All Due Respect Issue #1 (4 page)

He stuffed the turkey and whitebread through the fence at the dog, who, despite her hunger, ignored the sandwich in her grief. Albert hoped she’d eat it eventually.

The normally cacophonous mill was quieter than usual when Albert walked in. His heart dropped when he realized that the missing noise could only mean that one of the looms was offline.

“Mr. Souza wants to see you immediately,” Madeline said softly the moment he entered the offices. Madeline was Mr. Souza’s niece and office manager. Albert still found it strange that she called her uncle Mr. Souza while at work. He was an hour late, but hoped that nothing had happened that would require his attention in his absence. “The Sulzer Loom went down as soon as we started it up this morning.”

Madeline’s eyes never left the computer screen when he walked past. Albert’s eyes never left her face. Something deep down told him to look away, but like most days, he found himself unable. The thin burn scar along her left cheek was covered in base makeup, but not enough where it would ever be completely invisible.

She was a little darker-skinned than the other Portuguese kids that dominated the population of the high school they both attended and now, as adults, the mill. Her scar, instead of a darker line on light skin, was lighter than her tone, reminding Albert of the frosting on the cupcakes he couldn’t find at Shaw’s Market any more.

Albert thought it was beautiful.

Albert thought she was beautiful.

He always had, since their shared non-occupational training classes at Diman Vocational in Fall River almost four years ago. He remembered the girl who always had a smile for the quiet boy missing four of his fingertips, the boy who only seemed to excel in his specialized machine-tool-and-repair classes. Albert was the kind of boy who didn’t get many smiles.

He hadn’t seen that smile since she came back from “over there.”

At lunchtime, it took Albert a minute to remember what had happened to his sandwiches. Then he remembered the dog. All he had left in his lunchbox was the Ring Ding. Albert spent the rest of the day hungry, but that was okay. Albert had been hungry before. He almost found the gnawing pleasurable when he thought about easing the dog’s hunger.

He had done a Good Thing.

Albert made an additional sandwich the next day. He put extra turkey in the third sandwich, less in the two for himself. He didn’t know if dogs liked Miracle Whip, but he figured he’d hedge his bets and slathered the spread on the third sandwich, just in case.

Albert smiled while he made the sandwiches. He was doing Something Good again. His memory of the man at the house was hazy and unpleasant, but his pleasant memory of feeding a hungry dog overwhelmed the things he did remember.

He left his house early, giving himself extra time to locate the road. He knew himself well enough to know that he might have a hard time.

Albert was surprised when he found the road the first time he passed it. As he pulled the car onto the shoulder, the memory of the day before became clearer. He remembered the man, his cruelty a little clearer. He remembered the puppies. As he walked up the pathway, the cold air whipped his face, stinging like strands of nettles clinging to the wind.

The dog was back at the tree, lying on the frozen ground in front of her puppies. Each breath was exhaled with a low whine. She didn’t notice Albert’s approach until he stepped on a frozen branch, the crack of the dry wood snapping the dog’s head around. She growled and spread her shaking front paws defensively, teeth bared, ready to defend her litter.

“Hey,” Albert said. He crouched down a few feet away from her. Thin lines of blood streaked the frost underneath where the dog had lain. She had three deep scrapes on her underside. Albert took the thick sandwich from the pocket of his jacket and held it out to her.

The dog sniffed the air again, licked her chops, but didn’t attack the sandwich the way she had the day before. She took one step toward Albert’s outstretched hand, then pitched slightly, her leg unable to take the weight. She took another step with a limp.

Then Albert saw the bloody pawprints that led back toward the house he’d brought her to the day before. The fence was still intact. The dog must have jumped the fence, caught herself on the sharp tines of the chain link along the top.

Albert waddled toward the dog in his crouch, putting the sandwich on the ground in front of her. She sniffed the sandwich, but didn’t bite into it. Instead, she gently put her teeth around the bread and walked the mouthful back to her puppies, placing the food by their bodies.

“No. It’s for you,” Albert said. “They…they can’t eat it anymore. It’s for you.”

The dog limped back to the bottom half of the sandwich and did the same, spreading the turkey and bread at the foot of the hollow tree. Then she lay down again and resumed her watch.

Albert was conflicted. Part of him felt that he should return the dog to its house again, but knew that the dog would only jump over the fence at will, maybe hurting herself even worse. He then realized that fixing the fence, the thing he thought helped—that he thought was a Good Thing—might have, in fact, made things worse.

Albert walked over to the fence and opened the gate, should the dog choose to return on her own. A pair of rust-stained coffee filters stuck to the fence, dried and crusty. Albert peeled one of the filters off. The rust-colored deposit crumbled between his fingers. As the flakes fell to the ground, Albert saw more bloody pawprints tracking through the snowy yard.

He looked back to the dog and saw crusted blood on the bottoms of her paws, the pads cracked from the cold, colored not too differently from the filtrate on his gloved fingertips. For a moment, Albert wondered if it was blood on the filters, sniffed at his gloves. The sharp chemical odor made him recoil. It was the same that he’d smelled coming from the dilapidated house, just stronger, more distilled in its pungency.

Albert hurt inside looking at the dog. Reflexively, he clenched and unclenched his fingers. A dull ache steeled into the fingers that were missing the tips; a similar ache in his heart. It was then that Albert decided to take the dog. He would take care of her. He wasn’t going to let her die. He would call in sick if he had to. Albert had never called in sick the entire time he’d worked at Quequechan Mills. Mr. Souza would understand. At first, the general concept of taking the dog had entered his mind the night before—however, the hard-wired belief in the wrongness of taking something that belonged to someone else had quashed the thought.

Now he knew that he had to do something. Helping was more important. Bossy might be unhappy with it, but Albert figured the cat would get over it.

Albert took out another sandwich, even though the dog still hadn’t touched the first.

“C’mon girl. You want to go home with me?”

The dog didn’t move, didn’t lift her gaze from her lost little ones.

“I have a nice sandwich. I have a nice warm house.”

One ear flicked toward the sound of his voice, but nothing else.

Albert reached for her collar and laced his fingers under the frayed blue nylon. The dog whipped her head when Albert gently tried to tug her away from the puppies. Albert pulled his hand back, afraid that the dog was going to bite. Instead, she just warbled a small howl.

The sound broke his heart. The dog stood shakily to her feet and looked at him. Trembling, she took another deep breath and let out a full howl. Then another.

Albert dropped the sandwich and grit his teeth against the dog’s wails, trying to will the heartbreaking sound from entering him. He still had to try to save her. He still had to try to make this a Good Thing, to stop the dog’s cries.

Albert managed the end of his belt under her collar when a loud crack cut the air, making Albert jump back, the belt slipping out as the dog jumped at the sound too. Bark exploded from the tree with a
WHACK
five feet above his head.

“Yo, retard! What the fuck are you doing back here?” The man with the blue tattoos held a smoking pistol in his hand. And he was walking fast toward Albert, waving the gun as he yelled at him. “Get the fuck gone, you dumb motherfucker!”

He fired the gun high again, too high to hit him, but close enough to make Albert shriek.

Albert scrambled to his feet and ran down the path. He ran all the way to his car. Far enough where he couldn’t hear the man’s laughter that echoed after him. But even over his own ragged breaths, over the rumbling of the old car’s engine…

…he could still hear the howls.

Albert realized with humiliation that he was going to be late for work again. He had to go home to change out of the pants he’d peed.

Mr. Souza didn’t yell at Albert when he walked in an hour and a half late. He took one look at Albert’s eyes, pursed his lips, and walked back into his office. Albert had hoped that the signs of his crying would have left his face by the time he reached the mill, but clearly, Mr. Souza could see Albert’s pain.

So could Madeline. As he passed the office, she glanced up at him, looked over at her uncle when he returned to the office, then looked back at Albert. Her eyebrows knitted in concern at what she saw on Albert’s face. “Are you all right, Albert?”

Albert nodded, afraid that words would come out in the ragged sob he kept clenched in his chest.

Silently, he walked into his tiny tooling room to try and straighten out the bent rapier shaft from the Sulzer loom. It had taken him most of the afternoon the day before to remove the crooked piece of metal. Most of the time, he could simply replace one rapier with a second from storage while he made his repairs, but he’d forgotten to put in a parts request for a backup after the last time, when the rapier shaft had snapped beyond Albert’s abilities to repair it.

Instead, he worked on fixing the rapier that they did have to get the loom up and running as soon as they could. The metal
pinged
sharply every time he struck it over the curved molding iron, making his temples throb with every blow of the ball-peen hammer’s rounded edge.

By lunchtime, Albert almost had the metal rapier straightened out. He tried to eat his turkey sandwich, but each bite saddened him, forcing his thoughts back to the dog. He was saving his Ring Ding for when he completed the requisition form as a reward for himself, for undertaking the task he found the most difficult in his job.

Albert had the form laid out on the tablet desk in the corner of his workroom, but had to stop after only filling out the first third. He had enough of a hard time formulating words on paper with a clear head. In his current state, all he did was give himself a pulsing headache.

As he shoved the last remnants of the sandwich into his mouth, he decided to finish fixing the rapier before anything else. His Ring Ding would have to wait. He regretted using the treat as a bargaining chip with himself, but still felt compelled to live up to the bargain.

He slid the rapier back onto the tooling iron and—

“Albert?”

The small voice startled him, making him miss the rapier with the hammer on the downstroke. If Albert still had the top knuckle of his middle finger, he would have smashed it into pulp.