way back in there, in the trunk. ‘Can’t put sixteen dogs in there. They’ll kill each other.’

“These dogs, he tells me, ‘These’re little ones.’ He’s got a couple spaniels and a wire-haired. Tit right in, no sweat.’ So, we load them up. My dogs’re all dopey. He takes the front legs, I take back legs. My mother’s looking out of the window. Finally get all them dogs in. Stack them right up. I’m getting in the car, she opens the window. ‘That all of them?’ Yeah. ‘Good. Remember what I said.’ Right, and now I understand the old man a lot better, too. She shuts the window, bang.”

“You’re still better off’n I was,” Frankie said. “My mother, she used to come every week. Every single fuckin’ week, I’d, I used to sit on Sunday, and the first thing I hadda do was, I hadda go to Mass. Fuckin’ guy, every single fuckin’ week he talks about Dismas. Oh for Christ sake. Well, no. Some weeks he talks about beating off. Funny, didn’t have nothing to say about blow jobs and like that. And then, the good meal, you know? The one that was just as shitty as the rest of them, except it was supposed to be good. Seen a turnip? I see another turnip, I throw the fuckin’ thing at somebody. And then my poor old gray-haired mother, her and her fuckin’ coat that’s all beat to shit, comes in looking like somebody that just got hit on the head. And I got to sit through that. ‘I pray for you, Frankie.’ ‘I made a novena for you, Frankie.’ ‘I hope you get parole, Frankie.’ ‘I know in my heart you’re a good boy, Frankie.’ ‘Frankie, you’ve got to change your ways.’ And she’s gonna stay, boy, she’s not comin’ all the way up there, she’s gonna leave in five minutes. No, sir. One week she’s sick. Sandy comes for a change. ‘Anything I can do for you, Frankie?’ You bet your ass there is. Chain Ma the bed, for Christ sake. ‘She don’t mean anything,’ Sandy says.
‘She feels guilty. She told me, she dunno what she didn’t do.’ I told her: ‘She didn’t tell me about assholes like the Doctor, that’s what it is,’ ” Frankie said. “ ‘Tell her, the next kid, teach him to plan a job right, he doesn’t get some fatmouth bastard in there, fuck things up.’ She looks at me. ‘You want me to tell her, you don’t want her coming no more?’ Of course I do. So she does, and the next week Ma comes up, you should’ve seen her. Looked like somebody took her out and kicked the shit out of her. ‘
Frankie
,’ she says, ‘Sandy said, you don’t want your mother coming up here no more.’ And then she starts crying, and there’s guys looking at me, and half of them’re bulls and they’re all gonna tell the parole, ‘He’s mean to his mother, she comes up to see him and he don’t appreciate it.’ Oh, Jesus, it was awful. So, what could I do? I told her, come back, Ma, I was just talking. And she did. Novenas, the stations, the rosary, she’s going down to Mission Church there and everything for me. Christ. ‘I ain’t crippled, Ma,’ I tell her. ‘In your soul you are,’ she says. Jesus. I’m lucky I didn’t get at her through the screen.”

“They don’t know,” Russell said. “None of them know. They just think, you’re in there, you can’t get out. That’s all they know. They don’t know.”

“I wished they did,” Frankie said. “Putting up with them’s something awful. I wished I knew what it was, a guy goes in and they think it isn’t bad enough, they got to make it worse. I go in again, boy, I’m making sure nobody knows. I dunno if I can do time again, but I sure can’t take the visiting. Shit.”

“I’m not going in again,” Russell said. “That’s what I’m not gonna do.”

“You decided, huh?” Frankie said.

“I’m doing everything I can,” Russell said.

“And that’s what’s gonna put you in again,” Frankie said.

“Nah,” Russell said.

“Sure,” Frankie said, “you’re going back for stealing dogs.”

“Not so far,” Russell said, “and never again, either. You know something? The next dog I see, I’m gonna do a wheelie on him, is what I’m gonna do. Dogs, dogs’re stupid. You beat the living shit out of a dog, hit him with the pills and he goes to sleep, he wakes up the next day and he’s staggering around and all, but he’s hungry. All you got to do with a dog, you can do anything you want to a dog, then just wait till he gets hungry and feed him and he thinks you’re fuckin’ God or something. Except that black fucker.”

“Shepherd grab you?” Frankie said.

“That dog,” Russell said, “he’s the only dog I ever saw, remembers. First time he wakes up, sees me, rrrr, way down in his throat. So, I give him another day. Gets hungry enough, he’ll come around. I starved that fucker
four days
. His bones showed, for Christ sake. Know what I get when I go out? Rrrrr. I thought I was gonna have to give him some more of the stick. But he don’t come after me, see? Which proves it, that black bastard isn’t dumb. He remembers that stick. He’s not gonna tackle me. He’s just gonna make my life as hard’s he possibly can. So, I hadda feed him. I can’t sell hairy bones, for Christ sake.

“Now,” Russell said, “now he’s got me, and he knows it. I try and get him out, he holds back. I practically got to throw him out of the garage. Then he won’t, I can’t get him in. And he growls at me all the time, still. That bastard, all the way to Florida, we’re in this fuckin’ rainstorm in Maryland, they had a barge hit the bridge
and we either hadda go around or we use the tunnel. Which everybody else is using. So Kenny say, ‘We’re going around.’ I thought I seen rain when I was with my Uncle. Christ. And them dogs’re all pissing and farting and shitting and everything in there and we can’t leave the windows down, we don’t wanna suffocate, and we also don’t want to drown. It was awful. I thought dogs was an easy way to make money. It’s not dangerous. I was right about that. I was half right. You know what I get for that black fucker, I thought I was probably gonna get twenty million dollars or something? Seventy-five bucks I got for that dog, and I was lucky to get that. The guy we’re selling them to, he just buys them, right? He just, he only takes care of them. One of those guys with no meat on him. He doesn’t talk. We’re there, he’s got this kind of beaten-to-shit old farm down outside Cocoa Beach. We’re there about half an hour, we’re finally breathing again, we been on the road about ten years with them dogs, all of a sudden I notice, his wife does all the talking. ‘This one here looks like he’s been run over,’ she says. She never stops talking and he never starts. ‘He sick or something? We don’t want no sick dogs here, Mister. I can’t let you have more’n twenty dollars for this one.’

“So I say to her,” Russell said, “she said she’s gonna give me fifty bucks for the black one. ‘Look, he’s got papers, he’s a valuable dog. He’s the real thing. He’s a great dog. Fifty’s not enough.’

“ ‘He hasn’t got no papers today, Mister,’ she says to me,” Russell said. “ ‘He’s just another dog now that I got to think about selling to somebody and that means I got to keep him and feed him and look after him the whole time I’m trying to sell him to somebody, and that’s going to be a long time. I don’t want this dog. I
don’t want him at all. You want to take him back with you? Because that’s exactly what you can do, if you don’t like the price. I’ll have trouble, selling that dog to somebody. He looks vicious to me and he’ll look vicious to somebody else.’

“The guy still doesn’t say anything,” Russell said. “Now, she’s got me, of course. I’m not taking that dog no place with me ever again. What I want to say to that dog is ‘Good-bye,’ and I hope I never see him again. All the way to Florida that bastard’s watching the back of my neck, he’s gonna eat me if he gets half a chance. She’s right. He is vicious. But, he’s not being vicious then. The guy’s got him sitting down and the dog’s giving him his paw and the guy’s rubbing his ears and that dog is fuckin’ grinning at him. He thinks he’s home again with the stupid bastard that bought him to protect the medals. Then the dog, the guy stands up and the dog stands up too, puts his feet on the guy’s shoulders and starts lapping his face. ‘Look, Lady,’ I say, ‘that’s a vicious dog? You think somebody’s gonna think that’s a vicious dog? Let ’em see him like that.’

“ ‘Mister,’ she says, ‘that’s the way he is. That’s the way they all are with him. Every dog that comes in here’s like that. That’s why he keeps the dogs and I do the business. Fifty.’

“The guy wakes up or something,” Russell said. “He looks at us. The shepherd’s frenching him, for Christ sake. Guy finally gets the dog’s tongue out of his mouth. ‘Give him seventy-five, Imelda,’ he says.

“ ‘Seventy-five,’ she says,” Russell said. “ ‘Now,’ she says, takes her about three hours to say anything, ‘am I setting the prices here, or are you gonna argue with me every time he decides he likes another dog? Because if you are, you can leave right now and take the rest of
those animals with you.’ The only thing I wish,” Russell said, “I wish that woman could’ve met my mother. They’d get along fuckin’ great.”

“You got out of there all right, though,” Frankie said.

“Yeah,” Russell said. “Went over to Orlando with Kenny, burn the fuckin’ car. Kenny fuckin’ near killed himself. Went in this orange grove, right? Pulled it offa the road, there’s this little dirt road, there. So, Kenny was driving. He gets out, sticks a rag down the gas tank, he hangs it down and soaks it and then he pulls it out and hangs it down onna fender and lights it off. Fuckin’ car just blew up. And, he left it in gear, you know? Knocked him right on his ass, it was in reverse. He’s a hot shit. Gets up. ‘Okay,’ he says, ‘that’s the second job like that I fucked up. I got to do that again, I’m gonna find somebody, knows what he’s doing.’ Kenny, he didn’t have no eyebrows, for Christ sake, hasn’t got much hair left, either.”

“What was it,” Frankie said, “hot?”

“Nah,” Russell said, “it was Kenny’s car. But what the fuck’s a car good for, you had all them dogs in it over two days? Nothin’. It’s like riding in a shithouse. So, Kenny had it in his sister’s name, she called the cops the day we’re supposed to get there, says it got stolen. Then, we got out of there Wednesday. You should’ve seen those assholes when they search you at the airport, they see me and Kenny. I thought their eyes was gonna come right out of their heads. Four times we got to go through the metal detector. Then there was this guy, I guess he was the newest guy there or something, he had to pat us down. I think they give him the rest of the day off. ‘You’re gonna let us on the plane, finally,’ Kenny said, ‘aren’t you?’ They look at him. ‘Mister,’ one of them says, ‘if you haven’t got no weapons on you,
you can ride. You probably oughta ride in the baggage, but never mind that.’ Nobody’d sit next to us. We hadda ride way in the back and there was this one stewardess, every time she hadda come near us, she’d look at us like she never saw anything like us before in her life. ‘You guys going all the way to Boston?’ she says. ‘You wouldn’t consider, getting off in Washington or some place?’ Kenny fell for it. ‘This thing gonna land in Washington?’ he says. ‘I never been to Washington.’ See, we didn’t stop or anything. ‘No,’ she says, ‘but if you’ll get off there, I’ll use my influence with the captain and I’m sure he’ll agree to it.’ The guy on the bus from New York,” Russell said, “I come up from there onna bus? I’m not gonna get searched with the weight on me. I thought he was gonna make me ride outside. I fuckin’ crashed when I got here, boy. I never been so tired in my life.”

“You look all beat to shit,” Frankie said.

“Yeah,” Russell said, “and the hell of it is, I been up for about a week, you know? And I shouldn’t’ve even slept last night, only I hadda or I would’ve just fallen down. I got to keep moving till I finish this thing off. I thought I was gonna see the guy with the other stuff this morning, but I couldn’t raise him.”

“You haven’t dumped the stuff?” Frankie said.

“Dump it,” Russell said, “Christ, no. I didn’t hit it yet. I can’t, I probably won’t be able to move it till tonight, now, by the time I see him and everything. I know where it is. I can get it, and I haven’t got it on me.

“Down the bus station,” Frankie said.

“Never mind,” Russell said. “I know where it is.”

“You’re just an asshole,” Frankie said. “You know that, you asshole? The kind of chances you’re taking, they’re gonna forget about putting you away for the
stuff when they catch you. They’re gonna put you away for being nuts.”