T. Boyle - Tooth and Claw

Then it was the party, a blur of grinning, lurching faces, the music like a second pulse, the laughter of the girls, the brothers treating the pledges almost like human beings and everything made special by the snow that was still coming down, coming harder, coming like the end of the world. Every time the front door opened, the smell of it took hold of you as if you’d been plunged in a cold stream on the hottest day in August, and there would be two girls, two more girls, in knit hats pulled down to the eyebrows and scarves flung over their shoulders, stamping the snow from their boots and shouting, “A beer! A beer! My kingdom for a beer!”

Time contracted. One minute Chris and his pledgemates were scrambling to replenish the drinks and snacks on the big table in the dining room, everything reeking of spilled beer and tequila, as if a sea of it had washed through the house, from the attic on down to the basement, and the next minute the girls were gone, the night was settling in and Dagan was there, cracking the whip. “All right, you dogs, I want this place clean — spotless, you understand me? You’ve got ten minutes, ten minutes and all the trash is out of here and every scrap of this shit off the floor.” The rest of the brothers were standing around now, post-party, working on the keg — the ones who weren’t off getting laid, that is — and they added jeers and head slaps, barking out random orders and making the pledges drop for twenty at the slightest provocation (and being alive, breathing and present seemed provocation enough).

Like any other healthy eighteen-year-old, Chris drank, and he’d tried just about everything at least once. He was no angel on a pedestal, Jimmy knew that, and drinking — the taste for it — ran in his blood, sure it did, but in high school it was beer only and never to excess. Chris was afraid of what alcohol would do to him, to his performance on the field, to his grades, and more often than not he was the one who wound up driving everybody home after the post-game parties. But here he was, dense with it, his head stuffed full of cellulose, a screen pulled down over his eyes. He moved slowly and deliberately, lurching behind a black plastic bag full of wet trash, fumbling with the broom, the dustpan, listening for Dagan’s voice in the mélange of shouts and curses and too-loud dance music as if it were the one thing he could cling to, the one thing that would get him through this and into the shelter of his bed in the windowless room behind the stairway on the second floor.

“Wait a minute, what’s this? Hey, Dagan. Dagan . You see this?” It was the guy they called Pillar, a senior who wore a perpetual look of disappointment on his face and was said to have once won the drinking contest at Harry’s Bar in Key West by outlasting a three-hundred-pound Samoan through sixteen rounds of mojitos. He was holding up two still-sealed bottles of Don José tequila.

Dagan’s face floated into the picture. “I see what you mean, bro — the place just isn’t clean, is it? I mean, would you want to operate under these conditions?”

“Uh-uh, no way,” Pillar said. “Not while these motherfucking bottles are sitting here. I’m offended. I really am. How about you, Dagan? Aren’t you offended?”

Dude . That was what they called the drinking game, though Chris had never heard of it before and would never hear of it again. Dude, that was all, and the whole house was chanting it now, “Dude! Dude! Dude!” Dagan marched the pledges down to the game room in the basement, made them line up against the back wall and handed each of them a shot glass. This was where the big-screen TV was, where the whole house gathered to watch the Pats and the Celtics and the porn videos that made your blood surge till you thought it was going to keep on going right out the top of your head.

It was 2:00 A.M. Chris couldn’t feel his legs. Everything seemed funny suddenly, and he was laughing so hard he thought he was going to bring it all up, the beer, the schnapps, the pepperoni pizza and the chips and salsa and Cheez Doodles, and his pledgemates were laughing too, Dude, the funniest thing in the world. Then Dagan slipped the video into the VCR— Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure —and gave them their instructions, serious business now, a ritual, and no fooling around (“I’m serious, people, and wipe the smirks off your faces — you are in deep shit now”). Music, a flash of color, and there was Keanu Reeves, with his slice of an Asiatic face and disappearing eyes, playing the fool, or maybe playing to type, and every time he uttered the monosyllabic tag that gave the game its name, the pledge class had to lift the glasses to their lips and down a shot—“Hey, dude; ‘S up, dude”—till both bottles were drained.

Benny Chung was the first one to break. He was seventeen, a Merit Scholarship finalist, with narrow shoulders, wrists you could loop two fingers around and a head that seemed to float up like a balloon from the tether of his neck. His shoulders dipped forward as if he were trying to duck under a low-hanging limb, then his lips pulled back and he spewed all over the floor and his pant legs and his black high-top Converse sneakers. It was a heroic effort, so much of that umber chowder coming out of so frail a vessel, and Benny had to go down on one knee to get it all out. Nobody said anything, and nobody was laughing now. Up on the screen, Keanu Reeves said the magic word, and all the pledges, including Benny, hammered another shot. Benny couldn’t hold it, though, and neither could Chris. Chris saw the look on Benny’s face — the outrage of an entire organism and all its constituent cells — and he remembered his own legs buckling and the release the first wave of nausea gave him, and then he felt nothing more.

All the Delts were swarming the room now, expostulating over this disgusting display, this pathetic showing on the part of a pledge class that wasn’t worthy of the name, and hands took hold of Benny and Chris, people shouting and jostling, the whinny of laughter, cries of “Gross!” and “Don’t get any of that shit on me, man,” the hands finding purchase at armpit and knee. They laid Benny and Chris side by side on Chris’ bed, then thundered back down the three flights of stairs to the game room. Half an hour went by and both bottles of Don José were drained by the time anyone thought to look in on them, and another ten minutes elapsed before Dagan Drava, a premed student, realized that Chris wasn’t breathing.

“So he was drunk,” Jimmy told me, the band into their opening number now — blues, they were doing a blues tune that seemed vaguely familiar—“and who hasn’t been drunk? I’ve been drunk a thousand times in my life, you know what I mean? So I figure, all the way up there with Caroline hyperventilating and what-if-ing and driving me half crazy, that we’re going to walk into the hospital and he’ll be sitting up in bed with a sheepish grin on his face, one hell of a headache, maybe, and a lesson learned, but no harm done.”

Jimmy was wrong. His son had choked on his own vomit, inhaled it, compromising his lungs. No one knew how long he’d been lying there in the bed next to Benny Chung without drawing a breath before the E.R. team restarted his heart, and no one was sure of how much damage had been done to his brain functions. A CT scan showed edema of the brain tissue. He was in a coma. A machine was breathing for him. Caroline went after the doctors like an inquisitor, relentless, terrifying in her grief. She stalked the halls, chased them to their cars, harangued them on the phone, demanded — and got — the top neurologist in New England. Chris’ eyes never opened. Beneath the lids, like a dirty secret, his pupils dilated to full and fixed there, focused on nothing. Two days later he was dead.