T. Boyle - Tooth and Claw

The fire snapped and spat. It was all winding down now. Zach put the mug to his lips and felt the hot jolt of the coffee like a bullet in the back of his throat. He didn’t look at Ontario, didn’t pat her hand or slip an arm round her shoulders. “We’re going to need a room,” he said, gazing up at the man, and in the space of that instant he could hear the faint hum of the wings and the beat of the paws and the long doomed drumming of the hooves before Ontario corrected him.

“No,” she said. “Two rooms.”

I’VE BEEN LIVING in Jubilation for almost two years now. There’s been a lot of change in that time, both for the better and the worse, as you might expect in any real and authentic town composed of real and authentic people with their iron-clad personalities and various personal agendas, but overall I’d say I’m happy I chose the Contash Corp’s vision of community living. I’ve got friends here, neighbors, people who care about me the way I care about them. We’ve had our crises, no question about it — Mother Nature has been pretty erratic these past two years — and there isn’t a man, woman or child in Jubilation who isn’t worried about maintaining property values in the face of all the naysaying and criticism that’s come our way. Still, it’s the people this whole thing is about, and the people I know are as determined and forward-looking a bunch as any you’d ever hope to find. We’ve built something here, something I think we can all be proud of.

It wasn’t easy. From the beginning, everybody laughed behind my back. Everybody said, “Oh, sure, Jackson, you get divorced and the first thing you do is fly down to Florida and live in some theme park with Gulpy Gator and whoever — Chowchy the Lizard, right? — and you defend it with some tripe about community and the New Urbanists and we’re supposed to say you’re behaving rationally?” My ex-wife was the worst. Lauren. She made it sound as if I was personally going to drive the Sky Lift or slip into a Gulpy suit and greet people at the gates of Contash World, but the truth is I was a pioneer, I had a chance to get into something on the ground floor and make it work— sacrifice to make it work — and all the cynics I used to call friends just snickered in their apple martinis as if my post-divorce life was some opera bouffe staged for their amusement.

Take the lottery. They all thought I was crazy, but I booked my ticket, flew down to Orlando and took my place in line with six thousand strangers while the sun peeled the skin off the tip of my nose and baked through the soles of my shoes. There was sleet on the runway at LaGuardia when the plane took off, a foot and a half of snow expected in the suburbs, and it meant nothing to me, not anymore. The palms were nodding in a languid tropical breeze, the chiggers, no-see-ums and mosquitoes were all on vacation somewhere, children scampered across the emerald grass and vigorous little birds darted in and out of the jasmine and hibiscus. It was early yet, not quite eight. People shuffled their feet, tapped their watches, gazed hopefully off into the distance while a hundred Contash greeters moved up and down the line with crullers and Styrofoam cups of coffee.

The excitement was contagious, and yet it was inseparable from a certain element of competitive anxiety — this was a random drawing, after all, and there would necessarily have to be winners and losers. Still, people were outgoing and friendly, chatting amongst themselves as if they’d known one another all their lives, sharing around cold cuts and homemade potato salad, swapping stories. Everybody knew the rules — there was no favoritism here. Charles Contash was founding a town, a prět-à-porter community set down in the middle of the vacation wonderland itself, with Contash World on one side and Game Park U.S.A. on the other, and if you wanted in — no matter who you were or who you knew — you had to stand in line like anybody else.

Directly in front of me was a single mother in a powder-blue halter top designed to show off her assets, which were considerable, and in front of her were two men holding hands; immediately behind me, silently masticating crullers, was a family of four, mom, pop, sis and junior, their faces haggard and interchangeable, and behind them, a black couple burying their heads in a glossy brochure. The single mother — she’d identified herself only as Vicki — had one fat ripe cream puff of a baby slung over her left shoulder, where it (he? she?) was playing with the thin band of her spaghetti strap, while the other child, a boy of three or so decked out in a striped polo shirt and a pair of shorts he could grow into, clung to her knee as if he’d been fastened there with a strip of Velcro. “So what did you say your name was?” she asked, swinging round on me for what must have been the hundredth time in the past hour. The baby, in this view, was a pair of blinding white diapers and two swollen, rooting legs.

I told her my name was Jackson, and that I was pleased to meet her, and before she could say Is that your first name or last? I clarified the issue for her: “Jackson Peters Reilly. That’s my mother’s maiden name. Jackson. And her mother’s maiden name was Peters.”

She seemed to consider this a moment, her eyes drifting in and out of focus. She patted the baby’s bottom for no good reason. “Wish I’d thought of that,” she said. “This one’s Ashley, and my son’s Ethan— Say hello, Ethan. Ethan?” And then she laughed, a hearty, hopeful laugh that had nothing to do with rejection, abandonment or a night spent on the pavement with two exhausted children while holding a place something like four hundred deep in the lottery line. “Of course, my maiden name’s Silinski, so it wouldn’t exactly sound too feminine for little baby Ashley, now would it?”

She was flirting with me, and that was okay, that was fine, because wasn’t that what I’d come down here for in the first place — to upgrade my social life? I was tired of New York. Tired of L.A. Tired of the anonymity, the hassle, the grab and squeeze and the hostility snarling just beneath the surface of every transaction, no matter how small or insignificant. “I don’t know,” I said, “sounds kind of chic to me. The doorbell rings and there’s all these neighborhood kids chanting, ‘Can Silinski come out to play?’ Or the modeling agency calls. ‘So what about Silinski,’ they say, ‘is she available?’ ”

I was doing fine, grinning and smooth-talking and sailing right along, though my back felt misaligned and my right hip throbbed where the pavement had bitten into it during a mostly sleepless night under the amber glow of the newly installed Contash streetlamps. I took a swig from my Evian bottle, tugged the plastic brim of my visor down to keep the sun from irradiating the creases at the corners of my eyes. There was one more Silinski trope on my tongue, the one that would bring her to her knees in adoration of my wit and charm, but I never got to utter it because at that moment the rolling blast of a Civil War cannon announced the official opening of the lottery, and everybody in line crowded closer as ten thousand balloons, in the powder-blue and sun-kissed orange of the Contash Corp, rose up like a mad flock into the sky.

“Welcome, all you friends and neighbors,” boomed an amplified voice, and all eyes went to the head of the line. There, atop the four-story tower of the sales preview center, a tiny figure in the Contash colors held out his arms in benediction. “And all you little ones too — and remember, Gulpy Gator and Chowchy love you one and all, and so does our founder, Charles Contash, whose vision of community, of health and vigor and good schools and good neighbors, has never shone more brightly than it does today in Jubilation! No need to crowd, no need to fret. We’ve got two thousand Village Homes, Cottage Homes, Little Adobes and Mercado Street mini — luxury apartments available today, and three thousand more to come. So welcome, folks, and just step up and draw your lucky number from the hopper.”