Tooth and Claw (17 page)

At any rate, I was standing over the vegetable display at the Jubilation Market one afternoon watching my ex-wife’s face superimpose itself on the gleaming epidermis of an oversized zucchini, when
a familiar voice called out my name. It was Vicki. She was wearing a transparent blouse over a bikini top and she’d had her hair done up in a spill of tinted ringlets. A plastic shopping basket dangled from one hand. There were no children in sight. “I heard you got your Casual Contempo,” she said. “How’re you liking it?”

“A dream come true. And you?”

Her smile widened. “I got a job. At the company office? I’m assistant facilitator for tour groups.”

“Tour groups? You mean here? Or over at Contash World?”

“You haven’t noticed all the people in the streets?” she asked, holding her smile. “The ones with the cameras and the straw hats coming down to check us out and see what a model city looks like, works like? Look right there, right out the window there on the sidewalk in front of the Chowchy Grill. See that flock of Hawaiian shirts? And those women with the legs that look like they’ve just been pulled out of the deep freeze?”

I followed her gaze and there they were, tourists, milling around as if on a stage set. How had I failed to notice them? Even now one of them was backing away from the front of the grocery with a movie camera. “Tourists?” I murmured.

She nodded.

Maybe I was a little sour that morning, maybe I needed love and affection, not to mention sex, and maybe I was lonely and frustrated and beginning to feel the first stab of disappointment with my new life, but before I could think, I said, “They’re worse than the ants. Do you have ants, by the way—in your apartment, I mean? The little minuscule ones that make ant freeways all over the floor, the kitchen counter, the walls?”

Her face fell, but then the smile came back, because she was determined to be chirpy and positive. “I wouldn’t say they were worse than the ants—at least the ants clean up after themselves.”

“And cockroaches. Or palmetto bugs—isn’t that what we call them down here? I saw one the size of a frog the other day, right out on Penny Lane.”

She had nothing to say to this, so I changed the subject and asked how her kids were doing.

“Oh, fine. Terrific. They’re thriving.” A pause. “My mother’s down from Philadelphia—she’s babysitting for me until I can find somebody permanent. While I’m at work, that is.”

“Really,” I said, reaching down to shift the offending zucchini to the bottom of the bin. “So are you free right now? For maybe a drink? Unless you have to rush home and cook or something.”

She looked doubtful.

“What I mean is, don’t you want to see what a neo-retro Casual Contempo looks like when it’s fully furnished?”

T
HE FIRST REAL BUMP
in the road came a week or two later. I’d been called away to consult with the transition team at my former company, and when I got back I found a notice in the mailbox from the Contash Corp’s subsidiary, the Jubilation Company, or as we all knew it in short—and somewhat redundantly—the TJC. It seemed they were advising against our spending too much time on our wraparound porches, especially at sunrise and sunset, and to take all precautions while using the jogging trail round Lake Allagash or even window-shopping on Mercado Street. The problem was mosquitoes. Big, outsized Central Floridian mosquitoes that were found to be carrying encephalitis and dengue fever. The TJC was doing all it could vis-à-vis vector control, and they were contractually absolved from any responsibility—just read your Declaration of Covenants, Deeds and Restrictions—but in the interest of public safety they were advising everyone to stay indoors. Despite the heat. And the fact that staying in defeated the whole idea of the Casual Contempo, the wraparound porch and the free interplay between neighbors that lies at the core of what makes a real and actual town click.

I was brooding in the kitchen, idly scratching at the constellation of angry red welts on my right wrist and waiting for the meninges to start swelling in my brainpan, when a movement on the porch caught my eye. Two cloaked figures there, one large, one small, and a cloaked baby carriage. For a moment I didn’t know what to make of it all, but the baby carriage was a dead giveaway: it was Vicki, dressed like a beekeeper, with little Ethan in his own miniature beekeeper’s outfit beside her and baby Ashley imprisoned behind a wall of gauze
in the depths of the carriage. “Christ,” I said, ushering them in, “is this what we’re going to have to start wearing now?”

She pulled back the veil to reveal that hopeful smile and the small shining miracle of her hair. “No, I don’t think so,” she said, bending to remove her son’s impedimenta (“I don’t want,” he kept saying, “I don’t want”). “There,” she said, addressing the pale dwindling oval of his face, “there, it’s all right now. And you can have a soda, if Jackson still has any left in the refrigerator—”

“Oh, yeah, sure,” I said, and I was bending too. “Root beer? Or Seven-Up?”

We wound up sitting in the kitchen, drinking white wine and sharing a box of stale Triscuits while the baby slept and Ethan sucked at a can of Hires in front of the tube in the living room. Out back was the low fence that gave onto the nature preserve, with its bird-friendly marsh that also coincidentally happened to serve as a maternity ward for the mosquitoes, and beyond that was Lake Allagash. “At the office they’re saying the mosquitoes are just seasonal,” Vicki said, working a hand up under the tinted ringlets and giving them a shake, “and besides, they’re pretty much spraying around the clock now, so I would think—well, I mean, they’ve had to close down some of the outdoor rides over at Contash World, and that means money lost, big money.”

I wasn’t a cynic, or I tried not to be, because a pioneer can’t afford cynicism. Look on the bright side, that was what I maintained—there was no alternative. “Okay, fine, but have you seen my wrist? I mean, should I be concerned? Should I go to the doctor, do you think?”

She took my wrist in her cool grip, traced the bumps there with her index finger. She gave a little laugh. “Chigger bites, that’s all. Nothing to worry about. And the mosquitoes’ll just be a bad memory in a week or two, I guarantee it.”

There was a moment of silence, during which we both gazed out the window on the marsh—or swamp, as I’d mistakenly called it before Vicki corrected me. We watched an egret rise up out of nowhere and sail off into the trees. Clouds massed on the horizon in a swell of pure, unadulterated white; the palmettos gathered and released the faintest trace of a breeze. Next door, the wraparound porch of my
neighbors—the black couple, Sam and Ernesta Fills—was deserted. Ditto the porch of the house on the other side, into which Mark and Leonard, having traded $2,500 of the cash I’d given them for number 632 and a prime chance at a Casual Contempo, had recently moved. “No,” she said finally, draining her wineglass and holding it out in one delicate hand so that I could refill it for her, “what I’d be concerned about if I was you is your neighbors across the street—the Weekses?”

I gave her a dumb stare.

“You know them—July and Fili Weeks and their three sons?”

“Yeah,” I said, “sure.” Everybody knew everybody else here. It was a rule.

From the TV in the other room came the sound of canned laughter, followed by Ethan’s stuttering high whinny of an underdeveloped laugh. “What about the red curtains?” she said. “And that car? That whatever it is, that race car painted in the three ugliest shades of magenta they keep parked out there on the street where the whole world can see it? They’re in violation of the code on something like eight counts already and they haven’t been here a month yet.”

I felt a prickle of alarm. We were all in this together, and if everybody didn’t pitch in—if everybody didn’t subscribe to the letter as far as the Covenants and Restrictions were concerned—what was going to happen to our property values? “Red curtains?” I said.

Her eyes were steely. “Just like in a whorehouse. And you know the rules—white, off-white, beige and taupe only.”

“Has anybody talked to them? Can’t anybody do anything?”

She set the glass down, drew her gaze away from the window and looked into my eyes. “You mean the Citizens’ Committee?”

I shrugged. “Yeah. Sure. I guess.”

She leaned in close. I could smell the rinse she used in her hair, and it was faintly intoxicating. I loved her eyes, loved the shape of her, loved the way she aspirated her
h
’s like an elocution teacher. “Don’t you worry,” she whispered. “We’re already on it.”

O
NCE
V
ICKI HAD MENTIONED
the Weekses and the way they were flouting the code, I couldn’t get them out of my head. July
Weeks was a salesman of some sort, aviation parts, I think it was—he worked for Cessna—and he seemed to spend most of his time, despite the mosquito scare, buried deep in his own white wicker chaise longue out on the wraparound porch of his Courteous Coastal directly across the street from me. He was a Southerner, and that was all right because this
was
the South, after all, but he had one of those accents that just went on clanging and jarring till you could barely understand a word he was saying. Not that I harbor any prejudices—he was my neighbor, and if he wanted to sound like an extra from
Deliverance
, that was his privilege. But I looked out the front window and saw that race car—
No excessive or unsightly vehicles, including campers, RVs, moving vans or trailers, shall be parked on the public streets for a period exceeding forty-eight continuous hours
, Section III, Article 12, Declaration of Covenants, Deeds and Restrictions—and the sight of it became an active irritation. Which was compounded by the fact that the eldest son, August, pulled up one afternoon in a pickup truck that sat about six feet up off its Bayou Crawler tires and deposited a boat trailer at the curb. The boat was painted puce with lime-green trim and it had a staved-in hull. Plus, there were those curtains.

A week went by. Two weeks. I got updates from Vicki—we were seeing each other just about every day now—and of course the Citizens’ Committee, as an arm of the TJC, was threatening the Weekses with a lawsuit and the Weekses had hired an attorney and were threatening back, but nothing happened. I couldn’t enjoy my wraparound porch or the view out my mullioned Craftsman windows. Every time I looked up, there was the boat, there was the car, and beyond them, the curtains. The situation began to weigh on me, so one night after dinner I strolled down the three broad inviting steps of my wraparound porch, waved a greeting to the Fills on my right and Mark and Leonard on my left, and crossed the street to mount the equally inviting steps of the Weekses’ wraparound porch with the intention of setting Mr. Weeks straight on a few things. Or no, that sounds too harsh. I wanted to block out a couple issues with him and see if we couldn’t resolve things amicably for all concerned.

He was sitting in the chaise longue, his wife in the wicker armchair
beside him. An Atlanta Braves cap that looked as if it had just come off the shelf at Gulpy’s Sports Emporium hid his brow and the crown of his head and he was wearing a pair of those squared-off black sunglasses for people with cataracts, and that reduced the sum of his expression to the sharp beak of his nose and an immobile mouth. The wife was a squat Korean woman whose name I could never remember. She was peeling the husk off of a dark pungent pod or tuber. It was a homey scene, and the moment couldn’t have been more neighborly.

“Hi,” I said (or maybe, prompted by the ambience, I might even have managed a “Howdy”).

Neither of them said a word.

“Listen,” I began, after standing there for an awkward moment (and what had I been expecting—mint juleps?). “Listen, about the curtains and the car and all that—the boat—I just wanted to say, well, I mean, it might seem like a small thing, it’s ridiculous, really, but—”

He cut me off then. I don’t know what he said, but it sounded something like “Rabid rabid gurtz.”

The wife—her name came to me suddenly: Fili—translated. She carefully set aside the root or pod or whatever it was and gave me a flowering smile that revealed a set of the whitest and evenest teeth I’d ever seen. “He say you can blow it out you ass.”

“No, no,” I said, brushing right by it, “you misunderstand me. I’m not here to complain, or even to convince you of anything. It’s just that, well, I’m your neighbor, and I thought if we—”

Here he spoke again, a low rumble of concatenated sounds that might have been expressive of digestive trouble, but the wife—Fili—seeing my blank expression, dutifully translated: “He say his gun—you know gun?—he say he keep gun loaded.”

T
HINGS ARE NOT PERFECT
. I never claimed they were. And if you’re going to have a free and open town and not one of these gated neoracist enclaves, you’ve got to be willing to accept that. The TJC sued the Weekses and the Weekses sued them back, and still the curtains flamed behind the windows and the garish race car and the unseaworthy
boat sat at the curb across the street. So what I did to make myself feel better, was buy a dog. A Scottie. Lauren would never let me have a dog—she claimed to be allergic, but in fact she was pathologically averse to any intrusion on the rigid order she maintained around the house—and we never had any children either, which didn’t affect me one way or the other, though I should say I was one of the few single men in Jubilation who didn’t view Vicki’s kids as a liability. I grew to like them, in fact—or Ethan, anyway; the baby was just a baby, practically inert if it wasn’t shrieking as if it had just had the skin stripped from its limbs. But Ethan was something else. I liked the feel of his tiny bunched little sweating hand in mine as we strolled down to the Benny Tarpon Old Tyme Ice Cream Parlor in the evening or took a turn round Lake Allagash. He was always tugging me one way or the other, chattering, pointing like a tour director: “Look,” he would say. “Look!”

I named the dog Bruce, after my grandfather on my mother’s side. He was a year old and housetrained, and I loved the way the fur hid his paws so that he seemed to glide over the grass of the village green as if he had no means of locomotion beyond willpower and magic.