Tooth and Claw (13 page)

He could feel the rear wheels slipping away from him each time he steered into a curve, and there were nothing but curves, one switchback after another all the way up the flank of the mountain. The night was absolute, no lights, no habitation, nothing—they’d passed the last ranch house ten miles back and were deep into the national forest now, at fifty-five hundred feet and making for the Big Timber Lodge at seventy-two. There was a winter storm watch out for the Southern Sierras, he knew that, and he knew that the back road would be closed as soon as the first snow hit, but the alternative route—up the front of the mountain—was even more serpentine than this one, and a good half hour longer too. His feeling was that they’d make it before the rain turned to snow—or before anything accumulated, anyway. Was he a risk taker? Sure he was. And he was always in a hurry. Especially tonight. Especially with her.

“Zach—you listening to me?”

The radio caught a surging throb of chords and a wicked guitar lead burning over the top of them as if the guitarist’s fingers had suddenly burst into flame, but before he could enjoy it or even recognize the tune, a wall of static shut it out and was suddenly replaced by a snatch of mariachi and a superslick DJ booming something in Spanish—used cars probably, judging from the tone of it. Or Viagra.
Estimados Señores! ¿Tienen Vds. problemas con su vigor?
His fingers tweaked the dial as delicately as a recording engineer’s. But the static came back and persisted. “Shit,” he muttered, and punched the thing off.

Now there was nothing but the wet slash of the wheels and the rise and fall of the engine—gun it here, lay off there, gun it, lay off—and the mnemonic echo of the question he’d yet to answer:
You listening to me?
“Yeah,” he said, reaching for his buoyant tone—he
was
listening and there was nothing or no one he’d rather listen to because he was in love and the way she bit off her words, the dynamics of her voice, the whisper, the intonation, the soft sexy scratch of it shot from his eardrums right to his crotch, but this was sleet they were looking at now and the road was dark and he was pressing to get there. “The eels. And the people. They must’ve been surprised, huh?”

She feasted on that a moment and he snatched a glimpse at her, the slow satisfied smile floating on her uplifted face, and the wheels grabbed and slipped and grabbed again. “That’s the thing,” she said, her voice rich with the telling, “that’s the whole point, to imagine that. They’re in their huts, frame houses, whatever—tin roofs, maybe just thatch. But the tin roofs are cooler. Way cooler. Think of the tin roofs. It’s like, ‘Daddy! Mommy!’ the kids call out, ‘it’s
really
raining!’ ”

This was hilarious—the picture of it, the way she framed it for him, carrying it into falsetto for the kids’ voices—and they both broke up, laughing like kids themselves, kids set free in the back of the bus on a school trip. But then there was the road and a black tree-thick turn he nearly didn’t make and the last spasm of laughter died in his throat.

A minute fled by, the wipers beating, sleet trapped in the headlights. She readjusted herself in the seat and he saw her hand—a white furtive ghost in the dark of the cab—reach down to check the
seatbelt. “The tires are okay, aren’t they?” she asked, trying—and failing—to keep the concern out of her voice.

“Oh, yeah,” he said, “yeah, plenty of tread,” though he’d begun to think he should have sprung for chains. The last sign he’d seen, way back, had said
Cars Required With Chains
, and that stabbed him with the first prick of worry, but chains were something like seventy-five bucks a set and you didn’t need chains to get to work in Santa Monica. It seemed excessive to him. If he could have
rented
them, maybe—

And there went the back wheels again, fishtailing this time, a broad staggered Z inscribing itself across both sides of the road and thank God there was nobody else out here tonight, no chance of running into a vehicle coming down the opposite way, not with a winter storm watch and a road closure that was all but certain to go into effect at some point in the night…

“You’re really skidding,” she observed. He glanced at her a moment—sweet and compact in her black leggings and the sweater with the two reindeer prancing across her breasts—and then his eyes shot back to the road. Which was whitening before them, as if some cosmic hand had swept on ahead with a two-lane paintbrush.

“You know my theory?” he said, accelerating out of a turn and leaning into the pitch of the road—up and up, always up.

“No, what?”

“If you go fast enough”—he gave her a quick glance, straight-faced—“I mean really fast…”

“Yeah, uh-huh?”

“Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? You won’t have time to skid.”

There was the briefest hesitation—one beat, and he loved that about her, that moment of process—and then they were laughing again, laughing so hard he thought he’d have to pull over to keep from collapsing.

H
E
’
D MET HER
three weeks ago, just before Thanksgiving, at a party in Silver Lake. Friends of friends. A Craftsman house, restored down to the last lick of varnish, good wines, hors d’oeuvres from the caterer, a roomful of studiously hip people who if they weren’t rockers
or filmmakers or poets had to be training to swim the Java Strait or climb solo up the South Col of Mount Diablo. He figured he’d tank up on the hors d’oeuvres, get smashed on somebody else’s thirty-two-dollars-a-bottle Cabernet, then duck home and watch a movie on DVD, because he wasn’t really interested in much more than that. Not yet. He’d been with Christine for two and a half years and then she met somebody at work, and that had shaved him right on down to the root.

Ontario was standing by the fire with his best friend Jared’s sister, Mindy, and when he came to think of it later, he saw that there might have been more than a little matchmaking going on here from Mindy’s perspective—she knew Ontario from her book club, and she knew that Ontario, sweet and shy and reposing on a raft of arcane information about meteorological events and the swift passage of the various animal species from this sore and wounded planet, was six months divorced and in need of diversion. As he was himself, at least in Mindy’s eyes. The wine sang in his veins. He made his way over to the fire.

“So I suppose you must hear this all the time,” he said, trying to be clever, trying to impress her after Mindy had embraced him and made the introductions, “but are your parents Canadian?”

“You guessed it.”

“So your brother must be Saskatchewan, right? Or B.C., how about B.C.?”

Her hair shone. She was dressed all in black. Her eyes assessed him a moment—from behind the narrow plastic-frame glasses that were like a provocation, as if at any moment she would throw them off and dazzle the room with her unfettered beauty—and she very deliberately shifted the wineglass from one hand to the other. “Unfortunately, I don’t have a brother,” she said. “Or a sister either.” Then she smiled, fully radiant. “If I did, though, I’d think my parents would have gone for Alberta if it was a girl—”

“And what, let me guess—
Newfoundland
if it was a boy.”

She looked pleased. Her lips parted and she bit the tip of her tongue in anticipation of the punch line. “Right,” she said, “and we’d call him Newf for short.”

He’d phoned her the next night and taken her to dinner, and then to a concert two nights later, all the correspondences in alignment. She had a three-year-old daughter. Her ex paid alimony. She worked part-time as a receptionist and was taking courses at UCLA toward an advanced degree in environmental studies. One entire wall in her apartment, floor to ceiling, was dedicated to nature books, from Thoreau to Leopold to Wilson, Garrett, Quammen and Gould.

He fell. And fell hard.

E
ACH TURN WAS A
duplicate of the one he’d just negotiated, hairpin to the right, hairpin to the left, more trees, more snow, more distance. The road was gone now altogether, replaced by a broad white featureless plain without discernible limits. He used the trunks of the trees as guideposts, trying to keep the car equidistant from those on the left and the ones that clipped by on the right like so many slats in a fence. It really wouldn’t do to skid into any of these trees—they were yellow pines, sugar pines, Jeffreys and ponderosas, as wide around as the pillars of the Lincoln Memorial—but the gaps between them were what caught his attention. Go off the road there and no one could say how far you would drop. Guardrails? Not out here.

They were silent a moment, so he took up the eels again—just to hear his own voice by way of distraction. “So I suppose there’s an upside—the villagers must have enjoyed a little fried eel and plantains. Or maybe they smoked them.”

“You’d get awfully sick of eel after a couple days, don’t you think?” She wasn’t staring out the windshield into the white fury of the headlights, but watching him as if they were cruising down the Coast Highway under a ripe and delicate sun. “No, I think they went ahead and buried them—the ones that were too injured to crawl off.”

“The stink, huh?”

“Or slither off. Did you know that eels—the American eel, which is what these were—can crawl overland? Like a snake?”

He squinted into the sleet, reached out to flick the radio back on, but thought better of it. “No, I don’t think so. Or maybe. Maybe I did. I remember they used to be in every creek when I was a kid—you’d fish for trout and catch this big slick whipping thing that always
seemed to swallow the hook and then you couldn’t do anything but cut it loose. Because of the slime factor.”

“They’re all born in the Sargasso Sea, you know that, right? And that it’s the females that migrate inland?”

He did. Because he was something of a nature buff himself, hiking up the canyons on weekends, poking under rocks and in the willows along the streambeds, trying to learn the lore, and his own bookshelves featured many of the same titles he’d found on hers. Which was one of the reasons they were going to Big Timber for the weekend—so he could show her the trails he’d discovered the past summer, take her on the Trail of a Hundred Giants and then down the Freeman Creek Trail to the Freeman Grove. She was from Boston and she’d never seen the redwoods and sequoias except in photographs. When she’d told him that, over a plate of mussels marinara at a semi-hip, over-priced place on Wilshire with red banquette seats and votive candles on the tables, he began to rhapsodize Big Timber till he’d made it out to be the earthly paradise itself. Which it was, for all he knew. He’d only been there twice, both times with Jared, on their mountain bikes, but it was as wild and beautiful as it must have been in Muir’s time—sure it was—and he’d convinced her to have her sister babysit for the weekend so they could hike the trails and cross-country ski if there was enough snow, and then sit at the bar at the lodge till it was time to go to bed.

And that was the other reason for the trip, the unspoken promise percolating beneath the simple monosyllable of her assent—going to bed. On their first date she’d told him she was feeling fragile still—her word, not his—and wanted to take things slowly. All right. He respected that. But three weeks had gone by and when she’d agreed to come with him—for two days and two nights—he felt something pull loose inside of him.

“Right,” he said, “and then they all return to the Sargasso Sea to mate.”

“Amazing, isn’t it?”

“All those eels,” he said. “Eels from Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas”—he gave her a look—“Ontario even.”

That was when the wheels got away from him and the car spun across the road to glance off a white-capped boulder and into a glistening white ditch that undulated gracefully away from the hidden surface of the road, which was where he really and truly wanted to be.

T
HAT THEY WERE STUCK
was a given. The passenger’s side wheels were in the ditch, canting the car at an unfortunate angle, and beneath the furiously accumulating snow there was a glaze of ice that gave no purchase. He cursed under his breath—“Shit, shit, shit”—and slammed the wheel with his fist, and she said, “Are we stuck?” For a long moment he didn’t respond, the wipers stupidly beating, the snow glossy in the headlights and driving down like a hard white rain. “Are you all right?” he said finally. “Because I—I mean, it just got away from me there. The road—it’s like a skating rink or something.” Her face was ghost-lit. He couldn’t see her eyes. “Yeah,” she said softly, “I’m fine.”

When he cracked the door to get out and have a look, the snow stung his eyes and drove the breath from his lips. He caught a quick glimpse of her, huddled there in the passenger’s seat—and there was the smell of her perfume too, of the heat of her body and the sleepy warmth of the car’s interior—and then he slammed the door and walked round the car to assess the damage. The front fender on the passenger’s side had been staved in where it had hit the boulder, but it didn’t seem to be interfering with the wheel at all—and that was the good news. For the rest of it, the rear tires had dug themselves a pair of craters in the ice beneath the snow and the axle was resting on a scraped-bald patch of dirt just beneath the tailpipe. And the snow. The snow was coming down and the road was certain to be closed—till spring maybe—and he wasn’t sure how many miles yet it was to the lodge. Five? Ten? Twenty? He couldn’t begin to guess, and as he looked up into the thin streaming avenue of illumination the car’s headlights afforded him, he realized he didn’t recognize a thing. There were just trees. Trees and more trees.

Then the car door slammed and she was standing there beside him, the hood of her parka drawn tight over the oval of her face.
“You know, I grew up in snow, so this is nothing to me.” She was grinning, actually grinning, the glow of the taillights giving her features a weird pinkish cast. “I’ll tell you what we have to do, we have to jack up this back wheel here and put something under it.”

“Like what?” The engine coughed softly, twice, three times, and then settled into its own rhythm. There was the smell of the exhaust and the sound of the miniature ice pellets in all their trillion permutations hissing off the hood of his jacket, off the trunk of the car, off her hood and the boughs of the trees. He looked round him bleakly—there was nothing, absolutely nothing, to see but for the hummocks of the snow, white fading to gray and then to a drifting pale nullity beyond the range of the headlights.