T. Boyle - Tooth and Claw

On my break and after work, I called Kurt and Adele’s number over and over, but Helen wasn’t answering. Twice I drove my Dodge down the street past their house, but nobody was home the first time and then all three of them were there the next, and I couldn’t face going up those steps. For a while I entertained a fantasy of butting down the door, kicking Kurt in the crotch and dragging Helen out to the car by her hair, but it faded away in a pharmaceutical haze. I didn’t run through a checklist of emotions, like one of those phony Ph.D.s in the women’s magazines Helen stacked up on the coffee table like miniature Bibles and Korans — that wasn’t my way at all. I didn’t even tell my parents we weren’t together anymore. I just got high. And higher.

That was what brought about the culminating wreck — of that series, anyway. I was feeling bad one day, bad in every sense of the word, and since it was my day off, I spent the afternoon chasing down drugs in every house and apartment I could think of in Westchester and Putnam Counties, hitting up friends, acquaintances and acquaintances of acquaintances. Phil Cherniske was with me for part of the time, but then he had to go to work, and I found myself driving around the back roads, stoned on a whole smorgasbord of things, a bottle of vodka propped between my legs. I was looking at leaves, flaming leaves, and I was holding a conversation with myself and letting the car take me wherever it wanted. I think I must have pulled over and nodded out for a while, because all of a sudden (I’d say “magically,” but this was more like treachery) the leaves were gone and it was dark. There was nothing to do but head for the restaurant.

I came through the door in an envelope of refrigerated air and the place opened up to me, warm and frank and smelling of cigarettes, steak on the grill, fresh-cut lime. I wasn’t hungry myself, not even close to it, so I settled in at the bar and watched people eat dinner. Kurt was bartending, and at first he tried to be chummy and unctuous, as if nothing had happened, but the look on my face drove him to the far end of the bar, where he tried to keep himself urgently occupied. It was good sitting there with a cigarette and a pocketful of pills, lifting a finger to summon him when my drink needed refreshing — once I even made him light my cigarette, and all the while I stared hate into his eyes. Adele was waitressing, along with Jane Nardone, recently elevated from hostess. I never even looked at Adele, but at some point it seemed I tried to get overly friendly with Jane in the corner and Phil had to come out of the kitchen and put a hand on my arm. “Brennan’ll be in soon, you know,” Phil said, his hand like a clamp on the meat of my arm. “They’ll eighty-six you. They will.”

I gave him a leer and shook him off. “Hey, barkeep,” I shouted so that the whole place heard me, all the Surf ‘n’ Turf gnashers and their dates and the idiots lined up at the bar, “give me another cocktail down here, will you? What, do you want me to die of thirst?”

Dinner was over and the kitchen closed by the time things got ugly. I was out of line and I knew it, and I deserved what was coming to me — that’s not to say it didn’t hurt, though, getting tossed out of my own restaurant, my sanctuary, my place of employ, recreation and release, the place where the flame was kept and the legend accruing. But tossed I was, cut off, eighty-sixed, banned. I don’t know what precipitated it exactly, something with Kurt, something I said that he didn’t like after a whole long night of things he didn’t like, and it got physical. Next thing I knew, Phil, Kurt, Jimmy Brennan and two of the busboys had ten arms around me and we were all heaving and banging into the walls until the door flew open and I was out on the pavement where some bleached-out overweight woman and her two kids stepped over me as if I were a leper. I tried to get back in — uncool, unhip, raging with every kind of resentment and hurt — but they’d locked the door against me, and the last thing I remember seeing was Kurt Ramos’ puffed-up face peering out at me through the little window in the door.

I climbed into my car and fired it up with a roar that gave testimony to a seriously compromised exhaust system. When the smoke cleared — and I hoped they were all watching — I hit the gas, jammed the lever into gear and shot out onto the highway on screaming tires. Where was I headed? I didn’t know. Home, I guessed. There was no place else to go.

Now, to set this up properly, I should tell you that there was one wicked turn on the long dark blacktop road that led to that dark lane on the muddy lake, a ninety-degree hairpin turn the Alien had christened “Lester’s Corner” because of the inevitability of the forces gathered there, and that was part of the legend too. I knew that corner was there, I was supremely conscious of it, and though I can’t say I always coasted smoothly through it without some last-minute wheel-jerking and tire-squealing, it hadn’t really been a problem. Up to this point.

At any rate, I wasn’t really paying attention that night and my reaction time must have been somewhere in the range of the Alzheimer’s patient on medication — in fact, for those few seconds I was an Alzheimer’s patient on medication — and I didn’t even know where I was until I felt the car slip out from under me. Or no, that isn’t right. It was the road — the road slipped out from under me, and it felt just as if I were on a roller coaster, released from the pull of gravity. The car ricocheted off a tree that would have swatted me down like a fly if I’d hit it head-on, blasted down an embankment and wound up on its roof in a stew of skunk cabbage and muck. I wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, of course — I don’t even know if they’d been invented yet, and if they had, there wouldn’t have been one in that car — and I found myself puddled up in the well of the roof like an egg inside a crushed shell.

There was no sense in staying there, underneath two tons of crumpled and drooling machinery — that wasn’t the way things were supposed to be, even I could see that — so I poked my hands through the gap where the driver’s side window had formerly been and felt them sink into the cold ooze. There was a smell of gasoline, but it was overpowered by the reek of deconstructed skunk cabbage, and I didn’t give the situation any more thought or calculation than a groundhog does when he pulls himself out of his burrow, and the next thing I knew I was standing up to my ankles in cold muck, looking up in the direction of the road. There were lights there, and a shadowy figure in a long winter coat. “You all right?” a voice called down to me.

“Yeah, sure,” I said, “no problem,” and then I was lurching up the embankment on splayed feet, oozing muck. When I got to the top, a guy my age was standing there. He looked a little bit like Kurt — same hair, same slope to the shoulders — but he wasn’t Kurt, and that was a good thing. “What happened?” he said. “You lose control?”

It was a ridiculous question, but I answered it. “Something like that,” I said, my voice thick with alcohol and methaqualone.

“Sure you’re not hurt? You want to go to the hospital or anything?”

I took a minute to pat myself down, the night air like the breath of some expiring beast. “No,” I said, slowly shaking my head in the glare of the headlights, “I’m not hurt. Not that I know of, anyway.”

We stood there in silence a moment, contemplating the overturned hulk of the car. One wheel, persistent to the point of absurdity, kept spinning at the center of a gulf of shadow. “Listen,” I said finally, “can you give me a lift?”

“A lift? But what about—?”

“Tomorrow,” I said, and I let one hand rise and then drop.