Dog Eat Dog Read Free

stupid, how wonderful.
    I went with the whole family into the living room. Mrs. Sullivan sat at one end of the couch. I sat next to her. Sully rushed up, wedged himself between us.
    “You stay away from my mother, you animal,” he whispered in my ear.
    “You are so low,” I said.
    “What?” Mrs. Sullivan asked, smiling, as if this was a joke she would actually like to be let in on. I just shook my head.
    Mr. Sullivan stretched out on the floor, flipped on the TV. “You’re in for a treat, Mick. It’s a very special cinematic event we’re going to be sharing with you here.”
    The three of them started laughing at once. I was lost. Felt kind of eerie.
    The film came on. The Fighting Sullivans . It was a based-on-fact World War II movie about five brothers who served on the same ship in the navy. In the end they all croak together except one.
    “We always fight ta-gedda. We always fight ta-gedda,” Sully squawked, mimicking a character from the movie.
    “A giant of a film,” Mr. Sullivan crowed. Within sixty seconds, he was snoring.
    The movie was hysterically sappy and lame, but that wasn’t the point. They’d obviously done this a thousand times before, Sully trading off with his mother, spouting dialogue and laughing, Mr. Sullivan even wafting in and out of consciousness for the occasional remembered line. I watched them all as much as I did the movie, sneaking long looks at the sides of their faces. An hour into the movie, Mrs. Sullivan joined her husband in sleep, her face resting lightly in her palm, her elbow propped on the sofa arm.
    Sully looked at me, which he hadn’t done until we were alone. “Goofy, huh?”
    “Ya,” I said, with admiration.
    “Well, it’s sort of official now, you’ve been adopted. You’ve been made an honorary Sullivan.”
    “Ooooh,” I cracked, too stupid to act honest yet. “Oh, that’ll open some doors for me, huh?”
    “Stop bein’ an asshole, Mick.”
    He kept staring into me. Very un-Sully.
    “Okay,” I said.
    That was the good part of what came from my big weekend. Out of the fire, more or less. The Sullivans took me in. Took me deeper than before, and that was nice. Strange as hell, but nice. Who could figure? I couldn’t figure that. Family stuff, who could ever figure?
    The not-so-good part was Toy pursuing me.
    “You wanted to talk to me?” He was at my locker.
    “Ya. But I gotta run, Toy.”
    “You wanted to talk to me?” He was in gym, aiming a white leather ball at my head.
    “Gotta run,” I said about a quarter-step too slowly. The gym teacher, who was also the school nurse, gave me an ice bag for my nose.
    “You wanted to talk to me?” He was sitting in front of the superette, smoking a long thin cigar.
    “Ya, but jeez, Toy, now I completely forgot what it was about. I’ll catch ya—”
    “Now. You’ll catch me now, Mick.” He had a grip on the back of my shirt, pulling me down to sit on the milk crate next to his. He held up a cigar, and I took it.
    “Acting pretty damn weird lately, Mick.”
    I nodded, bobbing my head in and out of the smoke cloud that hovered in front of me. “ Feeling pretty weird lately, Toy.”
    “Hmmm?” he said coyly. “You mean, like, guilty?”
    “Ahhh.” I inched my crate away as I spoke. “Maybe, maybe guilty is it, I don’t know. It’s a lot of things, feels like every kind of feeling in me all at once.” I watched him out of the corner of my eye to see if he knew, if he was guessing, if it was just coincidence. I could see nothing.
    I was so scared, when I pulled the cigar out of my mouth I sneaked—for the first time in many years—a little tiny sign of the cross, drawn with my thumb tip across my lips. If I was going to be dead in a second, I wanted my grammar school God right there with me. Toy scared me in a lot of ways, more than Terry and his friends and their attack dogs and all the rest combined.
    “Why’d you do that?” He’d caught it.
    “I had a little tobacco spit on my lip,