T. Boyle - Tooth and Claw

OUR DAUGHTER IS not in the hospital. Our daughter is asleep in her room beneath the benevolent gaze of the posters on the wall, Britney and Brad and Justin, her things scattered around her as if laid out for a rummage sale. Our daughter has in fact gone to Hana Sushi at the mall, as planned, and Kimberly has driven her home. Our daughter has, unbeknownst to us or anyone else, fudged the rules a bit, the smallest thing in the world, nothing really, the sort of thing every teenager does without thinking twice, loaning her ID to her second-best friend, Kristi Cherwin, because Kristi is sixteen and Kristi wants to see — is dying to see — the movie at the Cineplex with Brad Pitt in it, the one rated NC17. Our daughter doesn’t know that we’ve been to the hospital, doesn’t know about Alice K. Petermann and the pinot noir and the glasses left on the bar, doesn’t know that even now the phone is ringing at the Cherwins’.

I am sitting on the couch with a drink, staring into the ashes of the fire. Maureen is in the kitchen with a mug of Ovaltine, gazing vacantly out the window where the first streaks of light have begun to limn the trunks of the trees. I try to picture the Cherwins — they’ve been to the house a few times, Ed and Lucinda — and I draw a blank until a backlit scene from the past presents itself, a cookout at their place, the adults gathered around the grill with gin and tonics, the radio playing some forgotten song, the children — our daughters — riding their bikes up and down the cobbled drive, making a game of it, spinning, dodging, lifting the front wheels from the ground even as their hair fans out behind them and the sun crashes through the trees. Flip a coin ten times and it could turn up heads ten times in a row — or not once. The rock is coming, the new Chicxulub, hurtling through the dark and the cold to remake our fate. But not tonight. Not for me.

For the Cherwins, it’s already here.

HE DIDN’T KNOW how it happened, exactly — lack of foresight on his part, lack of caring, planning, holding something back for a rainy day — but in rapid succession he lost his job, his girlfriend and the roof over his head, waking up one morning to find himself sprawled out on the sidewalk in front of the post office. The sun drilled him where he lay. Both knees were torn out of his jeans and the right sleeve of his jacket was gone altogether. People were skirting him, clopping by like a whole herd of self-righteous Republicans, though they were mostly Latino — and mostly illegal — in this part of town. He sat up, feeling around for his hat, which he seemed to be sitting on. The pavement glistened minutely.

What was motivating him at the moment was thirst, the kind of thirst that made him suspect everything and everybody, because somebody had to have done this to him, deprived him of fluids, dredged his throat with a swab, left him here stranded like a nomad in the desert. Just beyond his reach, and he noticed this in the way of a detective meditating on a crime scene, was a brown paper bag with the green neck of a Mogen David 20/20 bottle peeping out of it. The bag had been crushed, and the bottle with it; ants had gathered for the feast. In real time, the time dictated by the sun in the sky and the progressive seep of movement all around him, a woman who must have had three hundred pounds packed like mocha fudge into the sausage skin of her monumental blue-and-white-flecked top and matching toreador pants stepped daintily over the splayed impediment of his legs and shot him a look of disgust. Cars pulled up, engines ticking, then rattled away. Exhaust hovered in a poisonous cloud. Two gulls, perched atop the convenient drive-up mail depository, watched him out of their assayers’ eyes, big birds, vagrant and opportunistic, half again as tall as the boombox he’d left behind at Dana’s when she drilled him out the door.

It wasn’t an alcoholic beverage he wanted, though he wouldn’t turn down a beer, but water, just that, something to wet his mouth and dribble down his throat. He made a failed effort to rise, and then somehow his feet found their place beneath him and he shoved himself up and snatched his cap off the pavement in a single graceless lurch. He let the blood pound in his ears a minute, then scanned the street for a source of H 2O.

To be homeless, in July, in a tourist-infested city on the coast of Southern California, wasn’t as bad maybe as being homeless in Cleveland or Bogotá, but it wasn’t what he was used to. Even at his worst, even when he got going on the bottle and couldn’t stop, he was used to four walls and a bed, and if not a kitchen, at least a hotplate. A chair. A table. A place to put his things, wash up, have a smoke and listen to music while dreaming over a paperback mystery — he loved mysteries and police procedurals, and horror, nothing better than horror when you’re wrapped up in bed and the fog transfigures the streets and alleyways outside till anything could be lurking there. Except you. Because you’re in bed, in your room, with the door shut and locked and the blankets pulled up to your chin, reading. And smoking. But Dana’s face was like a cleaver, sharp and shining and merciless, and it cleaved and chopped till he had no choice but to get out the door or leave his limbs and digits behind. So now he was on the street, and everything he did, every last twitch and snort and furtive palpation of his scrotum, was a public performance, open to interpretation and subject to the judgment of strangers. Idiotic strangers. Strangers who were no better than him or anybody else, but who made way for him in a parting wave as if he was going to stick to the bottom of their shoes.

Across the street, kitty-corner to where he found himself at the moment, was a gas station — it floated there like a mirage, rippling gently in the convection waves rising up off the blacktop — and a gas station was a place where all sorts of fluids were dispensed, including water. Or so he reasoned. All right, then. He began to move, one scuffing sneaker following the other.

HE WAS RUNNING the hose over the back of his head when he became aware that someone was addressing him. He didn’t look up right away — he knew what was coming — but he made sure to twist off the spigot without hesitation. Then he ran his fingers through his hair, because if there was one thing that made him feel the strain of his circumstances it was unwashed hair, knocked the hat twice on his thigh and clapped it on his head like a helmet. He wasn’t presentable, he knew that. He looked like a bum — for all intents and purposes he was a bum, or at least making a pretty fair run at becoming one — and it just didn’t pay to make eye contact. Raymond rose slowly to his feet.

A man was standing there in the alley amidst the debris of torn-up boxes and discarded oil cans, the sun cutting into his eyes. Five minutes from picking himself up off the burning sidewalk, Raymond was in no condition to make fine distinctions, but he could see that whatever he was the man was no outraged service station attendant or hostile mechanic, no cop or security guard. He had a dog with him, for one thing, a little buff and yellow mutt that seemed to be composed entirely of hacked-off whiskers, and for another, he was dressed all in blue jeans, including two blue-jean jackets but no shirt, and none of the ensemble looked as if it had been washed and tumble-dried in recent memory. Raymond relaxed. He was in the presence of a fellow loser.

“Nice hat,” the man said. He looked to be in his thirties, long hair slicked back close to his scalp and tucked behind his ears, the beard neatly clipped, big hands dangling from his doubled-up sleeves. He was grinning. At least there was that.

“Oh, this?” Raymond’s hand went reflexively to his head. “It’s just…it’s nothing. It used to belong to my girlfriend.”