Tooth and Claw (3 page)

“Wait a minute, what’s this? Hey, Dagan.
Dagan
. You see this?” It was the guy they called Pillar, a senior who wore a perpetual look of disappointment on his face and was said to have once won the drinking contest at Harry’s Bar in Key West by outlasting a three-hundred-pound Samoan through sixteen rounds of mojitos. He was holding up two still-sealed bottles of Don José tequila.

Dagan’s face floated into the picture. “I see what you mean, bro—the place just isn’t clean, is it? I mean, would you want to operate under these conditions?”

“Uh-uh, no way,” Pillar said. “Not while these motherfucking bottles are sitting here. I’m offended. I really am. How about you, Dagan? Aren’t you offended?”

Dude
. That was what they called the drinking game, though Chris had never heard of it before and would never hear of it again. Dude, that was all, and the whole house was chanting it now, “Dude! Dude! Dude!” Dagan marched the pledges down to the game room in the
basement, made them line up against the back wall and handed each of them a shot glass. This was where the big-screen TV was, where the whole house gathered to watch the Pats and the Celtics and the porn videos that made your blood surge till you thought it was going to keep on going right out the top of your head.

It was 2:00
A
.
M
. Chris couldn’t feel his legs. Everything seemed funny suddenly, and he was laughing so hard he thought he was going to bring it all up, the beer, the schnapps, the pepperoni pizza and the chips and salsa and Cheez Doodles, and his pledgemates were laughing too, Dude, the funniest thing in the world. Then Dagan slipped the video into the VCR—
Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure
—and gave them their instructions, serious business now, a ritual, and no fooling around (“I’m serious, people, and wipe the smirks off your faces—you are in deep shit now”). Music, a flash of color, and there was Keanu Reeves, with his slice of an Asiatic face and disappearing eyes, playing the fool, or maybe playing to type, and every time he uttered the monosyllabic tag that gave the game its name, the pledge class had to lift the glasses to their lips and down a shot—“Hey, dude; ‘S up, dude”—till both bottles were drained.

Benny Chung was the first one to break. He was seventeen, a Merit Scholarship finalist, with narrow shoulders, wrists you could loop two fingers around and a head that seemed to float up like a balloon from the tether of his neck. His shoulders dipped forward as if he were trying to duck under a low-hanging limb, then his lips pulled back and he spewed all over the floor and his pant legs and his black high-top Converse sneakers. It was a heroic effort, so much of that umber chowder coming out of so frail a vessel, and Benny had to go down on one knee to get it all out. Nobody said anything, and nobody was laughing now. Up on the screen, Keanu Reeves said the magic word, and all the pledges, including Benny, hammered another shot. Benny couldn’t hold it, though, and neither could Chris. Chris saw the look on Benny’s face—the outrage of an entire organism and all its constituent cells—and he remembered his own legs buckling and the release the first wave of nausea gave him, and then he felt nothing more.

All the Delts were swarming the room now, expostulating over
this disgusting display, this pathetic showing on the part of a pledge class that wasn’t worthy of the name, and hands took hold of Benny and Chris, people shouting and jostling, the whinny of laughter, cries of “Gross!” and “Don’t get any of that shit on me, man,” the hands finding purchase at armpit and knee. They laid Benny and Chris side by side on Chris’ bed, then thundered back down the three flights of stairs to the game room. Half an hour went by and both bottles of Don José were drained by the time anyone thought to look in on them, and another ten minutes elapsed before Dagan Drava, a premed student, realized that Chris wasn’t breathing.

“So he was drunk,” Jimmy told me, the band into their opening number now—blues, they were doing a blues tune that seemed vaguely familiar—“and who hasn’t been drunk? I’ve been drunk a thousand times in my life, you know what I mean? So I figure, all the way up there with Caroline hyperventilating and what-if-ing and driving me half crazy, that we’re going to walk into the hospital and he’ll be sitting up in bed with a sheepish grin on his face, one hell of a headache, maybe, and a lesson learned, but no harm done.”

Jimmy was wrong. His son had choked on his own vomit, inhaled it, compromising his lungs. No one knew how long he’d been lying there in the bed next to Benny Chung without drawing a breath before the E.R. team restarted his heart, and no one was sure of how much damage had been done to his brain functions. A CT scan showed edema of the brain tissue. He was in a coma. A machine was breathing for him. Caroline went after the doctors like an inquisitor, relentless, terrifying in her grief. She stalked the halls, chased them to their cars, harangued them on the phone, demanded—and got—the top neurologist in New England. Chris’ eyes never opened. Beneath the lids, like a dirty secret, his pupils dilated to full and fixed there, focused on nothing. Two days later he was dead.

I bought Jimmy a drink, watched myself in the mirror behind the bar. I didn’t look like anybody I knew, but there I was, slouched over my elbows and a fresh drink, taking in air and letting it seep back out again. The woman with the deep-dredged laugh was gone. A couple in their twenties had settled into the vacant spot on the other side of Jimmy, oblivious to the drama that had just played out here,
the woman perched on the barstool while the man stood in place, rocking in her arms to the beat of the music. The band featured a harp player, and he moved round the confines of the stage like a caged animal, riffling the notes till he went all the way from despair to disbelief and back again, the bass player leaning in as if to brace himself, the guitar rising up slow and mournful out of the stew of the backbeat.

“Hey, don’t feel sorry for me,” Jimmy said. “I’m out here in California having the time of my life.” He pointed a finger at the rain-streaked window. “All this sun really cheers me up.”

I don’t know why I asked—I was drunk, I guess, feeling maudlin, who knows?—but I said, “You got a place to stay tonight?”

He looked into the shot glass as if he might discover a motel key at the bottom of it. “I’m on sabbatical,” he said. “Or on leave, actually. I was staying with my brother—up on Olive Mill?—but he got to be a pain in the ass. Caroline couldn’t take it. She’s back in New York. At least, I think she is.”

“Hard luck,” I said, just to say something.

“Oh, yeah,” he said, “sure, and that’s the long and the short of it. But I tell you, I clean up real nice, and what I plan to do is pick up one of these spare women here, like that one over there—the dye job looks like she just crawled out of a coffin? She’ll take me home with her, what you want to bet? And what you want to bet she’s got a shower, maybe even a Jacuzzi?”

I didn’t want to bet anything. I wanted another drink, that was all. And after that, I wanted to have maybe one more, at this place up the street I’d been to a couple of times, just to see what was happening, because it was Saturday night and you never knew.

A
WEEK LATER
—it was the next Friday, actually—I went into a place down at the marina for cocktails with a woman I’d almost picked up after I left Jimmy at the steakhouse the previous Saturday. Her name was Steena, she was five-ten, blond, and just getting over a major breakup with a guy named Steve whose name dropped from her lips with the frequency of a speech impediment. She’d agreed to “have a drink” with me, and though I’d hoped for more, I had to assume,
after we’d had two glasses each of Piper-Heidsieck at twelve and a half dollars per and a plate of oysters, that I wasn’t
her
type either. The whole time she kept glancing at her watch, and finally her cell phone rang and she got up from the table and went out into the anteroom to take the call. It was Steve. She was sorry, but he wanted to meet her later, for dinner, and he sounded so sad and heartbroken and shot through with misery and contrition she couldn’t refuse. I had nothing to say. I just stared at her, the plate of desecrated oysters between us. “So,” she said, hovering over the table as if she were afraid to sit back down, “I guess I’m going to have to say goodbye. It’s been nice, though. Really.”

I paid the waitress and moved up to the bar, idly watching the Lakers go through their paces with the sound muted and gazing out the window on the pale bleached forest of the ships’ masts gathered there against the night. I was drinking brandy and water, picking through a bowl of artificial snack food and waiting for something to happen, when I ran into the other man I wanted to tell you about. Shaq’s monumental head loomed up on the screen and then faded away again, and I turned around and there he was, just settling into the seat beside me. For a minute I thought he was Jimmy—he had the same hangdog look, the rangy height, the air of an athlete gone to seed—and it gave me a start, because the last thing I needed the way I was feeling was another bout of one-way commiseration. He nodded a greeting, then looked up at the screen. “What’s the score?”

“The Lakers are killing them,” I said. “I think. I’m pretty sure, anyway.” But this
was
Jimmy, had to be, Jimmy all dressed up and with his hair combed and looking satisfied with himself. It was then that I remembered the brother. “You wouldn’t be Jimmy’s brother, would you?” I said. “By any chance?”

“
Whose
brother?”

I felt foolish then. Obviously Jimmy hadn’t given me his real name, and why would he? The alcohol bloomed in my brain, petals unfolding like a rosebud in time-lapse photography. “It’s nothing,” I said, “I just thought…” and let it die. I went back to watching the game. Helped myself to the artificial snacks. Had another brandy
and water. After a while the man beside me ordered dinner at the bar, and I got into a conversation about recycling and the crime of waste with a startled-looking woman and her martini-fueled husband. Gradually, the bar filled up. The startled-looking woman and her husband went in to dinner and somebody else took their place. Nothing was happening. Absolutely nothing. I was thinking I should move on, pick up a pizza, some take-out, make it an early night, and I could envision myself standing at the supercharged counter of Paniagua’s Pizza Palace, where you could get two slices with chorizo and jalapeños for three dollars and fifty cents, but instead I found myself turning to the man on my left. “You do have a brother, though, right?” I said.

He gave me a long, slow, deliberate look, then shrugged. “What, does he owe you money?”

So we talked about Jimmy, Jimmy’s tragedy, Jimmy’s refusal to accept facts and the way Jimmy was running hard up against the sharp edges of the world and was sure to wind up in a coffin just like his father before him and his son too if he didn’t get himself into rehab as his number one priority. Then we talked about me, but I didn’t reveal much, and then it was general subjects, the look of the people on TV as opposed to the look of the flesh-and-blood people sitting at the tables at our feet like an undiscovered tribe, and then, inevitably, we came back to alcohol. I told him of some of my escapades, he told me of his. I was probably on my sixth or seventh brandy and water when we got back as far as our mutual childhoods lived mutually under the shadow of booze, though on opposite coasts. The brother was in an expansive mood, his wife and six-year-old daughter gone for the weekend to a Little Miss pageant in Sacramento, and the four walls of his house—or eight or sixteen or however many there were—inadequate to contain him. I took a sip of my drink and let him fly.

He was three years older than Jimmy, and they had two other brothers and a sister, all younger. They moved around a lot as kids, but one winter they were living out in the country in Dutchess County, at the junction of two blacktop roads where there were a
handful of summer cabins that had been converted to cheap year-round housing, a two-pump gas station where you could get milk, bread and Coke in the eight-ounce bottle, and a five-stool roadhouse with a jukebox and a griddle called the Pine-Top Tavern. The weather turned nasty, their father was out of work and about a month from bailing out for good, and neither of their parents left the tavern for more than a shower or a shave or to put a couple cans of chicken broth in a saucepan and dump a handful of rice and sliced wieners in on top of it so the kids would have something to eat. Jimmy’s brother had a cough that wouldn’t go away. Their little sister had burned her arm on the stove trying to make herself a can of tomato soup and the brother had to change her bandage twice a day and rub ointment into the exfoliated skin. Jimmy spent his time out in the weed-blistered lot behind the house, kicking a football as close to vertical as he could, over and over again, then slanting off to retrieve it before it could hit the ground. Their dog—Gomer, named after the TV character—had been killed crossing the road on Christmas Eve, and their father blamed one of the drunks leaving the tavern, but nobody did anything about it.

It was just after Christmas—or maybe after New Year’s, because school had started up again—when a cold front came down out of Hudson Bay and froze everything so thoroughly nobody could stand to be out of doors more than five minutes at a time. The birds huddled under the eaves of the tavern, looking distressed; the squirrels hung like ornaments in the stripped trees. Everybody in the family drank hot tea thick with honey and the oily residue of the bitter lemon juice that came out of the plastic squeeze bottle, and that was the only time their hands seemed to warm up. When they went outside, the bare ground crackled underfoot as if it were crusted with snow, and for a few days there none of the converted cabins had water because the lines from the well had frozen underground. Jimmy’s brother, though he had a cough that wouldn’t go away, had to take a pail across the road to the pond and break the ice to get water for the stove.

He remembered his father, wizened forearms propped up on the bar in a stained khaki parka he’d worn in Korea, a sheaf of hair canted
the wrong way because it hadn’t seen a comb in days, the smoke of his cigarette fuming in the dark forge of the bar. And his mother, happiest woman in the world, laughing at anything, laughing till all the glasses were drained and the lights went out and the big-bellied bartender with the caved-in face shooed them out the door and locked the place up for the night. It was cold. The space heater did nothing, less than nothing, and Jimmy’s brother could have earned his merit badge as a fire-starter that winter because all he did was comb the skeletal forest for fallen branches, rotten stumps and fence posts, anything that would burn, managing to keep at least a continuous smolder going day and night. And then he got up for school one morning and there was an old woman—or a woman his mother’s age, anyway—laid out snoring on the couch in front of the fireplace where the dog used to sleep. He went into his parents’ room and shook his mother awake. “There’s somebody sleeping out there on the couch,” he told her, and watched her gather her features together and assess the day. He had to repeat himself twice, the smell of her, of her warmth and the warmth of his father beside her, rising up to him with a sweet-sick odor of sex and infirmity, and then she murmured through her cracked lips, “Oh, that’s only Grace. You know Grace—from the tavern? Her car won’t start, that’s all. Be a good boy, huh, and don’t wake her?”