Wild Child (26 page)

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m overwhelmed,” he said, so softly I could barely hear him, and then his breathing trailed off and the phone went dead.

……

They found him a week later. The next-door neighbors, Paul and Peggy Bartlett, noticed the smell, which seemed to intensify as the days went on, and when there was no answer at the door they called the fire department. I’m told that when the firemen broke down the front door, a sea of rodents flooded out into the yard, fleeing in every direction. Inside, the floors were gummy with waste, and everything, from the furniture to the plasterboard walls and the oak beams of the living room ceiling, had been gnawed and whittled till the place was all but unrecognizable. In addition to the free-roaming animals, there were hundreds more rats stacked in cages, most of them starving and many cannibalized or displaying truncated limbs.

A spokeswoman for the local ASPCA estimated that there were upwards of thirteen hundred rats in the house, most of which had to be euthanized at the shelter because they were in no condition to be sent out for adoption.

As for Gerard, he’d apparently succumbed to pneumonia, though there were rumors of hantavirus, which really put a chill into the community, especially with so many of the rodents still at large.

We all felt bad for him, of course, I more than anyone else. If only I’d been home through the winter, I kept thinking, if only I’d persisted when I’d stood outside his window and recognized the odor of decay, perhaps I could have saved him. But then I kept coming back to the idea that there must have been some deep character flaw in him none of us had recognized—he’d chosen a snake for a pet, for God’s sake, and that low animal had somehow morphed into this horde of creatures that could only be described as pests, as vermin, as enemies of mankind that should be exterminated, not nurtured.

And that was another thing neither my wife nor I could understand—how could he allow even a single one of them to come near him, to fall under the caress of his hand, to sleep with him, eat with him, breathe the same air?

For the first two nights I could barely sleep, playing over that horrific scene in my mind—how could he have sunk so low? How could anyone?

The ceremony was brief, the casket closed (and there wasn’t one of us who wanted to speculate on the reason, though it didn’t take an especially active imagination to picture Gerard’s final moments). I was very tender with my wife afterward. We went out to lunch with some of the others and when we got home I pressed her to me and held her for a long while. And though I was exhausted, I took the dogs out on the lawn to throw them their ball and watch the way the sun struck their rollicking fur as they streaked after the rumor of it, only to bring it back, again and again, and lay it in my palm, still warm from the embrace of their jaws.

The boat left at eight a.m., and that wouldn’t have presented a problem, or not especially, if Damian hadn’t been in town. But then Damian was the whole reason for being here on this dock in the first place, the two of them hunkered over Styrofoam cups of coffee and shuffling in place with an assemblage of thirty or so males and two females (one of whom would turn out to be the deckhand), waiting in a kind of suppressed frenzy to board and lay claim to the prime spots along the rail. Hunter didn’t like boats. Didn’t especially like fish or fishing. But Damian did, and Damian—his roommate at college fourteen years ago and a deep well of inspiration and irritation ever since—always got his way. Which was in part why eight a.m. was such an impossible hour on this martyred morning with the sun dissolved in mist and the gulls keening and his head pounding and his stomach shrunk down to nothing. The other part of it, the complicating factor, was alcohol. Gin, to be specific.

They’d drunk gin the night before because gin was what they’d drunk in college, gin and tonic, the drink of liberation, the drink of spring break and summer vacation and the delirium of Friday and Saturday nights in the student clubs with the student bands pounding away and the girls burning like scented candles. Never mind that Hunter stuck almost exclusively to wine these days and had even become something of a snob about it (“Right over the hill in the Santa Ynez Valley? Best vineyards in the world,” he’d tell anyone who would listen), last night it was gin. It had started in the airport lounge when he’d arrived an hour early for Damian’s flight and heard himself say “Gin and tonic” to the bartender as if a ventriloquist were speaking for him. He’d had three by the time Damian arrived, and then for the rest of the night, wherever they went, the gin, which had managed to smell almost exactly like the scent of the jet fuel leaching in through the open window, continued to appear in neat little glasses with rectangular cubes of ice and wedges of lime till he and Damian collapsed at the apartment five short hours ago.

He stared blearily down at the blistered boards of the dock and the tired sea churning beneath them. For a long moment he watched a drift of refuse jerking to and fro in the wash beneath the pilings and then he leaned forward to drop a ball of spit into the place where, he supposed, waxing philosophical, all spit had originated.

Spit to spit. The great sea. Thalassa, roll on. The water was gray here, transparent to a depth of three or four feet, imbued with a smell of fish gone bad. He spat again, watching transfixed as the glistening fluid, product of his own body, spiraled through the air to vanish in the foam. And what was spit, anyway? A secretion of the salivary glands, serving to moisten food—and women’s lips. His first wife—Andrea—didn’t like to kiss while they were having sex. She always turned her head away, as if lips had nothing to do with it. Cee Cee, who’d left him three weeks ago, had been different. In his wallet, imprisoned behind a layer of scratched plastic, was a picture of her, in profile, her chin elevated as if she were being stroked, her visible eye drooping with passion, the red blaze of a carnation tucked behind her ear like a heat gauge. He resisted the impulse to look at it.

Damian’s voice—“Yeah, man, that’s what I’m talking about, forti-fication!”—rang out behind him and Hunter turned to see him tapping his Styrofoam cup to those of a couple in matching windbreakers, toasting them, as if there were anything to celebrate at this hour and in this place. Damian had a flask with him. Hunter had already been the recipient of a judicious shot of brandy—not gin, thank god—and he presumed Damian was sharing the wealth.

The woman—she was small-boned, dark, with her hair wrapped like a muffler round her throat—looked shy and sweet as she sipped her infused coffee and blinked her eyes against the burn of it. In the next moment, Damian had escorted the couple over to the rail and was making introductions. “Hey, Hunt, you ready for another?” he said, and Hunter held out his cup, hoping to deaden the pain, and then they were all four tapping the rims of the spongy white cups one against the other as if they were crystal flutes of Perrier-Jouet.

“This is Ilta’s maiden voyage, can you believe it?” Damian crowed, his voice too loud, so that people had begun to stare at him.

“This is correct,” she said in a small voice animated by the occasion, and, he supposed, the brandy. “I do it for Mock.” And here she looked to the man in the matching windbreaker, whose name seemed to be either Mack or Mark, Hunter couldn’t be sure.

“I’m a regular,” the man said, grinning as he tipped back his cup and then held it up for Damian to refresh, “but my wife’s never been out.” He looked harmless enough, one of those ubiquitous, fleshy-faced, pants-straining, good-time boys in his forties who probably sat behind a computer live days a week and dreamed in gigabytes, but Hunter would have killed him in a minute for the wife, whom he clearly didn’t deserve. She was a jewel, that was what she was, and that accent—what was it? Swedish? “She eats the fish, though,” Mack or Mark went on. He gave her a good-natured leer.

“Don’t you, dumpling?”

“Who doesn’t?” Damian put in, just to say something. He was the type who needed to be at the center of things, the impresario, the star of all proceedings, and that could be charming—Hunter loved him, he did—but it could be wearing too. “I mean, fresh fish, fresh from the sea like you never get it in the store?” He paused to tip the flask over the man’s cup. “I mean, come on, Ilta, what took you so long?”

“I do not like the, what do you say? The rocking.” She made an undulating motion with her hands. “Of this boat.”

They all looked to the boat. It was big enough, a typical party boat, seventy, eighty feet long, painted a crisp white and so immovable it might have been nailed to the dock. In that moment Hunter realized he hadn’t taken his Dramamine—the label advised taking two tablets half an hour to an hour before setting out—and felt in his jeans pocket for the package. His throat was dry. His head ached. He was wondering if the little white pills would have any effect if he took them now, or if they worked at all no matter when you took them, remembering the last time he’d been talked into this particular sort of adventure and the unrelenting misery he’d experienced for the entire six and a half hours of the trip (“There’s nothing more enjoyable—and tender, tender too—than seeing somebody you really admire puking over the rail,” Damian had kept saying). The memory ran a hot wire through him and before he could think he had the package out and was shaking four pills into the palm of his hand and offering them to Ilta. “Want a couple of these?” he asked. “Dramamine? You know, for motion sickness?” He pantomimed the act of gagging.

“We gave her the patch,” the husband said.

Ilta waved a finger back and forth, as if scolding Hunter. “I do it for Mock,” she repeated. “For the anniversary. We are married today three years ago.”

Hunter shrugged, cupped his palm to his mouth and threw back all four pills, figuring the double dose had to do something for him.

“In Helsinki,” the husband put in, his face lit with the blandest smile of possession and satisfaction. He put an arm around his wife and drew her to him. They kissed. The gulls squalled overhead.

Hunter looked away. And then suddenly everyone snapped to attention as the other woman—the deckhand in waiting—pulled back the bar to the gangplank. It was then, just as they’d begun to fumble around for their gear, that the man with the spider tattoo thrust himself into the conversation. Hunter had noticed him earlier—when they were in the office paying for their tickets and renting rods and tackle and whatnot. He was a crazy, you could see that from across the room, everything about him wired tight, his hair shaved down to a black bristle, his eyes like tracers, the tattoo of a red-and-black spider—or maybe it was a scorpion—climbing up the side of his neck. “Hey,” he said now, pushing past Ilta, “can I get in on this party?” And he held out his cup.

Damian never flinched. That was his way. Mr. Cool. “Sure, man,” he said, “just give me your cup.”

In the next moment they were shuffling forward to the reek of diesel as the captain fired up his engines and the boat shivered beneath them. Everything smelled of long use, fishermen here yesterday and fishermen coming tomorrow. The decks were wet, the seats damp with dew. Fish scales, opalescent, dried to a crust, crunched underfoot. They found a place in the cabin, room for four at one of the tables lined up there cafeteria style, and the spider man, aced out, made his way to the galley. Hunter had a moment to think about Cee Cee, how she would have hated this—she was a downtown girl, absolutely, at home in the mall, the restaurant and the movie theater and nowhere else—and then there was a lurch, the boat slipped free of the dock and beyond the salt-streaked windows the shore broadened and dipped, and very slowly fell away into the mist.

It was an hour and a half out to the fishing grounds. Hunter settled in gingerly, his stomach in freefall, the coffee a mistake, the brandy compounding that mistake and the Dramamine a dissolve of pure nothing, not even worthy of a placebo effect. It wasn’t as if it was rough—or as rough as it might have been. This was June, when the Santa Barbara Channel was entombed in a vault of fog that sometimes didn’t burn off till two or three in the afternoon—June Gloom, was what they called it in the newspaper—and as far as he knew the seas were relatively calm. Still, the boat kept humping over the waves like a toboggan slamming through the moguls at the bottom of a run and the incessant dip and rise wasn’t doing him any good. He glanced round him. No one else seemed much affected, the husband and wife playing cards, Damian ordering up breakfast in the galley at the front of the cabin, the others snoozing, reading the paper, scooping up their eggs over easy as if they were in a diner somewhere on upper State Street, miles from the ocean. After a while, he cradled his arms on the tabletop, put his head down and tumbled into a dark shaft of sleep.

When he woke, it was to the decelerating rhythm of the engines and a pulse of activity that rang through the cabin like a fire alarm.

Everybody was rising en masse and filing through the doors to the deck. They’d arrived. He felt a hand on his shoulder and lifted his head to see Damian looming over him. “You have a nice sleep?”

“I dreamed I was in hell, the ninth circle, where there’s nothing moving but the devil.” The boat rolled on a long gentle swell. The engines died. “And maybe the sub-devils. With their pitchforks.”

The flask appeared. Damian pressed it to his lips a moment, then held it out in offering. “You want a hit?”

Hunter waved him away. He still hadn’t risen from his seat.

“Come on, man, this is it. The fish are waiting. Let’s go.”

There was a shout. People were backed up against the windows, clumsy with the welter of rods that waved round them like antennae.

Somebody had a fish already, a silver thrashing on the boards.

Despite himself, he felt a vestigial thrill steal over him. He got to his feet.

Damian was halfway to the door when he turned round. “I put our stuff out there in back on the port side—Mark said that was the best spot. Come on, come on.” He waved a hand impatiently and Hunter found his balance all at once—it was as if he’d done a backflip and landed miraculously on his feet. Just then the sun broke through and everything jumped with light. Damian went flat as a silhouette. The sea slapped the hull. Someone else cried out. “And wait’ll you get a load of Julie,” he said under his breath.

“Julie? Who’s Julie?”

The look Damian gave him was instructive, teacher to pupil.

After all, as Damian had it he’d come all the way down here for the weekend—for this trip, for last night and tonight too—to cheer up his old buddy, to get him out of the house and back among the living, waxing eloquent on the subject of Hunter’s failings into the small hours of the day that was just now beginning. “The deckhand, man. Where you been?”

“Sleeping.”

“Yeah, well maybe it’s time to wake up.”

And then they were out in the light and the world opened up all the way to the big dun humps of the islands before them—he’d never seen them so close—and back round again to the boat and its serried decks and the smell of open water and Julie, the deckhand, freshly made-up and divested of the shapeless yellow slicker she’d worn back at the dock, Julie, in a neon-orange bikini and sandals with thin silver straps that climbed up her bare ankles, waiting to help each and every sportsman to his bait.

So they fished. The captain, a dark presence behind the smoked glass of the bridge that loomed over them, let his will be known through the loudspeakers on deck. Drop your lines, he commanded, and they dropped their lines. Haul in, he said, and they hauled in while he revved the engines and motored to another spot and yet another. There were long stretches of boredom after the initial excitement had passed and Hunter had an abundance of time to reflect on how much he hated fishing. At long intervals, someone would connect, his rod bent double and a mackerel or a big gape-

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mouthed thing variously described as either a rockfish or a sheephead would flap in over the rail, but Hunter’s rod never bent or even twitched. Nor did Damian’s. Before the first hour was up, Damian had left his rod propped on the rail and drifted into the cabin, emerging ten minutes later with two burgers wrapped in waxed paper and two beers in plastic cups. Hunter was hunched over his knees on one of the gray metal lockers that held the life jackets and ran along both sides of the boat, his stomach in neutral, trying all over again to get used to the idea of lateral instability. He accepted the burger and the beer.

“This sucks,” Damian said, settling in beside him with a sigh.

Their rods rode up and down with the waves like flagpoles stripped of their flags.

“It was your idea.”

Damian gazed out across the water to where the smaller island, the one separated from the bigger by a channel still snarled in fog, seemed to swell and recede. “Yeah, but it’s a ritual, it’s manly. It’s what buddies do together, right? And look at it, look where we are—I mean is this beautiful or what.”