All Due Respect Issue #1 Read online

  The wind prickled his nose with something sharp, acidic, wafting from the house. The moment before his finger touched the doorknob, something thumped loudly just on the other side of the door.

  The sound of a deadbolt clicked, and as the door opened, a blast of heat washed over Albert. “Goddamn it, Dex. If you’re gonna be here this fucking early, your ass better be towing a pair of Croissanwiches for me.” The guy froze when he saw Albert, a momentary flash of panic across his face. “The fuck’re you?”

  “I-I-I…”

  “You-you-you, what? You better answer me, motherfucker. You’re trespassing on private property.” The guy leaned his wiry frame to the right. Albert heard the wooden scrape of a drawer slowly opening.

  The guy was skinny, like Albert, but had a dense pack of wiry muscle on his frame, blue tattoos peppering his forearms. He sneered at Albert, possibly enjoying the rare occasion that he had physical superiority over someone.

  “I’m sorry to bother you, sir. Is that your dog?”

  The guy laughed when Albert said ‘sir.’ “Is that your fucking dog? Sir?” The man fanned his hand in mocking gentility.

  “No.”

  “Then that dog is none of your fucking business, Poindexter.”

  “M-my name is Albert.”

  “What?”

  “My name is Albert. Not Poindexter.” Albert was a little confused. First the man called him Dex, then Poindexter. “Again, I’m sorry to bother you, but there are three puppies…”

  “That bitch finally dropped?”

  “…they’re not alive. She…”

  “Well shit, less mouths to feed.”

  “So she is your dog?”

  The man shook his head and leaned forward, gazing deeply into Albert’s eyes. “Damn, Albert. You ain’t too smart, are ya?”

  “I’m not stupid.” Albert could feel himself redden as he lowered his eyes from the man’s stare. No matter how many times he heard people say something similar, the old humiliation came rushing right back. “I’m not.”

  “I think you are, Albert. I think you are. You have a good day, ya fucking retard.” The man twiddled his fingers at him as he slowly shut the door.

  “I think your dog is hungry,” he said to the door. Neither the door nor the man inside replied.

  Albert went back to his car and opened his lunchbox. He slid aside the chocolate Ring Ding, took out the second sandwich, and walked back up the road. The dog was still standing at the fence, whimpering and staring at the place where her puppies lay in the hollow tree.

  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.
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br />   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.

  Madeline stood in the doorway, hugging her thick, cable-knit sweater to herself.

  “Yeah?” Albert felt himself flush just having her in his space.

  “Did you finish the requisition forms yet?” Albert noticed that she always had her head turned slightly away from him on the side with the burn scar, that her eyes would dart almost imperceptibly from his when they met. That was okay with Albert. When they were at Diman, his palms would sweat whenever she would look at him. Her inability to maintain eye contact with him (or anyone else, for that matter) since coming back from “over there” made things slightly easier on Albert’s blood pressure.

  Albert’s ears went red at her question, regardless. Mrs. Medeiros, who used to have Madeline’s job before her stroke, would always help Albert with the forms. He wasn’t any good with forms, with letters and words, but was too embarrassed to ask Madeline for her help.

  Madeline glanced over at the obviously incomplete forms. “Can I help you?”

  Albert gulped and nodded slowly. “I…would appreciate that.”

  A light curl of a smile flicked at the corner of Madeline’s mouth and Albert’s heart warmed. It was the first time he’d seen anything resembling a smile on Madeline since she came back from “over there.”

  He went to stand, to offer her his chair, but Madeline waved him to sit back down. “It’s okay, I’ll stand. Do you have the parts number?”

  Albert flipped through the papers on his desk to find the right one. He pulled what he thought was the correct pink sheet from the pile and turned back to Madeline.

  She bent low at the waist, looking over what little Albert had thus far been able to scratch out on the form. Albert smelled flowers and soap. He closed his eyes and tried to push the memory of her scent into a place where he wouldn’t forget it.

  When he opened his eyes, he saw that the wide neck of her oatmeal-colored sweater draping open. Immediately, Albert’s eyes were drawn to the pink rose at the clasp of her bra. His throat tightened as he marveled at the light coffee color of her cleavage.

  Then Albert saw her other scar. Thick and angrily puffed up from the skin, the scar started two inches above the rose and bisected her breasts. Albert’s gaze followed the path of her scar. It continued down, stopping just shy of her belly button.

  Albert had heard that Madeline had been badly hurt “over there,” which was why she was back here in
the first place. He heard the old Kozak twins gossiping about it one day. Albert tried not to listen in, as he felt that eavesdropping was rude, but was unable to stop himself once he’d heard Madeline’s name mentioned.

  “Poor thing was in there for months. Did you hear about the conditions of those hospitals?”

  “I did.” (A clucking of the tongue.)

  “It’s a shame. Such a pretty girl. Her insides are all messed up. They nearly cut her in half to put things back where they were supposed to be.”

  “I heard they had to remove her spleen.”

  “Amongst other parts. Poor thing won’t ever be able to have any children, you know.”

  “Tsk…”

  Albert was hypnotized by the scar.

  It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen in this life.

  Albert heard himself gasp. Madeline looked at him when she heard his soft intake of air, saw where he was looking. She stood up too quickly, clutching the neck of her sweater.

  “No…wait!” Albert reached for her arm, but she stumbled back. She slammed into the wall with enough force to knock dust motes into the air, the wind pummeled from her lungs by the impact. As she came crashing down onto the concrete floor, her wig shifted halfway off her scalp.

  The white-gray burn didn’t stop at her hairline, but arced over her ear, the waxy scar reaching up almost to the crown of her head like the hand of a fiery giant had molded the flesh back with indelicate fingers.

  Hoarsely gasping for breath, she held one hand tightly to the neck of her sweater, the other trying to reset the wig with palsied fingers. Her entire body trembled violently, knees clenched tightly to her chest as she sat on the floor.

  Albert reached for her, but was afraid to touch her. “M-M-Madeline..?”

  When she regained her breath, she looked up at Albert with haunted eyes.