T.C. Boyle Stories

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  In the morning, search parties are organized. Bloodhounds, state police, Boy Scout troops, helicopters, flares. The Governor mobilizes the National Guard. The Vice President flies in. The voice of the Inventor’s mother (a wizened old woman in a babushka) is boomed through enormous loudspeakers. Woodsmen begin felling trees, burning off ground cover. The Inventor has vanished.

  Forty days later, Una, who alone has refused to give up the search, is struggling down a slick and rock-strewn slope. Again, rain falls. Again, she wears the overcoat. Again, she accommodates the reptile (the head a comfort in her hand). At the base of the hill, a swamp. Her boots slosh through the clots of algae, heels tug against the suck of the mud. She looks up to flail at a spider web and there he is, squatting naked in a ring of skunk cabbage, his back dancing with mosquito and fly. The glasses are gone, the black eyes crazed and bloodshot. “Here,” she says, and holds out her hand. He looks up at her, confused, then slowly lifts his hand to hers, loses his fingers in the triangular black mouth of the snake.

  From The Life:

  The now infamous “Bear Mountain Sojourn” marked the decline of the Inventor’s practical humanitarian phase. He called a press conference, announced his intention of permanently retiring to his home in suburban Westchester for the purpose of undertaking his great work, a work which wbuld “spiritually edify the race of men as [his] previous work had materially edified them.” For seven years nothing was heard of him. Of course there were the usual garbage sifters and mail steamers, the reports from the Inventor’s few privileged friends, the speculations of the press. And from time to time paparazzi came up with photographs of the Great Man: brooding on the bedroom fire escape, rooting in the turf with his son, sending up frozen slashes of foam (his slick arm poised) while swimming laps in the pool. Still, he was all but lost to the public eye.

  It was during the Seven Years of Silence that a nefarious innovation with enormous market potential appeared briefly in this country and in two Western European nations: a colorless, tasteless liquid, which, when combined with food or drink, reduced the ingestor to a heap of desiccated flakes. When the flakes were moistened, the desiccatee would regain his/her normal structure, totally free of side effects. Abuses of the product were legion.* And though the FDA banned its sale minutes after it was first made available commercially, it was readily obtainable on the black market and even today continues suspect in any number of unsolved kidnappings and missing-persons cases. Rumor attributed its invention to the Great Man. Schlaver read a statement denying his associate’s participation in the development of the chemical and asserting how deeply the Inventor deplored the discovery of a product so potentially pernicious. But rumor is not easily squelched, and the whole affair left a bad taste.

  He is dozing in an armchair, three Furballs purring in his lap. In the hall, the sound of his son’s hoofs like a drumbeat on the linoleum. His eyes flutter open, caught in the rift between consciousness and the deeps. He stands. Gropes for his glasses. Una lies asleep on the davenport, the snake coiled round her like a meandering stream. He finds the tail. It stiffens under his fingers, then goes limp. He heaves, fireman and firehose: the coils spin to the carpet. “What’s up?” Una murmurs. He is unbuttoning her smock. The python lies on the floor, dead weight, quietly digesting its bimonthly rabbit. The Inventor climbs atop her, arching over her stiff as a mounted butterfly. “I had a dream,” he says.

  From The Life:

  It is now known that Una Moss was not the mother of the Inventor’s peculiarly deformed son. In fact, as Sissler and Teebe have shown in The Brewing Storm, their perceptive study of his last years, the Inventor and Miss Moss were never sexually intimate. The reason is simple: the Great Man was impotent.

  The son remains a problem.

  The Inventor stands in the rain, surrounded by marble monuments: angels, christs, bleeding hearts. Una and the boy at his side. Their overcoats. Bowed heads. The smell of mold, the open hole. The man in black reading from a book.

  It is Schlaver’s funeral. Cardiac arrest. The Inventor lingers after the others have gone, the rain slanting down, and watches the attendants as they slap the muddy earth on the coffin, scrape it into the corners, tamp the reddish mound that rises above the grass like bread in a pan. He stands there for a long while, the eyes black, elbow tucked, fist under chin. Suddenly he turns and hurries back to the limousine. Una and the boy are there, the windows fogged. He snaps open his notebook and begins scrawling equations across the page.

  Three days later Schlaver is leaning back in an armchair at the Westchester house, surrounded by reporters, lights, TV cameras. He is in his bathrobe, looking much as he did before death. The medical world is astounded. The press calls it a hoax. The Inventor stands in the shadows, grinning.

  From The Life:

  There were threatening phone calls. Windows were broken. The house egged. The boy came home from school, blood on the seat of his pants. His tail had been clipped. In the shower room. It had been a pink tail, almost translucent, curled in three tight coils like an angleworm, or the breath of a serpent.

  The interviewer clears his throat, blows his nose in a checked handkerchief, fiddles with the controls of the portable tape recorder. Una sits cross-legged on the carpet, barefoot, a ring on each toe. She is lining up dominoes on the coffee table, standing them on end in a winding file. The Inventor is in his armchair; he is wearing a flannel shirt, sipping sherry. “And which of your myriad inventions,” says the interviewer, “gives you the greatest personal satisfaction?” The Inventor looks down at the carpet, his fingers massaging the Furball in his lap. The wheels of the recorder whir, faint as the whine of a mosquito. “Those to come,” he says. “Those that exist ab ovo, that represent possibility, moments of chemical reaction, epiphanies great and small. You must see of course that invention makes metaphor a reality, fixes—” but then he is interrupted by the clack of tumbling dominoes, regular as a second hand, beating like a train rushing over a bad spot in the rail. Una looks up, smiling, serene, her lips fat as things stung. The final domino totters. “Yes,” says the Inventor. “Where were we?”

  A Jewish star has been burned on his lawn. The Inventor is puzzled. He is not Jewish.

  From The Life:

  The great work which had brooded so long on the Great Man’s horizon came like Apocalypse. The world’s ears stung. The work was met with cries of outrage, despair, resentment. Never, said his critics, have the hopes, the illusions, the dignity of mankind been so deflated in a single callous swipe. Fact, brutal undeniable naked fact, ate like a canker at all our hearts, they said. Who will reclothe our illusions? they asked. His friends hung their heads and feebly praised his candor. Others persisted in calling it a canard. It was no canard. How he had done it no one could begin to imagine. But there were the formulas for the experts to wonder at, and there, for all the world to see, were the slides. The color slides of God dead.

  1) God, his great white beard, gauzy dressing gown, one arm frozen at half-mast. Supine. His mouth agape. Nebular backdrop.

  2) A top view. God stretching below the lens like a colossus, purple mountains’ majesty, from sea to shining sea. Cloud foaming over his brow, hissing up from beneath his arms, legs, crotch.

  3) The closeup. Eye sockets black, nostrils collapsed, the stained hairs of the beard, lips gone, naked hideous teeth.

  Night. Insects scraping their hind legs together, things stirring in the grass. Then the first cries, the flare of the torches. The earthquaking roar of the crowd. His neighbors are in the street, garden rakes and edgers poking over their massed heads, Yorkies and Schnauzers yanking them forward at the ends of leashes. Linked arm in arm, chanting “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” they come on, wrenching the great iron gates from their hinges, crushing through the beds of peonies, the banks of shrubbery, their faces savage and misaligned in the glare of the torches. Then the crash of the windows like a fever, the jeers of the women and children, husky brays of the men. And then the flames licking a
t the redwood planking, fluttering through the windows to chew at the drapes and carpets. The flash of Molotovs, the thunder of the little red cans of gasoline from a hundred lawn mowers. “Yaaaar!” howls the canaille at the first concussion. “Yaaaar!”

  He is there. In the upper window. Una, Schlaver and the boy struggling to reach him from the fire escape. The flames, licking up twenty, thirty feet, framing the window like jagged teeth. The granite forehead, wisp of a beard, black eyes swimming behind the bottle lenses. Suddenly a cloud of smoke, dark as burning rubber, swells up and obscures the window. The crowd roars. When the smoke passes, the window is empty. Una’s scream. Then the groan of the beams, the house collapsing in on itself with a rush of air, the neon cinders shooting high against the black and the stars, like the tails of a thousand Chinese rockets.

  (1976)

  * The’ oaks and willows shadowing the home of Helmut Holtz, his first tutor, have attained heights in excess of three hundred feet, and continue to grow at an annual rate of nine feet, three and three quarters inches.

  † In Finland, for example, a 10.3 annual per capita consumption of the Furballs (pat. trade name) is indicated. At Reykjavik they are sold on the street corner. An American Porno Queen posed nude in a sea of Furballs for a still-controversial spread in a men’s publication. And the Soviet Premier has forgone bedclothes for them. His explanation: “Can you make to purr the electric blanket?”

  * A Cincinnati man, J. Leonard Whist, was prosecuted for possession of a controlled substance, intent to do great bodily harm, and bigamy, when police found that he had married four times, desiccated each of his wives, and reconstituted them as the whim took him.

  THE EXTINCTION TALES

  I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

  —T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

  He was in his early fifties, between jobs, his wife dead ten years. When he saw the position advertised in the Wellington paper it struck him as highly romantic, and he was immediately attracted to it.

  LIGHTHOUSEKEEPER. Stephen Island. References.

  Inquire T. H. Penn, Maritime Authority.

  He took it. Sold his furniture, paid the last of the rent, filled two duffel bags with socks and sweaters and his bird-watcher’s guide, and hired a cart. Just as he was leaving, a neighbor approached him with something in her arms: pointed ears, yellow eyes. Take it, she said. For company. He slipped the kitten into the breast of his pea coat, waved, and started off down the road.

  Stephen Island is an eruption of sparsely wooden rock seventeen miles northwest of Wellington. It is uninhabited. At night the constellations wheel over its quarter-mile radius like mythical beasts.

  The man was to be relieved for two weeks every six months. He planted a garden, read, fished, smoked by the sea. The cat grew to adolescence. One afternoon it came to him with a peculiar bird clenched in its teeth. The man took the bird away, puzzled over it, and finally sent it to the national museum at Wellington for identification. Three weeks later a reply came. He had discovered a new species: the Stephen Island wren. In the interim the cat had brought him fourteen more specimens of the odd little buff and white bird. The man never saw one of the birds alive. After a while the cat stopped bringing them.

  In 1945, when the Russians liberated Auschwitz, they found 129 ovens in the crematorium. The ovens were six feet long, two feet high, one and a half feet wide.

  The Union Pacific Railroad had connected New York, Chicago and San Francisco, Ulysses S. Grant was stamping about the White House in hightop boots, Jay Gould was buying up gold and Jared Pink was opening a butcher shop in downtown Chicago.

  PINK’S POULTRY, BEEF AND GAME

  The town was booming. Barouches and cabriolets at every corner, men in beavers and frock coats lining the steps of the private clubs, women in bustles, bonnets and flounces giving teas and taking boxes at the theater. Thirty-room mansions, friezes, spires, gargoyles, the opera house, the exchange, shops, saloons, tenements. In the hardpan streets men and boys trailed back from the factories, stockyards, docks, their faces mapped in sweat and soot and the blood of animals.

  All of them ate meat. Pink provided it. Longhorns from Texas, buffalo from the plains, deer, turkey, pheasant and pigeon from Michigan and Illinois. They stormed his shop, the bell over the door rushing and trilling as they bought up everything he could offer them, right down to the scraps in the brine barrels. Each day he sold out his stock and in the morning found himself at the mercy of his suppliers. A pre-dawn trip to the slaughterhouse for great swinging sides of beef, livers and tripe, blood for pudding, intestine for sausage. And then twice a week to meet the Michigan Line and long low boxcars strung with dressed deer and piled deep with pigeons stinking of death and excrement. Unplucked, their feathers a nightmare, they filled the cars four feet deep and he would bring a boy along to shovel them into his wagon. They sold like a dream.

  When his supplier tripled the price per bird Pink sent his brother Seth up to the nesting grounds near Petoskey, Michigan. As Seth’s train approached Petoskey the sky began to darken. He checked his pocket watch: it was three in the afternoon. He leaned over the man beside him to look out the window. The sky was choked with birds, their mass blotting the sun, the drone of their wings and dry rattling feathers audible over the chuff of the engine. Seth whistled. Are those—? he said. Yep, said the man. Passenger pigeons.

  Seth wired his brother from the Petoskey station. Two days later he and Jared were stalking the nesting ground with a pair of Smith & Wesson shotguns and a burlap sack. They were not alone. The grove was thronged with hunters, hundreds of them, drinking, shooting, springing traps and tossing nets. Retrievers barked, shotguns boomed. At the far edge of the field women sat beneath parasols with picnic lunches.

  Jared stopped to watch an old man assail the crown of a big-boled chestnut with repeated blasts from a brace of shotguns. A grim old woman stood at the man’s elbow, reloading, while two teenagers scrambled over the lower branches of the tree, dropping nestlings to the ground. Another man, surrounded by dirt-faced children, ignited a stick of dynamite and pitched it into a tree thick with roosting birds. A breeze ruffled the leaves as the spitting cylinder twisted through them, pigeons cooing and clucking in the shadows—then there was a flash, and a concussion that thundered over the popping of shotguns from various corners of the field. Heads turned. The smoke blew off in a clot. Feathers, twigs, bits of leaf and a fine red mist began to settle. The children were already beneath the tree, on their hands and knees, snatching up the pigeons and squab as they fell to earth like ripe fruit.

  Overhead the sky was stormy with displaced birds. Jared fired one barrel, then the other. Five birds slapped down, two of them stunned and hopping. He rushed them, flailing with the stock of his gun until they lay still. He heard Seth fire behind him. The flock was the sky, shrieking and reeling, panicked, the chalky white excrement like a snowstorm. Jared’s hair and shoulders were thick with it, white spots flecked his face. He was reloading. There’s got to be a better way, he said.

  Three weeks later he and his brother returned to Petoskey. They rode out to the nesting grounds in a horse-drawn wagon, towing an old Civil War cannon behind them. In the bed of the wagon lay a weighted hemp net, one hundred feet square, and a pair of cudgels. Strips of cotton broadcloth had been sewed into the center of the net to catch the wind and insure an even descent, but the net fouled on its maiden flight and Seth had to climb a silver maple alive with crepitating pigeons to retrieve it. They refolded the net, stuffed it into the mouth of the cannon, and tried again. This time they were successful: Seth flushed the birds from the tree with a shotgun blast, the cannon roared, and Jared’s net caught them as they rose. Nearly two thousand pigeons lay tangled in the mesh, their distress calls echoing through the trees, metallic and forlorn. The two brothers stalked over the grounded net with their cudgels, crushing the heads of the survivors. When the net had ceased to move and the blood had begun to settle into abstract patterns in the broadcloth, they d
ropped their cudgels and embraced, hooting and laughing like prospectors on a strike. We’ll be rich! Seth shouted.

  He was right. Within six months PINK’S POULTRY, BEEF AND GAME was turning over as many as seventeen thousand pigeons a day, and Jared opened a second and then a third shop before the year was out. Seth oversaw the Petoskey operation and managed one of the new shops. Two years later Jared opened a restaurant and a clothing store and began investing in a small Ohio-based petroleum company called Standard Oil. By 1885 he was worth half a million dollars and living in an eighteen-room mansion in Highland Park, just down the street from his brother Seth.

  On a September afternoon in 1914, when Jared Pink was seventy-two, a group of ornithologists was gathered around a cage at the Cincinnati zoo. Inside the cage was a passenger pigeon named Martha, and she was dying of old age. The bird gripped the wire mesh with her beak and stiffened. She was the last of her kind on earth.

  The variola virus, which causes smallpox, cannot exist outside the human body. It is now, as the result of pandemic immunization, on the verge of extinction.

  Numerous other lifeforms have disappeared in this century, among them the crested shelduck, Carolina parakeet, Kittlitz’s thrust, Molokai oo, huia, Toolach wallaby, freckled marsupial mouse, Syrian wild ass, Schomburgk’s deer, rufous gazelle, bubal hartebeest and Caucasian wisent.

  George Robertson was infused with the spirit of Christianity. When he arrived in Tasmania in 1835, the island’s autochthonous population had been reduced from seven thousand to less than two hundred in the course of the thirty-two years that the British colony at Risdon had been in existence. The original settlers, a group of convicts under the supervision of Lieutenant John Bowen, had hunted the native Tasmanians as they would have hunted wolves or rats or any other creatures that competed for space and food. George Robertson had come to save them.