Tooth and Claw (41 page)

I didn’t say anything, just parked my right buttock on the nearest desk and waited for her to go on. Robert wasn’t in any of my classes, just homeroom. I wasn’t his teacher. He wasn’t my responsibility. The fat kid, yes. The black kid who flew around the room on the wings beating inside his brain chanting
He’s white, he’s right
for hours at a time, the six months’ pregnant girl whose head would have fallen off if she stopped chewing gum for thirty seconds, yes and yes. But not Robert. Not Robert Rowe.

She was wearing a dirty white sweater, misbuttoned. A plaid skirt. Loafers. If I had been older, more attuned, more sympathetic, I would have seen that she was pretty, pretty still, and that she was desperately trying to communicate something to me, some nascent hope grown up out of the detritus of welfare checks and abandonment. “He looks up to you,” she said, her voice choked, as if suddenly she couldn’t breathe.

This took me by surprise. I didn’t know how to respond, so I threw it back at her, stalling a moment to assimilate what she was saying. “Me?” I said. “He looks up to
me
?”

Her eyes were pooling. She nodded.

“But why me? I’m not even his teacher.”

“Ever since his father left,” she began, but let that thought trail off as she struggled to summon a new one, the thought—the phrase—that would bring me around, that would touch me in the way she wanted to. “He talks about you all the time. He thinks you’re cool. That’s what he say, ‘Mr. Caddis is cool.’ ”

Robert Rowe’s face rose up to hover before me in the seat of my unconscious, a compressed little nugget of a face, with the extruded teeth and Coca-Cola eyes of this woman, his mother, Mrs. Rowe.
That was who she was, Mrs. Rowe, I reminded myself, and I seized on the proper form of address in that moment: “Mrs. Rowe, look, he’s a great kid, but I’m not, I mean—well, I’m not his
teacher
, you know that—”

The room smelled of adolescent fevers and anxieties, of socks worn too long, unwashed hair, jackets that had never seen the inside of a dry cleaner’s. There was a fading map of the United States on the back wall, chalkboards so old they’d faded to gray. The linoleum was cracked and peeled. The desks were a joke. Her voice was so soft I could barely hear her over the buzz of the fluorescent lights. “I know,” she said. “But he’s not…he’s getting F’s—D’s and F’s. I don’t know what to do with him. He won’t listen to me—he hasn’t listened to me in years.”

“Yeah,” I said, just to say something. He looked up to me, sure, but I had a date to meet Cole at Chase’s.

“Would you just, I don’t know, look out for him? Would you? That’s all I ask.”

I
SUPPOSE THERE ARE
several layers of irony here, not the least of which is that I wasn’t capable of looking out for myself, but I buried all that at the bar and when I saw Robert Rowe in homeroom the next morning, I felt nothing more than a vague irritation. He was wearing a tie-dyed shirt—starbursts of pink and yellow—under the parka and he’d begun to kink his hair out in the way I wore mine at night, but that had to be a coincidence, because to my knowledge he’d never seen me outside of school. It was possible, of course. Anything was possible. He could have seen me coming out of Chase’s or stopped in my car along South Street with Mike or Cole, looking to score. I kept my head down, working at my papers—the endless, hopeless, scrawled-over tests and assignments—but I felt his eyes on me the whole time. Then the bell rang and he was gone with the rest of them.

I was home early that evening, looking for sustenance—hoping to find my mother in the kitchen stirring something in a pot—because I was out of money till payday and Cole was lying low because
his mother had found a bag of pot in his underwear drawer and I felt like taking a break from the cottage and music and dope. Just for the night. I figured I’d stay in, read a bit, get to bed early. My mother wasn’t there, though. She had a meeting. At school. One of the endless meetings she had to sit through, taking minutes in shorthand, while the school board debated yet another bond issue. I wondered about that and wondered about Jerry Reilly too.

My father was home. There was no other place he was likely to be—he’d given up going to the tavern or the diner or anyplace else. TV was his narcotic. And there he was, settled into his chair with a cocktail, watching
Victory at Sea
(his single favorite program, as if he couldn’t get enough of the war that had robbed him of his youth and personality), the dog, which had been young when I was in junior high myself, curled up stinking at his feet. We exchanged a few words—
Where’s Mom? At a meeting. You going to eat? No. A sandwich? I’ll make you a sandwich? I said no
.—and then I heated a can of soup and went upstairs with it. For a long while I lay on the floor with my head sandwiched between the speakers, playing records over and over, and then I drifted off.

It was late when I woke—past one—and when I went downstairs to use the toilet, my mother was just coming in the door. The old dog began slapping his tail on the carpet, too arthritic to get up; the lamp on the end table flicked on, dragging shadows out of the corners. “You just getting in?” I said.

“Yes,” she said, her voice hushed. She was in her work clothes: flocked dress, stockings and heels, a cloth coat, no gloves, though the weather had turned raw.

I stood there a moment, listening to the thwack of the dog’s tail, half-asleep, summoning the beat of an internal rhythm. I should have mounted the stairs, should have gone back to bed; instead, I said, “Late meeting?”

My mother had set her purse down on the little table inside the door reserved for the telephone. She was slipping out of her coat. “We went out for drinks afterward,” she said. “Some of us—me and Ruth, Larry Abrams, Ted Penny.”

“And Jerry? What about him—was he there?”

It took a moment, the coat flung over the banister, the dog settled back in his coil, the clank of the heat coming on noisy out of all proportion, and then she turned to me, hands on her hips, and said, “Yes, Jerry was there. And you know what—I’m glad he was.” A beat. She swayed slightly, or maybe that was my imagination. “You want to know why?”

There was something in her voice that should have warned me off, but I was awake now, and instead of going back upstairs to bed I just stood there in the dim arc of light the lamp cast on the floor and shrugged my shoulders. She lifted her purse from the telephone stand and I saw that there was something else there, a metal case the size of the two-tiered deluxe box of candy I gave her for Christmas each year. It was a tape recorder, and she bent a moment to fit the plug in the socket next to the phone outlet. Then she straightened up and gave me that look again—the admonitory look, searing and sharp. “I want you to listen to something,” she said. “Something a friend of Jerry’s—he works for the Peterskill police department, he’s a detective—thought you ought to hear.”

I froze. There was no time to think, no time to fabricate a story, no time to wriggle or plead, because my own voice was coming at me out of the miniature speaker.
Hey
, I was saying,
you coming over or what? It’s like past nine already and everybody’s waiting—

There was music in the background, cranked loud—“Spinning Wheel,” the tune of that fall, and we were all intoxicated by David Clayton Thomas and the incisiveness of those punched-up horns—and my mind ran through the calendar of the past week, Friday or Saturday at the cottage in the woods, Cole running late, the usual party in progress…

Yeah, sure
, I heard Cole respond. He was at his mother’s—it was his mother’s birthday.
Just as soon as I can get out of here
.

Okay, man
, I said.
Catch you later, right?

That was it. Nothing incriminating, but incrimination wasn’t the point of the exercise. It took me a moment, and then I thought of Haze, his sudden appearance in our midst, the glad-handing and the parceling out of the cool, and then I understood why he’d come to
us—the term “infiltrated” soared up out of nowhere—and just who had put him up to it. I couldn’t think of what to say.

My mother could, though. She clicked off the tape with a punch of her index finger. “My friend said if you knew what was good for you, you’d stay clear of that place for a while. For good.” We stood five feet apart. There was no embrace—we weren’t an embracing family—no pat on the back, no gesture of any kind. Just the two of us standing there in the half-dark. When she spoke finally her voice was muted. “Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

A
S SOON AS
I got out of work the next day I changed my clothes and went straight to the cottage. It was raining steadily, a cold gray rain that drooled from the branches of the trees and braided in the gutters. Cole’s Bug was parked on the street as I drove up, but I didn’t park beside him—I drove another half mile on and parked on aside street, a cul-de-sac where nobody would see the car. Then I put my head down and walked up the road in the rain, veering off into the woods the minute I saw a car turn into the street. I remember how bleak everything looked, the summer’s trash revealed at the feet of the denuded trees, the weeds bowed and frost-burned, leaves clinging to my boots as if the ground were made of paste. My heart was pounding. It was a condition we called paranoia when we were smoking, the unreasoning feeling that something or somebody is about to pounce, that the world has become intractably dangerous and your own vulnerability has been flagged. But no, this wasn’t paranoia: the threat was real.

The hair was wet to my scalp and my jacket all but ruined by the time I pushed through the front door. The house was quiet, no music bleeding through the speakers, no murmur of voices or tread of footsteps. There was the soft fading scratch of one of the cats in the litter pan in the kitchen, and that was it, nothing, silence absolute. I stood in the entryway a moment, trying to scrape the mud and leaves from my boots, but it was hopeless, so finally I just stepped out of them in my stocking feet and left them there at the door. I suppose that was why Suzie and Cole didn’t hear me coming—I hadn’t meant to creep up on them, hadn’t meant anything except to
somehow come round to tell them what I knew, what I’d learned, warning them, sparing them, and as I say my heart was going and I was risking everything myself just to be there, just to be present—and when I stepped into the living room they gave me a shock. They were naked, their clothes flung down beside them, rolling on a blanket in sexual play—or the prelude to it. I suppose it doesn’t really matter at this juncture to say that I’d found her attractive—she was the pretty one, always that—or that I felt all along that she’d favored me over Cole or Nicky or any of the others? That didn’t matter. That had nothing to do with it. I’d come with a warning, and I had to deliver it.

“Who’s that?” Suzie’s voice rose up out of the stillness. Cole was atop her and she had to lift her head to fix her eyes on me. “John? Is that you?”

Cole rolled off her and flipped a fold of the blanket over her. “Jesus,” he said, “you picked a great moment.” His eyes burned, though I could see he was trying to be cool, trying to minimize it, no big thing.

“Jesus,” Suzie said, “you scared me. Do you always creep around like that?”

“My boots,” I said. “They just—or actually, I just came by to tell you something, that’s all—I can’t stay…”

The rain was like two cupped palms holding the place in its grip. The gutters rattled. Pinpricks needled the roof. “Shit,” Cole said, and Suzie reached out to gather up her clothes, shielding her breasts in the crook of one arm, “I mean, shit, John. Couldn’t you wait in the kitchen, I mean, for like ten fucking minutes? Huh? Couldn’t you?”

I swung round without a word and padded out to the kitchen even as the living room door thundered shut at my back. For a long while I sat at the familiar table with its detritus of burned joss sticks, immolated candles, beer bottles, mugs, food wrappers and the like, thinking I could just write them a note—that would do it—or maybe I’d call Cole later, from home, when he got home, that was, at his mother’s. But I couldn’t find a pencil—nobody took notes here,
that was for sure—and finally I just pushed myself up, tiptoed to the door and fell back into my boots and the sodden jacket.

I
T WAS JUST
getting dark when I pulled up in front of the house. My father’s car was parked there at the curb, but my mother’s wasn’t and it wasn’t in the driveway either. The rain kept coming down—the streets were flooding, broad sheets of water fanning away from the tires and the main road clogged with slow-moving cars and their tired headlights and frantically beating wipers. I ran for the house, kicked off my boots on the doorstep and flung myself inside as if I’d been away for years. My jacket streamed and I hurried across the carpet to the accompaniment of the dog’s thwacking tail and hung it from the shower head in the bathroom. Then I went to the kitchen to look in the refrigerator, feeling desolate and cheated. I didn’t have a habit despite the stigmata of my arms—I was a neophyte still, a twice- or three-times-a-week user—but I had a need, and that need yawned before me, opening up and opening up again, as I leaned over the sink. The cottage was over. Cole was over. Life, as I’d come to know it, was finished.

It was then that I noticed the figure of my father moving through the gloom of the backyard. He had on a pair of galoshes I’d worn as a kid, the kind with the metal fasteners, and he was wearing a yellow rain slicker and one of those winter hats with the fold-down earmuffs. I couldn’t quite tell what he was doing out there, raking dirt or leaves, something to do with the rain, I guessed—the driveway was eroding, maybe that was it. It never crossed my mind that he might need help. And Robert Rowe never crossed my mind either, nor the fact that his speech had been garbled and slow at the noon hour and his eyes drifting toward a point no one in this world could see but him.

No. I was hungry for something, I didn’t know what. It wasn’t food, because I mechanically chewed a handful of saltines over the sink and washed them down with half a glass of milk that tasted like chalk. I paced round the living room, snuck a drink out of my mother’s bottle—Dewar’s, that was what she drank; my father stuck with
vodka, the cheaper the better, and I’d never acquired a taste for it. I had another drink, and then another. After a while I eased myself down in my father’s chair and gazed around the room where I’d spent the better part of my life, the secondhand furniture, the forest-green wallpaper gone pale around the windowframes, the peeling sheet-metal planter I’d made for my mother in shop class, the plants within it long since expired, just curls of dead things now. Finally I got up and turned on the TV, then settled back in my father’s chair as the jets came in low and the village went up in flames.