Tooth and Claw (31 page)

But then the sun broke through the gloom in two pillars of fire, the visible world come to life with a suddenness that took away my breath, color bursting out everywhere, the range green all the way to the horizon, trees nodding in the wind, the very rock faces of the
cerros
set aflame, and the vision was gone. I listened to the drone of the engine, tipped the wings toward home, and never gave it another thought.

T
HE WEATHER
had absolutely nothing to do with it—though the rain had been falling off and on throughout the day and the way the gutters were dripping made me feel as if despair was the mildest term in the dictionary—because I would have gone down to Daggett’s that afternoon even if the sun was shining and all the fronds of the palm trees were gilded with light. The problem was work. Or, more specifically, the lack of it. The boss had called at six-thirty
A
.
M
. to tell me not to come in, because the guy I’d been replacing had recovered sufficiently from his wrenched back to feel up to working, and no, he wasn’t firing me, because they’d be onto a new job next week and he could use all the hands he could get. “So take a couple days off and enjoy yourself,” he’d rumbled into the phone in his low hoarse uneven voice that always seemed on the verge of morphing into something else altogether—squawks and bleats or maybe just static. “You’re young, right? Go out and get yourself some tail. Get drunk. Go to the library. Help old ladies across the street. You know what I mean?”

It had been a long day: breakfast out of a cardboard box while cartoon images flickered and faded and reconstituted themselves on the TV screen, and then some desultory reading, starting with the newspaper and a couple of
National Geographics
I’d picked up at a yard sale, lunch at the deli where I had ham and cheese in a tortilla wrap and exchanged exactly eleven words with the girl behind the counter (
Number 7, please, no mayo; Have a nice day; You too
), and a walk to the beach that left my sneakers sodden. And after all that it
was only three o’clock in the afternoon and I had to force myself to stay away from the bar till five, five at least.

I wasn’t stupid. And I had no intention of becoming a drunk like all the hard-assed old men in the shopping mall–blighted town I grew up in, silent men with hate in their eyes and complaint eating away at their insides—like my own dead father, for that matter—but I was new here, or relatively new (nine weeks now and counting) and Daggett’s was the only place where I felt comfortable. And why? Precisely because it was filled with old men drinking themselves into oblivion. It made me think of home. Or feel at home, anyway.

The irony wasn’t lost on me. The whole reason I’d moved out to the Coast to live, first with my Aunt Kim and her husband, Waverley, and then in my own one-bedroom apartment with kitchenette and a three-by-six-foot balcony with a partially obscured view of the Pacific, half a mile off, was so that I could inject a little excitement into my life and mingle with all the college students in the bars that lined State Street cheek to jowl, but here I was hanging out in an old man’s bar that smelled of death and vomit and felt as closed-in as a submarine, when just outside the door were all the exotic sun-struck glories of California. Where it never rained. Except in winter. And it was winter now.

I nodded self-consciously at the six or seven regulars lined up at the bar, then ordered a Jack-and-Coke, the only drink besides beer I liked the taste of, and I didn’t really like the taste of beer. There were sports on the three TVs hanging from the ceiling—this was a sports bar—but the volume was down and the speakers were blaring the same tired hits of the sixties I could have heard back home. Ad nauseam. When the bartender—
he
was young at least, as were the waitresses, thankfully—set down my drink, I made a comment about the weather, “Nice day for sunbathing, isn’t it?” and the two regulars nearest me glanced up with something like interest in their eyes. “Or maybe bird-watching,” I added, feeling encouraged, and they swung their heads back to the familiar triangulation of their splayed elbows and cocktail glasses and that was the end of that.

It must have been seven or so, the rain still coming down and people briefly enlivened by the novelty of it as they came and went
in spasms of umbrella furling and unfurling, when a guy about my own age—or no, he must have been thirty, or close to it—came in and took the seat beside me. He was wearing a baseball cap, a jeans jacket and a T-shirt that said
Obligatory Death
, which I took to be the name of a band, though I’d never heard of them. His hair was blond, cut short around the ears, and he wore a soul beard that was like a pale stripe painted under his lip by a very unsteady hand. We exchanged the standard greeting—
What’s up?
—and then he flagged down the bartender and ordered a draft beer, a shot of tomato juice and two raw eggs.

“Raw eggs?” the bartender echoed, as if he hadn’t heard him right.

“Yeah. Two raw eggs, in the shell.”

The bartender—his name was Chris, or maybe it was Matt—gave a smile and scratched the back of his head. “We can do them over-easy or sunny-side up or poached even, but
raw
, I don’t know. I mean, nobody’s ever requested raw before—”

“Ask the chef, why don’t you?”

The bartender shrugged. “Sure,” he said, “no problem.” He started off in the direction of the kitchen, then pulled up short. “You want toast with that, home fries, or what?”

“Just the eggs.”

Everybody was watching now, any little drama worth the price of admission, especially on a night like this, but the bartender—Chris, his name was definitely Chris—just went down to the other end of the bar and communicated the order to the waitress, who made a notation in her pad and disappeared into the kitchen. A moment went by, and then the man turned to me and said in a voice loud enough for everybody to hear, “Jesus, this music sucks. Are we caught in a time warp here, or what?”

The old men—the regulars—glanced up from their drinks and gave him a look, but they were gray-haired and slack in the belly and they knew their limits. One of them said something about the game on the TV and one of the others chimed in and the conversation started back up in an exclusionary way.

“Yeah,” I heard myself say, “it really sucks,” and before I knew it
I was talking passionately about the bands that meant the most to me even as the new guy poured tomato juice in his beer and sipped the foam off the top, while the music rumbled defiantly on and people came in the door with wet shoes and dripping umbrellas to crowd in behind us. The eggs, brown-shelled and naked in the middle of a standard dinner plate, were delivered by Daria, a waitress I’d had my eye on, though I hadn’t yet worked up the nerve to say more than hello and goodbye to her. “Your order, sir,” she said, easing the plate down on the bar. “You need anything with that? Ketchup? Tabasco?”

“No,” he said, “no, that’s fine,” and everyone was waiting for him to crack the eggs over his beer, but he didn’t even look at them. He was looking at Daria, holding her with his eyes. “So what’s your name?” he asked, grinning.

She told him, and she was grinning too.

“Nice to meet you,” he said, taking her hand. “I’m Ludwig.”

“Ludwig,” she repeated, pronouncing it with a hard
v
, as he had, though as far as I could tell—from his clothes and accent, which was pure Southern California—he wasn’t German. Or if he was, he sure had his English down.

“Are you German?” Daria was flirting with him, and the realization of it began to harden me against him in the most rudimentary way.

“No,” he said, “I’m from Hermosa Beach, born and raised. It’s the name, right?”

“I had this German teacher last year? His name was Ludwig, that’s all.”

“You’re in college?”

She told him she was, which was news to me. Working her way through. Majoring in business. She wanted to own her own restaurant someday.

“It was my mother’s idea,” he said, as if he’d been mulling it over. “She was listening to the ‘Eroica’ Symphony the night I was born.” He shrugged. “It’s been my curse ever since.”

“I don’t know,” she said, “I think it’s kind of cute. You don’t get many Ludwigs, you know?”

“Yeah, tell me about it,” he said, sipping at his beer.

She lingered, though there were other things she could have been
doing. The sound of the rain intensified so that for a moment it overcame the drone of the speakers. “So what about the eggs,” she said, “you going to need utensils, or—”

“Or what? Am I going to suck them out of the shell?”

“Yeah,” she said, “something like that.”

He reached out a hand cluttered with silver to embrace the eggs and gently roll them back and forth across the gleaming expanse of the plate. “No, I’m just going to fondle them,” he said, and he got the expected response: she laughed. “But does anybody still play dice around here?” he called down the bar as the eyes of the regulars slid in our direction and then away again.

In those days—and this was ten years ago or more—the game of Horse was popular in certain California bars, as were smoking, unprotected sex and various other adult pleasures that may or may not have been hazardous to your health. There were five dice, shaken in a cup, and you slammed that cup down on the bar, trying for the highest cumulative score, which was thirty. Anything could be bet on, from the next round of drinks to ponying up for the jukebox.

The rain hissed at the door and it opened briefly to admit a stamping, umbrella-less couple. Ludwig’s question hung unanswered on the air. “No? How about you, Daria?”

“I’m working, actually.”

He turned to me. I had no work in the morning or the next morning either—maybe no work at all. My apartment wasn’t what I’d thought it would be, not without anybody to share it with, and I’d already vowed to myself that I’d rather sleep on the streets than go back to my aunt’s because going back there would represent the worst kind of defeat.
Take good care of my baby, Kim
, my mother had said when she’d dropped me off.
He’s the only one I’ve got
.

“Sure,” I said, “I guess. What’re we playing for—for drinks, right?” I began fumbling in my pockets, awkward, shoulders dipping—I was drunk, I could feel it. “Because I don’t have, well, maybe ten bucks—”

“No,” he said, “no,” already rising from his seat, “you just wait here, just one minute, you’ll see,” and then he was out the door and into the grip of the rain.

Daria hadn’t moved. She was dressed in the standard outfit for Daggett’s employees, shorts, white ankle socks and a T-shirt with the name of the establishment blazoned across the chest, her legs pale and silken in the flickering light of the fake fireplace in the corner. She gave me a sympathetic look and I shrugged to show her I was ready for anything, a real man of the world.

There was a noise at the door—a scraping and shifting—and we all looked up to see Ludwig struggling with something against the backdrop of the rain. His hat had been knocked askew and water dripped from his nose and chin. It took a moment, one shoulder pinning the door open, and then he lifted a cage—a substantial cage, two and a half feet high and maybe four long—through the doorway and set it down against the wall. No one moved. No one said a word. There was something in the cage, the apprehension of it as sharp and sudden as the smell it brought with it, something wild and alien and very definitely out of the ordinary on what to this point had been a painfully ordinary night.

Ludwig wiped the moisture from his face with a swipe of his sleeve, straightened out his hat and came back to the bar, looking jaunty and refreshed. “All right,” he said, “don’t be shy—go have a look. It won’t bite. Or it will, it definitely will, but just don’t get your fingers near it, that’s all—”

I saw coiled limbs, claws, yellow eyes. Whatever it was, the thing hadn’t moved, not even to blink. I was going to ask what it was, when Daria, still at my side, said, “It’s a cat, some kind of wild cat. Right? A what—a lynx or something?”

“You can’t have that thing in here,” one of the regulars said, but already he was getting up out of his seat to have a look at it—everyone was getting up now, shoving back chairs and rising from the tables, crowding around.

“It’s a serval,” Ludwig was saying. “From Africa. Thirty-five pounds of muscle and quicker than a snake.”

And where had he gotten it? He’d won it, in a bar in Arizona, on a roll of the dice.

How long had he had it? Two years.

What was its name? Cat. Just Cat. And yes, it was a male, and no,
he didn’t want to get rid of it but he was moving overseas on a new job and there was just no way he could take it with him, so he felt it was apropos—that was the word he used,
apropos
—to give it up in the way he’d gotten it.

He turned to me. “What was your name again?”

“Junior,” I said. “James Jr. Turner, I mean. James Turner Jr. But everybody calls me Junior.” I wanted to add, “Because of my father, so people wouldn’t confuse us,” but I left it at that, because it got even more complicated considering that my father was six months dead and I could be anybody I wanted.

“Okay, Junior, here’s the deal,” Ludwig said. “Your ten bucks against the cat, one roll, what do you say?”

I wanted to say that I had no place for the thing, that I didn’t want a cat of any kind or even a guinea pig or a fish in a bowl and that the ten dollars was meaningless, but everyone was watching me and I couldn’t back out without feeling the shame rise to my face—and there was Daria to consider, because she was watching me too. “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, okay, sure.”

Sixty seconds later I was still solvent and richer by one cat and one cage. I’d gotten lucky—or unlucky, depending on how you want to look at it—and rolled three fives and two fours; Ludwig rolled a combined eleven. He finished his beer in a gulp, took my hand to seal the deal and offer his congratulations, and then started toward the door. “But what do I feed it?” I called. “I mean, what does it eat?”

“Eggs,” he said, “it loves eggs. And meat. Raw. No kibble, forget kibble. This is the real deal, this animal, and you need to treat it right.” He was at the door, looking down at the thing with what might have been wistfulness or satisfaction, I couldn’t tell which, then he reached down behind the cage to unfasten something there—a gleam of black leather—and toss it to me: it was a glove, or a gauntlet actually, as long as my arm. “You’ll want to wear this when you feed him,” he said, and then he was gone.