Tooth and Claw

by T. C. Boyle

  As for myself, I’ve been rebuilding with the help of a low-interest loan secured through the Contash Corp, and I’ve begun, in a tentative way, to date Felicia, whose husband was one of the six fatalities we recorded once the storm had moved on. Beyond that, my committee work keeps me pretty busy, I’ve been keeping in touch with Vicki both by phone and e-mail, and every time I see Bruce chase a palmetto bug up the side of the new retaining wall, I just want to smile. And I do. I do smile. Sure, things could be better, but they could be worse too. I live in Jubilation. How bad can it be?

  Rastrow’s Island

  A car radio bleats,

  “Love, O careless Love.…”

  —ROBERT LOWELL, “SKUNK HOUR”

  SHE CALLED and he was ready if not eager to sell, because he’d had certain reverses, the market gone sour, Ruth in bed with something nobody was prepared to call cancer, and his daughter, Charlene, waiting for his check in her dorm room with her unpacked trunk full of last year’s clothes and the grubby texts with the yellow scars of the USED stickers seared into their spines. “That’s right,” she said, her old lady’s voice like the creak of oarlocks out on the bay in the first breath of dawn, “Mrs. Rastrow, Alice Rastrow, and I used to know your mother when she was alive.” There was a sharp crackling jolt of static, as if an electrical storm were raging inside the wires, then her voice came back at him: “I never have put much confidence in realtors. Do you want to talk or not?”

  “So go,” Ruth said. Her face had taken on the shine and color of the elephant-ear fungus that grew out of the sodden logs in the ravine at the foot of the park. “Don’t worry about me. Just go.”

  “You know what she’s doing, don’t you?”

  “I know what she’s doing.”

  “I never wanted to sell the place. I wanted it for Charlene, for Charlene’s kids. To experience it the way I did, to have that, at least—” He saw the house then, a proud two-story assertion of will from the last century, four rooms down, four rooms up, the wood paintless now and worn to a weathered silver, the barn subsiding into its angles in a bed of lichen-smeared rock, the hedges gone to straw in the absence of human agency. And when was the last time—? Two summers ago? Three?

  “It’s just a summer house.” She reached out a hand you could see right through and lifted the rimed water glass from the night table. He watched the hand tremble, fumble for the pills, and he looked away, out the window and down the row of townhouses and the slouching, copper-flagged maples. “Isn’t that the first thing to go when you—?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I guess it is.”

  “I mean,” and she paused to draw the water down, gulp the pills, “it’s not as if we really need the place or anything.”

  THE WATER WAS CHOPPY, the wind cold, and he sat in his car with the engine running and the heater on full as the ferry slammed at the seething white roil of the waves and the island separated itself from the far shore and began to fan out across the horizon. When the rain came up, first as a spatter that might have been nothing more than the spray thrown up by the bow and then as a moving scrim that isolated him behind the wheel, he thought of switching on the windshield wipers, but he didn’t. There was something about the opaque windows and the pitch of the deck tugging at the corners of the light that relaxed him—he could have been underwater, in a submarine, working his way along the bottom of the bay through the looming tangle of spars and timbers of the ships gone to wrack a hundred years ago. He laid his hand idly on the briefcase beside him. Inside were all the relevant papers he could think of: the deed, signed in his father’s ecstatic rolling hand, termite, electrical, water rights. But what did she care about termites, about water or dry rot?—she wasn’t going to live there. She wasn’t going to live anywhere but the whitewashed stone cottage she was entombed in now, the one she’d been born in, and after that she had her place reserved in the cemetery beside her husband and two drowned children. She must have been eighty, he figured. Eighty, or close to it.

  Ronald Rastrow—he was a violinist, or no, a violist—and his sister, Elyse. At night, in summer, above the thrum of the insects and the listless roll of the surf, you could hear his instrument tuned to some ancient sorrow and floating out across the water. He was twenty-two or -three, a student at Juilliard, and his sister must have been twenty or so. They went sailing under a full moon, rumors of a party onshore and Canadian whiskey and marijuana, the sea taut as a bedspread, a gentle breeze out of the east, and they never came back. He was twelve the summer it happened, and he used to thrill himself leaning out over the stern of the dingy till the shadow of his head and shoulders made the sea transparent and the dense architecture of the bottom rushed up at him in a revulsion of disordered secrets. He remembered the police divers gathered in a dark clump at the end of the pier. Volunteers. Adults, kids in sailboats, Curtis Mayhew’s father in his fishing boat fitted out with a dragline, working up and down the bay as if he were plowing it for seed. It was a lobsterman who found them, both of them, tangled in his lines at the end of a long cold week that was like December in July.

  He drove along the shore, past the saltbox cottages with their weathered shingles and the odd frame house that had acquired a new coat of paint, the trees stripped by the wind, nothing in the fields but pale dead stalks and the refulgent slabs of granite that bloomed in all seasons. There were a few new houses clustered around the village, leggy things, architecturally wise, but the gas station hadn’t changed or the post office/general store or Dorcas’ House of Clams (Closed for the Season). The woman behind the desk at The Seaside Rest (Sep Units Avail by Day or Week) took his money and handed him the key to the last cottage in a snaking string of them, though none of the intervening cottages seemed to be occupied. That struck him as a bit odd—she must have marked him down for a drug fiend or a prospective suicide—but it didn’t bother him, not really. She didn’t recognize him and he didn’t recognize her, because people change and places change and what once was will never be again. He entered the cottage like an acolyte taking possession of his cell, a cold little box of a room with a bed, night table and chair, no TV. He spent half an hour down on his knees worshipping the AC/heater unit, but could raise no more than the faintest stale exhalation out of it. At quarter of one he got back in the car and drove out to Mrs. Rastrow’s place.

  There was a gate to be negotiated where the blacktop gave way to the dirt drive, and then there was the drive itself, unchanged in two hundred years, a pair of beaten parallel tracks with a yellow scruff of dead vegetation painted down the center of it. He parked beneath a denuded oak, went up the three stone steps and rang the bell. Standing there on the doorstep, the laden breeze in his face and the bay spread out before him in a graceful arc to Colson’s Head, where the summer house stood amidst the fortress of trees like a chromatic miscalculation on a larger canvas, he felt the anxiety let go of him, eased by the simple step-by-step progress of his day, the business at hand, the feel of the island beneath his feet. She hadn’t mentioned a price. But he had a figure in mind, a figure that would at least stanch his wounds, if not stop the bleeding altogether, and she had the kind of capital to take everything down to the essentials, everybody knew that—Mrs. Rastrow, Alice Rastrow, widow of Julius, the lumber baron. He’d prepared his opening words, and his smile, cool and at ease, because he wasn’t going to be intimidated by her or let her see his need, and he listened to the bell ring through the house that was no mansion, no showplace, no testament to riches and self-aggrandizement but just what it was, and he pictured her moving through the dimness on her old lady’s limbs like a deep-sea diver in his heavy, confining suit. A moment passed. Then another. He debated, then rang again.

  His first surprise—the first in what would prove to be an unraveling skein of them—was the face at the door. The big pitted brown slab of oak pulled back and Mrs. Rastrow, ancient, crabbed, the whites of her eyes gone to yellow and her hair flown away in the white wisps of his recollection, was nowhere to be seen. A young
Asian woman was standing there at the door, her eyes questioning, brow wrinkled, teeth bundled beneath the neat bow of her lips. Her hair shone as if it had been painted on. “I came to see Mrs. Rastrow,” he said. “About the house?”

  The woman—she looked to be in her late twenties, her body squeezed into one of those luminous silk dresses the hostess in a Chinese restaurant might wear—showed no sign of recognition.

  He gave her his name. “We had an appointment today,” he said, “—for one?” Still nothing. He wondered if she spoke English. “I mean, me and Mrs. Rastrow? You know Mrs. Rastrow? Do you work for her?”

  She pressed a hand to her lips in a flurry of painted nails and giggled through her fingers, and the curtain dropped. She was just a girl, pretty, casual, and she might have been standing in the middle of her own dorm room, sharing a joke with her friends. “It’s just—you look like a potato peeler salesman or something standing there like that.” Her smile opened up around even, white teeth. “I’m Rose,” she said, and held out her hand.

  There was a mudroom, flagstone underfoot, firewood stacked up like breastworks on both sides, and then the main room with its bare oak floors and plaster walls. A few museum pieces, tatted rug, a plush sofa with an orange cat curled up in the middle of it. Two lamps, their shades as thin as skin, glowed against the gray of the windows. Rose bent to the stove in the corner, opened the grate and laid two lengths of wood on the coals, and he stood there in the middle of the room watching the swell of her figure in the tight wrap of her dress and the silken flex and release of the muscles in her shoulders. The room was cold as a meat locker.

  He was watching Rose, transfixed by the incongruity of her bent over the black stove in her golden Chinese restaurant dress that clung to her backside as if it had been sewn over her skin, and the old lady’s voice startled him, for all the pep talk he’d given himself. “You came,” she said, and there she was in the doorway, looking no different from the picture he’d held of her.

  She waited for him to say something in response, and he complied, murmuring “Yes, sure, it’s my pleasure,” and then she was standing beside him and studying him out of her yellowed eyes. “Did you bring the papers?” she said.

  He patted the briefcase. They were both standing, as if they’d just run into each other in a train station or the foyer at the theater, and Rose was standing too, awaiting the moment of release. “Rose,” she said then, her eyes snapping sharply to her, “fetch my reading glasses, will you?”

  THE CAR HAD DEVELOPED a cough on the drive up from Boston, a consumptive wheeze that rattled the floorboards when he depressed the accelerator, and now, with the influence of the sea, it had gotten worse. He turned the key in the ignition and listened to the slow seep of strangulation, then put the car in gear, backed out from beneath the oak and made his hesitant way down the drive, wondering how much they were going to take him for this time when he brought it into the shop—if he made it to the shop, that is. There was no reward in any of this—he’d tried to keep the shock and disappointment from rising to his face when the old lady named her price—but at least, for now, there was the afternoon ahead and the rudimentary animal satisfaction of lunch, food to push into his maw and distract him, and he took the blacktop road back into the village and found a seat at the counter in the diner.

  There were three other customers. The light through the windows was like concrete, like shale, the whole place hardened into its sediments. He didn’t recognize anyone, and he ate his grilled cheese on white with his head down, gathering from the local newspaper that the creatures had deserted the sea en masse and left the lobstermen scrambling for government handouts and the cod fleet stranded at anchor. He’d countered the old lady’s offer, but she’d held firm. At first he thought she hadn’t even heard him. They’d moved to the sofa and she was looking through the papers, nodding her head like a battered old sea turtle fighting the pull of gravity, but she turned to him at last and said, “My offer is final. You might have known that.” He fought himself, tried to get hold of his voice. He told her he’d think about it—sleep on it, he’d sleep on it—and have an answer for her in the morning.

  It was raining again, a pulsing hard-driven rain that sheathed the car and ran slick over the pavement till the parking lot gleamed like the sea beyond it. He didn’t want to go back to the cottage in the motor court, not yet anyway—the thought of it entered his mind like a closed box floating in the void, and he had to squeeze his eyes shut to make it disappear—and he wasn’t much of a drinker, so there wasn’t any solace in the lights of the bar across the street. Finally, he decided to do what he’d known he was going to do all along: drive out to the house and have a last look at it. Things would have to be sold, he told himself, things stored, winnowed, tossed into the trash.

  As soon as he pulled into the dirt drive that dropped off the road and into the trees, he could see he’d been fooling himself. The place was an eyesore, vandalized and vandalized again, the paint gone, windows shattered, the porch skewed away from the foundation as if it had been shoved by the hand of a giant. He switched off the ignition and stepped out into the rain. Inside, there was nothing of value: graffiti on the walls, a stained mattress in the center of the living room, every stick of furniture broken down and fed to the fire, the toilet bowl smashed and something dead in the pit of it, rodent or bird, it didn’t matter. He wandered through the rooms, stooping to pick things up and then drop them again. For a long while he stood at the kitchen sink, staring out into the rain.

  The summer the Rastrows drowned, he’d lived primitive, out on the water all day every day, swimming, fishing, crabbing, racing from island to shore and back again under the belly of his sail. That was the year his parents had their friends from the city out to stay, the Morses—Mr. Morse, ventricose and roaring, with his head set tenuously atop the shaft of his neck, as if they’d given him the wrong size at birth, and Mrs. Morse, her face drawn to a point beneath the bleached bird fluff of her hair—and a woman who worked with his mother as a secretary, a divorcée with two shy pretty daughters his own age. And what was the woman’s name? Jean. And the daughters? He could no longer remember, but they wore sunsuits that left their legs and midriffs bare, the field of their taut browned flesh a thrill and revelation to him. He couldn’t look them in the face, couldn’t even pretend. But they went off after a week to be with their father, and the Morses—and Jean—stayed on with his parents, sunning outside in the vinyl lawn chairs, drinking and playing cards so late in the night that their voices—murmurous, shrill suddenly, murmurous again—were like the disquisitions of the birds that wakened him at dawn to go down to the shore and the boat and the sun that burned the chill off the water.

  There was something tumultuous going on amongst them—all five of them—but he didn’t understand what it was till he looked back on it years later. It was something sexual, that much he knew, something forbidden and shameful and emotionally wrought. He lay in his bed upstairs, twelve years old and discovering his own body, and they shouted recriminations at each other a floor down. Mr. Morse took him and Jean out fishing for pollack one afternoon, the big man shirtless and rowing, Jean in the bow, an ice bucket sprouting a bristle of green-necked bottles between them. He fished. Baited his hook with squid and dropped the weighted line into the shifting gray deep. Behind him, Mr. Morse slipped his hand up under Jean’s blouse and they kissed and wriggled against each other until they couldn’t seem to catch their breath, even as he peered down into the water and pretended he didn’t notice. He remembered a single voice raised in agony that night, a voice caught between a sob and a shriek, and in the morning Mrs. Morse was gone. A few days later, her husband got behind the wheel of Jean’s car and the two of them pulled out of the drive. Nobody said a word. He sat with his parents at dinner—coleslaw, corn on the cob, hamburgers his father seared on the grill—and nobody said a word.

  He was back at the motor court by five and he called Ruth just to hear the sound of her voice and to
lie to her about the old lady’s offer. Yes, he told her, yes, it was just what he’d expected and he’d close the deal tomorrow, no problem. Yes, he loved her. Yes, good night. Then, though he wasn’t a drinker, he walked into the village and sat at the bar while the Celtics went through the motions up on the television screen and the six or seven patrons gathered there either cheered or groaned as the occasion demanded. He let two beers grow warm by the time he got to the bottom of them and he had a handful of saltines to steady his stomach. He was hoping someone would mention Mrs. Rastrow, offer up some information about her, some gossip about what she was doing to the island, about Rose, but nobody spoke to him, nobody even looked at him. By seven-thirty he was back in the cottage paging through half a dozen back issues of a news magazine the woman at the desk had given him with an apologetic thrust of her hand, and she was sorry they didn’t have any TV for him to watch but maybe he’d be interested in these magazines?

  He was reading of things that had happened five years ago—big stories, crises, and he couldn’t for the life of him remember how any of them had turned out—when there was a knock at the door. It was Rose, dressed in a bulky sweater and blue jeans. The black patent-leather pumps she’d been wearing earlier had been replaced by tennis shoes. Her ankles were bare. “Hi,” she said. “I thought I’d drop by to see how you were doing.”