T. Boyle - Tooth and Claw

A thin smile. “I’m just worried about you, that’s all.”

How I bristled at this. I wasn’t a child — I could take care of myself. How many times had her soft dejected voice come at me out of the shadows of the living room at three and four in the morning, where she sat smoking in the dark while I roamed the streets with my friends? Where had I been? she always wanted to know. Nowhere , I told her. There was the dark, the smell of her cigarette, and then, even softer: I was worried . And what did I do now? I worked my face and gave her a disgusted look to show her how far above all this I was.

She looked to Jerry Reilly, then back to me. I became aware of the sound of traffic out on the road. It was dark beyond the windows. “You’re not using drugs,” she asked, drawing at her cigarette, so that the interrogative lift came in a fume of smoke, “are you?”

THE FIRST TIME I ever saw anyone inject heroin was in the bathroom of that stone cottage in the woods. It was probably the third or fourth night I’d gone there with Cole to hang out, listen to music and be convivial on our own terms (he was living at his parents’ house too, and there was no percentage in that). Mike greeted us at the door — he’d put a leather jacket on over a T-shirt and he was all business, heading out to the road to meet a guy named Nicky and they were going on into town to score and we should just hang tight because they’d be right back and did we happen to have any cash on us? — and then we went in and sat with the girls and smoked and didn’t think about much of anything until the front door jerked back on its hinges half an hour later and Mike and Nicky came storming into the room as if their jackets had been set afire.

Then it was into the bathroom, Mike first, the door open to the rest of us lined up behind him, Nicky (short, with a full beard that did nothing to flesh out a face that had been reduced to the sharp lineaments of bone and cartilage) and the two sisters, Cole and me. I’d contributed five dollars to the enterprise, though I had my doubts. I’d never done anything like this and I was scared of the consequences, the droning narration of the anti-drug films from high school riding up out of some backwater of my mind to assert itself, to take over, become shrill even. Mike threw off his jacket, tore open two glassine packets with his teeth and carefully — meticulously — shook out the contents into a tablespoon. It was a white powder, and it could have been anything, baking soda, confectioners’ sugar, Polident, but it wasn’t, and I remember thinking how innocuous it looked, how anonymous. In the next moment, Mike sat heavily on the toilet, drew some water up into the syringe I’d seen lying there on a shelf in the medicine cabinet last time I’d used the facilities, squeezed a few drops into the powder, mixed it around and then held a lighter beneath the spoon. Then he tied himself off at the biceps with a bit of rubber tubing, drew the mixture from the spoon through a ball of cotton and hit a vein. I watched his eyes. Watched the rush take him, and then the nod. Nicky was next, then Suzie, then JoJo, and finally Cole. Mike hit them, one at a time, like a doctor. I watched each of them rush and go limp, my heart hammering at my rib cage, the record in the living room repeating over and over because nobody had bothered to put the changer down, and then it was my turn. Mike held up the glassine packet. “It’s just a taste,” he said. “Three-dollar bag. You on for it?”

“No,” I said, “I mean, I don’t think I—”

He studied me a moment, then tossed me the bag. “It’s a waste,” he said, “a real waste, man.” His voice was slow, the voice of a record played at the wrong speed. He shook his head with infinite calm, moving it carefully from side to side as if it weighed more than the cottage itself. “But hey, we’ll snort it this time. You’ll see what you’re missing, right?”

I saw. Within the week I was getting off too, and it was my secret — my initiation into a whole new life — and the tracks, the bite marks of the needle that crawled first up one arm and then the other, were my testament.

IT WAS MY JOB to do lunch duty one week a month, and lunch duty consisted of keeping the student body out of the building for forty-five minutes while they presumably went home, downtown or over to the high school and consumed whatever nourishment was available to them. It was necessary to keep them out of the junior high building for the simple reason that they would destroy it through an abundance of natural high spirits and brainless joviality. I stood in the dim hallway, positioned centrally between the three doors that opened from the southern, eastern and western sides of the building, and made my best effort at chasing them down when they burst in howling against the frigid collapse of the noon hour. On the second day of my third tour of duty, Robert Rowe sauntered in through the front doors and I put down my sandwich — the one my mother had made me in the hour of the wolf before going off to work herself — and reminded him of the rules.

He opened his face till it bloomed like a flower and held out his palms. He was wearing a T-shirt and a sleeveless parka. I saw that he’d begun to let his hair go long. “I just wanted to ask you a question is all.”

I was chewing tunafish on rye, standing there in the middle of all that emptiness in my ridiculous pants and rumpled jacket. The building, like most institutions of higher and lower learning, was overheated, and in chasing half a dozen of my charges out the door I’d built up a sweat that threatened to break my hair loose of its mold. Without thinking, I slipped off the jacket and let it dangle from one hand; without thinking, I’d pulled a short-sleeved button-down shirt out of my closet that morning because all the others were dirty. That was the scene. That was the setup. “Sure,” I said. “Go ahead.”

“I was just wondering — you ever read this book, The Man with the Golden Arm ?”

“Nelson Algren?”

He nodded.

“No,” I said. “I’ve heard of it, though.”

He took a moment with this, then cocked his head back till it rolled on his shoulders and gave me a dead-on look. “He shoots up.”

“Who?”

“The guy in the book. All the time.” He was studying me, gauging how far he could go. “You know what that’s like?”

I played dumb.

“You don’t? You really don’t?”

I shrugged. Dodged his eyes.

There was a banging at the door behind us, hilarious faces there, then the beat of retreating footsteps. Robert moved back a pace, but he held me with his gaze. “Then what’s with the spots on your arms?”

I looked down at my arms as if I’d never seen them before, as if I’d been born without them and they’d been grafted on while I was napping. “Mosquito bites,” I said.

“In November? They must be some tough-ass mosquitoes.”

“Yeah,” I said, shifting the half-eaten sandwich from one hand to the other so I could cover up with the jacket, “yeah, they are.”

MIKE LIKED THE COUNTRY. He’d grown up in the projects on the Lower East Side, always pressed in by concrete and blacktop, and now that he was in the wilds of northern Westchester he began to keep animals. There were two chickens in a rudely constructed pen and a white duck he’d hatched from the egg, all of which met their fate one bitter night when a fox — or more likely, a dog — sniffed them out. He had a goat too, chained to a tree from which it had stripped the bark to a height of six feet or more, its head against the palm of your hand exactly like a rock with hair on it, and when he thought about it he’d toss it half a bale of hay or a loaf of stale bread or even the cardboard containers the beer came in. Inside, he had a fifty-gallon aquarium with a pair of foot-long alligators huddled inside it under a heat lamp, and these he fed hamburger in the form of raw meatballs he’d work between his palms. Every once in a while someone would get stoned and expel a lungful of smoke into the aquarium to see what effect it would have on a pair of reptiles and the things would scrabble around against the glass enclosure, hissing.