Tooth and Claw (25 page)

The cool breath of a breeze rode up off the water. He could hear the waves lifting and falling against the plane of the beach with a low reverberant boom, could feel the concussion radiating through the worn-out soles of his sneakers and up into his feet and ankles like a new kind of friction. The parking lot was deserted, five cars exactly, and the gulls had taken over as if he’d walked into that other movie, the Hitchcock one, what was it called? With Tippi Hedren? They were grouped at the edge of the pavement, a hundred of them or more, pale and motionless as statues. “Tippi, Tippi, Tippi,” he said aloud. “The Tipster.” There was a smell of iodine and whatever the tide had brought in.

He went from fire to fire on the beach, shared a swig of vodka in exchange for whatever the huddled groups were drinking, saw the guy with the broken glasses—Herbert, his name was Herbert—and
a few other faces he vaguely recognized, but no Sky and no Pal. The night was clear, the stars alive and spread over the deepening sky all the way out to the Channel Islands and down as far as Rincón to the east. He shuffled through the still-warm sand in a kind of bliss, the second pint of vodka pressed to his lips, all the rough edges of things worn smooth, all his problems reduced to zero. He was going to find Sky, Sky his benefactor, the songbird, and see if he wanted a hit or two of vodka, and maybe they could sit around the fire and sing, order up another pizza, lie there and stare up at the stars as if they owned them all. It was early yet. The night was young.

The train gave him his first scare. He’d just come across the trestle and stepped to one side, careful of his footing in the loose stone, when the whistle sounded behind him. He was drunk and slow to react, sure, but it just about scared him out of his skin nonetheless. There was a rush of air and then the train—it was a freight, a thousand dark, clanking cars—went by like thunder, like war. He twisted his right ankle trying to lurch out of the way and went down hard in the bushes, but he held on to the bottle, that was the important thing, because the bottle—and most of it was left—was an offering for Sky, and maybe Knitsy too, if she was there. For a long while, as the sound of the train faded in the distance, he sat there in the dark, rubbing his ankle and laughing softly to himself—he could have been like the deaf-mute, somebody Dana would read about in the morning paper.
Raymond Leitner, cut down by the southbound. After a week-long illness. Currently—make that permanently—unemployed. Survived by his loving mother. Wherever she might be
.

When he got close enough to the camp to see the glow of candlelight suffusing the walls of the wigwam, he was startled by a sudden harsh shout and then Pal started barking, and there was movement there, framed against the drizzle of the light. “I said you ever touch her I’m going to kill your ass, because she’s my soulmate, you motherfucker, my
soulmate
, and you know it!”

Sky’s voice sang out, harsh and ragged, “Get off of me, get out of here, go on, get out!” And the barking. The barking rose to a frenzy, high-pitched, breathless, and then suddenly there was the dull wet thump of a blow, and the barking ceased, even as the movement shook
the floating walls and the light snuffed out. “Here comes, you son of a bitch,” Dougie’s voice shouted out, “I’ll give you here comes,” and there was that wet sound again, the percussion of unyielding metal and yielding flesh, and again, and again.

Raymond froze. He took a step back in the dark, collided with something that shouldn’t have been there, a solid immovable shape stretched out across the flat of the ground—and the tarp, the tarp he’d slept on—and the ankle gave way. He went down again, and the bottle with him, the sudden explosion of its shattering like gunfire in the night. His blood raced. He felt around him for a branch, a rock, anything, and that was when his hands told him what it was he’d tripped over. Her hair was the first thing, then the slick cotton of the dress, and everything wet and cold.

The night went silent. He couldn’t see, all the shadings of uncommitted dark swelling and shrinking around him. A shadow rose up then out of the black pool of the ground no more than twenty feet away, rose to full height, and began to slash at the darkness where the wigwam would have been, and Dougie was cursing, raging, beating at everything in the night till the galvanized post rang out against the stones. Raymond was no longer drunk. He didn’t move, didn’t breathe. The post rose and fell till the shadows changed shape and the curses subsided into sobs and choked, half-formed phrases, to barks and whispers, and then there was another sound, the clangor of the post flung away against the stones of the railway bed and a new metallic sound, the whirring of gears, and suddenly the shadow was moving off down the deserted tracks on the dark skeleton of a mountain bike.

I
T TOOK HIM NEARLY
an hour, hobbled by the ankle that felt as if it had been snapped off the bone, sharpened to a point and jammed back in again, an hour treading along the railway ties, through the sand, up the sidewalks still full of safe, oblivious people passing from one appointment to another. He just kept walking, rotating up off the bad ankle, and they saw his face and stood aside for him. Dogs barked. Cars shot past. There were shouts and voices in the night. He had never been down there by the railroad tracks, never been to
any bum’s encampment, never passed a bottle with a bunch of derelicts, and there’d never been any question in his mind about going to Sky’s aid or calling the police or anything else. He was just walking, that was all, walking home. And when he got there, when he saw Dana just getting out of her car, her face softened with drink and her hair newly cut, cut short as an acolyte’s, he got down on his knees and crawled to her.

A
LL
I
WANTED
, really, was to attain mythic status. Along the lines, say, of James Dean, Brom Bones, Paul Bunyan, my father. My father was a giant among men, with good-sized trees for arms and fists like buckets of nails, and I was not a giant among men. I wasn’t even a man, though I began to look like one as I grew into my shoulders and eventually found something to shave off my cheeks after a close and patient scrutiny, and I manfully flunked out of three colleges and worked at digging graves at the Beth-El cemetery and shoveling chicken shit at the Shepherd Hill Egg Farm till I got smart and started bartending. That was a kind of wreckage, I suppose—flunking out—but there was much more to come, wrecks both literal and figurative, replete with flames, blood, crushed metal and broken hearts, a whole swath of destruction and self-immolation, my own personal skid marks etched into the road of my life and maybe yours too.

So. Where to start? With Helen, I suppose, Helen Kreisler. She was a cocktail waitress at the restaurant where I was mixing drinks six and a half days a week, four years older than I when I met her—that is, twenty-seven—and with a face that wasn’t exactly pretty in any conventional sense, but more a field for the play of psychodrama, martyrdom and high-level neurosis. It was an old face, much older than her cheerleader’s body and her still relatively tender years, a face full of worry, with lines scored around her eyes and dug deep into the corners of her mouth. She wore her hair long and parted in the middle, after the fashion of the day, and her eyes—the exact color of aluminum foil—jumped out of her tanned face from a hundred feet
away. They were alien eyes, that’s what I called them. And her too.
Alien
, that was my pet name for her, and I used it to urge her on when she was on top of me and my hands were on her breasts and her mouth had gone slack with the feeling of what I was doing to her.

It was about a month after I started working at Brennan’s Steakhouse that we decided to move in together. We found a two-bedroom house dropped down in a blizzard of trees by the side of a frozen lake. This was in suburban New York, by the way, in the farthest, darkest reaches of northern Westchester, where the nights were black-dark and close. The house was cheap, so far as rent was concerned, because it was a summer house, minimally insulated, but as we were soon to discover, two hundred dollars a month would go up the chimney or stovepipe or whatever it was that was connected to the fuel-evaporating furnace in the basement. Helen was charmed despite the water-stained exterior walls and the stink of frozen mouseshit and ancient congealed grease that hit you in the face like a two-by-four the minute you stepped in the door, and we lied to the landlady (a mustachioed widow with breasts the size of New Jersey and Connecticut respectively) about our marital status, got out our wallets and put down our first and last months’ rent. It was a move up for me at any rate, because to this point I’d been living in a basement apartment at my parents’ house, sleeping late as bartenders will do, and listening to the heavy stolid tread of my father’s footsteps above me as he maneuvered around his coffee cup in the morning before leaving for work.

Helen fixed the place up with some cheap rugs and prints and a truckload of bric-a-brac from the local head shop—candles, incense burners, ceramic bongs, that sort of thing. We never cooked. We were very drunk and very stoned. Meals, in which we weren’t especially interested, came to us out of a saucepan at the restaurant—except for breakfast, a fuzzy, woozy meal heavy on the sugars and starches and consumed languidly at the diner. Our sex was youthful, fueled by hormonal rushes, pot and amyl nitrate, and I was feeling pretty good about things—about myself, I mean—for the first time in my life.

But before I get into all that, I ought to tell you about the first of the wrecks, the one from which all the others seemed to spool out
like fishing line that’s been on the shelf too long. It was my first night at work, at Brennan’s, that is. I’d done a little bartending weekends in college, but it was strictly beer, 7&7, rum and Coke, that sort of thing, and I was a little tentative about Brennan’s, a big softly lit place that managed to be intimate and frenziedly public at the same time, and Ski Silinski, the other bartender, gave me two shots of 151 and a Tuinol to calm me before the crush started. Well, the crush started, and I was still about as hyper as you can get without strictly requiring a straitjacket, but way up on the high end of that barely controlled hysteria there was a calm plateau of rum, Tuinol and the beer I sipped steadily all night long—and this was a place I aspired to reach eventually, once the restaurant closed down and I could haul myself up there and fade into a warm, post-conscious glow. We did something like a hundred and ten dinners that night, I met and flirted with Helen and three other cocktail waitresses and half a dozen partially lit female customers, and, all things considered, acquitted myself well. Ski and I had the door locked, the glasses washed and tomorrow’s fruit cut and stowed when Jimmy Brennan walked in.

Helen and one of the other waitresses—Adele-something—were sitting at the bar, the stereo was cranked and we were having a celebratory nightcap at the time. It didn’t faze Jimmy. He was the owner, only thirty-two years old, and he’d really stepped in it with this place, the first West Coast-style steak-and-salad-bar restaurant in the area. He drove a new Triumph, British racing green, and he drank martinis, straight up with a twist. “How’d it go tonight, Lester?” he asked, settling his lean frame on a barstool even as Ski set a martini, new-born and gleaming with condensation, before him.

I gave the waitresses a look. They were in their skimpy waitress outfits, long bare perfect legs crossed at the knee, cigarettes propped between the elegantly bunched knuckles that in turn propped up their weary silken heads. I was a man among men—and women—and I feared no evil and felt no pain. “Fine,” I said, but I was already amending what seemed a much-too-modest assessment. “No, better than fine: great. Stupendous. Magnificent.”

Jimmy Brennan wore glasses, the thin silver-framed discs made
popular two years earlier by John Lennon. His eyes were bright behind them and I attributed that brightness to the keenness of mind and Darwinian fortitude that had made him rich at thirty-two, but I was wrong. That gleam was the gleam of alcohol, nothing more. Jimmy Brennan was, as I would discover, an alcoholic, though at the time that seemed just fine to me—anything that altered your consciousness and heightened your perceptions was cool in the extreme, as far as I was concerned.

Jimmy Brennan bought us a round, and then another. Helen gave me a look out of her silver-foil eyes—a look of lust, complicity, warning?—picked up her bag and left with Adele. It was three-thirty in the morning. Ski, who at twenty-seven was married and a father, pleaded his wife. The door closed behind him and I remember vividly the sound of the latch clicking into place as he turned his key from the outside. “Well,” Jimmy said, slapping my back, “I guess it’s just us, huh?”

I don’t remember much of the rest of it, except this: I was in my car when I woke up, there was a weak pale sun draped over everything like a crust of vomit, and it was very, very hot. And more: there was a stranger in a yellow slicker beating out the glass of the driver’s side window and I was trying to fight him off till the flames licking away at my calves began to make their point more emphatically than he could ever have. As I later reconstructed it, or as it was reconstructed for me, I’d apparently left the bar in the cold glow of dawn, fired up the engine of my car and then passed out with my foot to the floor. But as Jimmy said when he saw me behind the bar the next night, “It could have been worse—think what would’ve happened if the thing had been in gear.”

M
Y FATHER SEEMED TO THINK
the whole affair was pretty idiotic, but he didn’t deliver any lectures. It was idiotic, but by some convoluted way of thinking, it was manly too. And funny. Deeply, richly, skin-of-the-teeth and laughing-in-the-face-of-Mr.-D. funny. He rubbed his balding head with his nail-bucket hands and said he guessed I could take my mother’s car to work until I could find myself another
heap of bolts, but he hoped I’d show a little more restraint and maybe pour a drop or two of coffee into my brandy before trying to make it home on all that glare ice.