T. Boyle - Tooth and Claw

That was all right. Everything was all right. The school year began and he dug out his notes, Xeroxed study guides, looked up and down the class register and saw who he could trust and who he’d have to watch. In the mornings, before it was light, he ate breakfast alone in the kitchen, listening to the soft hum of the classic rock channel, the hits that took him back, hits he hadn’t heard in years because Chris always had the radio tuned to hip-hop or the alternative station. Above him, in the master bedroom, Caroline was enjoying the luxury of sleeping late after thirteen years of scrambling eggs and buttering toast and seeing her son off to school. It was still dark when he climbed into his car, and most mornings he was the first one in the building, striding down the wide polished halls in a silence that could have choked on itself.

Fall settled in early that year, a succession of damp glistening days that took the leaves off the trees and fed on the breath of the wind. It seemed to do nothing but rain, day after day. The sky never swelled to flex its glory; the sun never shone. He saw a photo in the paper of a barechested jogger on the beach in Key Biscayne and felt reality slipping away from him. One afternoon he was out on the field in back of the school — the lacrosse team was scrimmaging with a bigger, more talented squad from a prep school upstate — and he couldn’t seem to focus on the game. The assistant coach, no more than three or four years out of school himself, stepped up and took over the hectoring and the shoulder patting, managed the stream of substitutions and curbed the erupting tempers — discipline, that’s what Jimmy taught above all else, because in a contact sport the team that controls its emotions will win out every time — while the clock ticked off the minutes to the half and the sky drew into itself and the rain whitened to sleet.

The sticks flashed, the players hurtled past him, grunting and cursing. He stood there in the weather, a physical presence, chilled, his hair wet, yet he wasn’t there at all. He was reliving an episode from the previous year when his son had been the star player on the team, a moment like this one, the field slick, the players’ legs a patchwork of mud, stippled flesh and dark blooming contusions. Chris had the ball. Two defenders converged on him, and Jimmy — the coach, the father — could see it all coming, the collision that would break open the day, bone to bone, the concussion, the shattered femur, injury to the spinal cord, to the brain. The sound of it — the sick wet explosion — froze him so that he couldn’t even go to his son, couldn’t move. But then, a miracle, Chris pushed himself up from the icy turf, stiff as a rake, and began to walk it off.

Jimmy awoke to the fact that someone was tugging at his arm. “Coach,” somebody was saying, Mary-Louise, the principal’s secretary, and what was she doing out here in this weather, the sleet caught like dander in the drift of her hairdo that must have cost sixty-five dollars to streak and color and set? “Jimmy,” she said. “You need to call your wife.” Her face fell, the white pellets pounded her hair. “It’s an emergency.”

He used the phone in the history chair’s office, more weary than anything else. Since Chris had left home, everything seemed to set off alarm bells in Caroline’s head — she thought she heard a sound in the front end of the car, the telephone had rung three times in succession but nobody was there, the cat was refusing to eat and she was sure it was feline leukemia because she’d just read an article about it in the local paper. And what was it this time — a furtive scratching in the attic? Mold eating at the caulking around the tub? He thought nothing. Stared at the crescent of white beach on the marked-up calendar tacked to the wall behind Jerry Mortensen’s desk as he dialed, and wished he could feel some sun on his face for a change. Florida. Maybe they’d go to Florida for the holidays, if Chris was up for it.

Caroline picked up on the second ring and her words burned a hole right through him. “It’s Chris,” she said. “He’s in the hospital.” There was no quaver, no emotion, no cracking around the edges of what she was trying to convey, and it scared him. “He’s in the hospital,” she repeated.

“The hospital?”

“Jimmy,” she said, and her voice cracked now, snapped like a compound fracture. “Jimmy. He’s dying.”

Dying? An eighteen-year-old athlete with a charmer’s smile and no bad habits, heart like a clock, limbs of hammered wire, studious, dutiful, not a wild bone in his body? “What was it,” I said, sounding tinny in my own ears, because his pain wasn’t mine and there was no confusing the two. “Car crash?”

There had been a fraternity party the night before. The streets were slick, power lines were down, rain turned to ice, ice to snow. Chris was one of twelve pledges at Delta Upsilon, a party-hearty fraternity that offered instant access to the social scene, and it was the pledges’ responsibility to pick up the party supplies — beer, vodka, cranberry juice, chips and salsa, and bunting to drape over the doorways of the big white ocean liner of a house, which had belonged to a shipping magnate at the turn of the last century. None of them had a car, so they had to walk into town and back, three trips in all, over sidewalks that were like bobsled runs, the snow so thick it was coming down in clumps, and somebody — it was Sonny Hammerschmitt, twenty-three years old and fresh from four years in the Navy and the only one of them who didn’t need fake ID — suggested they ought to stop in at the Owl’s Eye Tavern and sneak a quick beer to get in the party mood. Chris tried to talk them out of it. “Are you kidding?” he said, a cardboard box bristling with the amber necks of tequila bottles perched up on one shoulder while cars shushed by on the street and the intermediate distance blurred to white. “Dagan’ll kill us if he finds out.”

“Fuck Dagan. What’s he going to do, blackball us? All of us?”

A snowball careened off the box and Chris almost lost his grip on it. Everybody was laughing, breath streaming, faces red with novelty, with hilarity and release. He set down the box and pelted his pledgemates with snowballs, each in his turn. Directly across the street was the tavern, a nondescript shingled building with a steep-pitched roof that might have been there when the Pilgrims came over — ancient, indelible, rooted like the trees. It was getting dark. Snow frosted the roof; the windows were pools of gold. A car crept up the street, chains jingling on the rear tires. Chris threw back his head and closed his eyes a moment, the snow accumulating like a cold compress on his eyelids. “Sure,” he said, “okay. Why not? But just one, and then we’d better—” but he never finished the thought.

Inside, it was like another world, like a history lesson, with jars of pickled eggs and Polish sausage lined up behind the bar, a display of campaign buttons from the forties and fifties— I Like Ike —and a fireplace, a real fireplace, split oak sending up fantails of sparks against a backdrop of blackened brick. The air smelled sweet — it wasn’t a confectionary sweetness or the false scent of air freshener either, but the smell of wood and wood smoke, pipe tobacco, booze. Sonny got them two pitchers of beer and shots of peppermint schnapps all around. They were there no more than half an hour — Dagan Drava, their pledgemaster, would really have their hides if he ever found out — and they drank quickly, greedily, drank as if they were getting away with something. Which they were. The snow mounted on the ledge outside the window. They had two more shots each and refilled the pitchers at least once, or maybe it was twice. Chris couldn’t be sure.