T. Boyle - Tooth and Claw

“Yeah, I guess so, because why would a guy wear a hat like that, right?”

The hat — it was a cheap baseball cap made of plastic mesh — featured a black badge on the crown, and a legend, in a tiny, looping, gold script, that read: You Can Pet My Cat, But Don’t Touch My Pussy . To Dana’s mind, this was the height of subversive humor and she insisted on wearing the thing whenever they went out bar-hopping, which was every night except when they gave up all pretense and got a bottle at Von’s and drank at home in front of the TV. He’d snatched it off her head the night she shoved him out the door with nothing but the clothes on his back, and it served her right, because she had his boombox and his other pair of shoes and his books and bedroll and shaving kit, and by the next afternoon the locks had been changed and every time he went over to demand his things back she just sat there in the window with her knifeblade of a face and waited for one of the neighbors to call the cops.

Raymond was new to all this. He was shy, lonely, angry. It had been something like five or six days now, and during that time he’d kept away from the street people, bedding down wherever he could (but not on the sidewalk, that was crazy, and he still didn’t know how that happened), eating when he felt like it and steadily drinking up what was left of his last and final paycheck. He ducked his head. “Right,” he murmured.

The man introduced himself through his shining wet-toothed grin, because he was just there to get a little drink of fresh H 2O himself, and then he was thinking about maybe going into the convenience store on the corner and picking up a nice twelve-pack of Keystone and maybe sitting down by the beach and watching the A-types jog by with their dogs and their two-hundred-dollar running shoes. His name was Schuyler, Rudolph Schuyler, though everybody called him Sky for short, and his dog was Pal.

The light was like a scimitar, cutting the alley in two. Raymond didn’t think he’d ever seen a line so sharp, a shadow so deep, and that was a kind of revelation, a paean to what man had built — a rectilinear gas station and a neatly proportionate fence topped with a spray of pink-tinged trumpet flowers — and how God had come to light it like a photographer setting up the trickiest shot of his life. And there was a shot just as tricky played out over and over throughout the city, the country, the world even. He patted down his pockets, felt something there still, a few bucks, anyway. When he looked up at Sky, when he finally looked him in the eye, he heard his own voice crawling out of his throat as if there were somebody else in there speaking for him. “Am I hearing you right, or is that an invitation?”

AFTER THE FIRST twelve-pack, there was another — Raymond’s treat — because the great and wise and all-knowing people who brewed the beer in their big vats and sealed it in the shining aluminum cans that were like little pills, little individual doses delivered up in the convenient twelve-ounce format, had foreseen the need and stocked the shelves to overflowing. “You know,” Raymond said, easing back the flip-top on a fresh can, “I read in the paper a couple years ago about that time the mudslides put Big Sur out of business, I mean going both ways on Highway 1—did you hear about that? They had no beer, I mean — they ran out. You remember that?”

Sky was leaning back against one of the polished boulders the city had dumped along the beach as a seawall, both jackets spread out beneath him, his bare chest and arms exposed to the sun. He was tanned right down to the roots of his hair, tanned like a tennis pro or maybe a diving instructor, somebody vigorous and clean making a clean living under the sun. Out here, on the beach, he didn’t look like a bum — or at least not one of the mental cases you saw on the streets, immured in the walking dungeon of their own stink. “Yeah,” he said. “Maybe. I mean, I don’t know — no beer?” He laughed. “How’d they survive?”

Raymond shrugged. He was looking out to sea, out to where the shimmer of the waves met the horizon in an explosion of light as if diamonds were being ground up in a thin band that stretched laterally as far as you could see. “They’re all rich people up there. I guess they just dug the single-malt scotch and green Chartreuse out of their liquor cabinets and forgot about it. Or their wine cellars, or whatever. But the trucks couldn’t get through, so there was no beer, no potato chips, no Slim Jims.”

“What, no Pampers and underarm deodorant? What’s a young mother to do?”

“No Kotex,” Raymond said, tipping back his beer and reaching for another one. The cans were getting warm, though he’d stowed them in the shade, in a crevice between two boulders the size of Volkswagens, but he didn’t mind: warm was better than nothing. He was enjoying himself. “No condoms. No Preparation-H.”

“Yeah,” Sky said, “but let me tell you, those people suck up there. Big-time. And I know from experience, because if you haven’t got a motel key on you to show the cops — right there, show me a motel key, motherfucker — they put you in the car and drive you out to the city limits, period, no arguments. As if this wasn’t America or something.”

Raymond had nothing to say to that. He understood where the city fathers were coming from: who wanted an army of bums camped out on the streets? It turned off the tourists, and the tourists were what made a place like Big Sur click in the first place. Or this town. This town right here.

“So how long?” Sky asked, turning to him with eyes drawn down to slits against the sun.

Raymond took a pull at the fresh beer in his hands and felt warm all over, felt good, felt superior. “I don’t know, a couple days. A week maybe. I had a place but my girlfriend — she’s a bitch, a real queen bitch — kicked me out.”

A rope of muscle flashed across Sky’s shoulders as he reached for another beer and felt for the pop-top. “No,” he said, “I mean how long were the roads closed down, like a week, two weeks, what?”

“Months. Months at least.”

“Wow. Picture that. But if you had beer and jug wine — and maybe a little stash of canned food, Dinty Moore and the like, it must have been like paradise, if not for the cops, I mean. But even the cops. What are they going to do, kick you out of a place that’s already closed off? Kick you out of nowhere? Like, I’m sorry, officer, I’d really like to accommodate you here, but where the fuck you expect me to go, huh, motherfucker? Like, suck on this.”

Raymond took a moment to think about that, about the kind of paradise that must have been, or might have been — or could have been under the right conditions — and then, unaccountably, he found himself staring into the glazed brown eyes of a German shepherd with a foam-flecked muzzle and a red bandanna looped round its neck. One minute there’d been nothing there but the open vista of the sea, and now here was this big panting animal crowding his frame of reference and looking at him as if it expected him to get down on all fours and chase it round the beach. “Nice dog,” Raymond said, giving the broad triangular head a pat. The dog panted, stray grains of sand glistening along the black seam of its lips. Pal, curled up at Sky’s feet, never even so much as twitched a muscle. In the next moment two girls in tube tops and shorts jogged by on the compacted sand at the foot of the waves, beautiful girls with their hair and everything else bouncing in the shattered light, and they shouted for the dog and Raymond eased back and popped another beer, wondering why anybody would want to go to work nine-to-five and live in an apartment you had to kill yourself just to make the rent on when you could just kick back, like this, and let the dogs and the women present themselves to you as if you were a potentate on his throne.