Sharp Teeth Read online

  his stomach full from all the meals she’s cooked.

  Their love is just about the weight

  of the casserole she’s taking out of the oven right now.

  Their love is eternal because time

  seems to have fled, embarrassed

  to be sharing such a small apartment

  with so much dumb affection.

  XVI

  Lark sits. He’s tired.

  He’s been trotting around this neighborhood

  trying to look loose and aimless.

  The green lawns of Pasadena hiss with wealth.

  At the moment, he’s an unleashed dog

  prowling around,

  causing horns to honk

  as he crosses against the lights.

  Circling school yards

  he eyes the children

  and waits for someone to call the cops.

  Where is the concerned citizen?

  Lark takes another rest,

  looking around impatiently,

  his nose full of the cut scent

  of fresh grass and money.

  He waits.

  The Pasadena Animal Shelter is said to be

  the Four Seasons and The Ritz combined.

  The woman who funded it was rich enough

  to distrust

  all who approached. Nephews, nieces, cousins,

  were turned away as she

  found her only comfort

  in the soft fur of her terriers’ coats.

  When she died, alone, she gave to those

  whose loyalty was most easily earned and hardest lost.

  The Pasadena Animal Shelter has a spa. It has more vets

  than the local clinic has doctors,

  it has a dietician and

  a masseuse.

  Lark waits. He barks. A stray can’t get arrested in this town.

  Finally, not seeing any option, he goes and takes

  a dump on the green grass of the open plaza.

  Then he does a little dance,

  it’s one of the peculiar canine habits

  he wishes more people would adopt.

  He could have gone downtown

  wound up in Anthony’s shelter,

  but Anthony’s is a city kennel

  and city kennels have a policy

  of neutering strays.

  And if there’s one thing Lark is not signing up for

  it’s that.

  Pasadena’s shelter is private and of a sweeter disposition

  when a beast comes through the door

  they don’t take a knife to its balls

  first thing.

  As if he needed a second reason, he suspects

  the girl’s near that kennel

  with her dogcatcher, and if so, they have worries enough.

  He doesn’t know what that other pack is up to.

  But again there were a lot of pieces of his plan

  just lying out there in plain view

  for Bone or Baron or any of them to put together.

  In any case, his untethered wandering seems

  to have finally sparked some interest.

  Questions ripple through the park.

  “Hey, is that your dog?” The man’s holding a cup of Starbucks.

  “No,” says the woman with the yoga mat.

  They briefly consult and agree,

  the man goes to find a cop.

  Lark sits.

  He’ll eat well. Sleep. Have some time to think.

  One nice thing about Pasadena, he thinks, is that

  nobody’s hunting dog in this town tonight.

  The man is back, he couldn’t find a cop.

  He calls 911 on his cell.

  The woman waits with him.

  They flirt. Lark is amused to eavesdrop.

  “Oh yeah, he’s a beautiful dog.”

  “Looks like he’s got some shepherd in him.”

  “Or wolf.”

  “Yeah, he’s big. I had a dog sort of like this once…”

  Lark listens to them come together,

  their mutual problem solving

  leading to small chuckles, nervous smiles.

  Lark wonders if way back when

  the first bonds, the first community

  didn’t really begin

  with the same simple question

  “What are we going to do

  with all these wild animals?”

  XVII

  Close by

  Cutter and Blue are in a tough spot.

  Two old sisters from La Jolla have them down, cornered,

  The boys haven’t won a hand in hours and

  they’re just a few points away

  from being utterly wiped out.

  Damn.

  They shouldn’t be slammed like this.

  But there have been some late nights of late.

  The last time they talked to Lark he said

  it would probably be a while till they heard from him again.

  He sent them new credit cards linked to new accounts

  told them to lie low and not answer the door.

  He told them to keep playing.

  Then he was gone.

  Since then it’s been cases of Mountain Dew and mountains of Domino’s pizza.

  They have been doing well, rising slowly in the various local tournaments.

  And when the claustrophobia gets too bad

  they drive out to the desert and run,

  hunting for the occasional feral cat.

  They like to think of it as a community ser vice,

  after all, house cats that escape into the wild

  survive on local birds, threatening the blue jays and warblers.

  So hunting the felines down does protect the biodiversity,

  but actually, they only do it

  because dogs hate cats.

  Later, in the car again, they change and they drive,

  racing the dawn

  back to the hotel.

  When the valet greets them

  they look ruffled and unkempt, their eyes burning.

  They hit the beds

  Two hours of sleep and they’re back to the tourney

  where things had been going just fine until they met these two.

  The sisters are from La Jolla, both married real estate,

  worth a mint, they dress and smile like dolls.

  Cutter imagines that they were lovely once.

  But now they’re just quaint little grins.

  He looks at the one on his left

  what a biddy, who would think the gray matter

  would be that sharp at that age. And then,

  for a flicker there,

  mischief glints in her eyes.

  Is there something going on?

  Cutter tries to step outside of himself

  seeks a broader perspective on the game

  using his imagination to walk around the table

  to watch it cold

  thinking it through,

  looking for the solution to the puzzle.

  Now there’s a game within the game.

  The sisters sit erect, their posture polite,

  their bidding perfectly pronounced through pursed lips.

  No hidden messages there.

  But Cutter keeps watching

  their serene faces, their well-timed and courteous smiles.

  They hold their hands straight up, as erect as their backs.

  They fan out the cards, ordering them just so.

  Perhaps there’s something there.

  Usually, someone holding a hand

  holds it the same way, game after game,

  but a cheater can signal, there—he sees it—

  the sister bidding holds her cards up with not just her thumbs

  but with a stray finger tucked back there too,

  while her sister holds her cards in a normal fashion.

  They are ahead in the bidding

  but Cutter’s not goin
g to give it to them.

  If they win this they win it all.

  He overbids the girls with no cards to support.

  Cutter and a mystified Blue go down hard.

  But Cutter has bought some time.

  The next hand is dealt.

  Now we shall see, he thinks, he waits, he waits,

  the girls each organize their hand, moving the cards about.

  Watching, out of the corner of his eye,

  he sees one suavely tuck two fingers behind her hand

  while the other sister nestles one finger back behind the cards,

  and props the cards up with her thumb.

  It is a casual, smooth, and practiced move,

  but it makes Cutter’s pulse surge,

  because it’s so clearly a signal, a cheat.

  Cutter smiles, he likes these girls.

  And this time he has some cards to play,

  even with their slippery ways, they can’t beat his hand.

  He bids low, holds the win. Then asks to take a break.

  The girls sip bottled water in the corner of the stale lounge.

  Blue is in the men’s room.

  A club secretary approaches the ladies.

  “There’s a call for you at the front desk.”

  Crossing the room together, one lifts the receiver while the other watches.

  Cutter’s voice growls into her ear,

  “If you cheat again this match, lady,

  I will chew off your fingers with my teeth

  while my partner gnaws the flesh off your sister’s skull.”

  He hangs up.

  She hangs up.

  She shakes her head, looks at her sister

  and sighs. “Oh my.”

  Blue and Cutter pull it out,

  trouncing the ladies in a surprise comeback.

  Over at the next table, the losers

  are a couple from Ventura County

  while the winners are a small man

  who could pass for Truman Capote

  and a large man who could pass for a Samoan.

  XVIII

  Ray vs. Sasha,

  Sasha vs. Ray,

  day in

  day out

  real chaos for the whole pack to bear.

  Skulking to the sides like children

  as the metal gets thrown around the kitchen the dogs listen

  along with the occasional shattering of glass.

  The dogs shake their heads, after all

  Ray has made this bed,

  he wants Sasha to keep the pack in line

  but he wants her too. As his own.

  She calls bullshit on his attitude every few days.

  Things get physical. Both of them kick

  and scream and bite.

  She’s not afraid to put her fist into his face,

  though she pays for it.

  The back-and-forth goes on.

  Blood spills on the floor.

  The tussle sometimes comes when they’re wolves

  sometimes when they’re just another couple

  trying to make it in LA.

  This fight isn’t supposed to be mortal,

  merely cathartic, a bleeding of the bitterness.

  They fight till they are spent, breathing heavy,

  Sasha’s black hair wet with sweat,

  Ray heavy in his breath like an old wrestler

  and then the balance returns.

  She licks his ear.

  He quietly reaches out and holds her, kissing

  the bruises on her arms and shoulders.

  Like so much of the trouble in the world,

  it simply ends with exhaustion.

  Bone is watching, thinking, trying to get out from the bottom.

  He stands against the wall quietly observing

  as Ray sits at the center of the warehouse, listening

  to Penn.

  Penn is telling him about some other pack that might exist,

  a San Pedro pack that he had investigated a while back for Lark.

  Ray is rocking back on one leg of his chair.

  Bone hopes Ray is smarter than he looks

  which would be a good thing

  ’cause he looks about as dumb as a rock.

  Too many tats but maybe some brain.

  Ray’s eyes are stone and coal. His physique looks like

  it was once prime, fit and tight

  before slipping into this looser form, a perpetual

  slow leak of flesh. He studies a map on the floor,

  points to the southeast section of the city.

  “So maybe cruise around in there, ask around

  working in ones or in twos. I don’t care.”

  Bone wonders about this. Lark always had a plan, always cared.

  Ray likes to improvise,

  filling in the blanks

  with little more than dense muscle.

  But leaning there against the wall, Bone remembers something too,

  an idea Lark was toying with,

  something to do with the pound.

  Bone never knew exactly what the idea was or even his part.

  It hurts his head to think like this,

  piecing a plan together from nothing,

  his mind drowning in the folds of its own confusion.

  He decides to simply begin putting what he knows into motion,

  figuring that if he acts out the scenes,

  the rest of the play will come to him.

  Later that night Sasha comes to his bed

  slipping in next to him as he lies curled up on his bunk.

  “Move over,” she says. Bone makes room.

  They curl up like wisps of smoke

  wrapped around each other.

  This is the first time. Bone wonders

  what it means. A promotion?

  A level up in the pack? The end of the indoctrination?

  “Rub my back,” she says, ever so softly exposing

  something feminine in her voice.

  Bone hasn’t been with a woman for a long time.

  Lark took them to Vegas a while ago. But that was

  somewhere beyond the distant past.

  He rubs her shoulders, pushing back her hair

  to touch the bare whiteness of her skin.

  His breath feels shallow in his lungs.

  She is silent, but her neck bends to his touch.

  Her body has as many scars as a choppy sea.

  Somehow she wears it well. Then, she presses her hips

  against him.

  Before they even begin he knows

  it will be over quickly.

  Bone grabs, tugs, pushes. She yelps. They keep it muffled.

  No sense in waking the dogs.

  His hand on her naked stomach, his teeth

  on her neck, so close together he’s hearing

  echoes of his breath on her flesh.

  His eyes are blinded by the blackness of her hair.

  He inhales deeply, trying to hold on to something from this.

  Fast rhythms and heaving chests pass

  and when it’s over she lies there breathing deep

  for a few moments. Then, pulling her clothes on

  she tells him

  “Ray wants you in the first van tomorrow,”

  and rolls off into the darkness.

  Then there’s nothing.

  No lights, just the sighs of sleeping men.

  Some tossing. Some turning.

  Bone almost wishes she hadn’t been there.

  It’s like she only came into his world

  to show him how empty it would be

  without her.

  XIX

  In the dogcatcher’s house,

  she’s beginning to worry.

  When she’s in Anthony’s arms it’s not so bad.

  It’s safe and quiet and warm there.

  It’s the rest of the world that has her on edge.

  But where is Lark?

&nbs
p; What happened to the pack?

  What happens if someone shows up?

  What will she say?

  She wrings her hands,

  pulling at the length of her finger bones

  as if hoping to draw answers from her body.

  The worst secrets are the ones

  that sit like spiders

  waiting to bite.

  Anthony is aware of her in the other room.

  Sometimes he wants to go in

  wrap her in his arms, hold her

  until her blue eyes turn their focus away

  from whatever haunts her

  to find him again there

  kneeling beside her, patiently removing the thorns.

  Strong love can hold on to anything fairly given,

  he knows this.

  He has held her in Pacific waves

  standing against the tide that pulled firmly at their sides,

  “See,” he said. “We’re stronger than this.”

  She looked in his eyes.

  She was almost there

  but not yet.

  That morning, sitting in the kitchen, she smiled.

  “Why you smiling?”

  She said the sweet scent of the jasmine in the garden makes her smile

  and the toasted smell of the bread makes her smile

  and the roasting of the coffee makes her smile.

  “You’ve got a good nose,” he said, kissing her.

  And like that her face froze, and she

  left the room.

  The same way it went down when she was reading that day

  and he said, “Hey, instead of a dog,

  maybe we could get a cat?”

  And she said, without looking up, “No.”

  “What, are you allergic to cats?”

  She looked up, eyes cold. “No. I just don’t like them.

  and they don’t like me.”

  He worries that this

  is beginning to feel like

  driving in a car through the mountains,

  finding a great song on the radio

  and then as you pass out of its range

  hearing it flicker and fade.

  Snap, pop, and

  then it’s gone.

  XX

  Lark waits in the cage.

  The other dogs are worked up.

  He has his own kennel but still

  he has to watch his step.

  Dogs will fight first, think later.

  And he’s got to conserve his energy.

  So he’s avoiding them.

  He eats his food, tries to savor it,

  but the luxury of the Pasadena Animal Shelter

  turns out largely to be a myth.

  It’s okay enough.