T. Boyle - Tooth and Claw

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following magazines, in which these stories first appeared: GQ , “The Kind Assassin”; Harper’s , “Rastrow’s Island” and “Here Comes”; McSweeney’s , “Blinded by the Light” and “The Doubtfulness of Water”; The New Yorker , “When I Woke Up This Morning, Everything I Had Was Gone,” “Swept Away,” “Dogology,” “Chicxulub” and “Tooth and Claw”; Playboy , “Jubilation,” “Up Against the Wall” and “The Swift Passage of the Animals”; and StoryQuarterly , “All the Wrecks I’ve Crawled Out Of.”

“Swept Away” also appeared in The O. Henry Prize Stories, 2003 , edited by Laura Furman (Anchor Books), and “Tooth and Claw” in The Best American Short Stories, 2004 , edited by Lorrie Moore (Houghton Mifflin).

The author would also like to cite the following books as sources of certain factual details in “Dogology”: The Wolf Children: Fact or Fantasy , by Charles MacLean; Wolf-Children and Feral Man , by the Reverend J. A. L. Singh and Robert M. Zingg; and The Hidden Lives of Dogs , by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas.

THE MAN I WANT to tell you about, the one I met at the bar at Jimmy’s Steak House, was on a tear. Hardly surprising, since this was a bar, after all, and what do people do at bars except drink, and one drink leads to another — and if you’re in a certain frame of mind, I suppose, you don’t stop for a day or two or maybe more. But this man — he was in his forties, tall, no fat on him, dressed in a pair of stained Dockers and a navy blue sweatshirt cut off raggedly at the elbows — seemed to have been going at it steadily for weeks, months even.

It was a Saturday night, rain sizzling in the streets and steaming the windows, the dinner crowd beginning to rouse themselves over decaf, cheesecake and V.S.O.P. and the regulars drifting in to look the women over and wait for the band to set up in the corner. I was new in town. I had no date, no wife, no friends. I was on something of a tear myself — a mini-tear, I guess you’d call it. The night before I’d gone out with one of my co-workers from the office, who, like me, was recently divorced, and we had dinner, went to a couple places afterward. But nothing came of it — she didn’t like me, and I could see that before we were halfway through dinner. I wasn’t her type, whatever that might have been — and I started feeling sorry for myself, I guess, and drank too much. When I got up in the morning, I made myself a Bloody Mary with a can of Snap-E-Tom, a teaspoon of horseradish and two jiggers of vodka, just to clear my head, then went out to breakfast at a place by the water and drank a glass or two of Chardonnay with my frittata and homemade duck sausage with fennel, and then I wandered over to a sports bar and then another place after that, and I never got any of the errands done I’d been putting off all week — and I didn’t have any lunch either. Or dinner. And so I drifted into Jimmy’s and there he was, the man in the sweatshirt, on his tear.

There was a space around him at the bar. He was standing there, the stool shoved back and away from him as if he had no use for comfort, and his lips were moving, though nobody I could see was talking to him. A flashlight, a notebook and a cigarette lighter were laid out in front of him on the mahogany bar, and though Jimmy’s specialized in margaritas — there were eighteen different types of margaritas offered on the drinks menu — this man was apparently going the direct route. Half a glass of beer sat on the counter just south of the flashlight and he was guarding three empty shot glasses as if he was afraid someone was going to run off with them. The bar was filling up. There were only two seats available in the place, one on either side of him. I was feeling a little washed out, my legs gone heavy on me all of a sudden, and I was thinking I might get a burger or a steak and fries at the bar. I studied him a moment, considered, then took the seat to his right and ordered a drink.

Our first communication came half a second later. He tapped my arm, gave me a long, tunneled look, and made the universal two-fingered gesture for a smoke. Normally this would have irritated me — the law says you can no longer smoke in a public place in this state, and in any case I don’t smoke and never have — but I was on a tear myself, I guess, and just gave him a smile and shrugged my shoulders. He turned away from me then to flag down the bartender and order another shot — he was drinking Herradura Gold — and a beer chaser. There was a ritualistic moment during which he took a bite from the wedge of lime the bartender provided, sprinkled salt onto the webbing between the thumb and index finger of his left hand, licked it off and threw back the shot, after which the beer came into play. He exhaled deeply, and then his eyes migrated back to me. “Nice to see you,” he said, as if we’d known each other for years.

I said it was nice to see him too. The gabble of voices around us seemed to go up a notch. A woman at the end of the bar began to laugh with a thick, dredging sound, as if she were bringing something up with great reluctance.

He leaned in confidentially. “You know,” he said, “people drink for a lot of reasons. You know why I drink? Because I like the taste of it. Sweet and simple. I like the taste.”

I told him I liked the taste of it too, and then he made a fist and cuffed me lightly on the meat of the arm. “You’re all right, you know that?” He held out his hand as if we’d just closed a deal, and I took it. I’ve been in business for years — for all but one of the years since I left college — and it was just a reflex to give him my name. He didn’t say anything in response, just stared into my eyes, grinning, until I said, “And what do I call you?”

The man looked past me, his eyes groping toward the red and green neon sign with its neatly bunched neon palm trees that glowed behind the bar and apprised everybody of the name of the establishment. It took him a minute, but then he dropped my hand and said, “Just call me Jimmy.”

After a couple of drinks at a bar, after the subjects of sports, movies and TV have been exhausted, people tend to talk about liquor, about the people they know who drink too much, fly off the handle, wind up wrecking their lives and the lives of everyone around them, and then they tend to get specific. This man — Jimmy — was no different. Alcoholism ran in his family, he told me. His father had died in the streets when he was younger than Jimmy was now, a transient, a bum, useless to the world and, more emphatically, to his wife and children. And Jimmy himself had a problem. He admitted as much.

A year before, he’d been living on the East Coast, in a town up the Hudson River, just outside of New York. He taught history at the local high school, and he’d come to it late, after working a high-stress job in Manhattan and commuting for years. History was his passion, and he hadn’t had time to stagnate in the job like so many of his fellow teachers who went through the motions as if they were the walking dead. He loved sports too. He was a jogger, a tennis player, a mountain-biker, and he coached lacrosse in the fall and baseball in the spring. He was married to a girl he’d met in his senior year at the state university at Albany. They had a son—“Call him ‘Chris,’ ” he said, looking to the neon sign again — and he’d coached Chris in high school and watched him go on to college himself as a newly minted freshman at an Ivy League school.