Tooth and Claw (34 page)

“Who is this?”

Junior.

“Monday, Monday at the earliest.”

I told him I was going crazy cooped up in my apartment, but he didn’t seem to hear me. “What is it?” he said. “Money? Because I’ll advance you on next week if you really need it, though it’ll mean a trip to the bank I wasn’t planning on. Which is a pain in the ass. But I’ll do it. Just say the word.”

“No, it’s not the money, it’s just—”

He cut me off. “Don’t you ever listen to anything I say? Didn’t I tell you to go out and get yourself laid? That’s what you’re supposed to be doing at your age. It’s what I’d be doing.”

“Can’t I just, I don’t know, help out?”

“Monday,” he said.

I was angry suddenly and I slammed the phone down. My eyes went to the hole cut in the bedroom door and then to the breakfast plates, egg yolk congealing there in bright yellow stripes, the muffin, Daria’s muffin, untouched but for a single neat bite cut out of the round. It was Friday. I hated my life. How could I have been so stupid?

There was no sound from the bedroom, and as I laced my sneakers I fought down the urge to go to the peephole and see what the cat had accomplished in the night—I just didn’t want to think about it. Whether it had vanished like the bad odor of a bad dream or chewed through the wall and devoured the neighbor’s yapping little dogs or broken loose and smuggled itself onto a boat back to Africa, it was all the same to me. The only thing I did know was that there was no
way I was going to attempt to feed that thing on my own, not without Daria there. It could starve for all I cared, starve and rot.

Eventually, I fished a jean jacket out of a pile of clothes on the floor and went down to the beach. The day was overcast and a cold wind out of the east scoured the sand. I must have walked for hours and then, for lack of anything better to do, I went to a movie, after which I had a sandwich at a new place downtown where the college students were rumored to hang out. There were no students there as far as I could see, just old men who looked exactly like the regulars at Daggett’s, and they had their square-shouldered old wives with them and their squalling unhappy children. By four I hit my first bar, and by six I was drunk.

I tried to stay away from Daggett’s—
Give her a day or two
, I told myself,
don’t nag, don’t be a burden
—but at quarter of nine I found myself at the bar, ordering a Jack-and-Coke from Chris. Chris gave me a look, and everything had changed since yesterday. “You sure?” he said.

I asked him what he meant.

“You look like you’ve had enough, buddy.”

I craned my neck to look for Daria, but all I saw were the regulars, hunched over their drinks. “Just pour,” I said.

The music was there like a persistent annoyance, dead music, ancient, appreciated by no one, not even the regulars. It droned on. Chris set down my drink and I lifted it to my lips. “Where’s Daria?” I asked.

“She got off early. Said she was tired. Slow night, you know?”

I felt a stab of disappointment, jealousy, hate. “You have a number for her?”

Chris gave me a wary look, because he knew something I didn’t. “You mean she didn’t give you her number?”

“No,” I said, “we never—well, she was
at
my house…”

“We can’t give out personal information.”

“To me? I said she was at my house. Last night. I need to talk to her, and it’s urgent—about the cat. She’s really into the cat, you know?”

“Sorry.”

I threw it back at him. “You’re sorry? Well, fuck you—I’m sorry too.”

“You know what, buddy—”

“Junior, the name’s Junior.”

He leaned into the bar, both arms propped before him, and in a very soft voice he said, “I think you better leave now.”

I
T HAD BEGUN
to rain, a soft patter in the leaves that grew steadier and harder as I walked home. Cars went by on the boulevard with the sound of paper tearing, and they dragged whole worlds behind them. The streetlights were dim. There was nobody out. When I came up the hill to my apartment I saw the Mustang standing there under the carport, and though I’d always been averse to drinking and driving—a lesson I’d learned from my father’s hapless example—I got behind the wheel and drove up to the jobsite with a crystalline clarity that would have scared me in any other state of mind. There was an aluminum ladder there, and I focused on that—the picture of it lying against the building—till I arrived and hauled it out of the mud and tied it to the roof of the car without a thought for the paint job or anything else.

When I got back, I fumbled in the rain with the overzealous knots I’d tied until I got the ladder free and then I hauled it around the back of the apartment. I was drunk, yes, but cautious too—if anyone had seen me, in the dark, propping a ladder against the wall of an apartment building, even my own apartment building, things could have gotten difficult in a hurry. I couldn’t very well claim to be painting, could I? Not at night. Not in the rain. Luckily, though, no one was around. I made my way up the ladder, and when I got to the level of the bedroom the odor hit me, a rank fecal wind sifting out of the dark slit of the window. The cat. The cat was in there, watching me. I was sure of it. I must have waited there in the rain for fifteen minutes or more before I got up the nerve to fling the window open, and then I ducked my head and crouched reflexively against the wall. Nothing happened. After a moment, I made my way down the ladder.

I didn’t want to go in the apartment, didn’t want to think about it, didn’t know if a cat of that size could climb down the rungs of a ladder or leap twenty feet into the air or unfurl its hidden wings and fly. I stood and watched the dense black hole of the window for a
long while and then I went back to the car and sat listening to the radio in the dark till I fell asleep.

In the morning—there were no heraldic rays of sunshine, nothing like that, just more rain—I let myself into the apartment and crept across the room as stealthily as if I’d come to burgle it. When I reached the bedroom door, I put my eye to the peephole and saw a mound of carpet propped up against an empty cage—a den, a makeshift den—and only then did I begin to feel something for the cat, for its bewilderment, its fear and distrust of an alien environment: this was no rocky kopje, this was my bedroom on the second floor of a run-down apartment building in a seaside town a whole continent and a fathomless ocean away from its home. Nothing moved inside. Surely it must have been gone, one great leap and then the bounding limbs, grass beneath its feet, solid earth. It was gone. Sure it was. I steeled myself, pulled open the door and slipped inside. And then—and I don’t know why—I pulled the door shut behind me.

BOSTON TO DEDHAM

T
HE ROAD WAS DARK
, even at six in the evening, and if it held any wonders aside from the odd snug house or the stubble field, she couldn’t have said because all that was visible was the white stripe of heaven overhead. Her horse was no more than a sound and a presence now, the heat of its internal engine rising round her in a miasma of sweat dried and reconstituted a hundred times over, even as she began to feel the repetition of its gait in the deep recesses of her seat and that appendage at the base of the spine her mother used to call the tailbone. Cousin Robert was some indeterminate distance ahead of her, the slow crepitating slap of his mount’s hooves creating a new kind of silence that fed off the only sound in the world and then swallowed it up in a tower of vegetation as dense and continuous as the waves of the sea. Though it was only the second of October, there had been frost, and that was a small comfort in all of this hurt and upset, because it drew down the insects that a month earlier would have eaten her alive. The horse swayed, the stars staggered and flashed. She wanted to call out to Robert to ask if it was much farther yet, but she restrained herself. She’d talked till her throat went dry as they’d left town in the declining sun and he’d done his best to keep up though he wasn’t naturally a talker, and eventually, as the shadows came down and the rhythmic movement of the animals
dulled their senses, they’d fallen silent. She resigned herself. Rode on. And just as she’d given up hope, a light appeared ahead.

AT DEDHAM

R
OBERT HER COUSIN
leaving her to await the Post at the cottage of the Reverend and Madam Belcher before turning round for Boston with a dozen admonitions on his lips—She should have gone by sea as there was no telling what surprises lay ahead on the road in that savage country and she was to travel solely with trusted companions and the Post, et cetera—she settled in by the fire with a cup of tea and explained her business to Madam Belcher in her cap and the Reverend with his pipe. Yes, she felt responsible. And yes, it was she who’d introduced her boarder, a young widow, to her kinsman, Caleb Trowbridge, only to have him die four months after the wedding and leave the poor woman twice widowed. There were matters of the estate to be settled in both New Haven and New York, and it was her intention to act in the widow’s behalf, being a widow herself and knowing how cruel such divisions of property can be.

An old dog lay on the rug. A tallow candle held a braided flame above it. There was a single ornament on the wall, a saying out of the Bible in needlepoint:
He shall come down like rain upon the mown grass: as showers that water the earth
. After a pause, the Reverend’s wife asked if she would like another cup.

Sarah’s eyes rose from the fire to the black square of the window. “You’re very kind,” she said, “but no thank you.” She was concerned about the Post. Shouldn’t he have been here by now? Had she somehow managed to miss him? Because if she had, there was no sense in going on—she might just as well admit defeat and find a guide back to Boston in the morning. “But where can the Post be?” she asked, turning to the Reverend.

The Reverend was a big block of a man with a nose to support the weight of his fine-ground spectacles. He cleared his throat. “Might be he’s gone on to the Billingses, where he’s used to lodge.”

She listened to the hiss of the water trapped in a birch stick on
the fire. Her whole body ached with the soreness of the saddle. “And how far would that be?”

“Twelve mile on.”

AT DEDHAM TAVERN

S
HE SAT
in a corner in her riding clothes while the Reverend brought the hostess to her, the boards of the floor unswept, tobacco dragons putting their claws into the air and every man with a black cud of chew in his mouth. The woman came to her with her hair in a snarl and her hands patting at her hips, open-faced and wondering. The Reverend stood beside her with his nose and his spectacles, the crown of his hat poking into the timbers overhead. Could she be of assistance?

“Yes, I’d like some refreshment, if you please. And I’ll need a guide to take me as far as the Billingses’ to meet up with the Post.”

“The Billingses? At this hour of night?”

The hostess had raised her voice so that every soul in the place could appreciate the clear and irrefragable reason of what she was saying, and she went on to point out that it was twelve miles in the dark and that there would be none there to take her, but that her son John, if the payment was requisite to his risking life and limb, might be induced to go. Even at this unholy hour.

And where was John?

“You never mind. Just state your price.”

Madam Knight sat as still as if she were in her own parlor with her mother and daughter and Mrs. Trowbridge and her two boarders gathered round her. She was thirty-eight years old, with a face that had once been pretty, and though she was plump and her hands were soft, she was used to work and to hard-dealing and she was no barmaid in a country tavern. She gazed calmly on the hostess and said nothing.

“Two pieces of eight,” the woman said. “And a dram.”

A moment passed, every ear in the place attuned to the sequel. “I will not be accessory to such extortion,” Sarah pronounced in an
even voice, “not if I have to find my own way, alone and defenseless in the dark.”

The hostess went on like a singing Quaker, mounting excuse atop argument, and the men stopped chewing and held the pewter mugs arrested in their hands, until finally an old long-nosed cadaver who looked to be twice the hostess’s age rose up from the near table and asked how much she
would
pay him to show her the way.

Sarah was nonplussed. “Who are you?”

“John,” he said, and jerked a finger toward the hostess. “’Er son.”

DEDHAM TO THE BILLINGSES’

I
F THE ROAD
had been dark before, now it was as if she were blind and afflicted and the horse blind too. Clouds had rolled in to pull a shade over the stars and planets while she’d sat listening to the hostess at the tavern, and if it weren’t for the sense of hearing and the feel of a damp breeze on her face, she might as well have been locked in a closet somewhere. John was just there ahead of her, as Cousin Robert had been earlier, but John was a talker and the strings of his sentences pulled her forward like a spare set of reins. Like his mother, he was a monologuist. His subject was himself and the myriad dangers of the road—savage Indians, catamounts, bears, wolves and common thieves—he’d managed to overthrow by his own cunning and heroism in the weeks and months just recently passed. “There was a man ‘ere, on this very spot, murdered and drawn into four pieces by a Pequot with two brass rings in ‘is ears,” he told her. “Rum was the cause of it. If I’d passed by an hour before it would have been me.” And: “The catamount’s a wicked thing. Gets a horse by the nostrils and then rakes out the innards with ‘is hinder claws. I’ve seen it myself.” And again: “Then you’ve got your shades of the murdered. When the wind is down you hear them hollowin’ at every crossroads.”

She wasn’t impressed. They’d hanged women for witches in her time, and every corner, even in town, seemed to be the haunt of one
goblin or another. Stories and wives’ tales, legends to titillate the children before bed. There were real dangers in the world, dangers here in the dark, but they were overhead and underfoot, the nagging branch and open gully, the horse misstepping and coming down hard on her, the invisible limb to brain her as she levitated by, but she tried not to think of them, tried to trust in her guide—John the living cadaver—and the horse beneath her. She gripped the saddle and tried to ease the ache in her seat, which had radiated out to her limbs now and her backbone, even her neck, and she let her mind go numb with the night and the sweet released odors of the leaves they crushed underfoot.