Tooth and Claw

by T. C. Boyle

  There was a noise at the door—a scraping and shifting—and we all looked up to see Ludwig struggling with something against the backdrop of the rain. His hat had been knocked askew and water dripped from his nose and chin. It took a moment, one shoulder pinning the door open, and then he lifted a cage—a substantial cage, two and a half feet high and maybe four long—through the doorway and set it down against the wall. No one moved. No one said a word. There was something in the cage, the apprehension of it as sharp and sudden as the smell it brought with it, something wild and alien and very definitely out of the ordinary on what to this point had been a painfully ordinary night.

  Ludwig wiped the moisture from his face with a swipe of his sleeve, straightened out his hat and came back to the bar, looking jaunty and refreshed. “All right,” he said, “don’t be shy—go have a look. It won’t bite. Or it will, it definitely will, but just don’t get your fingers near it, that’s all—”

  I saw coiled limbs, claws, yellow eyes. Whatever it was, the thing hadn’t moved, not even to blink. I was going to ask what it was, when Daria, still at my side, said, “It’s a cat, some kind of wild cat. Right? A what—a lynx or something?”

  “You can’t have that thing in here,” one of the regulars said, but already he was getting up out of his seat to have a look at it—everyone was getting up now, shoving back chairs and rising from the tables, crowding around.

  “It’s a serval,” Ludwig was saying. “From Africa. Thirty-five pounds of muscle and quicker than a snake.”

  And where had he gotten it? He’d won it, in a bar in Arizona, on a roll of the dice.

  How long had he had it? Two years.

  What was its name? Cat. Just Cat. And yes, it was a male, and no, he didn’t want to get rid of it but he was moving overseas on a new job and there was just no way he could take it with him, so he felt it was apropos—that was the word he used, apropos—to give it up in the way he’d gotten it.

  He turned to me. “What was your name again?”

  “Junior,” I said. “James Jr. Turner, I mean. James Turner Jr. But everybody calls me Junior.” I wanted to add, “Because of my father, so people wouldn’t confuse us,” but I left it at that, because it got even more complicated considering that my father was six months dead and I could be anybody I wanted.

  “Okay, Junior, here’s the deal,” Ludwig said. “Your ten bucks against the cat, one roll, what do you say?”

  I wanted to say that I had no place for the thing, that I didn’t want a cat of any kind or even a guinea pig or a fish in a bowl and that the ten dollars was meaningless, but everyone was watching me and I couldn’t back out without feeling the shame rise to my face—and there was Daria to consider, because she was watching me too. “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, okay, sure.”

  Sixty seconds later I was still solvent and richer by one cat and one cage. I’d gotten lucky—or unlucky, depending on how you want to look at it—and rolled three fives and two fours; Ludwig rolled a combined eleven. He finished his beer in a gulp, took my hand to seal the deal and offer his congratulations, and then started toward the door. “But what do I feed it?” I called. “I mean, what does it eat?”

  “Eggs,” he said, “it loves eggs. And meat. Raw. No kibble, forget kibble. This is the real deal, this animal, and you need to treat it right.” He was at the door, looking down at the thing with what might have been wistfulness or satisfaction, I couldn’t tell which, then he reached down behind the cage to unfasten something there—a gleam of black leather—and toss it to me: it was a glove, or a gauntlet actually, as long as my arm. “You’ll want to wear this when you feed him,” he said, and then he was gone.

  FOR A LONG MOMENT I stared at the door, trying to work out what had happened, and then I looked at the regulars—the expressions on their faces—and at the other customers, locals or maybe even tourists who’d come in for a beer or burger or the catch of the day and had all this strangeness thrust on them, and finally at the cage. Daria was bent beside it, cooing to the animal inside, Ludwig’s eggs cradled in one hand. She was short and compact, conventionally pretty, with the round eyes and symmetrical features of an anime heroine, her running shoes no bigger than a child’s, her blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, and I’d noticed all that before, over the course of weeks of study, but now it came back to me with the force of revelation. She was beautiful, a beautiful girl propped on one knee while her shorts rode up in back and the T-shirt bunched beneath her breasts, offering this cat—my cat—the smallest comfort, as if it were a kitten she’d found abandoned on the street.

  “Jesus, what are you going to do with the thing?” Chris had come out from behind the bar and he was standing beside me now, looking awed.

  I told him I didn’t know. That I hadn’t planned on owning a wild cat, hadn’t even known they existed—servals, that is—until five minutes ago.

  “You live around here?”

  “Bayview Apartments.”

  “They accept pets?”

  I’d never really given it much thought, but they did, they must have—the guy next door to me had a pair of yapping little dogs with bows in their hair and the woman down the hall had a Doberman that was forever scrabbling its nails on the linoleum when she came in and out with it, which she seemed to do about a hundred times a day. But this was something different. This was something that might push at the parameters of the standard lease. “Yeah,” I said, “I think so.”

  There was a single slot where the door of the cage fastened that was big enough to receive an egg without crushing its shell, and Daria, still cooing, rolled first one egg, then the other, through the aperture. For a moment, nothing happened. Then the cat, hunched against the mesh, shifted position ever so slightly and took the first egg in its mouth—two teeth like hypodermics, a crunch, and then the soft frictive scrape of its tongue.

  Daria rose and came to me with a look of wonder. “Don’t do a thing till I get off, okay?” she said, and in her fervor she took hold of my arm. “I get off at nine, so you wait, okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”

  “We can put him in the back of the storage room for now, and then, well, I guess we can use my pickup—”

  I didn’t have the leisure to reflect on how complex things had become all of a sudden, and even if I had I don’t think I would have behaved any differently. I just nodded at her, stared into her plenary eyes and nodded.

  “He’s going to be all right,” she said, and added, “He will,” as if I’d been disagreeing with her. “I’ve got to get back to work, but you wait, okay? You wait right here.” Chris was watching. The manager was watching. The regulars had all craned their necks and half the dinner customers too. Daria patted down her apron, smoothed back her hair. “What did you say your name was again?”

  SO I HAD A CAT. And a girl. We put the thing in the back of her red Toyota pickup, threw a tarp over it to keep the rain off, and drove to Von’s, where I watched Daria march up and down the aisles seeking out kitty litter and the biggest cat pan they had (we settled for a dishpan, hard blue plastic that looked all but indestructible), and then it was on to the meat counter. “I’ve only got ten bucks,” I said.

  She gave me a withering look. “This animal’s got to eat,” she informed me, and she reached back to slip the band from her ponytail so that her hair fell glistening across her shoulders, a storm of hair, fluid and loose, the ends trailing down her back like liquid in motion. She tossed her head impatiently. “You do have a credit card, don’t you?”

  Ten minutes later I was directing her back to my building, where I had her park next to the Mustang I’d inherited when my father died, and then we went up the outside stairs and along the walkway to my apartment on the second floor. “I’m sorry,” I said, swinging open the door and hitting the light switch, “but I’m afraid I’m not much of a housekeeper.” I was going to add that I hadn’t expected company either, or I would have straightened up, but Daria just strode right in, cleared a spot on the
counter and set down the groceries. I watched her shoulders as she reached into the depths of one bag after another and extracted the forty-odd dollars’ worth of chicken parts and ribeye steak (marked down for quick sale) we’d selected in the meat department.

  “Okay,” she said, turning to me as soon as she’d made space in the refrigerator for it all, “now where are we going to put the cat, because I don’t think we should leave it out there in the truck any longer than we have to, do you? Cats don’t like the rain, I know that—I have two of them. Or one’s a kitten really.” She was on the other side of the kitchen counter, a clutter of crusted dishes and glasses sprouting various colonies of mold separating us. “You have a bedroom, right?”

  I did. But if I was embarrassed by the state of the kitchen and living room—this was my first venture at living alone, and the need for order hadn’t really seemed paramount to me—then the thought of the bedroom, with its funk of dirty clothes and unwashed sheets, the reeking workboots and the duffel bag out of which I’d been living, gave me pause. Here was this beautiful apparition in my kitchen, the only person besides my aunt who’d ever stepped through the door of my apartment, and now she was about to discover the sad lonely disorder at the heart of my life. “Yeah,” I said, “that door there, to the left of the bathroom,” but she was already in the room, pushing things aside, a frown of concentration pressed between her eyes.

  “You’re going to have to clear this out,” she said. “The bed, everything. All your clothes.”

  I was standing in the doorway, watching her. “What do you mean ‘clear it out’?”

  She lifted her face. “You don’t think that animal can stay caged up like that, do you? There’s hardly room for it to turn around. And that’s just cruel.” She drilled me with that look again, then put her hands on her hips. “I’ll help you,” she said. “It shouldn’t take ten minutes—”

  Then it was up the stairs with the cat, the two of us fighting the awkwardness of the cage. We kept the tarp knotted tightly in place, both to keep the rain off the cat and disguise it from any of my neighbors who might happen by, and though we shifted the angle of the thing coming up the stairs, the animal didn’t make a sound. We had a little trouble getting the cage through the doorway—the cat seemed to concentrate its weight as if in silent protest—but we managed, and then we maneuvered it into the bedroom and set it down in the middle of the rug. Daria had already arranged the litter box in the corner, atop several sheets of newspaper, and she’d taken my biggest stewpot, filled it with water and placed it just inside the door, where I could get to it easily. “Okay,” she said, glancing up at me with a satisfied look, “it’s time for the unveiling,” and she bent to unfasten the tarp.

  The overhead light glared, the tarp slid from the cage and puddled on the floor, and there was the cat, pressed to the mesh in a compression of limbs, the yellow eyes seizing on us. “Nice kitty,” Daria cooed. “Does he want out of that awful cage? Hmm? Does he? And meat—does he want meat?”

  So far, I’d gone along with everything in a kind of daze, but this was problematic. Who knew what the thing would do, what its habits were, its needs? “How are we going to—?” I began, and left the rest unspoken. The overhead light glared down on me and the alcohol whispered in my blood. “You remember what that guy said about feeding him, right?” In the back of my head, there was the smallest glimmer of a further complication: once he was out of the cage, how would we—how would I—ever get him back into it?

  For the first time, Daria looked doubtful. “We’ll have to be quick,” she said.

  And so we were. Daria stood at the bedroom door, ready to slam it shut, while I leaned forward, my heart pounding, and slipped the release bolt on the cage. I was nimble in those days—twenty-three years old and with excellent reflexes despite the four or five Jack-and-Cokes I’d downed through the course of the evening—and I sprang for the door the instant the bolt was released. Exhilaration burned in me. And it burned in the cat too, because at the first click of the bolt it came to life as if it had been hot-wired. A screech tore through the room, the cage flew open and the thing was an airborne blur slamming against the cheap plywood panel of the bedroom door, even as Daria and I fought to force it shut.

  IN THE MORNING (she’d slept on the couch, curled up in the fetal position, faintly snoring; I was stretched out on the mattress we’d removed from the bedroom and tucked against the wall under the TV) I was faced with a number of problems. I’d awakened before her, jolted out of a dreamless sleep by a flash of awareness, and for a long while I just lay there watching her. I could have gone on watching her all morning, thrilled by her presence, her hair, the repose of her face, if it weren’t for the cat. It hadn’t made a sound, and it didn’t stink, not yet, but its existence was communicated to me nonetheless—it was there, and I could feel it. I would have to feed it, and after the previous night’s episode, that was going to require some thought and preparation, and I would have to offer Daria something too, if only to hold her here a little longer. Eggs, I could scramble some eggs, but there was no bread for toast, no milk, no sugar for the coffee. And she would want to freshen up in the bathroom—women always freshened up in the morning, I was pretty sure of that. I thought of the neatly folded little matching towels in the guest bathroom at my aunt’s and contrasted that image with the corrugated rag wadded up on the floor somewhere in my own bathroom. Maybe I should go out for muffins or bagels or something, I thought—and a new towel. But did they sell towels at the 7-Eleven? I didn’t have a clue.

  We’d stayed up late, sharing the last of the hot cocoa out of the foil packet and talking in a specific way about the cat that had brought us to that moment on my greasy couch in my semi-darkened living room and then more generally about our own lives and thoughts and hopes and ambitions. I’d heard about her mother, her two sisters, the courses she was taking at the university. Heard about Daggett’s, the regulars, the tips—or lack of them. And her restaurant fantasy. It was amazingly detailed, right down to the number of tables she was planning on, the dinnerware, the cutlery and the paintings on the walls, as well as the decor and the clientele—“Late twenties, early thirties, career people, no kids”—and a dozen or more of the dishes she would specialize in. My ambitions were more modest. I told her how I’d finished community college without any particular aim or interest, and how I was working setting tile for a friend of my aunt and uncle; beyond that, I was hoping to maybe travel up the coast and see Oregon. I’d heard a lot about Oregon, I told her. Very clean. Very natural up there. Had she ever been to Oregon? No, but she’d like to go. I remembered telling her that she ought to open her restaurant up there, someplace by the water, where people could look out and take in the view. “Yeah,” she said, “yeah, that would be cool,” and then she’d yawned and dropped her head to the pillow.

  I was just getting up to go to the bathroom and to see what I could do about the towel in there, thinking vaguely of splashing some aftershave on it to fight down any offensive odors it might have picked up, when her eyes flashed open. She didn’t say my name or wonder where she was or ask for breakfast or where the bathroom was. She just said, “We have to feed that cat.”

  “Don’t you want coffee or anything—breakfast? I can make breakfast.”

  She threw back the blanket and I saw that her legs were bare—she was wearing the Daggett’s T-shirt over a pair of shiny black panties; her running shoes, socks and shorts were balled up on the rug beneath her. “Sure,” she said, “coffee sounds nice,” and she pushed her fingers through her hair on both sides of her head and then let it all fall forward to obscure her face. She sat there a moment before leaning forward to dig a hair clip out of her purse, arch her back and pull the hair tight in a ponytail. “But I am worried about the cat, in new surroundings and all. The poor thing—we should have fed him last night.”

  Perhaps so. And certainly I didn’t want to contradict her—I wanted to be amicable and charming, wanted to ingratiate myself in any
way I could—but we’d both been so terrified of the animal’s power in that moment when we’d released it from the cage that neither of us had felt up to the challenge of attempting to feed it. Attempting to feed it would mean opening that door again and that was going to take some thought and commitment. “Yeah,” I said. “We should have. And we will, we will, but coffee, coffee first—you want a cup? I can make you a cup?”

  So we drank coffee and ate the strawberry Pop-Tarts I found in the cupboard above the sink and made small talk as if we’d awakened together a hundred mornings running and it was so tranquil and so domestic and so right I never wanted it to end. We were talking about work and about what time she had to be in that afternoon, when her brow furrowed and her eyes sharpened and she said, “I wish I could see it. When we feed it, I mean. Couldn’t you like cut a peephole in the door or something?”

  I was glad for the distraction, damage deposit notwithstanding. And the idea appealed to me: now we could see what the thing—my pet—was up to, and if we could see it, then it wouldn’t seem so unapproachable and mysterious. I’d have to get to know it eventually, have to name it and tame it, maybe even walk it on a leash. I had a brief vision of myself sauntering down the sidewalk, this id with claws at my side, turning heads and cowing the weight lifters with their Dobermans and Rottweilers, and then I fished my power drill out from under the sink and cut a neat hole, half an inch in diameter, in the bedroom door. As soon as it was finished, Daria put her eye to it.

  “Well?”

  “The poor thing. He’s pacing back and forth like an animal in a zoo.”

  She moved to the side and took my arm as I pressed my eye to the hole. The cat flowed like molten ore from one corner of the room to the other, its yellow eyes fixed on the door, the dun, faintly spotted skin stretched like spandex over its seething muscles. I saw that the kitty litter had been upended and the hard blue plastic pan reduced to chewed-over pellets, and wondered about that, about where the thing would do its business if not in the pan. “It turned over the kitty pan,” I said.