After the Plague: And Other Stories

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Then it was the bar, the scene at the bar at four o’clock in the afternoon, when the sun was still high and nobody was there. Edison didn’t even bother to go home and change. He hadn’t gone near the water—he was too furious, too pissed off, burned up, rubbed raw—and aside from a confectioner’s sprinkle of dry sand on his ankle and the dark stain in the center of his T-shirt, no one would have guessed he’d been to the beach, and what if they did? This was California, beach city, where the guy sitting next to you in the bleached-out shirt and dollar-twenty-nine Kmart flip-flops was probably worth more than the GNP of half a dozen third world countries. But there was nobody sitting next to him today—the place was deserted. There was only the bartender, the shrine to booze behind him, and a tall slim cocktail waitress with blue eyes, dimples, and hair that glistened like the black specks of tar on the beach.

  He ordered a top-shelf margarita on the rocks, no salt, and morosely chewed a handful of bar mix that looked and tasted like individual bits of laminated sawdust, his dark blood-flecked eyes sweeping the room, from TV to waitress to the mirror behind the bar and back again. His heart was still pounding, though he’d left the beach half an hour ago, humiliated, decrepit, feeling like the thousand-year-old man as he gathered up his things and limped up the steps to his car. It was irrational, he knew it, a no-win situation, but all he could think about was revenge—Revenge? Murder was more like it—and he methodically combed the street along the beach, up one narrow lane and down another, looking for any sign of his three antagonists. Every time he came round a bend and saw movement up ahead, he was sure it would be them, drunk and stoned and with their guard down, whacking one another with rolled-up towels, shoving and jostling, crowing at the world. He’d take them by surprise, jerk the wheel, and slice in at the curb to cut them off, and then he’d be on them, slamming the tall kid’s face, over and over, till there was no more smirk left in him… .

  “You want another one?” the bartender was asking. Edison had seen him before—he was the day man and Edison didn’t know his name and he didn’t know Edison’s—and he had no opinion about him one way or the other. He was young, twenty-eight, thirty maybe, with a deep tan and the same basic haircut as the kids on the beach, though it wasn’t cut so close to the scalp. Edison decided he liked him, liked the look of him, with his surfer’s build and the streaks of gold in his hair and the smile that said he was just enjoying the hell out of every goddamned minute of life on this earth.

  “Yeah, sure,” Edison said, and he found that the first drink, in combination with the codeine, had made his words run down like an unoiled machine, all the parts gummed up and locked in place, “and let me maybe see the bar menu. You got a bar menu?”

  The cocktail waitress—she was stunning, she really was, a tall girl, taller than the bartender, with nice legs and outstanding feet perched up high on a pair of black clogs—flashed her dimpled smile when Edison cocked his head to include her in the field of conversation.

  Sure they had a bar menu, sure, but they really wouldn’t have anything more than crudités or a salad till the kitchen opened up for dinner at six—was that all right, or would he rather wait? Edison caught sight of himself in the mirror in back of the bar then, and it shook him. At first he didn’t even recognize himself, sure that some pathetic older guy had slipped onto the stool beside him while he was distracted by the waitress, but no, there was the backwards Lakers cap and the shades and the drawn-down sinkhole of his mouth over the soul beard and the chin that wasn’t nearly as firm as it should have been. And his skin—how had his skin got so yellow? Was it hepatitis? Was he drinking too much?

  The bartender moved off down the bar to rub at an imaginary speck on the mahogany surface and convert half a dozen limes into neat wedges, and the cocktail waitress was suddenly busy with the cash register. On the TV, just above the threshold of sound, somebody was whispering about the mechanics of golf while the camera flowed over an expanse of emerald fairways and a tiny white ball rose up into the sky in a distant looping trajectory. A long moment hung suspended, along with the ball, and Edison was trying not to think about what had happened on the beach, but there it was, nagging at him like grief, and then the bartender was standing in front of him again. “You decide yet?”

  “I think I’ll,” Edison began, and at that moment the door swung open and a woman with a wild shag of bleached hair slipped in and took a seat three stools down, “I’ll … I don’t know, I think I’ll wait.”

  Who was she? He’d seen her around town, he was sure of it.

  “Hi, Carlton,” she said, waving two fingers at the bartender while simultaneously swinging round to chirp “Hi, Elise” at the waitress. And then, shifting back into position on the stool, she gave Edison a long cool look of appraisal and said hi to him too. “Martini,” she instructed the bartender, “three olives, up. And give me a water back. I’m dying.”

  She was a big girl, big in the way of the jeans model who’d married that old tottering cadaver of a millionaire a few years back and then disappeared from the face of the earth, big but sexy, very sexy, showing off what she had in a tight black top—and how long had it been since Kim had left? Edison, the T-shirt still damp over his breastbone, smiled back.

  He initiated the conversation. He’d seen her around, hadn’t he? Yes, she had a condo just down the street. Did she come in here often? A shrug. The roots of her hair were black, and she dug her fingers deep into them, massaging as she talked. “Couple times a week maybe.”

  “I’m Edison,” he said, smiling like he meant it, and he did. “And you’re—?”

  “I’m Sukie.”

  “Cool,” Edison said, in his element now, smiling, smiling, “I’ve never known anybody named Sukie. Is that your real name?”

  She dug her fingers into her scalp, gave her head a snap so that the whole towering shako of her hair came to life. “No,” she said.

  “It’s a nickname?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t want to tell me your real name? Is that it?”

  She shrugged, an elegant big-shouldered gesture that rippled all the way down her body and settled in one gently rocking ankle. She was wearing a long blue print skirt and sandals. Earrings. Makeup. And how old was she? Thirty-five, he figured. Thirty-five and divorced. “What about you?” she said. “What kind of name is Edison?”

  Now it was his turn. He lifted both hands and flashed open the palms. “My father thought I was going to be an inventor. But maybe you’ve heard of me, my band, I mean—I had an eponymous rock band a few years back.”

  She just blinked.

  “Edison Banks. You ever hear of them—of us, I mean? Early eighties? Warner Brothers? The Downtown LP?”

  No, she hadn’t heard of anything.

  All right. He knew how to play this, though he was out of practice. Back off—“We weren’t all that big, really, I don’t know”—and then a casual mention of the real firepower he could bring to the table. “That was before I got into TV.”

  And now the scene shifted yet again, because before she could compress her lips in a little moue and coo “Tee-vee?” the door swung open, loudly, and brought in the sun and the street and three guys in suits, all of them young, with haircuts that chased them around the ears and teeth that should have been captured on billboards for the dental hygienists’ national convention. One of them, as it turned out, would turn out to be Lyle, and when she saw him come through the door, Sukie froze just for the briefest slice of an instant, but Edison saw it, and registered it, and filed it away.

  The roar went down the other end of the bar, and Edison asked her if she’d like another drink. “No,” she said, “I don’t think so. But it’s been nice talking to you,” and already she was shifting away from the stool to reach for her purse.

  “How about a phone number?” he said. “We could do dinner or something—sometime, I mean.”

  She was on her feet now, looking down at him, the purse clutched in her hand. “No,” she said,
and she shook her head till her hair snatched up all the light in the room, “no, I don’t think so.”

  Edison had another drink. The sun slid down the sky to where it should have been all along. He gazed out idly across the street and admired the way the sunlight sat in the crowns of the palms and sank into the grip of the mountains beyond. Cars drifted lazily by. He watched a couple turn the corner and seat themselves under a green umbrella on the patio of the restaurant across the way. For the briefest moment the face of his humiliation rose up in his mind—the kid’s face, the poised stick—but he fought it down and thumbed through a copy of the village paper, just to have something to do while he sucked at his sweet-sour drink and chewed his way through another dish of sawdust pellets.

  He read of somebody’s elaborate wedding (“fifteen thousand dollars on sushi alone”), the booming real estate market, and the latest movie star to buy up one of the estates in the hills, browsed the wine column (“a dramatic nose of dried cherries and smoked meat with a nicely defined mineral finish”), then settled on an item about a discerning burglar who operated by daylight, entering area homes through unlocked doors and ground-floor windows to make off with all the jewelry he could carry—as long as it was of the very highest quality, that is. Paste didn’t interest him, nor apparently did carpets, electronics, vases, or artwork. Edison mulled that over: a burglar, a discerning burglar. The brazenness it must take—just strolling up the walk and knocking on the front door, hello, is anybody home? And if they were, he was selling magazine subscriptions or looking for a lost cat. What a way to make a living. Something for those little shits on the beach to aspire to.

  By the time he looked up to order his fourth drink, the place had begun to fill up. The cocktail waitress—Elise, he had to remember her name, and the bartender’s too, but what was it?—was striding back and forth on her long legs, a tray of drinks held high above the jostling crowd. Up on the TV in the corner the scene had shifted from golf to baseball, fairways and greens giving way to the long, dense grass of the outfield—or was it artificial turf, a big foam mat with Easter basket fluff laid over it? He was thinking he should just eat and get it over with, ask what’s his name for the menu and order something right at the bar and then hang out for a while and see what developed. Home was too depressing. All that was waiting for him at home was the channel changer and a thirty-two-ounce packet of frozen peas to wrap around his bad knee. And that killed him: where was Kim when he needed her, when he was in pain and could barely get around? What did she care? She had her car and her credit cards and probably by now some new sucker to take to the dance—

  “Excuse me,” somebody was saying at his elbow, and he looked up into the face of one of the men who’d come in earlier, the one the big blonde had reacted to. “I don’t mean to bother you, but aren’t you Edison Banks?”

  The codeine was sludge in his veins, and his knee—he’d forgotten he had a knee—but he peeled off his sunglasses and gave the man a smile. “That’s right,” he said, and he would never admit to himself that he was pleased, but he was. He’d lived here three years now, and nobody knew who he was, not even the mailman or the girl who counted out his money at the bank.

  “I’m Lyle,” the man was saying, and then they were locked palm to palm in a rollicking soul shake, “Lyle Hansen, and I can’t tell you how cool this is. I mean, I’m a big fan. Savage Street was the coolest thing in the history of TV, and I mean that—it got me through high school, and that was a bad time for me, real adolescent hell, with like all the rules and the regimentation and my parents coming down on me for every little minor thing—shit, Savage Street was my life.”

  Edison took hold of his drink, the comforting feel of the glass in his hand, the faces at the bar, dark blue shadows leaning into the building across the street. There was a trip-hop tune playing on the jukebox, a languid slow female vocal over an industrial storm of guitars and percussion that managed to be poignant and ominous at the same time, and it felt right. Just right.

  “Listen, I didn’t mean to intrude or anything—”

  Edison waved a hand. “No problem, man, it’s cool, it’s all right.”

  Lyle looked to be about the same age as the bartender, which meant he would have been out of high school for ten or twelve years. He wore his hair longer than the bartender’s, combed back up off his forehead with enough mousse to sustain it and the odd strand dangling loose in front. He kept shifting from foot to foot, rattling the keys in his pocket, tugging at his tie, and his smile flashed and flashed again. “Hey, Carlton,” he spoke into the din, “give me another one, will you—and one for Mr. Banks here too. On me.”

  “No, no,” Edison protested, “you don’t have to do that,” but the money was on the bar, and the drink appeared in a fresh glass.

  “So you wrote and produced that show, right?”

  “Shit, I created it. You know, when you see the titles and it says ‘Created By’? I wrote the first two seasons, then left it to them. Why work when you can play, right?”

  Lyle was drinking shooters of Herradura out of a slim tube of a glass. He threw back the current one, then slapped his forehead as if he’d been stung. “I can’t believe it. Here I am talking to Edison Banks. You know, when you moved into town, like what was it, three, four years ago?”

  “Three.”

  “Yeah, I read that article in the paper about you and I thought wow—you were the guitarist for Edison Banks too, right? I had both their albums, New Wave, right? But what I really dig is jazz. Miles Davis. Monk. That era stuff.”

  Edison felt a weight lift off him. “I’ve been a jazz fan all my life,” he said, the alcohol flaring up in him till the whole place was on fire with it, mystical fire, burning out of the bottles and the light fixtures and the golden shining faces lined up at the bar. “Since I was a kid of fifteen, anyway, hopping the subway up to Harlem and bullshitting my way into the clubs. I’ve got everything—Birth of the Cool, Sketches, all the Coltrane stuff, Sonny Rollins, Charles Lloyd, Ornette, Mulligan—and all of it on the original LPs too.”

  Lyle set both hands down on the bar, as if to brace himself. He was wearing a pinkie ring that featured a silver skull, and the rough edge of a tattoo showed at the base of his left wrist where the cuff climbed up his arm. “You might think I’m just some suit or something,” he said, “but that’s not me at all.” He plucked at his lapels. “See this? This is my first day on the job. Real estate. That’s where the money is. But I tell you, I’d love to hear some of that shit with you—I mean, Miles. Wow. And I know what you’re saying—CDs just don’t cut it like vinyl.”

  And Edison, in the shank of a bad evening that had begun to turn clement after all, turned to him and said, “I’m up at the corner of Dolores and San Ignacio—big Spanish place with the tile roof? Come by anytime, man—anytime, no problem.” And then he looked up to see the waitress—Elise—glide by like a ballerina, that’s what she was like, a ballerina, with her bare arms held high and the tray levitating above her head. He had to get home. Had to eat. Feed the cat. Collapse in front of the tube. “Just don’t come between maybe one and four—that’s when I’m down at the beach.”

  In the morning, the dryness in the back of his throat told him he’d drunk too much the night before—that and a fuzziness between his ears, as if his head were a radio caught between stations—and he took two of the Tylenol-codeine tabs to ease his transition into the day. Theoretically, he was working on a screenplay about the adventures of a rock band on the road as seen through the eyes of the drummer’s dog, but the work had stalled even before Kim walked out, and now there was nothing there on the screen but words. He took the newspaper and a glass of orange juice out on the patio, and then he swam a couple of laps and began to feel better. The maid came at eleven and fixed him a plate of eggs and chorizo before settling into her routine with the bucket, the mop and the vacuum cleaner. Two hours later, as he sat frozen at his desk, playing his eighteenth game of computer solitaire, there was a tap at
the door.

  It was Orbalina, the maid. “Mr. Banks,” she said, poking her head into the room, “I don’t want to bother you, but I can’t, I can’t—” He saw that she was crying, her face creased with the geography of her grief, tears wetting her cheeks. This was nothing new—she was always sobbing over one thing or another, the tragedies that constantly befell her extended family, the way a man on TV had looked right at her as if he’d come alive right there in her own living room, the hollowness of the sky over the graveyard in Culiacán where her mother lay buried under a wooden cross. Kim used to handle her moods with a mixture of compassion and firmness that bordered on savagery; now it was up to him. “What is it?” he said. “What’s the matter?”

  She was in the room now, a whittled-down woman in her thirties whose weight had migrated to her haunches. “The elephants,” she sobbed.

  “Elephants? What elephants?”

  “You know what they do to them, to the elephants?” She buried her face in her hands, then looked up at him out of eyes that were like two pools of blood. “Do you?” she demanded, her frame shaken with the winds of an unceasing emotional storm.

  He didn’t. His knee hurt. He had a headache. And his screenplay was shit.

  “They beat them. With big, with big sticks!” Her hands flailed at the air. “Like this! And this! And when they get too old to work, when they fall down in the jungle with their big trees in their noses, you know what they do then? They beat them more! They do! They do! And I know what I’m saying because I saw it on the, on the”—and here her voice failed her, till her final words were so soft and muted they might have been a prayer—“on the TV.”

  He was on his feet now, the screen behind him displaying seven neat rows of electronic cards, a subtle crepitating pain invading his knee, as if a rodent were trapped beneath the patella and gnawing to get out. “Listen,” he said, “it’s okay, don’t worry about it.” He wanted to take her in his arms and press her to him, but he couldn’t do that because she was the maid and he the employer, so he limped past her to the door and said, “Look, I’m going to the beach, okay? You finish up here and take the rest of the day off—and tomorrow, tomorrow too.”