T. Boyle - Tooth and Claw

The tracks swept around a bend ahead and followed a trestle over the boulevard that ran along the beach, and he was thinking he didn’t want to risk the trestle — you were always reading about somebody getting hit by a train out here, the last time a deaf-mute who couldn’t hear the whistle, and that was pathetic — when he saw a figure approaching him in the distance. It was Dougie — or Droogie — and he had something in his hand, a pole or a stick, that caught the sun in a metallic shimmer. When he got closer, Raymond saw that it was a length of pipe ripped out of one of the public restrooms in the park or lifted from a construction site, and Dougie kept swinging it out away from his body and clapping it back in again as if he were trying to tenderize the flesh of his leg. He stopped ten feet from Raymond, and Raymond stopped too. “You seen Knitsy? Because I’m going to kill the bitch.”

Raymond didn’t answer. The beer had made him slow.

“What are you, deaf, motherfucker? I said, you seen Knitsy?”

It took him a minute, staring into the slits of the man’s eyes as if he could find the answer there. He was conflicted. He was. But the pipe focused his attention. “I don’t know, I think she’s”—he gestured with a jerk of his head—“back there, you know, in the trees back there.”

The man took a step closer and swiped at the near rail with the pipe till it clanged and clanged again. “Son of a bitch. It’s Sky, then, right? She’s with Sky? Because I’m going to kill his ass too.”

Raymond didn’t have anything to say to this. He just shrugged and moved on, even as Dougie cursed at his back. “I won’t forget you either, you sorry son of a bitch. Payback time, I’m telling you, payback ,” but Raymond just kept going, all the way down the tracks and across the trestle and into town. It was nothing to him. He was out of this. He was gone. Let them work it out among themselves, that’s what he figured.

HE WAITED till six, when he was sure she’d be there, and walked up the familiar street with its kids and dogs and beat-up cars and the men home from work and sitting out on the porch with a beer to take in the lingering sun, another day down, a job well done and a beer well deserved. Nobody waved to him, nobody said a word or even looked at him twice, and you would have thought he’d never lived here, never paid rent or electric bills or brought back a distillery’s worth of bourbon in the plastic two-liter jug, night after night for a year and more. All right. Well, fuck them. He didn’t need them or anybody else, except maybe Dana and a little sympathy. A shower, a shave, a couple of bucks to get him back on his feet again, that was all, because he’d had enough of sleeping in the bushes like some vagrant.

The only problem was, Dana wasn’t home. He didn’t hear the buzz of the TV she switched on the minute she came in the door and kept going till she passed out in front of it at midnight, or the canned diarrhea of the easy-listening crap she played on the radio in the kitchen all the time. He knocked. Rang the buzzer. Leaned out away from the porch to cup his hands over the shifting mirror of the front window and peer inside. But by this time Mrs. Ruiz was out on her own porch, twenty feet away, giving him an uncompromising look out of her flat black old-lady’s eyes.

He thought of the Wildcat then — that’s where she’d be, sitting at the bar with one of her hopeless, titanic, frizzy-haired friends from work with their dried-blood fingernails and greasy lipstick, knocking back bourbon and water as if they were afraid Prohibition was going to start up again at the stroke of the hour. It would be a walk — two miles, at least, but he was used to walking since his last DUI, and he had nothing better to do. The afternoon had been an exercise in futility, because by the time he got to the head of the line at the unemployment office he realized he was wearing the pussy hat (no choice, what with the state of his hair) and that they’d probably laugh him out of the place, so he just turned around and walked out the door. He was hungry — he hadn’t put anything on his stomach since the pizza the night before — but he wouldn’t go to the soup kitchen or the mission or whatever it was. That was were the bums went, and he was no bum, not yet anyway. Once the effects of the beer wore off, he wanted a drink, but without money or an ATM card or a bank account to go with it, he just couldn’t see how he was going to get one. For a while there he’d lingered in the back of the liquor department at the grocery store, thinking to liberate something from the cooler, but they had television monitors mounted on the walls and a vigilant little smooth-skinned guy with a mustache and a tie who kept asking if he could help him find anything, and that was probably the low point of his day. Till now. Because now he just backed down off the porch, shot Mrs. Ruiz a look of burning hate, and started walking.

There was some coming and going at the Wildcat, people milling around the door in schools like fish, like barracuda — or no, like guppies, bloated and shining with all their trumped-up colors — but he peered in the window and didn’t see Dana there at the bar. In the off chance she was in the ladies’ or in the back room, he went in to have a look for himself. She wasn’t there. It was crowded, though, the speakers were putting out music and there was a pervasive rising odor of rum and sour mix that brought him back to happier times, like the week before last. He took the opportunity to duck into the men’s and wash some of the grit off his face and hands and smooth back the gray-flecked scrub of a beard that made him look about sixty years old, though he was only thirty-two — or no, thirty-three. Thirty-three, last birthday. He thought to reverse the hat, too, just for the sake of respectability, and then he stood at the bar awhile, hoping somebody would turn up and stand him a couple of drinks. Nobody did. Steve, the bartender, asked him if he wanted anything, and he asked Steve if he’d seen Dana. Yeah, she’d been in earlier. Did he want anything?

“Double vodka on the rocks.”

“You going to pay for it this time?”

“When did I never pay?”

There was a song on he hated. Somebody jostled him, gave him a look. Steve didn’t answer.

“Can I put it on Dana’s tab?”

“Dana doesn’t have a tab. It’s cash only, my friend.”

He got loud then, because he wanted that drink, and they knew him, didn’t they? What did they think he was, some kind of dead-beat or something? But when Steve came out from behind the bar he felt it all go out of him in a long hissing rush of air. “All right,” he said. “Okay, I hear you,” and then he was back out on the street.

His feet hurt. He was at the tail end of a week-long drunk and he felt sick and debilitated, his stomach clenched around a hard little ball of nothing, his head full of beating wings, the rasp of feathers, a hiss that was no sound at all. Dana was out there somewhere — it wasn’t that big a town, a grid of palmy streets configured around the tourist haven of the main drag, and a bar and T-shirt shop on every corner — and if he could only find her, go down on his knees to her, abase himself, beg and whine and lie and wheedle, she would relent, he knew she would. He was heading back up the street with the appealing idea of forcing a back window at the house, climbing in, making a sandwich and washing it down with bourbon and just crawling into bed and let come what will, when he spotted Dana’s car in the lot behind the movie theater.

That was her car, no doubt about it, a ravaged brown Corolla with a rearranged front bumper and the dark slit at the top of the passenger’s side window where it wouldn’t roll up all the way. He crossed the street, sidled through the lot like any other carefree moviegoer and casually worked his arm through the crack of the window till he caught the handle and popped open the door. There was change in the glove compartment, maybe twelve or thirteen dollars’ worth of quarters, dimes and nickels — and one Sacajawea dollar — she kept there against emergencies, and it took him no more than thirty seconds to scoop it up and weigh down his pockets. Then he relocked the door, eased it shut and headed back down the block, looking for the nearest liquor store.