T. Boyle - Tooth and Claw

“Who’s that?” Suzie’s voice rose up out of the stillness. Cole was atop her and she had to lift her head to fix her eyes on me. “John? Is that you?”

Cole rolled off her and flipped a fold of the blanket over her. “Jesus,” he said, “you picked a great moment.” His eyes burned, though I could see he was trying to be cool, trying to minimize it, no big thing.

“Jesus,” Suzie said, “you scared me. Do you always creep around like that?”

“My boots,” I said. “They just — or actually, I just came by to tell you something, that’s all — I can’t stay…”

The rain was like two cupped palms holding the place in its grip. The gutters rattled. Pinpricks needled the roof. “Shit,” Cole said, and Suzie reached out to gather up her clothes, shielding her breasts in the crook of one arm, “I mean, shit, John. Couldn’t you wait in the kitchen, I mean, for like ten fucking minutes? Huh? Couldn’t you?”

I swung round without a word and padded out to the kitchen even as the living room door thundered shut at my back. For a long while I sat at the familiar table with its detritus of burned joss sticks, immolated candles, beer bottles, mugs, food wrappers and the like, thinking I could just write them a note — that would do it — or maybe I’d call Cole later, from home, when he got home, that was, at his mother’s. But I couldn’t find a pencil — nobody took notes here, that was for sure — and finally I just pushed myself up, tiptoed to the door and fell back into my boots and the sodden jacket.

IT WAS JUST getting dark when I pulled up in front of the house. My father’s car was parked there at the curb, but my mother’s wasn’t and it wasn’t in the driveway either. The rain kept coming down — the streets were flooding, broad sheets of water fanning away from the tires and the main road clogged with slow-moving cars and their tired headlights and frantically beating wipers. I ran for the house, kicked off my boots on the doorstep and flung myself inside as if I’d been away for years. My jacket streamed and I hurried across the carpet to the accompaniment of the dog’s thwacking tail and hung it from the shower head in the bathroom. Then I went to the kitchen to look in the refrigerator, feeling desolate and cheated. I didn’t have a habit despite the stigmata of my arms — I was a neophyte still, a twice- or three-times-a-week user — but I had a need, and that need yawned before me, opening up and opening up again, as I leaned over the sink. The cottage was over. Cole was over. Life, as I’d come to know it, was finished.

It was then that I noticed the figure of my father moving through the gloom of the backyard. He had on a pair of galoshes I’d worn as a kid, the kind with the metal fasteners, and he was wearing a yellow rain slicker and one of those winter hats with the fold-down earmuffs. I couldn’t quite tell what he was doing out there, raking dirt or leaves, something to do with the rain, I guessed — the driveway was eroding, maybe that was it. It never crossed my mind that he might need help. And Robert Rowe never crossed my mind either, nor the fact that his speech had been garbled and slow at the noon hour and his eyes drifting toward a point no one in this world could see but him.

No. I was hungry for something, I didn’t know what. It wasn’t food, because I mechanically chewed a handful of saltines over the sink and washed them down with half a glass of milk that tasted like chalk. I paced round the living room, snuck a drink out of my mother’s bottle — Dewar’s, that was what she drank; my father stuck with vodka, the cheaper the better, and I’d never acquired a taste for it. I had another drink, and then another. After a while I eased myself down in my father’s chair and gazed around the room where I’d spent the better part of my life, the secondhand furniture, the forest-green wallpaper gone pale around the windowframes, the peeling sheet-metal planter I’d made for my mother in shop class, the plants within it long since expired, just curls of dead things now. Finally I got up and turned on the TV, then settled back in my father’s chair as the jets came in low and the village went up in flames.