Tooth and Claw (40 page)

That wasn’t how it worked out. Something was in the air and I couldn’t fathom what it was. I kept looking at Jerry Reilly, with his cuff links and snowy collar and whipcord tie and thinking,
No, no way—my mother wouldn’t cheat on my father, not with this guy
. But her life and what she did with it was a work in progress, as unfathomable to me as my own life must have been to my students—and tonight’s agenda was something else altogether, something that came in the form of a very special warning, specially delivered. We were on our third drink, seated in the dining room now, eating steak all around, though my mother barely touched hers and Jerry Reilly just pushed his around the plate every time I lifted my eyes to look at him. “Listen, John,” my mother said finally, “I just wanted to say something to you. About Cole.”

All the alarm bells went off simultaneously in my head. “Cole?” I echoed.

She gave me a look I’d known all my life, the one reserved for missteps and misdeeds. “He has a record.”

So that was it. “What’s it to you?”

My mother just shrugged. “I just thought you ought to know, that’s all.”

“I know. Of course I know. And it’s nothing, believe me—a case of mistaken identity. They got the wrong guy is all.” The fact was
that Cole had been busted for selling marijuana to an undercover agent and they were trying to make a felony out of it even as his mother leaned on a retired judge she knew to step in and squash it. I put on a look of offended innocence. “So what’d you do, hire a detective?”

A thin smile. “I’m just worried about you, that’s all.”

How I bristled at this. I wasn’t a child—I could take care of myself. How many times had her soft dejected voice come at me out of the shadows of the living room at three and four in the morning, where she sat smoking in the dark while I roamed the streets with my friends?
Where had I been?
she always wanted to know.
Nowhere
, I told her. There was the dark, the smell of her cigarette, and then, even softer:
I was worried
. And what did I do now? I worked my face and gave her a disgusted look to show her how far above all this I was.

She looked to Jerry Reilly, then back to me. I became aware of the sound of traffic out on the road. It was dark beyond the windows. “You’re not using drugs,” she asked, drawing at her cigarette, so that the interrogative lift came in a fume of smoke, “are you?”

T
HE FIRST TIME
I ever saw anyone inject heroin was in the bathroom of that stone cottage in the woods. It was probably the third or fourth night I’d gone there with Cole to hang out, listen to music and be convivial on our own terms (he was living at his parents’ house too, and there was no percentage in that). Mike greeted us at the door—he’d put a leather jacket on over a T-shirt and he was all business, heading out to the road to meet a guy named Nicky and they were going on into town to score and we should just hang tight because they’d be right back and did we happen to have any cash on us?—and then we went in and sat with the girls and smoked and didn’t think about much of anything until the front door jerked back on its hinges half an hour later and Mike and Nicky came storming into the room as if their jackets had been set afire.

Then it was into the bathroom, Mike first, the door open to the rest of us lined up behind him, Nicky (short, with a full beard that did nothing to flesh out a face that had been reduced to the sharp
lineaments of bone and cartilage) and the two sisters, Cole and me. I’d contributed five dollars to the enterprise, though I had my doubts. I’d never done anything like this and I was scared of the consequences, the droning narration of the anti-drug films from high school riding up out of some backwater of my mind to assert itself, to take over, become shrill even. Mike threw off his jacket, tore open two glassine packets with his teeth and carefully—meticulously—shook out the contents into a tablespoon. It was a white powder, and it could have been anything, baking soda, confectioners’ sugar, Polident, but it wasn’t, and I remember thinking how innocuous it looked, how anonymous. In the next moment, Mike sat heavily on the toilet, drew some water up into the syringe I’d seen lying there on a shelf in the medicine cabinet last time I’d used the facilities, squeezed a few drops into the powder, mixed it around and then held a lighter beneath the spoon. Then he tied himself off at the biceps with a bit of rubber tubing, drew the mixture from the spoon through a ball of cotton and hit a vein. I watched his eyes. Watched the rush take him, and then the nod. Nicky was next, then Suzie, then JoJo, and finally Cole. Mike hit them, one at a time, like a doctor. I watched each of them rush and go limp, my heart hammering at my rib cage, the record in the living room repeating over and over because nobody had bothered to put the changer down, and then it was my turn. Mike held up the glassine packet. “It’s just a taste,” he said. “Three-dollar bag. You on for it?”

“No,” I said, “I mean, I don’t think I—”

He studied me a moment, then tossed me the bag. “It’s a waste,” he said, “a real waste, man.” His voice was slow, the voice of a record played at the wrong speed. He shook his head with infinite calm, moving it carefully from side to side as if it weighed more than the cottage itself. “But hey, we’ll snort it this time. You’ll see what you’re missing, right?”

I saw. Within the week I was getting off too, and it was my secret—my initiation into a whole new life—and the tracks, the bite marks of the needle that crawled first up one arm and then the other, were my testament.

I
T WAS MY JOB
to do lunch duty one week a month, and lunch duty consisted of keeping the student body out of the building for forty-five minutes while they presumably went home, downtown or over to the high school and consumed whatever nourishment was available to them. It was necessary to keep them out of the junior high building for the simple reason that they would destroy it through an abundance of natural high spirits and brainless joviality. I stood in the dim hallway, positioned centrally between the three doors that opened from the southern, eastern and western sides of the building, and made my best effort at chasing them down when they burst in howling against the frigid collapse of the noon hour. On the second day of my third tour of duty, Robert Rowe sauntered in through the front doors and I put down my sandwich—the one my mother had made me in the hour of the wolf before going off to work herself—and reminded him of the rules.

He opened his face till it bloomed like a flower and held out his palms. He was wearing a T-shirt and a sleeveless parka. I saw that he’d begun to let his hair go long. “I just wanted to ask you a question is all.”

I was chewing tunafish on rye, standing there in the middle of all that emptiness in my ridiculous pants and rumpled jacket. The building, like most institutions of higher and lower learning, was overheated, and in chasing half a dozen of my charges out the door I’d built up a sweat that threatened to break my hair loose of its mold. Without thinking, I slipped off the jacket and let it dangle from one hand; without thinking, I’d pulled a short-sleeved button-down shirt out of my closet that morning because all the others were dirty. That was the scene. That was the setup. “Sure,” I said. “Go ahead.”

“I was just wondering—you ever read this book,
The Man with the Golden Arm
?”

“Nelson Algren?”

He nodded.

“No,” I said. “I’ve heard of it, though.”

He took a moment with this, then cocked his head back till it rolled on his shoulders and gave me a dead-on look. “He shoots up.”

“Who?”

“The guy in the book. All the time.” He was studying me, gauging how far he could go. “You know what that’s like?”

I played dumb.

“You don’t? You really don’t?”

I shrugged. Dodged his eyes.

There was a banging at the door behind us, hilarious faces there, then the beat of retreating footsteps. Robert moved back a pace, but he held me with his gaze. “Then what’s with the spots on your arms?”

I looked down at my arms as if I’d never seen them before, as if I’d been born without them and they’d been grafted on while I was napping. “Mosquito bites,” I said.

“In November? They must be some tough-ass mosquitoes.”

“Yeah,” I said, shifting the half-eaten sandwich from one hand to the other so I could cover up with the jacket, “yeah, they are.”

M
IKE LIKED THE COUNTRY
. He’d grown up in the projects on the Lower East Side, always pressed in by concrete and blacktop, and now that he was in the wilds of northern Westchester he began to keep animals. There were two chickens in a rudely constructed pen and a white duck he’d hatched from the egg, all of which met their fate one bitter night when a fox—or more likely, a dog—sniffed them out. He had a goat too, chained to a tree from which it had stripped the bark to a height of six feet or more, its head against the palm of your hand exactly like a rock with hair on it, and when he thought about it he’d toss it half a bale of hay or a loaf of stale bread or even the cardboard containers the beer came in. Inside, he had a fifty-gallon aquarium with a pair of foot-long alligators huddled inside it under a heat lamp, and these he fed hamburger in the form of raw meatballs he’d work between his palms. Every once in a while someone would get stoned and expel a lungful of smoke into the aquarium to see what effect it would have on a pair of reptiles and the things would scrabble around against the glass enclosure, hissing.

I was there one night without Cole—he was meeting with his
lawyer, I think; I remember he’d shaved his mustache and trimmed his hair about that time—and I parked out on the street so as to avoid suspicion and made my way over the stone wall and through the darkened woods to the indistinct rumble of live music, the pulse of Mike’s bass buoyed by the chink-chink of a high hat, an organ fill and cloudy vocals. My breath steamed around me. A sickle moon hung over the roof of the cottage and one of the cats shot along the base of the outer wall as I pushed through the door.

Everyone was gathered in the living room, JoJo and Suzie stretched out on the floor, Mike and his band, his new band, manning the instruments. I stood in the doorway a moment, feeling awkward. Nicky was on keyboards and a guy I’d met a few times—Skip—was doing the drumming. But there was a stranger, older, in his late twenties, with an out-of-date haircut and the flaccid beginnings of jowls, up at the mike singing lead and playing guitar. I leaned against the doorframe and listened, nodding my head to the beat, as they went through a version of “Rock and Roll Woman,” Mike stepping up to the microphone to blend his voice effortlessly with the new guy’s on the complex harmonies, and it wasn’t as if they were rehearsing at all. They could have been onstage playing the tune for the hundredth time. When the song finished, I ducked into the room, nodding to Mike and saying something inane like, “Sounding good, man.”

As it turned out, the new guy—his name was either Haze or Hayes, I never did get that straight—had played with Mike in a cover band the year before and then vanished from sight. Now he was back and they were rehearsing for a series of gigs at a club out on Route 202, where eventually they’d become the house band. I sat there on the floor with the girls and listened and felt transported—I wanted to get up and sing myself, ask them if they couldn’t use a saxophone to cut away from the guitar leads, but I couldn’t work up the nerve. Afterward, in the kitchen, when we were all stoned and riding high on the communion of the music, Haze launched into “Sunshine of My Love” on his acoustic guitar and I lost my inhibitions enough to try to blend my voice with his, with mixed results. But he kept on playing, and I kept on singing, till Mike went out to the living room
and came back with the two alligators, one clutched in each hand, and began banging them together like tambourines, their legs scrambling at the air and tails flailing, the white miniature teeth fighting for purchase.

T
HEN THERE WAS
parent / teacher night. I got home from work and went straight to bed, and then, cruelly, had to get back up, put the tie on all over again and drive to school right in the middle of cocktail hour, or at the tail end of it anyway. I make a joke of it now, but I was tentative about the whole thing, afraid of the parents’ scrutiny, afraid I’d be exposed for the imposter I was. I pictured them grilling me about the rules of grammar or Shakespeare’s plays—the ones I hadn’t read—but the parents were as hopeless as their offspring. Precious few of them turned up, and those who did looked so intimidated by their surroundings I had the feeling they would have taken my word for practically anything. In one class—my fifth period—a single parent turned up. His son—an overweight, well-meaning kid mercilessly ragged by his classmates—was one of the few in the class who weren’t behavioral problems, but the father kept insisting that his son was a real hell-raiser, “just like his old man.” He sat patiently, work-hardened hands folded on the miniature desk, through my fumbling explanation of what I was trying to accomplish with this particular class and the lofty goals to which each and every student aspired and more drivel of a similar nature, before interrupting me to say, “He gives you a problem, you got my permission to just whack him one. All right? You get me?”

I was stuffing papers into my briefcase just after the final bell rang at 8:15, thinking to meet Cole at Chase’s as soon as I could change out of my prison clothes, when a woman in her thirties—a mother—appeared in the doorway. She looked as if she’d been drained of blood, parchment skin and a high sculpted bluff of bleached-blond hair gone dead under the dehumanizing wash of the overhead lights. “Mr. Caddis?” she said in a smoker’s rasp. “You got a minute?”

A minute? I didn’t have thirty seconds. I wanted nothing but to get out of there and get loose before I fell into my bed for a few hours of
inadequate dreamless sleep and then found myself right here all over again. “I’m in a hurry,” I told her. “I have—well, an appointment.”

“I only want a minute.” There was something about her that looked vaguely familiar, something about the staring cola-colored eyes and the way her upper teeth pushed at her lip, that reminded me of somebody, somewhere—and then it came to me: Robert Rowe. “I’m Robert’s mother,” she said.