The Third Brother. Andrew Welsh-Huggins

      7

      THE ONE-STORY RENTAL HALFWAY DOWN the block was the color of puke left in the sun for a week. The blinds were drawn and duct tape covered a crack in the bottom right corner of the front window. The chewed-up lawn looked like a family of woodchucks had spent the night excavating it. What appeared to be an actual sapling was growing out of the front gutter, which sagged in the middle like a mocking smile.

      “Good thing is, we don’t have to worry about some prissy home-and-garden editor interrupting us while we work,” Mulligan said, eyeing the property from where we’d parked along the street two houses up. He drove a battered Chevy Suburban that looked like it was motored new off the lot around the time Jimmy Carter was putting solar panels on the White House roof. “You go around back, watch the rear door, just in case.”

      “In case of what?”

      “Inclement weather. Come on.”

      He was out of the car before I could respond. I followed, walking behind him down the gravel berm. At the house, a rusty gate opening into the yard squeaked in protest. Mulligan signaled for me to cut left. I tiptoed past several piles of dogshit I was hoping were not as fresh as they looked and crept around to the back. Concrete steps ran up to the rear entrance. There was a screen door without its screen. The backyard lawn ornaments consisted of crumpled-up Taco Bell and White Castle bags.

      I positioned myself a few feet away from the stairs and waited. I heard a knocking on the front door, followed by an explosion of barking. So the shit was fresh. I tried not to think of my Louisville Slugger collecting dust in my van back in German Village. More knocking, more barking, then voices. At first the tenor of the conversation sounded reasonable enough, as if Mulligan were pitching an alternative natural gas supply. Then I heard a shout and still more barking and what sounded like a crash. A rapid thudding inside indicated someone running, and getting close. I bent my knees and adopted my best pro wrestling stance, minus the makeup and green spandex. A moment later the rear door burst open and a man hurtled out. A small man, no more than five five and maybe 120 pounds in the shower. Definitely shrimpy. But his eyes were glazed, and for a moment I thought he might be high, which would have complicated things. Instead, I saw he was terrified, as if he’d just seen a ghost while in the shower. He ran straight into me.

      “Easy now,” I said, grabbing him by the arms and turning him around. He didn’t struggle. Maneuvering him was like putting a coat rack back in the corner where it belonged.

      “Otto!” I yelled. “Back here.” When Mulligan didn’t reply I started marching my prisoner around to the front.

      “Please,” the man whined.

      “Talk to Otto. I’m just the hired help.”

      “Please. Save me.”

      “Save you? From what?”

      “From her.”

      “Her who?”

      The answer came a second later. I heard a sound behind us, turned, and saw a two-headed monster rounding the corner and barreling towards us. I stared in disbelief. The bottom half of the monster was a woman the size and approximate shape of an extra-long chest freezer turned on end, snorting like a bull and yelling something that sounded like Blobby Baby. She was wearing too-tight black yoga pants and a black CD101 Radio T-shirt, her brown hair pulled back in a ponytail with a frilly white scrunchie. The top of the monster was Mulligan, clinging to her back and trying to restrain her as she charged in our direction. Tangled up in the woman’s feet was a corgi, ears raised and fangs bared as it barked its little head off.

      “Get him out of here, Woody!” Mulligan yelled.

      I pushed the bail skip forward and started to run. But it was too late. The woman’s forward momentum overtook me, even with Mulligan trying to hold her back, and we went down in a tangle of limbs and arms and barking canine. I pulled myself free, started to stand up, looked around for the little guy, and had just enough time to back up slightly before the woman’s right fist connected with my left eye. I staggered, caught my balance, staggered again, and fell over. The corgi pounced and clamped its jaws onto my right sneaker, jerking my foot this way and that like a rat it had dug out of a hole. I rolled to my left, reached for something to pull myself up by, and found a fleshy, sockless ankle instead. I grabbed it with both hands and held on tight. For nearly twenty seconds I was back on my uncle’s pig farm being dragged through the mud by a surly sow as the woman fought her way forward hollering “Blobby Baby, Blobby Baby!” and I bumped and scraped my way across the dug-up yard. I’m pretty sure I ran over an expired woodchuck. Finally, just when I thought there was no way sweet potato fries were ever going to cut it, the woman said, in a surprisingly high, girlish voice, “God damn you motherfuckers to hell.” I stopped moving and she fell over with Mulligan splayed across her back like a rodeo rider at the county fair prelims. I took a breath, got to my knees, got all the way up, and rubbed my eye. I was seeing not just stars but entire constellations.

      “Let’s get out of here,” Mulligan said. He ran up to the object of his pursuit and took him roughly by the left arm. The man was shaking like a leaf in a November breeze. He didn’t resist. “Thank you,” he whispered.

      “Bobby baby,” the woman wailed, lying prone in the yard as she squeezed mud and God knows what else between her fingers. “Bobby baby.”

      “I’M TELLING YOU, YOU’RE a natural, Woody,” Mulligan said an hour later, as I sat at the bar at Jury of Your Pours, an uneaten burger and a double helping of sweet potato fries before