T. Boyle - Tooth and Claw

It took me a few strokes to reacquaint myself with the apparatus of oars and oarlocks, and we lurched away from the dock as if we’d been torpedoed, but I got into the rhythm of it soon enough and we glided cleanly out across the mirrored surface of the lake. Vicki didn’t want me to go more than twenty or thirty feet from shore, and that was all right too, except that I found myself dredging up noxious-smelling clumps of pondweed that seemed to cast a powerful olfactory spell over Bruce. He kept snapping at the weed as I lifted first one oar and then the other to try to shake it off, and once or twice I had to drop the oars and discipline him because he was leaning so far out over the bow I thought we were going to lose him. Still, we saw birdlife everywhere we looked, herons, egrets, cormorants and anhingas, and Ethan got a real kick out of a clutch of painted turtles stacked up like dinner plates on a half-submerged log.

We’d gone half a mile or so, I guess, to the far side of the lake where the wake of the motorboats wouldn’t interfere overmuch with the mustarding of the sandwiches and the delicate operation of pouring the wine into long-stemmed crystal glasses. The baby, wrapped up like a sausage in her life jacket — or life-cradle, might be more accurate — was asleep, a blissful baby smile painted on her lips. Bruce curled up at my feet in the brown swill at the bottom of the boat and Vicki sipped wine and gave me a look of contentment so deep and pure I was beginning to think I wouldn’t mind seeing it across the breakfast table for the rest of my life. It was tranquil. Dragonflies hovering, fish rising, not a mosquito in sight. Even little Ethan, normally such a clingy kid, seemed to be enjoying himself tracing the pattern of his finger in the water as the boat rocked and drifted in a gentle airy dance.

About that water. The TJC assured us it was unpolluted by human waste and uncontaminated by farm runoff, and that its rusty color — it was nearly opaque and perpetually blooming with the microscopic creatures that comprise the bottom of the food chain in a healthy and thriving aquatic ecosystem — was perfectly natural. Though the lake had been dredged out of the swampland some forty years earlier, this was the way its waters had always looked, and the creatures that lived and throve here were grateful for it — like all of us in Jubilation, they had Charles Contash to thank for that too.

Well. We drifted, the dog and the baby snoozed, Vicki kept up a happy chatter on any number of topics, all of which seemed to have a subtext of sexual innuendo, and I just wasn’t prepared for what came next, and I blame myself, I do. Maybe it was the wine or the influence of the sun and the faint sweet cleansing breeze, but I wasn’t alert to the dangers inherent in the situation — I was an American, raised in a time of prosperity and peace, and I’d been spared the tumult and horror visited on so many of the less fortunate in this world. New York and L.A. might have been nasty places, and Lauren was certainly a plague in her own right, but nobody had ever bombed my village or shot down my family in the street, and when my parents died they died quietly, in their own beds.

I was in the act of extracting the wine bottle from its cradle of ice in the cooler when the boat gave a sudden lurch and I glanced up just in time to see the broad flat grinning reptilian head emerge from the water, pluck Ethan off the gunwale and vanish in the murk. It was like an illusion in a magic show, now he’s here, now he isn’t, and I wasn’t able to respond until my brain replayed the scene and I felt the sudden horror knife at my heart. “Did you—?” I began, but Vicki was already screaming.

THE SEQUENCE OF EVENTS becomes a little confused for me at this juncture, but looking back on it, I’m fairly certain the funeral service preceded the thrashing we took from Hurricane Albert — I distinctly remember the volunteerism the community showed in dredging the lake, which would have been impossible after the hurricane hit. Sadly, no trace of little Ethan was ever found. No need to tell you how devastated I was — I was as hurt and wrung out as I’ve ever been in my life, and I’ll never give up second-guessing myself — but even more, I was angry. Angry over the Contash Corp’s failure to disclose the hazards lurking around us and furious over the way the press jumped on the story, as if the life of a child was worth no more than a crude joke or a wedge to drive between the citizens of the community and the rest of the so-called civilized world. Alligator Mom . That was what they called Vicki in headlines three inches high, and could anyone blame her for packing up and going back to her mother in Philadelphia? I took her place on the Citizens’ Committee, though I’d never been involved in community affairs in my life to this point, and I was the one who pushed through the initiative to remove all the dangerous animals from the lake, no matter what their size or species (and that was a struggle too, the environmentalists crying foul in all their puritanical fervor, and one man — I won’t name him here — even pushing to have the alligators’ teeth capped as a compromise solution).

It wasn’t all bad, though. The service at the Jubilation Non-Denominational Chapel, for all its solemnity, was a real inspiration to us all, a public demonstration of our solidarity and determination. Charles Contash himself flew in from a meeting with the Russian premier to give the eulogy, every man, woman and child in town turned out to pay their respects, and the cards and flowers poured in from all over the country. Even July Weeks turned up, despite his friction with the TJC, and we found common ground in our contempt for the reporters massed on the steps out front of the chapel. He stood tall that day, barring the door to anyone whose face he didn’t recognize, and I forgave him his curtains, for the afternoon at least.

If anything, the hurricane brought us together even more than little Ethan’s tragedy. I remember the sky taking on the deep purple-black hue of a bruise and the vanguard of the rain that lashed down in a fusillade of wind-whipped pellets and the winds that sucked the breath right out of your body. Sam and Ernesta Fills helped me board up the windows of my Casual Contempo, and together we helped Mark and Leonard and the Weekses with their places and then went looking to lend a hand wherever we could. And when the storm hit in all its intensity, just about everybody in town was bundled up safe and sound in the bastion of the movie palace, where the emergency generator allowed the TJC to lift the burden from our minds with a marathon showing of the Contash Corp’s most-beloved family films. Of course, we emerged to the devastation of what the National Weather Service was calling the single most destructive storm of the past century, and a good proportion of Jubilation had been reduced to rubble or swept away altogether. I was luckier than most. I lost the back wall that gives onto the kitchen, which in turn was knee-deep in roiling brown water and packed to the ceiling with wind-blown debris, and my wraparound porch was wrapped around the Weekses’ house, but on the plus side the offending race car and the boat were lifted right up into the sky and for all we know dropped somewhere over the Atlantic, and the Weekses’ curtains aren’t really an issue anymore.

As for myself, I’ve been rebuilding with the help of a low-interest loan secured through the Contash Corp, and I’ve begun, in a tentative way, to date Felicia, whose husband was one of the six fatalities we recorded once the storm had moved on. Beyond that, my committee work keeps me pretty busy, I’ve been keeping in touch with Vicki both by phone and e-mail, and every time I see Bruce chase a palmetto bug up the side of the new retaining wall, I just want to smile. And I do. I do smile. Sure, things could be better, but they could be worse too. I live in Jubilation. How bad can it be?