Tooth and Claw (39 page)

I came up the cellar stairs from the garage, my father sunk into the recliner in the living room with the TV going—the news grim and grimmer—and my mother rattling things around in the kitchen. “You going to eat tonight?” she asked, just to say something. I ate every night—I couldn’t afford not to. She had a cigarette at her lips, a drink in her hand—scotch and water. There were dishes set out on the table, a pot of something going on the stove. “I’m making chili con carne.”

I had a minute, just a minute, no more, because I was afraid Cole would wake up to the fact that he was waiting for nothing and then it would be the room upstairs, the hypnosis of the records, the four walls and the sloping ceiling and a gulf of boredom so deep you could have sailed a fleet into it. “No,” I said, “I think I might go out.”

She stirred the pot, went to set the cigarette in the ashtray on the stove and saw that there was another there, already burning and rimmed red with lipstick. “Without dinner?” (I have to give her her due here—she loved me, her only son, and my father must have loved me too, in his own way, but I didn’t know that then, or didn’t care, and it’s too late now to do anything about it.)

“Yeah, I might eat out, I guess. With Cole.”

“Who?”

“Cole Harman. He was in high school with me?”

She just shrugged. My father said nothing, not hello or goodbye or you look half-starved already and you tell me you’re going to miss dinner? The TV emitted the steady whipcrack of small-arms fire, and then the correspondent came on with the day’s body count. Four minutes later—the bells, the boots, a wide-collared shirt imprinted
with two flaming outsized eyeballs under the greasy jacket and my hair kinked up like Hendrix’s—and I was out the door.

“H
EY
,” I
SAID
, rapping at the window of the Bug. “Hey, it’s me.”

Cole looked up as if he’d been asleep, as if he’d been absorbed in some other reality altogether, one that didn’t seem to admit or even recognize me. It took him a moment, and then he leaned across the passenger’s seat and flipped the lock, and I went round the car and slid in beside him. I said something like, “Good to see you, man,” and reached out for the soul shake, which he returned, and then I said, “So, what’s up? You want to go to Chase’s, or what?”

He didn’t reply. Just handed me the tight white tube of a joint, put the car in gear and hit the accelerator with the sound of a hundred eggbeaters all rattling at once. I looked back to see my house receding at the end of the block and felt as if I’d been rescued. I put the lighter to the joint.

The night before we’d gone to Chase’s, a bar in town I’d never been to before, an ancient place with a pressed-tin ceiling and paneled booths gone the color of beef jerky with the smoke of a hundred thousand cigarettes. The music was of the moment, though, and the clientele mostly young—women were there, in their low-slung jeans and gauzy tops, and it was good to see them, exciting in the way of an afterthought that suddenly blooms into prominence (I’d left a girlfriend behind at college, promising to call, visit, write, but long distance was expensive, she was five hundred miles away and I wasn’t much of a writer). My assumption—my hope—was that we’d go back there tonight.

But we didn’t. Cole just drove aimlessly past bleached-out lawns and squat houses, down the naked tunnels of trees and into the country, where the odd field—crippled cornstalks, rotting pumpkins—was squeezed in among the housing developments and the creep of shopping malls. We smoked the joint down to the nub, employed a roach clip and alternated hits till it was nothing but air. An hour stole by. The same hits thumped through the radio, the same commercials. It was getting dark.

After a while we pulled up at a deserted spot along a blacktop road not two miles from my house. I knew the place from when I was a kid, riding my bike out to the reservoir to fish and throw rocks and fool around. There was a waist-high wall of blackened stone running the length of a long two blocks, and behind that a glimpse of a cluster of stone cottages through the dark veins of the trees. We’d been talking about something comforting—a band or a guitar player—and I’d been drifting, wheeling round and round the moment, secure, calm, and now suddenly we were stopped out on the road in the middle of nowhere. “So, what’s the deal?” I said.

A car came up the street in the opposite direction and the lights caught Cole’s face. He squinted, put a hand up to shield his eyes till the car had passed, and he craned his neck to make sure it was still moving, watching for the flash of brake lights as it rounded the curve at the corner behind us and vanished into the night. “Nothing,” he said, a spark of animation igniting his voice as if it were a joke—the car, the night, the joint—“I just wanted you to meet some people, that’s all.”

“What people? Out here?” I gave it a beat. “You don’t mean the little people, do you? The elves? Where are they—crouching behind the wall there? Or in their burrows, is that where they are—asleep in their burrows?”

We both had a laugh, one of those protracted, breast-pounding jags of hilarity that remind you just how much you’ve smoked and how potent it was. “No,” he said, still wheezing, “no. Big people. Real people, just like you and me.” He pointed to the faintest glow of light from the near cottage. “In there.”

I was confused. The entrance to the place—the driveway, which squeezed under a stone arch somebody had erected there at some distant point in our perfervid history—was up on the cross street at the end of the block, where the car had just turned. “So why don’t we just go in the driveway?” I wanted to know.

Cole took a moment to light a cigarette, then he cracked the door and the dark pure refrigerated smell of the night hit me. “Not cool,” he said. “Not cool at all.”

I
MADE A REAL EFFORT
the next day, and though I had less than three hours’ sleep, I made homeroom with maybe six seconds to spare. The kids—the students, my charges—must have scented the debauch on me, the drift away from the straight and narrow they demanded as part of the social contract, because they were more restive than usual, more boisterous and slippery, as if the seats couldn’t contain them. There was one—there’s always one, memorable not for excellence or scholarship but for weakness, only that—and he spoke up now. Robert, his name was, Robert Rowe. He was fifteen, left back once, and he was no genius but he had more of a spark in him than the others could ever hope for, and that made him stand out—it gave him power, but he didn’t know what to do with it. “Hey, Mr. Caddis,” he called from the back of the room where he was slumped into one of the undersized desks we’d inherited from another era when the average student was shorter, slimmer, more attentive and eager. “You look like shit, you know that?”

The rest of them—this was only homeroom, where, as I’ve indicated, nothing was expected—froze for a moment. The interaction was delicious for them, I’m sure—they were scientists dissecting the minutest gradations of human behavior: would I explode? Overheat and run for the lavatory like Mr. James, the puker? Ignore the comment? Pretend I hadn’t heard?

I was beat, truly. Two nights running with less than three hours’ sleep. But I was energized too because something new was happening to me, something that shone over the bleakness of this job, this place, my parents’ damaged lives, as if I’d suddenly discovered the high beams along a dark stretch of highway. “Yeah, Robert,” I said, holding him with my eyes, though he tried to duck away, “thanks for the compliment.” A tutorial pause, flatly instructive. “You look like shit too.”

The cottage, the stone cottage on the far side of the stone wall in the featureless mask of the night that had given way to this moment of this morning, was a place I felt I’d come home to after a long absence. I’d been to war, hadn’t I? Now I was home. How else to describe
it, what that place meant to me from the minute the door swung back and I stepped inside?

I hadn’t known what to expect. We vaulted the stone wall and picked our way through a dark tangle of leafless sumac and stickers that raked at our boots and the oversized flaps of our pants, and then there was another, lower wall, and we were in the yard. Out front was a dirt bike with its back wheel missing, skeletal under the porch light, and there were glittering fragments of other things there too, machines in various states of disassembly—a chain saw minus the chain, an engine block decorated with lit candles that flickered like votives in the dark cups of the cylinders, a gutted amplifier. And there was music. Loud now, loud enough to rattle the glass in the windowpanes. Somebody inside was playing along with the bass line of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.”

Cole went in without knocking, and I followed. Through a hallway and into the kitchen,
obladi oblada life goes on bra!
There were two women there—girls—rising up from the table in the kitchen with loopy grins to wrap their arms around Cole, and then, after the briefest of introductions—“This is my friend, John, he’s a
professor
”—to embrace me too. They were sisters, both tall, with the requisite hair parted in the middle and trailing down their shoulders. Suzie, the younger, darker and prettier one, and JoJo, two years older, with hair the color of rust before it flakes. There was a Baggie of pot on the table, a pipe and what looked to be half a bar of halvah candy but wasn’t candy at all. Joss sticks burned among the candles that lit the room. A cat looked up sleepily from a pile of newspaper in the corner. “You want to get high?” JoJo asked, and I was charmed instantly—here she was, the consummate hostess—and a portion of my uncertainty and awkwardness went into retreat.

I looked to Cole, and we both laughed, and this was a laugh of the same quality and flavor as the one we’d shared in the car.

“What?” Suzie said, leaning back against the stove now, grinning wide. “Oh, I get it—you’re already stoned, both of you, right? High as kites, right?”

From the living room—the door was closed and I had to presume
it was the living room—there was the sudden screech of the needle lifting off the record, then the superamplified rasp of its dropping down again, and “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” came at us once more. JoJo saw my quizzical look and paused in putting the match to the pipe. “Oh, that’s Mike—my boyfriend? He’s like obsessed with that song.”

I don’t know how much time slid by before the door swung open—we were just sitting there at the table, enveloped in the shroud of our own consciousness, the cat receding into the corner that now seemed half a mile away, candles flickering and sending insubstantial shadows up the walls. I turned round to see Mike standing in the doorframe, wearing the strap of his bass like a bandolier over a shirtless chest. He was big, six feet and something, two hundred pounds, and he was built, pectorals and biceps sharply defined, a stripe of hard blue vein running up each arm, but he didn’t do calisthenics or lift weights or anything like that—it was just the program of his genes. His hair was long, longer than either of the women’s. He wore a Fu Manchu mustache. He was sweating. “That was hot,” he said, “that was really hot.”

JoJo looked up vacantly. “What,” she said, “you want me to turn down the heat?”

He gave a laugh and leaned into the table to pluck a handful of popcorn out of a bowl that had somehow materialized there. “No, I mean the— Didn’t you hear me? That last time? That was hot, that’s what I’m saying.”

It was only then that we got around to introductions, he and Cole swapping handclasps, and then Cole cocking a finger at me. “He’s a professor,” he said.

Mike took my hand—the soul shake, a pat on the shoulder—and stood there looking bemused. “A professor?” he said. “No shit?”

I was too stoned to parse all the nuances of the question, but still the blood must have risen to my face. “A teacher,” I corrected. “You know, just to beat the draft? Like because if you—” and I went off on some disconnected monologue, talking because I was nervous, because I wanted to fit in, and I suppose I would have kept on talking
till the sun came up but for the fact that everyone else had gone silent and the realization of it suddenly hit me.

“No shit?” Mike repeated, grinning in a dangerous way. He was swaying over the table, alternately feeding popcorn into the slot of his mouth and giving me a hooded look. “So how old are you—what, nineteen, twenty?”

“Twenty-one. I’ll be twenty-two in December.”

There was more. It wasn’t an inquisition exactly—Cole at one point spoke up for me and said, “He’s cool”—but a kind of scientific examination of this rare bird that had mysteriously turned up at the kitchen table. What did I think? I thought Cole should ease up on the professor business—as I got to know him I realized he was inflating me in order to inflate himself—and that we should all smoke some of the hash, though I wasn’t the host here and hadn’t brought anything to the party.

Eventually, we did smoke—that was what this was all about, community, the community of mind and spirit and style—and we moved into the living room where the big speakers were to listen to the heartbeat of the music and feel the world settle in around us. There were pillows scattered across the floor, more cats, more incense, ShopRite cola and peppermint tea in heavy homemade mugs and a slow sweet seep of peace. I propped my head against a pillow, stretched my feet out before me. The music was a dream, and I closed my eyes and entered it.

A
WEEK OR TWO
later my mother asked me to meet her after work at a bar / restaurant called the Hollander. This was a place with pretensions to grander things, where older people—people my mother’s age—came to drink Manhattans and smoke cigarettes and feel elevated over the crowd that frequented taverns with sawdust on the floors, the sort of places my father favored. Teachers came to the Hollander, lawyers, people who owned car dealerships and dress shops. My mother was a secretary, my father a bus driver. And the Hollander was an ersatz place, with pompous waiters and a fake windmill out front.

She was at the bar, smoking, sitting with a skinny white-haired guy I didn’t recognize, and as I came up to them I realized he could have been my father’s double, could have been my father, but he wasn’t. There were introductions—his name was Jerry Reilly and he was a teacher just like me—and a free beer appeared at my elbow, but I couldn’t really fathom what was going on here or why my mother would want me to join her in a place like this. I played it cool, ducked my head and answered Jerry Reilly’s interminable questions about school as best I could—
Yeah, sure, I guess I liked it; it was better than being executed in Vietnam, wasn’t it?
—without irritating him to the point at which I would miss out on a free dinner, but all I wanted to do was get out of there and meet Cole at the cottage in the woods. As expeditiously as possible. Dinner down, goodbyes and thankyou’s on file, and out the door and into the car.