Tooth and Claw (18 page)

That was around the time we began to feel the effects of the three-year drought that none of the TJC salespeople had bothered to mention in their all-day seminars and living-color brochures. The wind came up out of the south carrying a freight of smoke (apparently the Everglades were on fire) and a fine brown dust that obliterated our lawns and flowerbeds and made a desert of the village green. The heat seemed to increase too, as if the fires had somehow turned up the thermostat, but the worst of it was the smell. Everywhere you went, whether you were standing on line at the bank, sunk into one of the magic-fingers lounge chairs at the movie theater or pulling your head up off the pillow in the morning, the stale smell of old smoke assaulted your nostrils.

I was walking Bruce up on Golfpark Drive one afternoon, where our select million-dollar-plus homes back up onto the golf course—and you have to realize that this is part of the Contash vision too, millionaires living cheek by jowl with single mothers like Vicki and all the others struggling to pay mortgages that were thirty-five percent
higher than those in the surrounding area, not to mention special assessments and maintenance fees—when a man with a camera slung round his neck stopped me and asked if he could take my picture. The sky was marbled with smoke. Dust fled across the pavement. The birds were actually shrieking in the trees. “Me?” I said. “Why me?”

“I don’t know,” he said, snapping the picture. “I like your dog.”

“You do?” I was flattered, I admit it, but I was on my guard too. Journalists from all over the world had descended on the town en masse, mainly to cook up dismissive articles about a legion of Stepford wives and robotic husbands living on a Contash movie set and doing daily obeisance to Gulpy Gator. None of them ever bothered to mention our equanimity, our openness and shared ideals. Why would they? Hard work and sacrifice never have made for good copy.

“Yeah, sure,” he said, “and would you mind posing over there, by the gate to that gingerbread mansion? That’s good. Nice.” He took a series of shots, the camera whirring through its motions. He wore a buzz cut, a two-day growth of nearly translucent beard and a pair of tri-colored Nikes. “You do live here, don’t you?” he asked finally. “I mean, you’re an actual resident, right, and not a tourist?”

I felt a surge of pride. “That’s right,” I said. “I’m one of the originals.”

He gave me an odd look, as if he were trying to sniff out an imposter. “Do they really pay you to walk the dog around the village green six times a day?”

“
Pay
me? Who?”

“You know, the town, the company. You can’t have a town without people in it, right?” He looked down at Bruce, who was sniffing attentively at a dust-coated leaf. “Or dogs?” The camera clicked again, several times in succession. “I hear they pay that old lady on the moped too—and the guy that sets up his easel in front of the Gulpy monument every morning.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You’re out of your mind.”

“And I’ll tell you another thing—don’t think just because you bought into the Contash lifestyle you’re immune from all the shit that comes down in the real world, because you’re not. In fact, I’d watch that dog if I were you—”

Somewhere the fires were burning. A rag of smoke flapped at my face and I began to cough. “You’re one of those media types, aren’t you?” I said, pounding at my breastbone. “You people disgust me. You don’t even make a pretense of unbiased reporting—you just want to ridicule us and tear us down, isn’t that right?” My dander was up. Who were these people to come in here and try to undermine everything we’d been working for? I shot him a look of impatience. “It wouldn’t be jealousy, would it? By any chance?”

He shrugged, shifted the camera to one side and dug a cigarette out of his breast pocket. I watched him cup his hands against the breeze and light it. He flung the match in the bushes, a symbolic act, surely. “We used to have a Scottie when I was a kid,” he said, exhaling. “So I’m just telling you—you’d be surprised what I know about this town, what goes on behind closed doors, the double-dealing, the payoffs, the flouting of the environmental regs, all the dirt the TJC and Charles Contash don’t want you to know about. View me as a resource, your diligent representative of the fourth estate. Keep the dog away from the lake, that’s all.”

I was stubborn. I wasn’t listening. “He can swim.”

The man let out a short, unpleasant laugh. “I’m talking about alligators, my friend, and not the cuddly little cartoon kind. You might or might not know it because I’m sure it’s not advertised in any of the TJC brochures, but when they built Contash World back in the sixties they evicted all the alligators, not to mention the coral snakes and cane rattlers and snapping turtles—and where do you think they put them?”

A
LL RIGHT
. I was forewarned. And what happened should never have happened, I know that, but there are hazards in any community, whether it be South Central L.A. or Scarsdale or Kuala Lumpur. I took Bruce around Lake Allagash—twice—and then went home and barbecued a platter of wings and ribs for Vicki and the kids and I thought no more about it. Alligators. They were there, sure they were, but so were the mosquitoes and the poison toads that looked like deflated kick balls and chased the dogs off their kibble. This was Florida. It was muggy. It was hot. We had our share of sand fleas and
whatnot. But at least we didn’t have to worry about bronchial pneumonia or snow tires.

The rains came in mid-September, a series of thunderstorms that rolled in off the Gulf and put out the fires. We had problems with snails and slugs for a while there, armadillos crawling up half-drowned on the lawn, snakes in the garage, walking catfish, that sort of thing—I even found an opossum curled up in the dryer one morning amidst my socks and boxer shorts. But the Citizens’ Committee was active in picking up strays, nursing them back to health and restoring them to the ecosystem, so it wasn’t as bad as you’d think. And after that, the sun came out and the earth just seemed to steam till every trace of mold and mud was erased and the flowers went mad with the glory of it. The smoke was gone, the snails had crawled back into their holes or dens or wherever they lived when they weren’t smearing the windows with slime, and the air was scented so sweetly it was as if the Contash Corp had hired a fleet of crop dusters to spray air freshener over the town. Even the thermometer cooperated, the temperature holding at a nice equitable seventy-eight degrees for three days running. Tear the page out of the brochure: this was what we’d all come for.

I was sitting out on my wraparound porch, trying to ignore the decrepit boat and magenta car across the street,
Crime and Punishment
spread open in my lap (Raskolnikov was just climbing the steps to the old lady’s place and I was waiting for the axe to fall), when Vicki called and proposed a picnic. She’d made up some sandwiches on the brown nut bread I like, asiago cheese, sweet onion and roasted red pepper, and she’d picked up a nice bottle of Chilean white at the Contash Liquor Mart. Was I ready for some sun? And maybe a little backrub afterward at her place?

Ethan wanted to go out on the water, but when we got to the Jubilation dock the sound of the ratcheting motors scared him, so we settled on an aluminum rowboat, and that was better—or would have been better—because we could hear ourselves think and didn’t have to worry about all that spew of fumes, and that was a real concern for Vicki. We might have been raised in houses where our parents smoked two packs a day and sprayed Raid on the kitchen counter every time an ant or roach showed its face—or head or feelers
or whatever—but there was no way any toxins were entering her children’s systems, not if she could help it. So I rented the rowboat. “No problem,” I told Vicki, who was looking terrific in a sunbonnet, her bikini top and a pair of skimpy shorts that showed off her smooth solid legs and the Gulpy tattoo on her ankle. The fact was I hadn’t been kayaking since the rains started and the exercise was something I was looking forward to.

It took me a few strokes to reacquaint myself with the apparatus of oars and oarlocks, and we lurched away from the dock as if we’d been torpedoed, but I got into the rhythm of it soon enough and we glided cleanly out across the mirrored surface of the lake. Vicki didn’t want me to go more than twenty or thirty feet from shore, and that was all right too, except that I found myself dredging up noxious-smelling clumps of pondweed that seemed to cast a powerful olfactory spell over Bruce. He kept snapping at the weed as I lifted first one oar and then the other to try to shake it off, and once or twice I had to drop the oars and discipline him because he was leaning so far out over the bow I thought we were going to lose him. Still, we saw birdlife everywhere we looked, herons, egrets, cormorants and anhingas, and Ethan got a real kick out of a clutch of painted turtles stacked up like dinner plates on a half-submerged log.

We’d gone half a mile or so, I guess, to the far side of the lake where the wake of the motorboats wouldn’t interfere overmuch with the mustarding of the sandwiches and the delicate operation of pouring the wine into long-stemmed crystal glasses. The baby, wrapped up like a sausage in her life jacket—or life-cradle, might be more accurate—was asleep, a blissful baby smile painted on her lips. Bruce curled up at my feet in the brown swill at the bottom of the boat and Vicki sipped wine and gave me a look of contentment so deep and pure I was beginning to think I wouldn’t mind seeing it across the breakfast table for the rest of my life. It was tranquil. Dragonflies hovering, fish rising, not a mosquito in sight. Even little Ethan, normally such a clingy kid, seemed to be enjoying himself tracing the pattern of his finger in the water as the boat rocked and drifted in a gentle airy dance.

About that water. The TJC assured us it was unpolluted by human
waste and uncontaminated by farm runoff, and that its rusty color—it was nearly opaque and perpetually blooming with the microscopic creatures that comprise the bottom of the food chain in a healthy and thriving aquatic ecosystem—was perfectly natural. Though the lake had been dredged out of the swampland some forty years earlier, this was the way its waters had always looked, and the creatures that lived and throve here were grateful for it—like all of us in Jubilation, they had Charles Contash to thank for that too.

Well. We drifted, the dog and the baby snoozed, Vicki kept up a happy chatter on any number of topics, all of which seemed to have a subtext of sexual innuendo, and I just wasn’t prepared for what came next, and I blame myself, I do. Maybe it was the wine or the influence of the sun and the faint sweet cleansing breeze, but I wasn’t alert to the dangers inherent in the situation—I was an American, raised in a time of prosperity and peace, and I’d been spared the tumult and horror visited on so many of the less fortunate in this world. New York and L.A. might have been nasty places, and Lauren was certainly a plague in her own right, but nobody had ever bombed my village or shot down my family in the street, and when my parents died they died quietly, in their own beds.

I was in the act of extracting the wine bottle from its cradle of ice in the cooler when the boat gave a sudden lurch and I glanced up just in time to see the broad flat grinning reptilian head emerge from the water, pluck Ethan off the gunwale and vanish in the murk. It was like an illusion in a magic show, now he’s here, now he isn’t, and I wasn’t able to respond until my brain replayed the scene and I felt the sudden horror knife at my heart. “Did you—?” I began, but Vicki was already screaming.

T
HE SEQUENCE OF EVENTS
becomes a little confused for me at this juncture, but looking back on it, I’m fairly certain the funeral service preceded the thrashing we took from Hurricane Albert—I distinctly remember the volunteerism the community showed in dredging the lake, which would have been impossible after the hurricane hit. Sadly, no trace of little Ethan was ever found. No need to tell you how devastated I was—I was as hurt and wrung out as I’ve ever been
in my life, and I’ll never give up second-guessing myself—but even more, I was angry. Angry over the Contash Corp’s failure to disclose the hazards lurking around us and furious over the way the press jumped on the story, as if the life of a child was worth no more than a crude joke or a wedge to drive between the citizens of the community and the rest of the so-called civilized world.
Alligator Mom
. That was what they called Vicki in headlines three inches high, and could anyone blame her for packing up and going back to her mother in Philadelphia? I took her place on the Citizens’ Committee, though I’d never been involved in community affairs in my life to this point, and I was the one who pushed through the initiative to remove
all
the dangerous animals from the lake, no matter what their size or species (and that was a struggle too, the environmentalists crying foul in all their puritanical fervor, and one man—I won’t name him here—even pushing to have the alligators’ teeth capped as a compromise solution).

It wasn’t all bad, though. The service at the Jubilation Non-Denominational Chapel, for all its solemnity, was a real inspiration to us all, a public demonstration of our solidarity and determination. Charles Contash himself flew in from a meeting with the Russian premier to give the eulogy, every man, woman and child in town turned out to pay their respects, and the cards and flowers poured in from all over the country. Even July Weeks turned up, despite his friction with the TJC, and we found common ground in our contempt for the reporters massed on the steps out front of the chapel. He stood tall that day, barring the door to anyone whose face he didn’t recognize, and I forgave him his curtains, for the afternoon at least.

If anything, the hurricane brought us together even more than little Ethan’s tragedy. I remember the sky taking on the deep purple-black hue of a bruise and the vanguard of the rain that lashed down in a fusillade of wind-whipped pellets and the winds that sucked the breath right out of your body. Sam and Ernesta Fills helped me board up the windows of my Casual Contempo, and together we helped Mark and Leonard and the Weekses with their places and then went looking to lend a hand wherever we could. And when the
storm hit in all its intensity, just about everybody in town was bundled up safe and sound in the bastion of the movie palace, where the emergency generator allowed the TJC to lift the burden from our minds with a marathon showing of the Contash Corp’s most-beloved family films. Of course, we emerged to the devastation of what the National Weather Service was calling the single most destructive storm of the past century, and a good proportion of Jubilation had been reduced to rubble or swept away altogether. I was luckier than most. I lost the back wall that gives onto the kitchen, which in turn was knee-deep in roiling brown water and packed to the ceiling with wind-blown debris, and my wraparound porch was wrapped around the Weekses’ house, but on the plus side the offending race car and the boat were lifted right up into the sky and for all we know dropped somewhere over the Atlantic, and the Weekses’ curtains aren’t really an issue anymore.