Tooth and Claw (6 page)

Then he was there, fighting his way out of the car, and he had to hold to the door to keep from being blown away himself. The moor was as black as the hide of an Angus bull. The wind shrieked in every passage, scouring the heather till it lay flat and cried out its agony. He could hear the sea battering the cliffs below. It was then that the door of the minivan gave way and in the next instant he was coasting
out over the scrub like a tobogganer hurtling down Burrafirth Hill, and there’ll be men to tell you it was a tree saved him from going over, but what tree could grow on an island as stingy as this? It was a thornbush is what it was, a toughened black unforgiving snarl of woody pith combed down to the ground with fifty years of buffeting, but it was enough. The shining white door of the minivan ran out to sea as if it would run forever, an awkward big plate of steel that might as well have been a Frisbee sailing out over the waves, but Robbie Baikie was saved, though the thorns dug into his hands and the wind took the hair off his head and flailed the beard from his cheeks. He squinted against it, against the airborne dirt and the darkness, and there it was, two hundred yards away and off behind him to the left: the crofter’s cottage, and with her in it. “Junie!” he cried, but the wind beat at the sound of his voice and carried it away till it was no voice at all. “Junie!”

As for her, the bird woman, the American girl with the legs that took the breath out of you and the face and figure that were as near perfection as any man here had ever dreamed of on the best night of his life, she never knew Robbie had come for her. What she did know was that the wind was bad. Very bad. She must have struggled against it and realized how futile it was to do anything more than to succumb to it, to huddle and cling and wait it out. Where were the birds? she wondered. How would they weather this—on their wings? Out at sea? She was cold, shivering, the fire long since consumed by the gusts that tore at the chimney. And then the chimney went, with a sound of claws raking at a windowpane. There was a crack, and the roof beams gave way, and then it was the night staring down at her from above. She clung to the andirons, but the andirons blew away, and then she clung to the stones of the hearth but the stones were swept away as if they were nothing more than motes of dust, and what was she supposed to cling to then?

We never found her. Nobody did. There are some who’ll say she was swept all the way to the coast of Norway and came ashore speaking Norse like a native or that a ship’s captain, battened down in a storm-sea, found her curled round the pocked safety glass of the bridge like a living figurehead, but no one really believes it. Robbie
Baikie survived the night and he survived the mourning of her too. He sits even now over his pint and his drop of whisky in the back nook at Magnuson’s, and if anybody should ask him about the only love of his life, the bird woman from America, he’ll tell you he’s heard her voice in the cries of the kittiwakes that swarm the skies in spring, and seen her face there too, hanging over the black crashing sea on the stiff white wings of a bird. Poor Robbie.

RUMORS

I
T WAS THE SEASON
of mud, drainpipes drooling, the gutters clogged with debris, a battered and penitential robin fixed like a statue on every lawn. Julian was up early, a Saturday morning, beating eggs with a whisk and gazing idly out the kitchen window and into the colorless hide of the day, expecting nothing, when all at once the scrim of rain parted to reveal a dark, crouching presence in the far corner of the yard. At first glance, he took it to be a dog—a town ordinance he particularly detested disallowed fences higher than three feet, and so the contiguous lawns and flowerbeds of the neighborhood had become a sort of open savanna for roaming packs of dogs—but before the wind shifted and the needling rain closed in again, he saw that he was wrong. This figure, partially obscured by the resurgent forsythia bush, seemed out of proportion, all limbs, as if a dog had been mated with a monkey. And what was it, then? Raccoons had been at the trash lately, and he’d seen a opossum wavering down the street like a pale ghost one late night after a dreary overwrought movie Cara had insisted upon, but this was no opossum. Or raccoon either. It was dark in color, whatever it was—a bear, maybe, a yearling strayed down from the high ridges along the river, and hadn’t Ben Ober told him somebody on F Street had found a bear in their swimming pool? He put down the whisk and went to fetch his glasses.

A sudden eruption of thunder set the dishes rattling on the drain-board, followed by an uncertain flicker of light that illuminated the dark room as if the bulb in the overhead fixture had gone loose in the socket. He wondered how Cara could sleep through all this, but the wonder was short-lived, because he really didn’t give a damn one way or the other if she slept all day, all night, all week. Better she should sleep and give him some peace. He was in the living room now, the gloom ladled over everything, shadows leeching into black holes behind the leather couch and matching armchairs, the rubber plant a dark ladder in the corner and the shadowy fingers of the potted palms reaching out for nothing. The thunder rolled again, the lightning flashed. His glasses were atop the TV, where he’d left them the night before while watching a sorry documentary about the children purportedly raised by wolves in India back in the nineteen twenties, two stringy girls in sepia photographs that revealed little and could have been faked in any case. He put his glasses on and padded back into the kitchen in his stocking feet, already having forgotten why he’d gone to get them in the first place. Then he saw the whisk in a puddle of beaten egg on the counter, remembered, and peered out the window again.

The sight of the three dogs there—a pair of clownish chows and what looked to be a shepherd mix—did nothing but irritate him. He recognized this trio—they were the advance guard of the dog army that dropped their excrement all over the lawn, dug up his flowerbeds, and, when he tried to shoo them, looked right through him as if he didn’t exist. It wasn’t that he had anything against dogs per se—it was their destructiveness he objected to, their arrogance, as if they owned the whole world and it was their privilege to do as they liked with it. He was about to step to the back door and chase them off, when the figure he’d first seen—the shadow beneath the forsythia bush—suddenly emerged. It was no animal, he realized with a shock, but a woman, a young woman dressed all in black, with her black hair hanging wet in her face and the clothes stuck to her like a second skin, down on all fours like a dog herself, sniffing. He was dumbfounded. As stunned and amazed as if someone had just
stepped into the kitchen and slapped him till his head rolled back on his shoulders.

He’d been aware of the rumors—there was a new couple in the neighborhood, over on F Street, and the woman was a little strange, dashing through people’s yards at any hour of the day or night, baying at the moon and showing her teeth to anyone who got in her way—but he’d dismissed them as some sort of suburban legend. Yet here she was, in his yard, violating his privacy, in the company of a pack of dogs he’d like to see shot—and their owners too. He didn’t know what to do. He was frozen there in his own kitchen, shadows undermining the flicker of the fluorescent tubes he’d installed over the counters, the omelet pan sending up a metallic stink of incineration. And then the three dogs lifted their heads as if they’d heard something in the distance, the thunder boomed overhead, and suddenly they leapt the fence in tandem and were gone. The woman rose up out of the mud at this point—she was wearing a sodden turtleneck, jeans, a watch cap—locked eyes with him across the expanse of the rain-screened yard for just an instant, or maybe he was imagining this part of it, and then she turned and took the fence in a single bound, vanishing into the rain.

CYNOMORPH

W
HATEVER IT WAS
they’d heard, it wasn’t available to her, though she’d been trying to train her hearing away from the ceaseless clatter of the mechanical and tune it to the finer things, the wind stirring in the grass, the alarm call of a fallen nestling, the faintest sliver of a whimper from the dog three houses over, begging to be let out. And her nose. She’d made a point of sticking it in anything the dogs did, breathing deep of it, rebooting the olfactory receptors of a brain that had been deadened by perfume and underarm deodorant and all the other stifling odors of civilization. Every smell was a discovery, and every dog discovered more of the world in ten minutes running loose than a human being would discover in ten years of sitting behind the wheel of a car or standing at the lunch counter in a deli or even hiking
the Alps. What she was doing, or attempting to do, was nothing short of reordering her senses so that she could think like a dog and interpret the whole world—not just the human world—as dogs did.

Why? Because no one had ever done it before. Whole hordes wanted to be primatologists or climb into speedboats and study whales and dolphins or cruise the veldt in a Land Rover to watch the lions suckle their young beneath the baobabs, but none of them gave a second thought to dogs. Dogs were beneath them. Dogs were common, pedestrian, no more exotic than the housefly or the Norway rat. Well, she was going to change all that. Or at least that was what she’d told herself after the graduate committee rejected her thesis, but that was a long time ago now—two years and more—and the door was rapidly closing on it.

But here she was moving again, and movement was good, it was her essence: up over the fence and into the next yard, dodging a clothesline, a cooking grill, a plastic trike, a sandbox, reminding herself always to keep her head down and go quadrupedal whenever possible, because how else was she going to hear, smell and see as the dogs did? Another fence, and there, at the far end of the yard, a shed, and the dense rust-colored tails of the chows wagging. The rain spat in her face, relentless. It had been coming down steadily most of the night, and now it seemed even heavier, as if it meant to drive her back indoors where she belonged. Lightning forked overhead. There was a rumble of thunder. She was shivering—had been shivering for the past hour, shivering so hard she thought her teeth were coming loose—and as she ran, doubled over in a crouch, she pumped her knees and flapped her arms in an attempt to generate some heat.

And what were the dogs onto now? She saw the one she called Barely disappear behind the shed and snake back out again, her tail rigid, sniffing now, barking, and suddenly they were all barking—the two chows and the semi-shepherd she’d named Factitious because he was such a sham, pretending he was a rover when he never strayed more than five blocks from his house on E Street. There was a smell of freshly turned earth, of compost and wood ash, of the half-drowned worms Snout the Afghan loved to gobble up off the pavement. She glanced toward the locked gray vault of the house, concerned that
the noise would alert whoever lived here, but it was early yet, no lights on, no sign of activity. The dogs’ bodies moiled. The barking went up a notch. She ran, hunched at the waist, hurrying.

And then, out of the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of A.1., the big-shouldered husky who’d earned his name by consuming half a bottle of steak sauce beside an overturned trash can one bright January morning. He was running—but where had he come from? She hadn’t seen him all night and assumed he’d been wandering out at the limits of his range, over in Bethel or Georgetown. She watched him streak across the yard, ears pinned back, head low, her path converging on his until he disappeared behind the shed. Angling round the back of the thing—it was aluminum, one of those prefab articles they sell in the big warehouse stores—she found the compost pile her nose had alerted her to (good, good: she was improving) and a tower of old wicker chairs stacked up six feet high. A.1. never hesitated. He surged in at the base of the tower, his jaws snapping, and the second chow, the one she called Decidedly, was right behind him—and then she saw: there was something under there, a face with incendiary eyes, and it was growling for its life in a thin continuous whine that might have been the drone of a model airplane buzzing overhead.

What was it? She crouched low, came in close. A straggler appeared suddenly, a fluid sifting from the blind side of the back fence to the yard—it was Snout, gangly, goofy, the fastest dog in the neighborhood and the widest ranger, A.1.’s wife and the mother of his dispersed pups. And then all five of the dogs went in for the kill.

The thunder rolled again, concentrating the moment, and she got her first clear look: cream-colored fur, naked pink toes, a flash of teeth and burdened gums. It was a opossum, unlucky, doomed, caught out while creeping back to its nest on soft marsupial feet after a night of foraging among the trash cans. There was a roil of dogs, no barking now, just the persistent unraveling growls that were like curses, and the first splintering crunch of bone. The tower of wicker came down with a clatter, chairs upended and scattered, and the dogs hardly noticed. She glanced around her in alarm, but there was nobody
to be seen, nothing moving but the million silver drill bits of the rain boring into the ground. Just as the next flash of lightning lit the sky, A.1. backed out from under the tumble of chairs with the carcass clenched in his jaws, furiously shaking it to snap a neck that was already two or three times broken, and she was startled to see how big the thing was—twenty pounds of meat, gristle, bone and hair, twenty pounds at least. He shook it again, then dropped it at his wife’s feet as an offering. It lay still, the other dogs extending their snouts to sniff at it dispassionately, and they were scientists themselves, studying and measuring, remembering. And when the hairless pink young emerged from the pouch, she tried not to feel anything as the dogs snapped them up one by one.

CARA

“Y
OU MEAN
you didn’t confront her?”

Cara was in her royal purple robe—her “wrapper,” as she insisted on calling it, as if they were at a country manor in the Cotswolds entertaining Lord and Lady Muckbright instead of in a tract house in suburban Connecticut—and she’d paused with a forkful of mushroom omelet halfway to her mouth. She was on her third cup of coffee and wearing her combative look.