After the Plague: And Other Stories

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  We’d marched forty feet across the ravaged yard before she turned to me. “This Sorenson,” she said. “Your associate?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I presume he’s just casual labor?”

  I nodded.

  She glanced up toward the house and I followed her line of sight to one of the second-story windows. Caitlin was there, in her funereal black, looking down on the wreckage of the yard with a fixed stare. “I don’t want to put you out, Vincent,” Moira was saying, and she was still staring up at the image of her sister, “but couldn’t you find someone a little less sallow for tomorrow?”

  There wouldn’t be any gardening going on around here for some time to come, and I didn’t really have to kowtow to this woman anymore—or humor her, either—but I went along with her just the same. Call it a reflex. “Sure,” I said, and I had to keep myself from tipping my hat. “No problem.”

  A week later the yard was an empty parking lot surrounded by a ten-foot-high clapboard fence (whitewashed, of course). From inside you couldn’t see a trace of green anywhere—or yellow, red, pink or tangerine, for that matter. I wondered how they felt, Moira and her sweet sad sister, when they stepped outside on their perfectly contoured blacktop plateau and looked up into the airy blue reaches of the sky with that persistent golden sun hanging in the middle of it. Disappointed? Frustrated? Sorry God hadn’t made us all as color-blind as dogs? Maybe they ought to just go ahead and dome the place—sure, just like a baseball stadium, and they could paint the underside of the thing Arctic white. Or avoid daylight altogether. A good starlit night wouldn’t interfere with the scheme at all.

  Do I sound bitter? I was bitter—and disgusted with myself for being party to the whole fiasco. It was so negative, so final, so life-quenching and drab. Moira was sick, and her heart and mind must have been as black as her sister’s dresses, but Caitlin—I couldn’t believe she was that far gone. Not after the day we’d spent drinking beer and reminiscing or the way she smiled at me and spoke my name, my real name, and not some bughouse invention (and who was Vincent, I’d like to know?). No, there was feeling there, I was sure of it, and sensitivity and sweetness too. And need. A whole lot of need. That was why I found myself slowing outside their fence as I came and went from one job or another, hoping to catch a glimpse of Caitlin backing her Mercedes out into the street or collecting the mail, but all I ever saw was the blank white field of the fence.

  Then, early one evening as I lay soaking in the tub, trying to scrub the deep verdigris stains of Miracle-Gro off my hands and forearms, the phone rang. I got to it, dripping, on the fifth ring. Caitlin was on the other end. “Larry,” she said, “hi. Listen,” she said, her voice soft and breathy, “I kind of miss you, I mean, not seeing you around. I’d like to offer you a beer sometime—”

  “Be right over,” I said.

  It was high summer and still light out when I got there, the streets bathed in a soft, milky luminescence, swallowtails leaping in the air, Bougainvillea, hibiscus, Euryops and oleander blazing against the fall of night. I’d automatically thrown on a pair of black jeans and an unadorned white T-shirt, but as I was going out the door I reached in the coat closet and pulled out a kelly-green sport coat I’d bought for St. Patrick’s Day one year, the sort of thing you regret having spent good money on the minute the last beer is drained and the fiddler stops fiddling. But by my lights, what Caitlin needed was a little color in her life, and I was the man to give it to her. I stopped by the florist’s on my way and got her a dozen long-stemmed roses, and I didn’t look twice at the white ones. No, the roses I picked were as deep and true as everything worth living for, red roses, bright red roses, roses that flowed up out of their verdant stems like blood from an open artery.

  I punched in the code at the gate and wheeled my pickup into the vast parking lot that was their yard and parked beside the front steps (the color of my truck, incidentally, is white, albeit a beat-up, battered and very dirty shade of it). Anyway, I climbed out of my white truck in my black jeans, white shirt and kelly-green jacket and moved across the blacktop and up the white steps with the blood-red roses clutched under one arm.

  Caitlin answered the door. “Larry,” she murmured, letting her eyes stray from my face to the jacket and back again, “I’m glad you could come. Did you eat yet?”

  I had. A slime burger, death fries and a side dish of fermented slaw at the local greasy spoon. I could have lied, trying to hold the picture of her whipping up a mud pie or blackened sole with mashed potatoes or black beans, but food wasn’t what I’d come for. “Yeah,” I said, “on my way home from work. Why? You want to go out?”

  We were in the front hall now, in a black and white world, no shade of gray even, the checkered tiles gleaming, ebony chairs, a lacquered Japanese cabinet. She gave me her black-lipped smile. “Me?” she said. “Uh-uh. No. I don’t want to go out.” A pause. “I want to go to bed.”

  In bed, after I discovered she was black and white without her clothes on too, we sipped stout and porter and contemplated the scintillating roses, set in a white vase against a white wall like a trompe l’oeil. And we talked. Talked about love and need and loss, talked about the world and its tastes and colors, and talked round and round the one subject that stood between us. We’d become very close for the second time and were lying in each other’s arms, all the black lipstick kissed off her, when I came back to the question I’d posed in the kitchen the last time we’d talked. “So,” I said. “Okay. It’s a long story, but the night’s long too, and I tell you, I don’t feel the least bit sleepy. Come on, the black and white. Tell me.”

  It would make a better story if there was some sort of “Rose for Emily” thing going on, if Moira had been left at the altar in her white satin and veil or seduced and abandoned by some neon hippie in an iridescent pink shirt and tie-dyed jacket, but that wasn’t it at all. She was just depressed. Afraid of the world. In need of control. “But what about you?” I said, searching Caitlin’s eyes. “You feel that way too?”

  We were naked, in each other’s arms, stretched the length of the bed. She shrugged. “Sort of,” she said. “When we were girls, before we moved to New York, Moira and I used to watch TV, everything in black and white, Fred MacMurray, Donna Reed, Father Knows Best, and we had a game, a competition really, to see who could make her room like that, like the world of those shows, where everything turned out right in the end. I wanted white, but Moira was older, so I got black.”

  There was more, but the next line—“Our parents didn’t like it, of course”—didn’t come from Caitlin, but her sister. Maybe I’d closed my eyes a minute, I don’t know, but suddenly there she was, all in white and perched at the end of the bed. Her mouth was drawn up in a little bow, as if the whole scene was distasteful to her, but she looked at me without blinking. “In New York, everything was pink, chiffon and lace, peach, champagne, the pink of little girls and blushing maidens. That was what Daddy wanted—and his wife too. Little girls. Normal, sweet, curtsying and respectfully whispering little girls who’d climb up into his lap for a bedtime story. I was sixteen at the time, Vincent; Caitlin was fourteen. Can you see? Can you?”

  I pulled the black sheets up to my hips, trying to calm the pounding in my chest. This was an unusual situation, to say the least—as I say, I’d been around, but this was out of my league altogether. I wanted to say something, but I couldn’t for the life of me guess what that might be. My right arm lay under the luxurious weight of Caitlin’s shoulders; I gave them a squeeze to reassure myself.

  “Oh, it’s nothing like that, Larry,” Caitlin said, anticipating me. “Nothing dirty. But Daddy wanted an end to black and white, and we—we didn’t. Did we, Moira?”

  Moira was staring off across the room to where the night hung in the windows, absolute and unadulterated. “No, Caitly, we didn’t. And we showed them, didn’t we?”

  I felt Caitlin tense beside me. I wanted nothing in that moment but to leap up out of the bed, pull the ridiculous green jac
ket over my head and sprint for my truck. But instead I heard myself asking, “How?”

  Both sisters laughed then, a low rasping laugh caught deep in their throats, and there wasn’t a whole lot of hilarity in it. “Oh, I don’t know, Vincent,” Moira said, throwing her head back to laugh again, and then coming back to me with a hand pattering at her breast. “Let’s just say that colors can get out of hand sometimes, if you know what I mean.”

  “Fire is our friend,” Caitlin said, leaving a little hiatus after the final syllable.

  “If you respect it,” Moira chimed in, and they both laughed again. I pulled the sheet up a little farther. Caitlin had lit a pair of tapering black candles when the sky had gone dark, and I stared into the unsteady flame of them now, watching the yellow ribbons of light die back and re-create themselves over and over. There wasn’t a sound in the world.

  “And Vincent,” Moira said, turning back to me, “if you’re going to be seeing my sister on any sort of regular basis, I have to tell you you’re simply not white enough. There’ll be no more outdoor work, that’s out of the question.” She let out another laugh, but this one at least had a little life in it. “You wouldn’t want to end up looking like your surfer friend, would you?”

  The silence held. I could hear the two sisters breathing gently, almost in unison, and it was as if they were breathing for me, and I’d never felt so tranquil and volitionless in my life. Whiteness loomed, the pale ethereality of nothingness, and blackness too, the black of a dreamless sleep. I closed my eyes. I could feel my head sinking into the pillow as if into the ancient mud of an untracked forest.

  “Oh, and Vincent, one more thing,” Moira said, and I opened my eyes long enough to see her cross the room and dump the roses in the wastebasket. “Dye your hair, will you?”

  Death of the Cool

  First there were the kids on the beach. What were they, fifteen, sixteen? Big ugly kids in big shorts with haircuts right out of a 1963 yearbook, all thatch and no shag, but what did they know about 1963? They were drunk, one-thirty in the afternoon, and they’d lifted a pint of tequila and a forty-ouncer from the convenience store or raided somebody’s mother’s liquor cabinet, and so what if he’d done the same sort of thing himself when he was their age, so what?—that was then and this was now. Drunk, and they had a dog with them, a retriever that had something else in it around the ears and snout and in the frantic splay of the rear legs. They were throwing a stick—an old scrap of flotsam spotted with tar and barnacles—and the dog was bringing it back to them. Every time the exchange was made and the stick went hurtling back into the ribbon of the surf, they collapsed with the hilarity of it, pounded each other’s freshly tattooed shoulders and melted right into the sand, because there was nothing under the sun funnier than this. Come to think of it, they were probably stoned too.

  “You want to buy a dog?” they were shouting at everybody who came up the beach. “Cheap. He’s real cheap.”

  They asked him—they asked Edison, Edison Banks—as he kicked through the sand to lay out his towel in the place tucked into the rocks where he’d been coming every afternoon for a week now to stretch out and ease the ache in his knee. He’d just had arthroscopic surgery on the right knee and it was weak and the Tylenol-codeine tabs they’d given him were barely scratching the surface of the pain. But walking in the sand was a good thing—it strengthened the muscles, or so the surgeon told him. “Hey, man,” the ugliest of the three kids had shouted, “you want to buy a dog?”

  Edison was wearing a pair of shorts nearly as big as the stiffened shrouds they’d somehow managed to prop up on their nonexistent hips, and he had his Lakers cap on backwards and an oversized T-shirt and beads, the beads he’d been wearing since beads were invented back in 1969. “No, thanks,” he said, a little ruffled, a little pissed off at the world in general and these three kids in particular, “—I had one for breakfast.”

  That was the end of the exchange, and on a better day, that would have been the end of the encounter and let’s turn the page and get on with it. Edison wanted to lie in the sun, shuffle through the deep sand above tideline for maybe a hundred yards in each direction, thrash his arms in the surf a bit and let the codeine work on the pain till cocktail hour, and that was it, that was the day he was envisioning, with dinner out and maybe a movie after that. But the kids wouldn’t let it rest. They didn’t recognize Edison as one of their own, didn’t appreciate his wit, his graying soul beard and the silver stud in his left ear. They saw him as a gimpy, pinch-faced old relic, in the same camp as their facially rejuvenated mothers, vanished fathers, and the various teachers, principals, deputy sheriffs and dance club bouncers who washed through their lives each day like some stinking red tide. They gave him a cold sneer and went back to the dog.

  And that would have been it, but no sooner had Edison stretched out on his towel and dug out the sunblock and his book than the stick came rocketing his way. And after the stick, half a beat later, came the dog, the wet dog, the heaving, whimpering, sand-spewing whipcrack of a wet dog with a wet smell all its own. The stick vanished, only to come thumping back at him, this time landing no more than two feet away, so that the sand kicked up in his face. Were they trying to provoke him, was that it? Or were they just drunk and oblivious? Not that it mattered. Because if that stick came his way one more time, he was going to go ballistic.

  He tried to focus on the page, his eyes stinging with sweat, the smell of the sunblock bringing him back to the beaches of the past, the sun like a firm, hot hand pressing down on his shoulders and the heavy knots of his calves. The book wasn’t much—some tripe about a one-armed lady detective solving crimes in a beach town full of rich people very much like the one he was living in—but it had been there on the hall table when he was limping out the door, a relic of Kim. Kim had been gone three weeks now, vanished along with the Z3 he’d bought her, an armload of jewelry and a healthy selection of off-the-shoulder dresses and open-toed shoes. He expected to hear from her lawyer any day now. And the credit card company. Them too, of course.

  When it came this time, the final time, the stick was so close it whirred in his ears like a boomerang, and before he could react—or even duck—it was there, right at his elbow, and the black panting form of the dog was already hurtling over him in an explosion of sand and saliva. He dropped the book and shoved himself up out of the sand, the tide pulling back all along the beach with a long, slow sigh, gulls crying out, children shrieking in the surf. They were smirking, the three of them, laughing at him, though now that he was on his feet, now that he was advancing on them, the line of his mouth drawn tight and the veins pounding in his neck, the smirks died on their faces. “Hey, Jack,” he snarled in his nastiest New York–transplanted–to–California voice, “would you mind throwing that fucking stick someplace else? Or do I have to shove it up your ass?”

  They were kids, lean and loose, flat stomachs, the beginner’s muscles starting to show in their upper arms and shoulders like a long-delayed promise, just kids, and he was a man—and a man in pretty good shape too, aside from the knee. He had the authority here. This was his beach—or the community’s, and he was a member of the community, paying enough in taxes each year to repave all the roads personally and buy the entire police force new uniforms and gold-capped nightsticks to boot. There were no dogs allowed on this beach, unless they were leashed (Dogs Required on Leash, the sign said, and he would joke to Kim that they had to get a dog and leash him or they were out of compliance with the law), and there was no drinking here either, especially underage drinking.

  One of the kids, the one with the black crewcut and dodgy eyes, murmured an apology—“We didn’t realize,” or something to that effect—but the big one, the ugly one, the one who’d started all this in the first place by giving him that wiseass crap about did he want to buy a dog, just stood his ground and said, “My name isn’t Jack.”

  Nobody moved. Edison swayed over the prop of his good leg, the right knee still red and swollen,
and the two blond kids—they were brothers, he saw that in a flash, something in the pinched mouths and the eyes that were squeezed too close together, as if there weren’t enough room on the canvas—crossed their arms over their tanned chests and gave him a look of contempt.

  “All right,” he said, “fine. Maybe you want to tell me what your name is then, huh?”

  Up on the street, on the ridge behind the beach, a woman in an aquamarine Porsche Boxster swung into the last open spot in a long line of parked cars, pausing to let a trio of cyclists glide silently past. The palms rose rigid above her. There was no breath of wind. “I don’t have to tell you nothing,” the kid said, and his hands were shaking as he drew the stub of a joint out of one of the pouches in his shorts and put a match to it. “You know what I say? I say fuck you, Mister.”

  And here was the dog, trembling all over, a flowing rill of muscle, dropping the stick at the kid’s feet, and “No,” Edison said, his voice like an explosion in his own ears, “no, fuck you!”

  He was ten feet from them, fifteen maybe, so imprisoned in the moment he couldn’t see the futility of it, standing there on the public beach trading curses with a bunch of drunk and terminally disaffected kids, kids a third his age, mere kids. What was it? What did they see in him? And why him? Why him and not one of the real geeks and geezers strung out up and down the beach with their potbellies and skinny pale legs and the Speedos that clung to their cracks like geriatric diapers?

  That was when the tall kid snatched the stick out of the dog’s mouth and flung it directly at Edison with everything he had, a savage downward chop of the arm that slammed the thing into his chest with so much force he found himself sprawling backwards in the sand even as the kids took to their feet and the harsh, high laughter rang in his ears.