T. Boyle - Tooth and Claw

For the first time, Daria looked doubtful. “We’ll have to be quick,” she said.

And so we were. Daria stood at the bedroom door, ready to slam it shut, while I leaned forward, my heart pounding, and slipped the release bolt on the cage. I was nimble in those days — twenty-three years old and with excellent reflexes despite the four or five Jack-and-Cokes I’d downed through the course of the evening — and I sprang for the door the instant the bolt was released. Exhilaration burned in me. And it burned in the cat too, because at the first click of the bolt it came to life as if it had been hot-wired. A screech tore through the room, the cage flew open and the thing was an airborne blur slamming against the cheap plywood panel of the bedroom door, even as Daria and I fought to force it shut.

IN THE MORNING (she’d slept on the couch, curled up in the fetal position, faintly snoring; I was stretched out on the mattress we’d removed from the bedroom and tucked against the wall under the TV) I was faced with a number of problems. I’d awakened before her, jolted out of a dreamless sleep by a flash of awareness, and for a long while I just lay there watching her. I could have gone on watching her all morning, thrilled by her presence, her hair, the repose of her face, if it weren’t for the cat. It hadn’t made a sound, and it didn’t stink, not yet, but its existence was communicated to me nonetheless — it was there, and I could feel it. I would have to feed it, and after the previous night’s episode, that was going to require some thought and preparation, and I would have to offer Daria something too, if only to hold her here a little longer. Eggs, I could scramble some eggs, but there was no bread for toast, no milk, no sugar for the coffee. And she would want to freshen up in the bathroom — women always freshened up in the morning, I was pretty sure of that. I thought of the neatly folded little matching towels in the guest bathroom at my aunt’s and contrasted that image with the corrugated rag wadded up on the floor somewhere in my own bathroom. Maybe I should go out for muffins or bagels or something, I thought — and a new towel. But did they sell towels at the 7-Eleven? I didn’t have a clue.

We’d stayed up late, sharing the last of the hot cocoa out of the foil packet and talking in a specific way about the cat that had brought us to that moment on my greasy couch in my semi-darkened living room and then more generally about our own lives and thoughts and hopes and ambitions. I’d heard about her mother, her two sisters, the courses she was taking at the university. Heard about Daggett’s, the regulars, the tips — or lack of them. And her restaurant fantasy. It was amazingly detailed, right down to the number of tables she was planning on, the dinnerware, the cutlery and the paintings on the walls, as well as the decor and the clientele—“Late twenties, early thirties, career people, no kids”—and a dozen or more of the dishes she would specialize in. My ambitions were more modest. I told her how I’d finished community college without any particular aim or interest, and how I was working setting tile for a friend of my aunt and uncle; beyond that, I was hoping to maybe travel up the coast and see Oregon. I’d heard a lot about Oregon, I told her. Very clean. Very natural up there. Had she ever been to Oregon? No, but she’d like to go. I remembered telling her that she ought to open her restaurant up there, someplace by the water, where people could look out and take in the view. “Yeah,” she said, “yeah, that would be cool,” and then she’d yawned and dropped her head to the pillow.

I was just getting up to go to the bathroom and to see what I could do about the towel in there, thinking vaguely of splashing some aftershave on it to fight down any offensive odors it might have picked up, when her eyes flashed open. She didn’t say my name or wonder where she was or ask for breakfast or where the bathroom was. She just said, “We have to feed that cat.”

“Don’t you want coffee or anything — breakfast? I can make breakfast.”

She threw back the blanket and I saw that her legs were bare — she was wearing the Daggett’s T-shirt over a pair of shiny black panties; her running shoes, socks and shorts were balled up on the rug beneath her. “Sure,” she said, “coffee sounds nice,” and she pushed her fingers through her hair on both sides of her head and then let it all fall forward to obscure her face. She sat there a moment before leaning forward to dig a hair clip out of her purse, arch her back and pull the hair tight in a ponytail. “But I am worried about the cat, in new surroundings and all. The poor thing — we should have fed him last night.”

Perhaps so. And certainly I didn’t want to contradict her — I wanted to be amicable and charming, wanted to ingratiate myself in any way I could — but we’d both been so terrified of the animal’s power in that moment when we’d released it from the cage that neither of us had felt up to the challenge of attempting to feed it. Attempting to feed it would mean opening that door again and that was going to take some thought and commitment. “Yeah,” I said. “We should have. And we will, we will, but coffee, coffee first — you want a cup? I can make you a cup?”

So we drank coffee and ate the strawberry Pop-Tarts I found in the cupboard above the sink and made small talk as if we’d awakened together a hundred mornings running and it was so tranquil and so domestic and so right I never wanted it to end. We were talking about work and about what time she had to be in that afternoon, when her brow furrowed and her eyes sharpened and she said, “I wish I could see it. When we feed it, I mean. Couldn’t you like cut a peephole in the door or something?”

I was glad for the distraction, damage deposit notwithstanding. And the idea appealed to me: now we could see what the thing — my pet — was up to, and if we could see it, then it wouldn’t seem so unapproachable and mysterious. I’d have to get to know it eventually, have to name it and tame it, maybe even walk it on a leash. I had a brief vision of myself sauntering down the sidewalk, this id with claws at my side, turning heads and cowing the weight lifters with their Dobermans and Rottweilers, and then I fished my power drill out from under the sink and cut a neat hole, half an inch in diameter, in the bedroom door. As soon as it was finished, Daria put her eye to it.

“Well?”

“The poor thing. He’s pacing back and forth like an animal in a zoo.”

She moved to the side and took my arm as I pressed my eye to the hole. The cat flowed like molten ore from one corner of the room to the other, its yellow eyes fixed on the door, the dun, faintly spotted skin stretched like spandex over its seething muscles. I saw that the kitty litter had been upended and the hard blue plastic pan reduced to chewed-over pellets, and wondered about that, about where the thing would do its business if not in the pan. “It turned over the kitty pan,” I said.

She was still holding to my arm. “I know.”

“It chewed it to shreds.”

“Metal. We’ll have to get a metal one, like a trough or something.”

I took my eye from the peephole and turned to her. “But how am I going to change it — don’t you have to change it?”

Her eyes were shining. “Oh, it’ll settle down. It’s just a big kitty, that’s all”—and then for the cat, in a syrupy coo—“Isn’t that right, kittums?” Next, she went to the refrigerator and extracted one of the steaks, a good pound and a half of meat. “Put on the glove,” she said, “and I’ll hold on to the doorknob while you feed him.”

“What about the blood — won’t the blood get on the carpet?” The gauntlet smelled of saddle soap and it was gouged and pitted down the length of it; it fit me as if it had been custom-made.