T.C. Boyle Stories

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  The three of us came alive, hope springing eternal, et cetera, and we pressed him for details. Did he know Gloyd? Could he find him? Would Gloyd consent to it? Cal lifted the derby to smooth back his hair and then launched a windy narrative that jumped around like a palsied frog. Seems he’d been on a three-week drunk with “the Doc” in St. Louis’s skid row six months earlier. The Doc had come into some money—-a twenty-dollar gold piece—and the two of them had lain out in a field behind a distillery until they’d gone through it. “Fresh-corked bottles of the smoothest, fifty cent,” said Cal, his eyes gone the color of butter. When he’d asked Gloyd about the twenty, Gloyd told him it was a token of gratitude from the thirsty citizens of Manhattan, Kansas. They’d paid his train-fare and soaked him full of hooch to come out and rid the town of a plague.

  “Mrs. Mad?” I said.

  “You guessed it,” said Cal, a rasping snicker working its way up his throat. “All she got to do is see him. It’s liken to holdin a cross up front of a vampire.”

  Two hours later Cal and I were leaning back in the club car of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe line, trying out their sipping whiskey, savoring a cigar, heading east. For St. Louis.

  We were feeling pretty ripe by the time we stepped down at the St. Louis station. I was a bit disoriented, what with the railway yard alone half the size of Topeka proper, and what with the rush of men in derby hats and short coats and women with their backsides hefted up all out of proportion. Cal, on the other hand, was right at home. He stooped to pluck up a cigar butt and then swaggered through the crowd to where a man, all tatters and ribs, sat propped against a bench like a discarded parasol. The man sat on the pavement, his elbows splayed on the bench behind him, head hanging as if his neck had been broken. Cal plunked down beside him like a wornout drayhorse, oblivious to the suspicious-looking puddle the fellow was sitting in. The man’s eyelids drooped open as Cal produced a bottle and handed it to him. The man drank, held the bottle up for Cal. Cal drank, handed it back. They conferred, sniggering, for five or ten minutes, then Cal rose with a crack of knee and beckoned to me. “He’s in town, all right, the salty dog. Redfearns here seen him yestiddy.” I glanced down at Redfearns. He looked as if he hadn’t seen anything in a long while. “Is he sure?”

  “Down by the docks,” Cal croaked, already whistling for a hackney cab.

  We left our things—my things, Cal had nothing but the hat on his head and a pair of suspenders—at Potter’s Saloon, Beds Five Cents, corner of Wharf St. and Albermarle Ave. Potter sold us two bottles of local whiskey for research purposes and we strolled out. to explore the underworld of the docks and environs. Each time we passed a supine figure in the street Cal stopped to make an identity check, and if expedient, to revive it with a slug or two of Potter’s poison. Then followed a period of bottle passing and sniggering colloquy that twinned the Redfearns encounter as if they’d rehearsed it.

  After a while I found myself heaving down beside Cal and these reeking winesoaks, the sun building a campfire under my hat, trousers soiled. taking my turn when the bottle was passed. There I sat, Editor in Chief of The Topeka Sun, a freethinker and one of the intellectual lights of the town, on the blackened cobblestones of St. Louis’s most disreputable streets, my judgment and balance eroded, vision going, while lazy bluebottles floated between the sweat-beaded tip of my nose and the mounds of horseshit that lay round us like a series of primitive sculptures. All in the cause of humanity.

  As the day wore on I began to lose touch with my surroundings. I rose when Cal touched my arm, collapsed like a rump-shot dog when he stopped to interrogate another souse. We walked, talked and drank endlessly. I remember a warehouse full of straw boaters and whalebone corsets, a bowl of chili and a cup of black coffee in a walk-up kitchen, a succession of filthy quays, garbage bins, toothless faces and runny eyes. But no Gloyd. When the sun finally lurched into the hills, Cal took me by the elbow and steered us back to Potter’s.

  I was discouraged, disheartened, and thanks to Potter’s home brew, nearly disemboweled. After puking against the side of a carriage and down the front of my shirt, there was only one thing I wanted from life: a bed. Potter (the only thing I remember about him is that he had the most flaccid, pendulous jowls I’d ever seen on man or beast—they looked like nothing so much as buttocks grafted onto his face) led me up the stairs to the dormitory and gave me a gentle shove into the darkened room. “Number Nine,” he said. When my eyes became accustomed to the light I saw that the ranks of wooden bedsteads were painted with white numbers. I started down the row, reeling and reeking, fighting for balance, until I drew up to Number Nine. As I clutched at the bedpost with my left hand and fought to unbutton my shirt with my right, I became aware of a form beneath the horsehair blanket spread across my bunk. Someone was in my bed. This was too much. I began to shake him. “Hey, wake up there, pardner. That’s my bunk you got there. Hey.” It was then that I lost my footing and tumbled atop him.

  He came alive like a whorehouse fire, screeching and writhing. “Buggery!” he shrieked. “Murder and sodomy!” The other occupants of the dormitory, jolted awake, began spitting threats and epithets into the darkness. I tried to extract myself but the madman had my head in a vise-grip. His voice was high-pitched and spasmodic, a sow scenting the butcher’s block. “Pederasty!” he bawled.

  Suddenly the room blazed with light. It was Potter, wagging his inhuman jowls, a lantern in his hand. Cal stood at his elbow, squinting into the glare. I turned my head. The man who had hold of me was hoary as a goat, yellow-toothed, his eyes like the eggs of some aquatic insect. “Doc!” shouted Cal.

  The madman loosened his grip. “Cal?” he said.

  McGurk met us at the Topeka station and gave us the lay of the land. A group of them—women in black bonnets, teetotalers and Holy Rollers—were still picketing the office, and in the absence of The Sun had begun an alternative press in the basement of the Baptist church. McGurk showed me a broadside they’d printed. It described me as “a crapulous anarchist,” “a human viper,” and “a lackey of the immoral and illicit business enterprises which prey on the emotionally feeble for the purpose of fiduciary gain.” But a syntactical lashing wasn’t the worst of it. Mrs. Mad had bought off the Sheriff and she and her vigilantes were scouring the town in the name of Jesus Christ, sobriety and abstinence from tobacco, fraternity and Texicano food. She’d evacuated the Moose Lodge and Charlie Trumbull’s Tobacco Emporium, and then her disciples had boarded up the doors. And she’d closed down Pedro Paramo’s eatery because he served fresh-pounded tortillas and refried beans with an order of eggs. It was high time for a showdown.

  We threw open the massive oaken door at Doge’s Place, took the boards down from the new plate-glass windows, lit the oil lamps, and hired a one-legged banjo strummer from Arkansas to cook us up some knee-slapping music. Before Cal had finished tracing the big winged D for DOGE’S PLACE on the front window, the saloon was shoulder-deep in drinking men, including a healthy salting of bad characters. That banjo rang and thrilled through the streets like the sweet song of the Sirens. Somebody even fired off a big horse pistol once or twice.

  Our secret weapon sat at the bar. His fee was fifty dollars and all he could drink. Doge had donated a bottle of his finest, and I took up a collection for the rest, beginning with a greenback ten out of my own pocket. Gloyd was pretty far gone. He stared into his empty shot glass, mooing her name over and over like a heifer coming into heat. “Carry. Ohhh, Carry.”

  It took her half an hour. On the nose. Up the street she came, grim and foreboding, her jackals and henchwomen in tow. I lounged against the doorframe, picking my teeth. The banjo rang in my ears. I could see their heads thrown back as they shrieked out the lyrics of some spiritual or other, and I felt the tremor as their glossy black boots descended on the pavement in unison, tramp, tramp, tramp. Up the street, arms locked, teeth flashing, uvulas aquiver. “He is my refuge and my fortress!” they howled. Tramp, tramp, tramp. She led them up the porch,
shoved me aside, and bulled her way in.

  Suddenly the place fell silent. The banjo choked off, yahoos and yip-hays were swallowed, chatter died. She raised her arm and the chorus swept up the scale to finish on a raging high C, pious and combative. Then she went into her act, snorting and stamping round the room till her wire-rimmed spectacles began to mist up with emotion. “Awake, ye drunkards, and weep!” she roared. “Howl, all ye drinkers of wine, for strong drink shall be bitter to them that drink it.” She was towering, swollen, red-faced, awesome as a twister roaring up out of the southwest. We were stunned silent—Cal, Doge, McGurk, Pedro—all of us. But then, from the rear of the crowd, all the long way down the far end of the bar, came the low moan of ungulate distress. “Carrrrry, ohhhh baby, what have I done to you?”

  The look on her face at that moment could have constituted a criminal act in itself. She was hideous. There was a scuffle of chairs and feet as we cleared out of her way, every man for himself. Doge ducked down behind the bar, Cal and McGurk sought refuge back of an overturned table, the bad characters made themselves scarce, and suddenly there were just the two of them—Mrs. Mad and Gloyd—staring into each other’s eyes across the vacant expanse of the barroom. Gloyd got down off the bar stool and started toward her, his gait shuffling and unsteady, his arms spread in a vague empty embrace. Suddenly the hatchet appeared in her hand, legerdemain, her knuckles clenched white round the handle. She was breathing like a locomotive, he was calm as comatose. She started toward him.

  When they got within two yards of one another they stopped. Gloyd tottered, swaying on his feet, a lock of yellowed hair catching in his eye socket. “Carry,” he said, his voice rough and guttural. “Honey, peachblossom, come back to me, come back to your old Doc.” And then he winked at her.

  She flushed red, but then got hold of herself and came back at him with the Big Book: “At the last it biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder.”

  He looked deep into her eyes, randy as an old coyote. “I am like a drunken man, and like a man whom wine hath overcome.” He was grinning. He raised his arms to embrace her and suddenly she lashed out at him with the hatchet, the arc and the savage swish of it as it sliced the air, missing him by a clean two feet or more. “Carry,” he said, his voice sad and admonishing. “Let bygones be bygones, honey, and come on back to your old Doc.” Her arm fell, the hatchet dropped to the floor. She hung her head. And then, just a whisper at first, he began crooning in a rusty old voice, soft and sad, quavering like a broken heart:

  The huntsman he can’t hunt the fox,

  Nor so loudly to blow his horn,

  And the tinker he can’t mend kettle nor pot,

  Without a little barleycorn.

  When he finished we stood there silent—the women in black, the bad characters, Doge, Cal, McGurk and me—as though we’d just watched the big brocaded curtain fall across the stage of Tyler’s Playhouse in Kansas City. And then suddenly she fell to her knees sobbing—wailing and clucking in the back of her throat till I couldn’t tell if it was laughing or crying. Her sobs, like her fulminations, were thunderous—they filled the room, shook the rafters. I began to feel embarrassed. But the Doc, he just stood over her, hands on his hips, grinning, until one of the women—it was Lucy McGurk—helped her from the room.

  The faces of her retinue were pale as death against their black bonnets and choirboy collars. No longer the core of a moral cyclone, they were just towns-women, teetotalers and pansies. We jeered like the bad characters we were, and they turned tail and ran.

  A month later a wagon rumbled up Warsaw Street from the station with Doge’s new mahogany bar counter in back. McGurk and I took the afternoon off to sit in the cool dusk of Doge’s Place and watch Doge and Cal nail it down and put the first coat of wax on it. The new Vivian DeLorbe, a bit rippled, but right in the right spots, hung proudly, and a sort of mosaic mirror—made up of pieces salvaged from the original and set in plaster—cast its submarine reflections round the room. We had a couple of whiskeys, and then Doge mentioned he’d heard Mrs. Mad was back at it again, parching all the good citizens down in Wichita. Cal and I laughed, but poor John didn’t take it so well, seeing that Lucy had left him to go off with her and join the movement.

  Cal shook his head. “These women,” he said. “There’s no stoppin ‘em. Next thing you know they’ll be wantin the vote.”

  (1977)

  THE HAT

  They sent a hit squad after the bear. Three guys in white parkas with National Forestry Service patches on the shoulders. It was late Friday afternoon, about a week before Christmas, the snow was coming down so fast it seemed as if the sky and earth were glued together, and Jill had just opened up the lodge for drinks and dinner when they stamped in through the door. The tall one—he ordered shots of Jim Beam and beers for all of them—could have been a bear himself, hunched under the weight of his shoulders in the big quilted parka, his face lost in a bristle of black beard, something feral and challenging in the clash of his blue eyes. “Hello, pretty lady,” he said, looking Jill full in the face as he swung a leg over the barstool and pressed his forearms to the gleaming copper rail. “I hear you got a bear problem.”

  I was sitting in the shadows at the end of the bar, nursing a beer and watching the snow. Jill hadn’t turned up the lights yet and I was glad—the place had a soothing underwater look to it, snow like a sheet stretched tight over the window, the fire in the corner gentle as a backrub. I was alive and moving—lighting a cigarette, lifting the glass to my lips—but I felt so peaceful I could have been dozing.

  “That’s right,” Jill said, still flushing from the “pretty lady” remark. Two weeks earlier, in bed, she’d told me she hadn’t felt pretty in years. What are you talking about? I’d said. She dropped her lower lip and looked away. I gained twenty pounds, she said. I reached out to touch her, smiling, as if to say twenty pounds—what’s twenty pounds? Little Ball of Suet, I said, referring to one of the Maupassant stories in the book she’d given me. It’s not funny, she said, but then she’d rolled over and touched me back.

  “Name’s Boo,” the big man said, pausing to throw back his bourbon and take a sip of beer. “This is Scott,” nodding at the guy on his left, also in beard and watchcap, “and Josh.” Josh, who couldn’t have been more than nineteen, appeared on his right like a jack-in-the-box. Boo unzipped the parka to expose a thermal shirt the color of dried blood.

  “Is this all together?” Jill asked.

  Boo nodded, and I noticed the scar along the ridge of his cheekbone, thinking of churchkey openers, paring knives, the long hooked ivory claws of bears. Then he turned to me. “What you drinking, friend?”

  I’d begun to hear sounds from the kitchen—the faint kiss of cup and saucer, the rattle of cutlery—and my stomach suddenly dropped like an elevator out of control. I hadn’t eaten all day. It was the middle of the month, I’d read all the paperbacks in the house, listened to all the records, and I was waiting for my check to come. There was no mail service up here of course—the road was closed half the time in winter anyway—but Marshall, the lodgeowner and unofficial kingpin of the community, had gone down the mountain to lay in provisions against the holiday onslaught of tourists, ski-mobilers and the like, and he’d promised to pick it up for me. If it was there. If it was, and he made it back through the storm, I was going to have three or four shots of Wild Turkey, then check out the family dinner and sip coffee and Kahlua till Jill got off work. “Beer,” I said.

  “Would you get this man a beer, pretty lady?” said Boo in his backwoods basso, and when she’d opened me one and come back for his money, he started in on the bear. Had she seen him? How much damage had he done? What about his tracks—anything unusual? His scat? He was reddish in color, right? Almost cinnamon? And with one folded ear?

  She’d seen him. But not when he’d battered his way into the back storeroom, punctured a case of twelve-and-a-half-ounce cans of tuna, lapped up a couple of gallons of mountain red burgundy and shards
of glass, and left a bloody trail that wound off through the ponderosa pines like a pink ribbon. Not then. No, she’d seen him under more intimate circumstances—in her own bedroom, in fact. She’d been asleep in the rear bedroom with her eight-year-old son, Adrian (they slept in the same room to conserve heat, shutting down the thermostat and tossing a handful of coal into the stove in the corner), when suddenly the back window went to pieces. The air came in at them like a spearthrust, there was the dull booming thump of the bear’s big body against the outer wall, and an explosion of bottles, cans, and whatnot as he tore into the garbage on the back porch. She and Adrian had jolted awake in time to see the bear’s puzzled shaggy face appear in the empty windowframe, and then they were up like Goldilocks and out the front door, where they locked themselves in the car. They came to me in their pajamas, trembling like refugees. By the time I got there with my Weatherby, the bear was gone.

  “I’ve seen him,” Jill said. “He broke the damn window out of my back bedroom and now I’ve got it all boarded up.” Josh, the younger guy, seemed to find this funny, and he began a low snickering suck and blow of air like an old dog with something caught in his throat.

  “Hell,” Jill said, lighting up, centerstage, “I was in my nightie and barefoot too and I didn’t hesitate a second—zoom, I grabbed my son by the hand and out the door we went.”

  “Your nightie, huh?” Boo said, a big appreciative grin transforming his face so that for a minute, in the dim light, he could have been a leering, hairy-hocked satyr come in from the cold.

  “Maybe it wasn’t just the leftovers he wanted,” I offered, and everyone cracked up. Just then Marshall stepped through the door, arms laden, stamping the snow from his boots. I got up to help him, and when he began fumbling in his breast pocket, I felt a surge of relief: he’d remembered my check. I was on my way out the door to help with the supplies when I heard Boo’s rumbling bass like distant thunder: “Don’t you worry, pretty lady,” he was saying, “we’ll get him.”