Tooth and Claw Read Online Free PDF Page B

threw some money on the bar and went out the door, feeling for my keys. What I didn’t tell him, though he might have known it himself, was that Jimmy had put his son in a crematory box at the hospital and he put the box in the back of his Suburban and drove it home and into the garage, and all night, while his wife lay stiff and sedated in the big queen-sized bed upstairs, Jimmy hugged the coffin to him. I didn’t tell him that life is a struggle against weakness, fought not in the brain or in the will but in the cells, in the enzymes, in the key theDNA inserts into the tumbler of our personalities. And I didn’t tell him that I had a son myself, just like Jimmy, though I didn’t see him as much as I would have wanted to, not anymore.
    The fact was that I hadn’t wanted a son, hadn’t planned on it or asked or prayed or hoped for or even imagined it. I was twenty-four. My wife was pregnant and I raged at her,
Get rid of it, you’re ruining my life, we can’t afford it, you’re crazy, get rid of it, get rid of it
. She was complete in herself, sweet-faced and hard-willed, and mine was a voice she couldn’t hear. She went to Lamaze classes, quit drinking, quit smoking, did her exercises, read all the books. My son was born in the Kaiser hospital in Panorama City, eight pounds, six ounces, as healthy as a rat and beautiful in his own way, and I was his father, though I wasn’t ready to be. He was nine months old when one of my drinking buddies—call him Chris, why not?—came for the weekend and we went on a tear. My wife put up with it, even joined in a bit, and on Monday morning, when she had to go in early to work, Chris and I took her out for breakfast.
    The day beat down like a hammer and everything in the visible world shone as if it had been lit from within. We’d been up till four, and now it was seven, and while we were waiting for a table Chris and I ducked into the men’s room and alternated hits from a pint of Smirnoff we were planning to doctor our fresh-squeezed orange juice with. So we were feeling fine as we chased the waffles around our plates and my wife smiled and joked and the baby unfurled his arms and grabbed at things in high baby spirits. Then my wife touched up her makeup and left, and right away the mood changed—here was this baby, my son, with his multiplicity of needs, his diapers and his stroller and all the rest of it, and I was in charge.
    We finally hit upon the plan of taking him to the beach, to get a little sun, throw a Frisbee, let the sand mold itself to us through the long, slow-simmering morning and into the afternoon and the barbecue I was planning for Chris’ send-off. The beach was deserted, a board-stretched canvas for gulls and pelicans and snapping blue waves, and as soon as we stepped out of the car I felt everything was all right again. My son was wearing nothing but his diaper, and Chris and I were laughing over something, and I tossed my son up in the air, agame we played, and he loved it, squealing and crying out in baby ecstasy. I tossed him again, and then I tossed him to Chris and Chris tossed him back, and that was when I lost my balance and the black sea-honed beak of a half-buried rock loomed up on me and I saw my future in that instant: I was going to drop my son, let him slip through my fingers in a moment of aberration, and he was going to be damaged in a way that nobody could repair.
    It didn’t happen. I caught him, and held on, and I never let go.

Swept Away
    P EOPLE CAN TALK , they can gossip and cavil and run down this one or the other, and certainly we have our faults, our black funks and suicides and crofters’ wives running off with the first man who’ll have them and a winter’s night that stretches on through the days and weeks like a foretaste of the grave, but in the end the only real story here is the wind. The puff and blow of it. The ceaselessness. The squelched keening of air in movement, running with its currents like a new sea