Tooth and Claw

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  The wind skreeled off down the street, carrying bits of paper, cans, bottles, old bones and rags and other refuse along with it. The bird woman’s eyes blinked open. Robbie Baikie, all fifteen stone of him, lay pressed atop her in a defensive posture, anticipating the impact of the car, and he hadn’t even thought to prop himself on his elbows to take some of the crush off her. Junie Ooley smelled the beer on him and the dulcet smoke of his pipe tobacco and the sweetness of the peat fire at Magnuson’s and maybe even something of the sheep he kept, and she couldn’t begin to imagine who this man was or what he was doing on top of her in the middle of the public street. “Get off me,” she said in a voice so flat and calm Robbie wasn’t sure he’d heard it at all, and because she was an American woman and didn’t commonly make use of the term “clod,” she added, “you big doof.”

  Robbie was shy with women—we all were, except for the women themselves, and they were shy with the men, at least for the first five years after the wedding—and he was still fumbling with the notion of what had happened to him and to her and to Duncan Stout’s automobile and couldn’t have said one word even if he’d wanted to.

  “Get off,” she repeated, and she’d begun to add physical emphasis to the imperative, writhing beneath him and bracing her upturned palms against the great unmoving slabs of his shoulders.

  Robbie went to one knee, then pushed himself up even as the bird woman rolled out from under him. In the next moment she was on her feet, angrily shifting the straps of her rucksack where they bit into the flesh, cursing him softly but emphatically and with a kind of fluid improvisatory genius that made his face light up in wonder. Twenty paces away, Duncan was trying to extricate himself from his car, but the wind wouldn’t let him. Howith Clarke, the greengrocer, was out in the street now, surveying the damage with a sour face, and Magnus was right there in the middle of things, his voice gone hoarse with excitement. He was inquiring after Junie Ooley’s condition—“Are you all right, lass?”—when a gust lifted all four of them off their feet and sent them tumbling like ninepins. That was enough for Robbie. He picked himself up, took hold of the bird woman’s arm and frog-marched her into the pub.

  In they came, and the wind with them, packets of crisps and beer coasters sailing across the polished surface of the bar, and all of us instinctively grabbing for our hats. Robbie’s head was bowed and his hair blown straight up off his crown as if it had been done up in a perm by some mad cosmetologist, and Junie Ooley heaving and thrashing against him till he released her to spin away from him and down the length of the bar. No one could see how pretty she was at first, her face all deformed with surprise and rage and the petulant crease stamped between her eyes. She didn’t even so much as look in our direction, but just threw herself back at Robbie and gave him a shove as if they were children at war on the playground.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she demanded, her voice piping high with her agitation. And then, glancing round at the rest of us: “Did you see what this big idiot did to me out there?”

  No one said a word. The smoke of the peat fire hung round us like a thin curtain. Tim Maconochie’s Airedale lifted his head from the floor and laid it back down again.

  The bird woman clenched her teeth, set her shoulders. “Well, isn’t anybody going to do anything?”

  Magnus was the one to break the silence. He’d slipped back in behind the bar, unmindful of the chaff and bits of this and that that the wind had deposited in his hair. “The man saved your life, that’s about all.”

  Robbie ducked his head out of modesty. His ears went crimson.

  “Saved—?” A species of comprehension settled into her eyes. “I was…something hit me, something the wind blew…”

  Tim Maconochie, though he wasn’t any less tightfisted than the rest of us, cleared his throat and offered to buy the girl a drop of whisky to clear her head, and her face opened up then like the sun coming through the clouds so that we all had a good look at the beauty of her, and it was a beauty that made us glad to be alive in that moment to witness it. Whiskies went round. A blast of wind rattled the panes till we thought they would burst. Someone led Duncan in and sat him down in the corner with his pipe and a pint of ale. And then there was another round, and another, and all the while Junie Ooley was perched on a stool at the bar talking Robbie Baikie’s big glowing ears right off him.

  THAT WAS THE BEGINNING of a romance that stood the whole island on its head. Nobody had seen anything like it, at least since the two maundering teens from Cullivoe had drowned themselves in a suicide pact in the Ness of Houlland, and it was the more surprising because no one had ever suspected such depths of passion in a poor slug like Robbie Baikie. Robbie wasn’t past thirty, but it was lassitude and the brick wall of introspection that made him sit at the bar till he carried the weight of a man twice his age, and none of us could remember him in the company of a woman, not since his mother died, anyway. He was the sort to let his sheep feed on the blighted tops of the heather and the wrack that blew up out of the sea and he kept his heart closed up like a lockbox. And now, all of a sudden, right before our eyes, he was a man transformed. That first night he led Junie Ooley up the street to her lodgings like a gallant out of the picture films, the two of them holding hands and leaning into the wind while cats and flowerpots and small children flew past them, and it seemed he was never away from her for five minutes consecutive after that.

  He drove her all the wind-blasted way out to the bird sanctuary at Herma Ness and helped her set up her equipment in an abandoned crofter’s cottage of such ancient provenance that not even Duncan Stout could say who the landlord might once have been. The cottage had a thatched roof, and though it was rotted through in half a dozen places and perfervid with the little lives of crawling things and rodents, she didn’t seem particular. It was in the right place, on a broad barren moor that fell off into the sea amongst the cliffs where the birds made their nests, and that was all that mattered.

  There was no fuss about Junie Ooley. She was her own woman, and no doubt about it. She’d come to see and study the flocks that gathered there in the spring—the kittiwakes, the puffins, terns and northern fulmars nesting the high ledges and spreading wide their wings to cruise out over the sea—and she had her array of cameras and telephoto lenses with her to take her photographs for the pricey high-grade magazines. If she had to rough it, she was prepared. There were the cynical amongst us who thought she was just making use of Robbie Baikie for the convenience of his Toyota minivan and the all-purpose, wraparound warmth of him, and there was no end to the gossip of the biddies and the potboilers and the kind who wouldn’t know a good thing if it fell down out of Heaven and conked them on the head, but there were those who saw it for what it was: love, pure and simple.

  IF ROBBIE NEVER much bothered about the moorits and Cheviots his poor dead and buried father had bred up over the years, now he positively neglected them. If he lost six Blackface ewes stranded by the tide or a Leicester tup caught on a bit of wire in his own yard, he never knew it. He was too busy elsewhere. The two of them—he and the bird woman—would be gone for a week at a time, scrabbling over the rock faces that dropped down to the sea, she with her cameras, he with the rucksack and lenses and the black bottles of stout and smoked-tongue sandwiches, and when we did see them in town they were either taking tea at the hotel or holding hands in the back nook of the pub. They scandalized Mrs. Dunwoodie, who let her rooms over the butcher’s shop to Junie Ooley on a monthly basis, because she’d seen Robbie coming down the stairs with the girl on more than one occasion and once in the night heard what could only have been the chirps and muffled cries of coital transport drifting down from above. And a Haroldswick man—we won’t name him here, for decency’s sake—even claims that he saw the two of them cavorting in the altogether outside the stone cottage at Herma Ness.

  One night when the wind was up they lingered in Magnuson’s past the dinner hour, murmuring to each other in a soft indistinguishable fusi
on of voices, and Robbie drinking steadily, pints and whiskies both. We watched him rise for another round, then weave his way back to the table where she awaited him, a pint clutched in each of his big red hands. “You know what we say this time of year when the kittiwakes first return to us?” he asked her, his voice booming out suddenly and his face aflame with the drink and the very joy of her presence.

  Conversations died. People looked up. He handed her the beer and she gave him a sweet inquisitive smile and we all wished the smile was for us and maybe we begrudged him it just the smallest bit. He spread his arms and recited a little poem for her, a poem we all knew as well as we knew our own names, the heart stirrings of an anonymous bird lover lost now to the architecture of time:

  Peerie mootie! Peerie mootie!

  O, du love, du joy, du Beauty!

  Whaar is du came frae? Whaar is du been?

  Wi di swittlin feet and di glitterin een?

  It was startling to hear these sentiments from Robbie Baikie, a man’s man who was hard even where he was soft, a man not given to maundering, and we all knew then just how far overboard he’d gone. Love was one thing—a rose blooming atop a prickly stem risen up out of the poor soil of these windswept islands, and it was a necessary thing, to be nourished, surely—but this was something else altogether. This was a kind of fealty, a slavery, a doom—he’d given her our poem, and in public no less—and we all shuddered to look on it.

  “Robbie,” Magnus cried out in a desperation that spoke for us all, “Robbie, let me stand you a drop of whisky, lad,” but if Robbie heard him, he gave no sign of it. He took the bird woman’s hand, a little bunch of chapped and wind-blistered knuckles, and brought it to his lips. “That’s the way I feel about you,” he said, and we all heard it.

  IT WOULD BE USELESS to deny that we were all just waiting for the other shoe to drop. There was something inhuman in a passion so intense as that—it was a rabbity love, a tup’s love, and it was bound to come crashing down to earth, just as the Artist lamented so memorably in “When Doves Cry.” There were some of us who wondered if Robbie even listened to his own CDs anymore. Or heeded them.

  And then, on a gloomy gray dour day with the wind sitting in the north and the temperatures threatening to take us all the way back to the doorstep of winter again, Robbie came thundering through the front door of the pub in a hurricane of flailing leaves, thistles, matchbooks and fish-and-chips papers and went straight to the bar for a double whisky. It was the first time since the ornithological woman had appeared amongst us that anyone had seen him alone, and if that wasn’t sign enough, there were those who could divine by the way he held himself and the particular roseate hue of his ears that the end had come. He drank steadily for an hour or two, deflecting any and all comments—even the most innocuous observations about the weather—with a grunt or even a snarl. We gave him his space and sat at the window to watch the world tumble by.

  Late in the day, the light of the westering sun slanted through the glass, picking out the shadow of the mullions, and for a moment it laid the glowing cross of our Saviour in the precise spot where Robbie’s shoulder blades conjoined. He heaved a sigh then—a roaring, single-malt, tobacco-inflected groan it was, actually—and finally those massive shoulders began to quake and heave. The barmaid (Rose Ellen MacGooch, Donal MacGooch’s youngest) laid a hand on his forearm and asked him what the matter was, though we all knew. People made their voices heard so he wouldn’t think we were holding our breath; Magnus made a show of lighting his pipe at the far end of the bar; Tim Maconochie’s dog let out an audible fart. A calm settled over the pub, and Robbie Baikie exhaled and delivered up the news in a voice that was like a scouring pad.

  He’d asked her to marry him. Up there, in the crofter’s hut, the wind keening and the kittiwakes sailing through the air like great overblown flakes of snow. They’d been out all morning, scaling the cliffs with numb hands, fighting the wind, and now they were sharing a sandwich and the stout over a turf fire. Robbie had kissed her, a long, lingering lover’s kiss, and then, overcome by the emotion of the moment, he’d popped the question. Junie Ooley had drawn herself up, the eyes shining in her heaven-sent face, and told him she was flattered by the proposal, flattered and moved, deeply moved, but that she just wasn’t ready to commit to something like that, like marriage, that is, what with him being a Shetland sheepman and she an American woman with a college degree and a rover at that. Would he come with her to Patagonia to photograph the chimango and the ñandú? Or to the Okefenokee Swamp in search of the elusive ivory bill? To Singapore? São Paolo? Even Edinburgh? He said he would. She called him a liar. And then they were shouting and she was out in the wind, her knit cap torn from her head in a blink and her hair beating mad at her green eyes, and he tried to pull her to him, to snatch her arm and hold her, but she was already at the brink of the cliff, already edging her way down amidst the fecal reek and the raucous avian cries. “Junie!” he shouted. “Junie, take my hand, you’ll lose your balance in this wind, you know you will! Take my hand!”

  And what did she say then? “I don’t need any man to cling to.” That was it. All she said and all she wrote. And he stood in the blast, watching her work her way from one handhold to another out over the yawning sea as the birds careened round her and her hair strangled her face, and then he strode back to the minivan, fired up the engine, and drove back into town.

  THAT NIGHT THE WIND soughed and keened and rattled like a set of pipes through the canyon of the high street on till midnight or so, and then it came at us with a new sound, a sound people hadn’t heard in these parts since ‘92. It was blowing a gale. Shingles fled before the gusts, shrubs gave up their grip on the earth, the sheep in the fields were snatched up and flung across the countryside like so many puffs of lint. Garages collapsed, bicycles raced down the street with no more than a ghost at the pedals. Robbie was unconscious in the sitting room of his cottage at the time, sad victim of drink and sorrow. He’d come home from the pub before the wind rose up in its fury, boiled himself a plate of liver muggies, then conked out in front of the telly before he could so much as lift a fork to them.

  It was something striking the side of the house that brought him to his senses. He woke to darkness, the electric gone with the first furious gusts, and at first he didn’t know where he was. Then the house shuddered again and the startled bellow of the Ayrshire cow he kept for her milk and butter roused him up out of the easy chair and he went to the door and stuck his head out into that wild night. Immediately the door was torn from his grasp, straining back on its hinges with a shriek even as the pale form of the cow shot past and rose up to tear away like a cloud over the shingles of the roof. He had one thought then, and one thought only: Junie. Junie needs me.

  It was his luck that he carried five hundred pounds of coal in the back of his minivan as ballast, as so many of us do, because without it he’d never have kept the thing to the road. As it was, he had to dodge the hurtling sheep, rabbits that flew out of the shadows like nightjars, posts torn from their moorings, the odd roof or wall, even a boat or two lashed up out of the heaving seas. He could barely see the road for the blowing trash, the wind slammed at him like a fist and he had to fight the wheel to keep the car from flipping end over end. If he was half-looped still when he climbed into the car, now he was as sober as a foude, all the alcohol burned away in his veins with the terrible anxiety that drove him. He put his foot to the floor. He could only pray that he wouldn’t be too late.

  Then he was there, fighting his way out of the car, and he had to hold to the door to keep from being blown away himself. The moor was as black as the hide of an Angus bull. The wind shrieked in every passage, scouring the heather till it lay flat and cried out its agony. He could hear the sea battering the cliffs below. It was then that the door of the minivan gave way and in the next instant he was coasting out over the scrub like a tobogganer hurtling down Burrafirth Hill, and there’ll be men to tell you it was a tree saved him from going over, but
what tree could grow on an island as stingy as this? It was a thornbush is what it was, a toughened black unforgiving snarl of woody pith combed down to the ground with fifty years of buffeting, but it was enough. The shining white door of the minivan ran out to sea as if it would run forever, an awkward big plate of steel that might as well have been a Frisbee sailing out over the waves, but Robbie Baikie was saved, though the thorns dug into his hands and the wind took the hair off his head and flailed the beard from his cheeks. He squinted against it, against the airborne dirt and the darkness, and there it was, two hundred yards away and off behind him to the left: the crofter’s cottage, and with her in it. “Junie!” he cried, but the wind beat at the sound of his voice and carried it away till it was no voice at all. “Junie!”

  As for her, the bird woman, the American girl with the legs that took the breath out of you and the face and figure that were as near perfection as any man here had ever dreamed of on the best night of his life, she never knew Robbie had come for her. What she did know was that the wind was bad. Very bad. She must have struggled against it and realized how futile it was to do anything more than to succumb to it, to huddle and cling and wait it out. Where were the birds? she wondered. How would they weather this—on their wings? Out at sea? She was cold, shivering, the fire long since consumed by the gusts that tore at the chimney. And then the chimney went, with a sound of claws raking at a windowpane. There was a crack, and the roof beams gave way, and then it was the night staring down at her from above. She clung to the andirons, but the andirons blew away, and then she clung to the stones of the hearth but the stones were swept away as if they were nothing more than motes of dust, and what was she supposed to cling to then?

  We never found her. Nobody did. There are some who’ll say she was swept all the way to the coast of Norway and came ashore speaking Norse like a native or that a ship’s captain, battened down in a storm-sea, found her curled round the pocked safety glass of the bridge like a living figurehead, but no one really believes it. Robbie Baikie survived the night and he survived the mourning of her too. He sits even now over his pint and his drop of whisky in the back nook at Magnuson’s, and if anybody should ask him about the only love of his life, the bird woman from America, he’ll tell you he’s heard her voice in the cries of the kittiwakes that swarm the skies in spring, and seen her face there too, hanging over the black crashing sea on the stiff white wings of a bird. Poor Robbie.