by T. C. Boyle
Praise for Tooth and Claw by T.C. Boyle
“Inside Tooth and Claw are Boyle’s trademark taut writing, immediate intimacy, vivid language.…Among Boyle’s gifts are his roaring intelligence and a curiosity that has led him over the years to develop a masterly range of subjects and locales.”
—Annie Proulx, The Washington Post
“Boyle returns to mercilessly test his characters’ physical and emotional endurance.…Each character, captured in Boyle’s calculating and caustic prose, fights his or her way out of the wreckage.”
—Time
“An impressive miscellany of styles, genres, voices, and subjects…at his best, Boyle succeeds in creating a world where scientific determinism plays a part, but the characters go on living as if they had a choice and a chance. That he makes their predicament not just compelling but often exuberantly amusing is a tribute to his talent and proof of John Cheever’s claim that good prose can cure anything, including the common cold.”
—Michael Mewshaw, Los Angeles Times
“Spine-freezing, guilty-giggle inducing and, oddly, heartwarming stories…fourteen small masterpieces of sculpture fashioned from sinew, muscle, marrow…heart. While unremittingly primal, they remain undeniably, and touchingly, human.”
—The San Diego Union-Tribune
“As always, Boyle writes wonderfully about oddballs, boozers, and the terminally self-deluded. But his best work here isn’t satirical. In ‘Chicxulub,’ he juxtaposes the history of civilization-ending asteroids with an account of a happy middle aged couple, summoned in the night with terrible news about their daughter. The impact is shattering.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Whether Boyle is breaking your heart or making you laugh, you just don’t care because he is so darned good at it.…Boyle has the voice to make you smile, make you care and make you hate yourself in the morning for being taken in by such a smooth storyteller.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“There is little doubt that Boyle is one of the most inventive writers of our age.…He is at the top of his game in ‘Swept Away’—wry, playful, and generous toward his tenderhearted lovers even as they are torn asunder.…‘Dogology’ is another irresistible romp [which] deftly plumbs the inextricable conflict between man’s rational capacities and his animalistic urges, a theme Boyle has been examining, in one way or another, since his debut collection Descent of Man.”
—The Boston Globe
“Boyle has an impressionist’s range with voice. He is adept at jerking the rip cord at story’s end without leaving readers feeling they’ve been jerked around. And he loves the challenge of grabbing an intimidating premise and whipping it toward despair or disaster.”
—The Oregonian
“For those who are unfamiliar with Boyle’s work, this collection is a perfect place to start.…The short story is an ideal form for his remarkable talents. He has a seemingly limitless gift for the outrageous, sometimes grotesque, often incredible situation and for compelling the reader to buy into it.…Many of these stories are dazzling.”
—Rocky Mountain News
“T.C. Boyle could probably spin a riveting story out of the contents of a seed catalog. He is a writer of astonishing range and imagination, fierce intelligence and trenchant wit. Those gifts are dazzlingly on display in this collection of fourteen short stories, each a fully realized world shot through with perils either natural or man-made.…His universe may be cruel and random, but it has a brilliant blaze.”
—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“Like the best episodes of the late Six Feet Under, T.C. Boyle’s new collection of stories takes readers to the edges of life just to keep it valid.…Boyle keeps us hooked by injecting vivid details and dark humor into his characters’ distress. His conversational storytelling also draws the reader in casually as if he is just sharing heartbreak over drinks at the bar.”
—Boston Herald
“The threat of imminent demise—whether self-inflicted or from an ungentle Mother Nature—hovers in Boyle’s seventh collection.…The wired rhythms of Boyle’s prose and the enormity of his imagination make this collection irresistible; with it he continues to shore up his place as one of the most distinctive, funniest—and finest—writers around.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Boyle has never been more enrapturing than in his seventh collection of shrewd and comic tales. He orchestrates suspenseful, ludicrous, and wrenching predicaments, and his evocation of visceral detail, great gift for supple social commentary, and ability to occupy the psyches of his perplexed male characters are extraordinary.”
—Booklist
“Vintage Boyle, and not to be missed.…Darker tones and an impressive range of subjects dominate this impressive collection of fourteen vivid stories.”
—Kirkus Reviews
PENGUIN BOOKS
TOOTH AND CLAW
T.C. Boyle is the author of Talk Talk, The Inner Circle, Drop City (a finalist for the National Book Award), A Friend of the Earth, Riven Rock, The Tortilla Curtain, The Road to Wellville, East Is East, World’s End (winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award), Budding Prospects, Water Music, and seven collections of stories. In 1999, he was the recipient of the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. His stories appear regularly in major American magazines, including The New Yorker, GQ, Esquire, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, and Playboy. He lives near Santa Barbara, California. T.C. Boyle’s Web site is www.tcboyle.com.
TOOTH and CLAW
T. Coraghessan Boyle
Penguin Books
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2005
Published in Penguin Books 2006
3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4
Copyright © T. Coraghessan Boyle, 2005
All rights reserved
Page ix constitutes an extension of this copyright page.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
These selections are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are
the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual
persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS:
Boyle, T. Coraghessan.
Tooth and claw / T. Coraghessan Boyle.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-101-20119-0
I. Title.
PS3552.O932T66 2005
813’.54—dc22 20040655108
Printed in the United States of America
/>
Set in Adobe Garamond
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not,
by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s
prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without
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of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
For Rob Jordan and Valerie Wong
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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 Simiadae then branched off into two great stems, the New World and the Old World monkeys; and from the latter at a remote period, Man, the wonder and the glory of the universe, proceeded.
—CHARLES DARWIN, The Descent of Man
CONTENTS
When I Woke Up This Morning, Everything I Had Was Gone
Swept Away
Dogology
The Kind Assassin
The Swift Passage of the Animals
Jubilation
Rastrow’s Island
Chicxulub
Here Comes
All the Wrecks I’ve Crawled Out Of
Blinded by the Light
Tooth and Claw
The Doubtfulness of Water: Madam Knight’s Journey to New York, 1702
Up Against the Wall
TOOTH and CLAW
When I Woke Up This Morning,
Everything I Had Was Gone
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 himsel
f 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.
That was all right. Everything was all right. The school year began and he dug out his notes, Xeroxed study guides, looked up and down the class register and saw who he could trust and who he’d have to watch. In the mornings, before it was light, he ate breakfast alone in the kitchen, listening to the soft hum of the classic rock channel, the hits that took him back, hits he hadn’t heard in years because Chris always had the radio tuned to hip-hop or the alternative station. Above him, in the master bedroom, Caroline was enjoying the luxury of sleeping late after thirteen years of scrambling eggs and buttering toast and seeing her son off to school. It was still dark when he climbed into his car, and most mornings he was the first one in the building, striding down the wide polished halls in a silence that could have choked on itself.
Fall settled in early that year, a succession of damp glistening days that took the leaves off the trees and fed on the breath of the wind. It seemed to do nothing but rain, day after day. The sky never swelled to flex its glory; the sun never shone. He saw a photo in the paper of a barechested jogger on the beach in Key Biscayne and felt reality slipping away from him. One afternoon he was out on the field in back of the school—the lacrosse team was scrimmaging with a bigger, more talented squad from a prep school upstate—and he couldn’t seem to focus on the game. The assistant coach, no more than three or four years out of school himself, stepped up and took over the hectoring and the shoulder patting, managed the stream of substitutions and curbed the erupting tempers—discipline, that’s what Jimmy taught above all else, because in a contact sport the team that controls its emotions will win out every time—while the clock ticked off the minutes to the half and the sky drew into itself and the rain whitened to sleet.