T. Boyle - Tooth and Claw

I tried to stay away from Daggett’s— Give her a day or two , I told myself, don’t nag, don’t be a burden —but at quarter of nine I found myself at the bar, ordering a Jack-and-Coke from Chris. Chris gave me a look, and everything had changed since yesterday. “You sure?” he said.

I asked him what he meant.

“You look like you’ve had enough, buddy.”

I craned my neck to look for Daria, but all I saw were the regulars, hunched over their drinks. “Just pour,” I said.

The music was there like a persistent annoyance, dead music, ancient, appreciated by no one, not even the regulars. It droned on. Chris set down my drink and I lifted it to my lips. “Where’s Daria?” I asked.

“She got off early. Said she was tired. Slow night, you know?”

I felt a stab of disappointment, jealousy, hate. “You have a number for her?”

Chris gave me a wary look, because he knew something I didn’t. “You mean she didn’t give you her number?”

“No,” I said, “we never — well, she was at my house…”

“We can’t give out personal information.”

“To me? I said she was at my house. Last night. I need to talk to her, and it’s urgent — about the cat. She’s really into the cat, you know?”

“Sorry.”

I threw it back at him. “You’re sorry? Well, fuck you — I’m sorry too.”

“You know what, buddy—”

“Junior, the name’s Junior.”

He leaned into the bar, both arms propped before him, and in a very soft voice he said, “I think you better leave now.”

IT HAD BEGUN to rain, a soft patter in the leaves that grew steadier and harder as I walked home. Cars went by on the boulevard with the sound of paper tearing, and they dragged whole worlds behind them. The streetlights were dim. There was nobody out. When I came up the hill to my apartment I saw the Mustang standing there under the carport, and though I’d always been averse to drinking and driving — a lesson I’d learned from my father’s hapless example — I got behind the wheel and drove up to the jobsite with a crystalline clarity that would have scared me in any other state of mind. There was an aluminum ladder there, and I focused on that — the picture of it lying against the building — till I arrived and hauled it out of the mud and tied it to the roof of the car without a thought for the paint job or anything else.

When I got back, I fumbled in the rain with the overzealous knots I’d tied until I got the ladder free and then I hauled it around the back of the apartment. I was drunk, yes, but cautious too — if anyone had seen me, in the dark, propping a ladder against the wall of an apartment building, even my own apartment building, things could have gotten difficult in a hurry. I couldn’t very well claim to be painting, could I? Not at night. Not in the rain. Luckily, though, no one was around. I made my way up the ladder, and when I got to the level of the bedroom the odor hit me, a rank fecal wind sifting out of the dark slit of the window. The cat. The cat was in there, watching me. I was sure of it. I must have waited there in the rain for fifteen minutes or more before I got up the nerve to fling the window open, and then I ducked my head and crouched reflexively against the wall. Nothing happened. After a moment, I made my way down the ladder.

I didn’t want to go in the apartment, didn’t want to think about it, didn’t know if a cat of that size could climb down the rungs of a ladder or leap twenty feet into the air or unfurl its hidden wings and fly. I stood and watched the dense black hole of the window for a long while and then I went back to the car and sat listening to the radio in the dark till I fell asleep.

In the morning — there were no heraldic rays of sunshine, nothing like that, just more rain — I let myself into the apartment and crept across the room as stealthily as if I’d come to burgle it. When I reached the bedroom door, I put my eye to the peephole and saw a mound of carpet propped up against an empty cage — a den, a makeshift den — and only then did I begin to feel something for the cat, for its bewilderment, its fear and distrust of an alien environment: this was no rocky kopje, this was my bedroom on the second floor of a run-down apartment building in a seaside town a whole continent and a fathomless ocean away from its home. Nothing moved inside. Surely it must have been gone, one great leap and then the bounding limbs, grass beneath its feet, solid earth. It was gone. Sure it was. I steeled myself, pulled open the door and slipped inside. And then — and I don’t know why — I pulled the door shut behind me.

BOSTON TO DEDHAM

THE ROAD WAS DARK, even at six in the evening, and if it held any wonders aside from the odd snug house or the stubble field, she couldn’t have said because all that was visible was the white stripe of heaven overhead. Her horse was no more than a sound and a presence now, the heat of its internal engine rising round her in a miasma of sweat dried and reconstituted a hundred times over, even as she began to feel the repetition of its gait in the deep recesses of her seat and that appendage at the base of the spine her mother used to call the tailbone. Cousin Robert was some indeterminate distance ahead of her, the slow crepitating slap of his mount’s hooves creating a new kind of silence that fed off the only sound in the world and then swallowed it up in a tower of vegetation as dense and continuous as the waves of the sea. Though it was only the second of October, there had been frost, and that was a small comfort in all of this hurt and upset, because it drew down the insects that a month earlier would have eaten her alive. The horse swayed, the stars staggered and flashed. She wanted to call out to Robert to ask if it was much farther yet, but she restrained herself. She’d talked till her throat went dry as they’d left town in the declining sun and he’d done his best to keep up though he wasn’t naturally a talker, and eventually, as the shadows came down and the rhythmic movement of the animals dulled their senses, they’d fallen silent. She resigned herself. Rode on. And just as she’d given up hope, a light appeared ahead.

AT DEDHAM

ROBERT HER COUSIN leaving her to await the Post at the cottage of the Reverend and Madam Belcher before turning round for Boston with a dozen admonitions on his lips — She should have gone by sea as there was no telling what surprises lay ahead on the road in that savage country and she was to travel solely with trusted companions and the Post, et cetera — she settled in by the fire with a cup of tea and explained her business to Madam Belcher in her cap and the Reverend with his pipe. Yes, she felt responsible. And yes, it was she who’d introduced her boarder, a young widow, to her kinsman, Caleb Trowbridge, only to have him die four months after the wedding and leave the poor woman twice widowed. There were matters of the estate to be settled in both New Haven and New York, and it was her intention to act in the widow’s behalf, being a widow herself and knowing how cruel such divisions of property can be.

An old dog lay on the rug. A tallow candle held a braided flame above it. There was a single ornament on the wall, a saying out of the Bible in needlepoint: He shall come down like rain upon the mown grass: as showers that water the earth . After a pause, the Reverend’s wife asked if she would like another cup.

Sarah’s eyes rose from the fire to the black square of the window. “You’re very kind,” she said, “but no thank you.” She was concerned about the Post. Shouldn’t he have been here by now? Had she somehow managed to miss him? Because if she had, there was no sense in going on — she might just as well admit defeat and find a guide back to Boston in the morning. “But where can the Post be?” she asked, turning to the Reverend.