Tooth and Claw

by T. C. Boyle

  I wasn’t rich, not by the standards I’d set for myself, but I’d sold my company to a bigger company and bought off my ex-wife, and what was left was more than adequate to set me up in a new life in a new house—and no, I wasn’t retiring to Florida to play golf till I dropped dead of boredom, but just looking for what was missing in my life, for the values I’d grown up with in the suburbs, where there were no fences, no walls, no gated communities and private security guards, where everybody knew everybody else and democracy wasn’t just a tattered banner the politicians unfurled for their convenience every four years. That was what the Jubilation Company promised. That and a rock-solid property valuation, propped up by Charles Contash and all the fiscal might of his entertainment and merchandising empire. The only catch was that you had to occupy your property a minimum of nine months out of the year and nobody could sell within two years of purchase, so as to discourage speculators, but to my way of thinking that wasn’t a catch at all, if you were committed. And if you weren’t, you had no business taking up space in line to begin with. “Not really,” I said, enjoying the look on her face, the unconscious widening of her eyes, the way her lips parted in expectation. “Comfortable, I guess you’d say.”

  Then the line jerked again and we all revised our footing. “Mercado Street!” somebody shouted. “Penny Lane!” countered another, and there was a flicker of nervous laughter.

  From where I was standing, I could barely see over the crush. A girl in a short blue skirt and orange heels stood on a platform at the head of the line, churning a gleaming stainless-steel hopper emblazoned with the Contash logo, and an LED display stood ready to flash the numbers as people extracted the little digitized cards from the depths of it. There was a ripple of excitement as the first man in line, a phys ed teacher from Las Vegas, New Mexico, climbed the steps of the platform. Rumor had it he’d been camped on the unforgiving concrete for over a month, eating his meals out of a microwave and doing calisthenics to keep in shape. I saw a running suit (blue with orange piping, what else?) surmounted by yard-wide shoulders and a head like a wrecking ball. The man bent to the hopper, straightened up again and handed a white plastic card to the girl, who in turn ran it under a scanner. The display flickered, and then flashed the number: 3,347. “Oh, God,” Vicki muttered under her breath. My pulse was racing. I couldn’t seem to swallow. The sun hung overhead like an over-ripe orange on a limb just out of reach as the crowd released a long slow withering exhalation. So what if the phys ed teacher had camped out for a month? He was a loser, and he was going to have to wait for Phase II construction to begin before he could even hope to become part of this.

  None of the next five people managed to draw under 1,000, but at least they were in, at least there was that. “They look like they want houses, don’t they?” Vicki said, a flutter of nerves undermining her voice. “I don’t mean Casual Contempos,” she said, “I wouldn’t want to jinx that for you, but maybe the Little Adobes or the Courteous Coastals. But not apartments. No way.”

  Then a couple who looked as if they belonged on one of the Contash Corp’s billboards drew number 5 and the crowd let out a collective groan before people recovered themselves and a spatter of applause went up. I shut my eyes. I hadn’t eaten since the previous afternoon on the plane and I felt dizzy suddenly. Get lucky, I told myself. Just get lucky, that’s all.

  A breeze came up. The line moved forward step by step, slab by slab. As each number was displayed, a thrill ran through the crowd, and they were all neighbors, or potential neighbors, but that didn’t mean they weren’t betting against you. It took nearly an hour before the men in front of Vicki—Mark and his partner, Leonard, nicest guys in the world—mounted the steps to the platform and drew number 222. I watched in silence as they fell into each other’s arms and improvised a little four-legged jig around the stage, and then Vicki was up there with the sun bringing out the highlights in her hair and drawing the color from her eyes as if they’d been inked in. The boy fidgeted. The baby squalled. She bent forward to draw her number, and when the display flashed 17 she flew down the steps and collapsed for sheer joy in the arms of the only man she knew in that whole astonished crowd—me—and everybody must have assumed I was the father of those creamy pale children until I climbed the steps myself and thrust my own arm into the hopper.

  The stage seemed to go quiet suddenly, all that tumult of voices reduced to a whisper, tongues arrested, lips frozen in mid-sentence. I was going to get what I wanted. I was sure of it. My fingers closed on a card, one of thousands, and I fished it out and handed it to the girl; an instant later the number flashed on the board—4,971—and Vicki, poised at the foot of the steps with a glazed smile, looked right through me.

  THERE ARE PEOPLE in this world who are content with the lot they’re given, content to bow their heads and accept what comes, to wait, sacrifice and look to the future. I’m not one of them. Within an hour of the drawing, I’d traded number 4,971 and $10,000 cash for Mark and Leonard’s number 222, and within a month of that I was reclining in a new white wicker chaise longue on the wraparound porch of my Casual Contempo discussing interior decoration with a very determined—and attractive—young woman from Coastal Design. The young woman’s name was Felicia, and she wore her hair in a French braid that exposed the long cool nape of her neck. She was looking into my eyes and telling me in her soft breathy reconstructed tones what I needed vis-à-vis the eclectic neo-traditional aesthetic of the Jubilation Community—“Really, Mr. Reilly, you can mix and match to your heart’s content, a Stickley sofa to go with your Craftsman windows set right next to a Chinese end table of lacquered rosewood with an ormolu inlay”—when I interrupted her. I listened to the ice cubes clink in my glass a moment, then asked her if she wouldn’t prefer discussing my needs over a nice étoufée on the deck of the Cajun Kitchen overlooking lovely Lake Allagash. “Oh, I would love that, Mr. Reilly,” she said, “more than practically anything I can think of, but Jeffrey—my sweet little husband of six months?—might just voice an objection.” She crossed her legs, let one heel dangle strategically. “No, I think we’d better confine ourselves to the business at hand, don’t you?”

  I wrote her a check, and within forty-eight hours I was inhabiting a color plate torn out of one of the Jubilation brochures, replete with throw rugs, armoires, sideboards, a set of kitchen chairs designed by a Swedish sadist and a pair of antique brass water pitchers—or were they spittoons?—stuffed with the Concours d’Elegance mix of dried coastal wildflowers. It hadn’t come cheap, but I wasn’t complaining. This was what I’d wanted since the breath had gone out of my marriage and I’d begun living the nomadic life of the motor court, the high-rise hotel and the inn round the corner. I was home. For the first time in as long as I could remember, I felt oriented and secure.

  I laid in provisions, rode my Exercycle, got into a couple of books I’d always meant to read (Crime and Punishment, Judgment at Nuremberg, The Naked and the Dead), took a divorcée named Cecily to the Chowchy Grill for dinner and afterward to a movie at the art deco palace designed by Cesar Pelli as the centerpiece of the Mercado Street pedestrian mall, and enjoyed the relatively bugless spring weather in a rented kayak out on Lake Allagash. By the end of the second month I’d lost eight pounds, my arms felt firmer and my face was as tan as a tennis pro’s. I wished my wife could see me now, but even as I wished it, the image of her—the heavy, pouting lips and irascible lines etched into the corners of her mouth, the flaring eyes and belligerent stab of her chin—rose up to engulf me in sorrow. Raymond, that was the name of the man she was dating—Raymond, who owned his own restaurant and had a boat out on Long Island Sound.

  At any rate, I was standing over the vegetable display at the Jubilation Market one afternoon watching my ex-wife’s face superimpose itself on the gleaming epidermis of an oversized zucchini, when a familiar voice called out my name. It was Vicki. She was wearing a transparent blouse over a bikini top and she’d had her hair done up in a spill of tinted ringlets. A
plastic shopping basket dangled from one hand. There were no children in sight. “I heard you got your Casual Contempo,” she said. “How’re you liking it?”

  “A dream come true. And you?”

  Her smile widened. “I got a job. At the company office? I’m assistant facilitator for tour groups.”

  “Tour groups? You mean here? Or over at Contash World?”

  “You haven’t noticed all the people in the streets?” she asked, holding her smile. “The ones with the cameras and the straw hats coming down to check us out and see what a model city looks like, works like? Look right there, right out the window there on the sidewalk in front of the Chowchy Grill. See that flock of Hawaiian shirts? And those women with the legs that look like they’ve just been pulled out of the deep freeze?”

  I followed her gaze and there they were, tourists, milling around as if on a stage set. How had I failed to notice them? Even now one of them was backing away from the front of the grocery with a movie camera. “Tourists?” I murmured.

  She nodded.

  Maybe I was a little sour that morning, maybe I needed love and affection, not to mention sex, and maybe I was lonely and frustrated and beginning to feel the first stab of disappointment with my new life, but before I could think, I said, “They’re worse than the ants. Do you have ants, by the way—in your apartment, I mean? The little minuscule ones that make ant freeways all over the floor, the kitchen counter, the walls?”

  Her face fell, but then the smile came back, because she was determined to be chirpy and positive. “I wouldn’t say they were worse than the ants—at least the ants clean up after themselves.”

  “And cockroaches. Or palmetto bugs—isn’t that what we call them down here? I saw one the size of a frog the other day, right out on Penny Lane.”

  She had nothing to say to this, so I changed the subject and asked how her kids were doing.

  “Oh, fine. Terrific. They’re thriving.” A pause. “My mother’s down from Philadelphia—she’s babysitting for me until I can find somebody permanent. While I’m at work, that is.”

  “Really,” I said, reaching down to shift the offending zucchini to the bottom of the bin. “So are you free right now? For maybe a drink? Unless you have to rush home and cook or something.”

  She looked doubtful.

  “What I mean is, don’t you want to see what a neo-retro Casual Contempo looks like when it’s fully furnished?”

  THE FIRST REAL BUMP in the road came a week or two later. I’d been called away to consult with the transition team at my former company, and when I got back I found a notice in the mailbox from the Contash Corp’s subsidiary, the Jubilation Company, or as we all knew it in short—and somewhat redundantly—the TJC. It seemed they were advising against our spending too much time on our wraparound porches, especially at sunrise and sunset, and to take all precautions while using the jogging trail round Lake Allagash or even window-shopping on Mercado Street. The problem was mosquitoes. Big, outsized Central Floridian mosquitoes that were found to be carrying encephalitis and dengue fever. The TJC was doing all it could vis-à-vis vector control, and they were contractually absolved from any responsibility—just read your Declaration of Covenants, Deeds and Restrictions—but in the interest of public safety they were advising everyone to stay indoors. Despite the heat. And the fact that staying in defeated the whole idea of the Casual Contempo, the wraparound porch and the free interplay between neighbors that lies at the core of what makes a real and actual town click.

  I was brooding in the kitchen, idly scratching at the constellation of angry red welts on my right wrist and waiting for the meninges to start swelling in my brainpan, when a movement on the porch caught my eye. Two cloaked figures there, one large, one small, and a cloaked baby carriage. For a moment I didn’t know what to make of it all, but the baby carriage was a dead giveaway: it was Vicki, dressed like a beekeeper, with little Ethan in his own miniature beekeeper’s outfit beside her and baby Ashley imprisoned behind a wall of gauze in the depths of the carriage. “Christ,” I said, ushering them in, “is this what we’re going to have to start wearing now?”

  She pulled back the veil to reveal that hopeful smile and the small shining miracle of her hair. “No, I don’t think so,” she said, bending to remove her son’s impedimenta (“I don’t want,” he kept saying, “I don’t want”). “There,” she said, addressing the pale dwindling oval of his face, “there, it’s all right now. And you can have a soda, if Jackson still has any left in the refrigerator—”

  “Oh, yeah, sure,” I said, and I was bending too. “Root beer? Or Seven-Up?”

  We wound up sitting in the kitchen, drinking white wine and sharing a box of stale Triscuits while the baby slept and Ethan sucked at a can of Hires in front of the tube in the living room. Out back was the low fence that gave onto the nature preserve, with its bird-friendly marsh that also coincidentally happened to serve as a maternity ward for the mosquitoes, and beyond that was Lake Allagash. “At the office they’re saying the mosquitoes are just seasonal,” Vicki said, working a hand up under the tinted ringlets and giving them a shake, “and besides, they’re pretty much spraying around the clock now, so I would think—well, I mean, they’ve had to close down some of the outdoor rides over at Contash World, and that means money lost, big money.”

  I wasn’t a cynic, or I tried not to be, because a pioneer can’t afford cynicism. Look on the bright side, that was what I maintained—there was no alternative. “Okay, fine, but have you seen my wrist? I mean, should I be concerned? Should I go to the doctor, do you think?”

  She took my wrist in her cool grip, traced the bumps there with her index finger. She gave a little laugh. “Chigger bites, that’s all. Nothing to worry about. And the mosquitoes’ll just be a bad memory in a week or two, I guarantee it.”

  There was a moment of silence, during which we both gazed out the window on the marsh—or swamp, as I’d mistakenly called it before Vicki corrected me. We watched an egret rise up out of nowhere and sail off into the trees. Clouds massed on the horizon in a swell of pure, unadulterated white; the palmettos gathered and released the faintest trace of a breeze. Next door, the wraparound porch of my neighbors—the black couple, Sam and Ernesta Fills—was deserted. Ditto the porch of the house on the other side, into which Mark and Leonard, having traded $2,500 of the cash I’d given them for number 632 and a prime chance at a Casual Contempo, had recently moved. “No,” she said finally, draining her wineglass and holding it out in one delicate hand so that I could refill it for her, “what I’d be concerned about if I was you is your neighbors across the street—the Weekses?”

  I gave her a dumb stare.

  “You know them—July and Fili Weeks and their three sons?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “sure.” Everybody knew everybody else here. It was a rule.

  From the TV in the other room came the sound of canned laughter, followed by Ethan’s stuttering high whinny of an underdeveloped laugh. “What about the red curtains?” she said. “And that car? That whatever it is, that race car painted in the three ugliest shades of magenta they keep parked out there on the street where the whole world can see it? They’re in violation of the code on something like eight counts already and they haven’t been here a month yet.”

  I felt a prickle of alarm. We were all in this together, and if everybody didn’t pitch in—if everybody didn’t subscribe to the letter as far as the Covenants and Restrictions were concerned—what was going to happen to our property values? “Red curtains?” I said.

  Her eyes were steely. “Just like in a whorehouse. And you know the rules—white, off-white, beige and taupe only.”

  “Has anybody talked to them? Can’t anybody do anything?”

  She set the glass down, drew her gaze away from the window and looked into my eyes. “You mean the Citizens’ Committee?”

  I shrugged. “Yeah. Sure. I guess.”

  She leaned in close. I could smell the rinse she used in her hair, and it
was faintly intoxicating. I loved her eyes, loved the shape of her, loved the way she aspirated her h’s like an elocution teacher. “Don’t you worry,” she whispered. “We’re already on it.”

  ONCE VICKI HAD MENTIONED the Weekses and the way they were flouting the code, I couldn’t get them out of my head. July Weeks was a salesman of some sort, aviation parts, I think it was—he worked for Cessna—and he seemed to spend most of his time, despite the mosquito scare, buried deep in his own white wicker chaise longue out on the wraparound porch of his Courteous Coastal directly across the street from me. He was a Southerner, and that was all right because this was the South, after all, but he had one of those accents that just went on clanging and jarring till you could barely understand a word he was saying. Not that I harbor any prejudices—he was my neighbor, and if he wanted to sound like an extra from Deliverance, that was his privilege. But I looked out the front window and saw that race car—No excessive or unsightly vehicles, including campers, RVs, moving vans or trailers, shall be parked on the public streets for a period exceeding forty-eight continuous hours, Section III, Article 12, Declaration of Covenants, Deeds and Restrictions—and the sight of it became an active irritation. Which was compounded by the fact that the eldest son, August, pulled up one afternoon in a pickup truck that sat about six feet up off its Bayou Crawler tires and deposited a boat trailer at the curb. The boat was painted puce with lime-green trim and it had a staved-in hull. Plus, there were those curtains.

  A week went by. Two weeks. I got updates from Vicki—we were seeing each other just about every day now—and of course the Citizens’ Committee, as an arm of the TJC, was threatening the Weekses with a lawsuit and the Weekses had hired an attorney and were threatening back, but nothing happened. I couldn’t enjoy my wraparound porch or the view out my mullioned Craftsman windows. Every time I looked up, there was the boat, there was the car, and beyond them, the curtains. The situation began to weigh on me, so one night after dinner I strolled down the three broad inviting steps of my wraparound porch, waved a greeting to the Fills on my right and Mark and Leonard on my left, and crossed the street to mount the equally inviting steps of the Weekses’ wraparound porch with the intention of setting Mr. Weeks straight on a few things. Or no, that sounds too harsh. I wanted to block out a couple issues with him and see if we couldn’t resolve things amicably for all concerned.