T. Boyle - Tooth and Claw

The limitless turf unraveled beneath me and I reached up a hand to rub at my eyes, weary suddenly, a man wearing the crown of defeat. A hellish vision came to me then, a vision of 9,000 sheep bleating on the range, their fleece stained and blackened, and every one of them, every one of those inestimable and beloved animals, my inheritance, my life, imprisoned behind a glistening new pair of wraparound sunglasses. So powerful was the vision I could almost hear them baa-ing out their distress. My heart seized. Tears started up in my eyes. Why go on? I was thinking. What hope is there?

But then the sun broke through the gloom in two pillars of fire, the visible world come to life with a suddenness that took away my breath, color bursting out everywhere, the range green all the way to the horizon, trees nodding in the wind, the very rock faces of the cerros set aflame, and the vision was gone. I listened to the drone of the engine, tipped the wings toward home, and never gave it another thought.

THE WEATHER had absolutely nothing to do with it — though the rain had been falling off and on throughout the day and the way the gutters were dripping made me feel as if despair was the mildest term in the dictionary — because I would have gone down to Daggett’s that afternoon even if the sun was shining and all the fronds of the palm trees were gilded with light. The problem was work. Or, more specifically, the lack of it. The boss had called at six-thirty A.M. to tell me not to come in, because the guy I’d been replacing had recovered sufficiently from his wrenched back to feel up to working, and no, he wasn’t firing me, because they’d be onto a new job next week and he could use all the hands he could get. “So take a couple days off and enjoy yourself,” he’d rumbled into the phone in his low hoarse uneven voice that always seemed on the verge of morphing into something else altogether — squawks and bleats or maybe just static. “You’re young, right? Go out and get yourself some tail. Get drunk. Go to the library. Help old ladies across the street. You know what I mean?”

It had been a long day: breakfast out of a cardboard box while cartoon images flickered and faded and reconstituted themselves on the TV screen, and then some desultory reading, starting with the newspaper and a couple of National Geographics I’d picked up at a yard sale, lunch at the deli where I had ham and cheese in a tortilla wrap and exchanged exactly eleven words with the girl behind the counter ( Number 7, please, no mayo; Have a nice day; You too ), and a walk to the beach that left my sneakers sodden. And after all that it was only three o’clock in the afternoon and I had to force myself to stay away from the bar till five, five at least.

I wasn’t stupid. And I had no intention of becoming a drunk like all the hard-assed old men in the shopping mall — blighted town I grew up in, silent men with hate in their eyes and complaint eating away at their insides — like my own dead father, for that matter — but I was new here, or relatively new (nine weeks now and counting) and Daggett’s was the only place where I felt comfortable. And why? Precisely because it was filled with old men drinking themselves into oblivion. It made me think of home. Or feel at home, anyway.

The irony wasn’t lost on me. The whole reason I’d moved out to the Coast to live, first with my Aunt Kim and her husband, Waverley, and then in my own one-bedroom apartment with kitchenette and a three-by-six-foot balcony with a partially obscured view of the Pacific, half a mile off, was so that I could inject a little excitement into my life and mingle with all the college students in the bars that lined State Street cheek to jowl, but here I was hanging out in an old man’s bar that smelled of death and vomit and felt as closed-in as a submarine, when just outside the door were all the exotic sun-struck glories of California. Where it never rained. Except in winter. And it was winter now.

I nodded self-consciously at the six or seven regulars lined up at the bar, then ordered a Jack-and-Coke, the only drink besides beer I liked the taste of, and I didn’t really like the taste of beer. There were sports on the three TVs hanging from the ceiling — this was a sports bar — but the volume was down and the speakers were blaring the same tired hits of the sixties I could have heard back home. Ad nauseam. When the bartender— he was young at least, as were the waitresses, thankfully — set down my drink, I made a comment about the weather, “Nice day for sunbathing, isn’t it?” and the two regulars nearest me glanced up with something like interest in their eyes. “Or maybe bird-watching,” I added, feeling encouraged, and they swung their heads back to the familiar triangulation of their splayed elbows and cocktail glasses and that was the end of that.

It must have been seven or so, the rain still coming down and people briefly enlivened by the novelty of it as they came and went in spasms of umbrella furling and unfurling, when a guy about my own age — or no, he must have been thirty, or close to it — came in and took the seat beside me. He was wearing a baseball cap, a jeans jacket and a T-shirt that said Obligatory Death , which I took to be the name of a band, though I’d never heard of them. His hair was blond, cut short around the ears, and he wore a soul beard that was like a pale stripe painted under his lip by a very unsteady hand. We exchanged the standard greeting— What’s up? — and then he flagged down the bartender and ordered a draft beer, a shot of tomato juice and two raw eggs.

“Raw eggs?” the bartender echoed, as if he hadn’t heard him right.

“Yeah. Two raw eggs, in the shell.”

The bartender — his name was Chris, or maybe it was Matt — gave a smile and scratched the back of his head. “We can do them over-easy or sunny-side up or poached even, but raw , I don’t know. I mean, nobody’s ever requested raw before—”

“Ask the chef, why don’t you?”

The bartender shrugged. “Sure,” he said, “no problem.” He started off in the direction of the kitchen, then pulled up short. “You want toast with that, home fries, or what?”

“Just the eggs.”

Everybody was watching now, any little drama worth the price of admission, especially on a night like this, but the bartender — Chris, his name was definitely Chris — just went down to the other end of the bar and communicated the order to the waitress, who made a notation in her pad and disappeared into the kitchen. A moment went by, and then the man turned to me and said in a voice loud enough for everybody to hear, “Jesus, this music sucks. Are we caught in a time warp here, or what?”

The old men — the regulars — glanced up from their drinks and gave him a look, but they were gray-haired and slack in the belly and they knew their limits. One of them said something about the game on the TV and one of the others chimed in and the conversation started back up in an exclusionary way.

“Yeah,” I heard myself say, “it really sucks,” and before I knew it I was talking passionately about the bands that meant the most to me even as the new guy poured tomato juice in his beer and sipped the foam off the top, while the music rumbled defiantly on and people came in the door with wet shoes and dripping umbrellas to crowd in behind us. The eggs, brown-shelled and naked in the middle of a standard dinner plate, were delivered by Daria, a waitress I’d had my eye on, though I hadn’t yet worked up the nerve to say more than hello and goodbye to her. “Your order, sir,” she said, easing the plate down on the bar. “You need anything with that? Ketchup? Tabasco?”