T.C. Boyle Stories

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  All right, he thought, his pulse racing, all right. And then he had a boot in his hand and he was hopping on one leg. Then the other boot. A confusion of splashes caromed around him, water flew, the wind cut across the dock. He tore off his jacket, sweater, T-shirt, dropped his faded jeans, and stood there in his briefs, scanning the black rollicking water. There she was, her head bobbing gently, arms flowing across her breast in an easy tread.

  He never hesitated. His feet pounded against the rough planks of the dock, the wind caught his hair, and he was up and out over the churning water, hanging suspended for the briefest, maddest, most lucid instant of his life, and then he was in.

  Funny. It was warm as a bath.

  (1988)

  BACK IN THE EOCENE

  Abscissa, ordinate, isosceles, Carboniferous, Mesozoic, holothurian: the terms come to him in a rush of disinterred syllables, a forgotten language conjured by the sudden sharp smell of chalk dust and blackboards. It happens every time. All he has to do is glance at the bicycle rack out front or the flag snapping crisply atop the gleaming aluminum pole, and the memories begin to wash over him, a typhoon of faces and places and names, Ilona Sharrow and Richie Davidson, Manifest Destiny, Heddy Grieves, the Sea of Tranquillity and the three longest rivers in Russia. He takes his daughter’s hand and shuffles toward the glowing auditorium, already choked up.

  Inside, it’s worse. There, under the pale yellow gaze of the overhead lights, recognition cuts at him like a knife. It’s invested in the feel of the hard steel frames and cushionless planks of the seats, in the crackling PA system and the sad array of frosted cupcakes and chocolate-chip cookies presided over by a puffy matron from the PTA. And the smells—Pine Sol, floor wax, festering underarms and erupting feet, a faint lingering whiff of meat loaf and wax beans. Wax beans: he hasn’t had a wax bean, hasn’t inserted a wax bean in his mouth, in what—twenty years? The thought overwhelms him and he stands there awkwardly a moment, just inside the door, and then there’s a tug at his hand and his daughter slips away, flitting through the crowd like a bird to chase after her friends. He finds a seat in back.

  The big stark institutional clock shows five minutes of eight. Settling into the unforgiving grip of the chair, he concentrates on the faces of his fellow parents, vaguely familiar from previous incarnations, as they trudge up and down the aisles like automatons. Voices buzz round him in an expectant drone. High heels click on the linoleum. Chairs scrape. He’s dreaming a scene from another auditorium an ice age ago, detention hall, the soporific text, shouts from beyond the windows and a sharp sweet taste of spring on the air, when Officer Rudman steps up to the microphone.

  A hush falls over the auditorium, the gale of chatter dropping off to a breeze, a stir in the rafters, nothing. His daughter, ten years old and beautiful, her feet too big and her shoulders slumped, strides up the aisle and drops into the chair beside him as if her legs have been shot out from under her. “Dad,” she whispers, “that’s Officer Rudman.”

  He nods. Who else would it be, up there in his spit and polish, his close-cropped hair and custom-fit uniform? Who else, with his sunny smile and weight lifter’s torso? Who else but Officer Rudman, coordinator of the school’s antidrug program and heartthrob of all the fifth-grade girls?

  A woman with frosted hair and remodeled hips ducks in late and settles noiselessly into the chair in front of him. “Good evening,” Officer Rudman says, “I’m Officer Rudman,” Someone coughs. Feedback hisses through the speakers.

  In the next moment they’re rising clumsily in a cacophony of rustling, stamping and nose blowing, as Officer Rudman leads them in the Pledge of Allegiance. Hands over hearts, a murmur of half-remembered words. He’s conscious of his daughter’s voice beside him, and of his own, and he shifts his eyes to steal a glimpse of her. Her face is serene, shining, hopeful, a recapitulation and refinement of her mother’s, and suddenly it’s too much for him and he has to look down at his feet: “… with liberty and-justice for all.” More coughing. The seats creak. They sit.

  Officer Rudman gives the crowd a good long look, and then he begins. “Drugs are dangerous,” he says, “we all know that,” and he pauses while the principal, a thick-ankled woman with feathered hair and a dogged expression, translates in her halting Spanish: “Las drogas son peligrosas.” The man sits there in back, his daughter at his side, tasting wax beans, rushing with weltschmerz and nostalgia.

  Eocene: designating or of the earliest epoch of the Tertiary Period in the Cenozoic Era, during which mammals became the dominant animals.

  Je romps; tu romps; il rompe; nous rompons; vous rompez; ils rompent.

  They didn’t have drugs when he was in elementary school, didn’t have crack and crank, didn’t have ice and heroin and AIDS to go with it. Not in elementary school. Not in the fifties. They didn’t even have pot.

  Mary Jane, that’s what they called it in the high school health films, but no one ever called it that. Not on this planet, anyway. It was pot, pure and simple, and he smoked it, like anyone else. He’s remembering his first joint, age seventeen, a walkup on Broome Street, holes in the walls, bottles, rats, padlocks on the doors, one puff and you’re hooked, when Officer Rudman beckons a skinny dark-haired kid to the microphone. Big adult hands choke the neck of the stand and the mike drops a foot. Stretching till his ankles rise up out of his high-tops, the kid clutches at the microphone and recites his pledge to stay off drugs in a piping timbreless voice. “My name is Steven Taylor and I have good feelings of self-esteem about myself,” he says, his superamplified breathing whistling through the interstices, “and I pledge never to take drugs or to put anything bad in my body. If somebody asks me if I want drugs I will just say no, turn my back, change the subject, walk away or just say no.”

  Brain-washing, that’s what Linda called it when he phoned to break their date for tonight. Easy for her to say, but then she didn’t have a daughter, didn’t know, couldn’t imagine what it was like to feel the net expand beneath you, high out over that chasm of crashing rock. What good did it do you? she said. Or me? She had a point. Hash, kif, LSD, cocaine, heroin. He’d heard all the warnings, watched all the movies, but how could you take anyone’s word for it? Was it possible, even? He’d sat through driver’s ed, sobering statistics, scare films and all, and then taken his mother’s Ford out on the highway and burned the tires off it. Scotch, gin, whiskey, Boone’s Farm, Night Train, Colt 45, Seconal, Tuinal, Quaalude. He’d heard all the warnings, yes, but when the time came he stuck the needle in his arm and drew back the plunger to watch the clear solution flush with his own smoldering blood. You remember to take your vitamins today?

  “My name is Lucy Fadel and I pledge never to abuse drugs, alcohol or tobacco because I like myself and the world and my school and I can get high from just life.”

  “My name is Roberto Campos and I don’t want to die from drugs. Peer pressure is what makes kids use drugs and I will just say no, I will walk away and I will change the subject.”

  “Voy a decir no—”

  Officer Rudman adjusts the microphone, clasps his hands in front of him. The parents lean forward. He holds their eyes. “You’ve all just heard the fifth graders’ pledges,” he says, “and these kids mean it. I’m proud of them. Let’s have a big hand for these kids.”

  And there it is, thunderous, all those parents in their suits and sportcoats and skirts, wearing sober, earnest, angry looks, pounding their hands together in relief, as if that could do it, as if the force of their acclamation could drive the gangs from the streets or nullify that infinitely seductive question to which “No” is never the answer. He claps along with them, not daring to glance down at his daughter, picturing the first boy, the skinny dark one, up against the wall with the handcuffs on him, dead in the street, wasting away in some charity ward. And the girl, mother of four, twice divorced, strung out on martinis and diet pills and wielding the Jeep Cherokee like a weapon. That’s what it came down to: that’s what the warnings meant. Agon, agape, Ulyss
es S. Grant, parthenogenesis, the Monitor and the Merrimack, yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look. His daughter takes his hand. “Now there’s a movie,” she whispers.

  What happened to finger painting, hearts for Valentine’s Day and bunnies for Easter? Fifth grade, for Christ’s sake. Where was Treasure Island, Little Women, Lassie, Come Home? What had happened? Who was responsible? Where did it go wrong?

  He’s on the verge of raising his hand and demanding an answer of Officer Rudman, the nostalgia gone sour in his throat now, but the lights dim and the film begins. A flicker of movement on the screen, bars, a jail cell. He watches a junkie writhe and scream, a demonic sunken-eyed man beating his head against a wall, someone, somewhere, lights flashing, police, handcuffs, more screams. Smoke a joint and you’re hooked: how they’d laughed over that one, he and Tony Gaetti, and laughed again to realize it was true, cooking the dope in a bottle cap, stealing disposable syringes, getting off in the rest room on the train and feeling they’d snowed the world. Things were different then. That was a long time ago.

  Cro-Magnon, Neanderthal, Homo erectus: his daughter’s hand is crushing him, prim and cool, lying across his palm like a demolished building, a cement truck, glacial moraine. Up on the screen, the junkies are gone, replaced by a sunny schoolyard and a clone of Officer Rudman, statistics now, grim but hopeful. Inspiring music, smiling faces, kids who Just Say No.

  When it’s over, he feels dazed, the lights flashing back on to transfix him like some animal startled along a darkened highway. All he wants is to be out of here, no more questions, no more tricks of memory, no more Officer Rudman or the vapid stares of his fellow parents. “Honey,” he whispers, bringing his face down close to his daughter’s, “we’ve got to go.” Officer Rudman’s chin is cocked back, his arms folded across his chest. “Any questions?” he asks.

  “But Dad, the cake sale.”

  The cake sale.

  “We’ll have to miss it this time,” he whispers, and suddenly he’s on his feet, slumping his shoulders in the way people do when they duck out of meetings early or come late to the concert or theater, a gesture of submission and apology. His daughter hangs back—she wants to stay, wants cake, wants to see her friends—but he tugs at her hand and then they’re fighting their way through the gauntlet of concerned parents at the door and out into the night. “Dad!” she cries, tugging back at him, and only then does he realize he’s hurting her, clutching her hand like a lifeline in a swirl of darkening waters.

  “I mean, have a cow, why don’t you?” she says, and he drops her hand.

  “Sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”

  The flag is motionless, hanging limp now against the pole. He gazes up at the stars fixed in their tracks, cold and distant, and then the gravel crunches underfoot and they’re in the parking lot. “I just wanted a piece of cake,” his daughter says.

  In the car, on the way home to her mother’s house, she stares moodily out the window to let him feel the weight of her disappointment, but she can’t sustain it. Before long she’s chattering away about Officer Rudman and Officer Torres, who sometimes helps with the program, telling him how nice they are and how corrupt the world is. “We have gangs here,” she says, “did you know that? Right here in our neighborhood.”

  He gazes out on half-million-dollar homes. Stone and stucco, mailboxes out front, basketball hoops over garage doors. The streets are deserted. He sees no gangs. “Here?”

  “Uh-huh. Chrissie Mueller saw two guys in Raiders hats at the 7-Eleven the other day—”

  “Maybe they were buying Ho-Ho’s, maybe they just wanted a piece of cake.”

  “Come on, Dad,” she says, but her tone tells him all is forgiven.

  Her mother’s house is lighted like an arena, porch light, security lights, even the windows poking bright gleaming holes in the fabric of the night. He leans over to kiss his daughter good night, the car vibrating beneath him.

  “Dad?”

  “Yes?”

  “I just wanted to, you know, ask you: did you ever use drugs? Or Mom?”

  The question catches him by surprise. He looks beyond her, looks at that glowing bright house a moment, curtains open wide, the wash of light on the lawn. Abstersion, epopt, Eleusinian, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.

  “No,” he says finally. “No.”

  (1990)

  SITTING ON TOP OF THE WORLD

  People would ask her what it was like. She’d watch them from her tower as they weaved along the trail in their baseball caps and day packs, their shorts, hiking boots and sneakers. The brave ones would mount the hundred and fifty wooden steps hammered into the face of the mountain to stand at the high-flown railing of the little glass-walled shack she called home for seven months a year. Sweating, sucking at canteens and bota bags, heaving for breath in the undernourished air, they would ask her what it was like. “Beautiful,” she would say. “Peaceful.”

  But that didn’t begin to express it. It was like floating untethered, drifting with the clouds, like being cupped in the hands of God. Nine thousand feet up, she could see the distant hazy rim of the world, she could see Mount Whitney rising up above the crenellations of the Sierra, she could see stars that haven’t been discovered yet. In the morning, she was the first to watch the sun emerge from the hills to the east, and in the evening, when it was dark beneath her, the valleys and ridges gripped by the insinuating fingers of the night, she was the last to see it set. There was the wind in the trees, the murmur of the infinite needles soughing in the uncountable branches of the pines, sequoias and cedars that stretched out below her like a carpet. There was daybreak. There was the stillness of 3:00 A.M. She couldn’t explain it. She was sitting on top of the world.

  Don’t you get lonely up here? they’d ask. Don’t you get a little stir-crazy?

  And how to explain that? Yes, she did, of course she did, but it didn’t matter. Todd was up here with her in the summer, one week on, one week off, and then the question was meaningless. But in September he went back to the valley, to his father, to school, and the world began to drag round its tired old axis. The hikers stopped coming then too. At the height of summer, on a weekend, she’d see as many as thirty or forty in the course of a day, but now, with the fall coming on, they left her to herself—sometimes she’d go for days without seeing a soul. But that was the point, wasn’t it?

  She was making breakfast—a real breakfast for a change, ham and eggs from the propane refrigerator, fresh-dripped coffee and toast—when she spotted him working his way along one of the switchbacks below. She was immediately annoyed. It wasn’t even seven yet and the sign at the trailhead quite plainly stated that visitors were welcome at the lookout between the hours of ten and five only. What was wrong with this guy—did he think he was exempt or something? She calmed herself: maybe he was only crossing the trail. Deer season had opened—she’d been hearing the distant muted pop of gunfire all week—and maybe he was only a hunter tracking a deer.

  No such luck. When she glanced down again, flipping her eggs, peering across the face of the granite peak and the steep snaking trail that clung to it, she saw that he was coming up to the tower. Damn, she thought, and then the kettle began to hoot and her stomach clenched. Breakfast was ruined. Now there’d be some stranger gawking over her shoulder and making the usual banal comments as she ate. To them it might have been like Disneyland or something up here, but this was her home, she lived here. How would they like it if she showed up on their doorstep at seven o’clock in the morning?

  She was eating, her back to the glass door, hoping he’d go away, slip over the lip of the precipice and disappear, vanish in a puff of smoke, when she felt his footfall on the trembling catwalk that ran round the outside of the tower. Still, she didn’t turn or look up. She was reading—she went through a truckload of books in the course of a season—and she never lifted her eyes from the page. He could gawk round the catwalk, peer through the telescope and hustle himself back on down the steps
for all she cared. She wasn’t a tour guide. Her job was to watch for smoke, twenty-four hours a day, and to be cordial—if she was in the mood and had the time—to the hikers who made the sweaty panting trek in from the trailhead to join her for a brief moment atop the world. There was no law that said she had to let them in the shack or show them the radio and her plotting equipment and deliver the standard lecture on how it all worked. Especially at seven in the morning. To hell with him, she thought, and she forked up egg and tried to concentrate on her book.

  The problem was, she’d trained herself to look up from what she was doing and scan the horizon every thirty seconds or so, day or night, except when she was asleep, and it had become a reflex. She glanced up, and there he was. It gave her a shock. He’d gone round the catwalk to the far side and he was standing right in front of her, grinning and holding something up to the window. Flowers, wildflowers, she registered that, but then his face came into focus and she felt something go slack in her: she knew him. He’d been here before.

  “Lainie,” he said, tapping the glass and brandishing the flowers, “I brought you something.”

  Her name. He knew her name.

  She tried a smile and her face froze around it. The book on the table before her upset the saltshaker and flipped itself shut with a tiny expiring hiss. Should she thank him? Should she get up and latch the door? Should she put out an emergency call on the radio and snatch up the kitchen knife?

  “Sorry to disturb you over breakfast—I didn’t know the time,” he said, and something happened to his grin, though his eyes—a hard metallic blue—held on to hers like pincers. He raised his voice to penetrate the glass: “I’ve been camping down on Long Meadow Creek and when I crossed the trail this morning I just thought you might be lonely and I’d surprise you”—he hesitated—“I mean, with some flowers.”