T.C. Boyle Stories

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Wang’s features are dappled with sweat. Old Chiung-hua sips white tea and dabs at Wang’s forehead with a handkerchief. “Push,” she says. “Bear down and heave.” At that moment, over the jabber of the radio and the clang of the pipes, a roar, as of numberless human voices raised in concert. Chiung-hua lifts her withered head and listens.

  Suddenly the door pushes open. The old woman turns, expecting Hung. It is not Hung. It is a pig, black head, white shoulders, brass ring through the nose. “Shoo!” cries Chiung-hua, astonished. “Shoo!” The pig stares at her, then edges into the room apologetically. The old lady staggers angrily to her feet, but then Wang grabs her hand. Wang’s teeth are gritted, her gymnast’s muscles flexed. “Uh-oh,” she says and Chiung-hua sits back down: a head has appeared between Wang’s legs. “Push, push, push,” the old woman hisses, and Wang obeys. There is a sound like a flushing toilet and then suddenly the infant is in Chiung-hua’s wizened hands. She cuts the cord, dabs the blood and tissue from the puckered red face, and swaddles the tiny thing in the only clean clothes at hand: a pair of patched blue jeans.

  Wang sits up and the old woman hands her the infant. She hefts it to look underneath. (A male. Heavy of jowl, abdomen, nates. And with hair on its head—the strangest growth of hair set across the most impossible expanse of brow. Square across.) Wang wrinkles her nose. “That smell,” she says. “Like a barnyard.”

  Chiung-hua, remembering, turns to shoo the pig. But then her ancient face drops: the pig is kneeling.

  Out in the street, so close it jars, a shout goes up.

  (1976)

  DADA

  We were organizing the Second International Dada Fair. The first had been held fifty-seven years ago in Berlin. The second, we felt, was overdue. Friedrich had asked Jean Arp’s grandson, Guillaume, to exhibit his Static Hobbyhorse #2, and Marcel Duchamp’s daughter, Lise, had agreed to show her Nude Descending Escalator. All very well and fine. But we were stuck for a main attraction, a drawing card, the pièce de résistance. Then Werther came up with a suggestion that slapped us all with its brilliance: waves beat on the rocks, lights flashed in dark rooms. I remember it clearly. We were drinking imported beer in Klaus’s loft, laying plans for the Fair. Werther slouched against a molded polyethylene reproduction of Tristan Tzara’s Upended Bicycle, a silver paper knife beating a tattoo in his palm. Beside him, on the coffee table, lay a stack of magazines. Suddenly he jerked the knife to his lips, shouted “Dada Redivivus!” and thrust the blade into the slick cellulose heart of them. Then he stepped back. The knife had impaled a magazine in the center of the stack: we began to understand.

  Werther extracted his prize and flipped back the page. It was a news magazine. Glossy cover. We gathered round. There, staring back at us, between the drum major’s braided cap and the gold epaulettes, were the dark pinguid features of Dada made flesh: His Excellency Al Haji Field Marshal and President for Life of Uganda: Idi Amin Dada.

  “Crazee!” said Friedrich, all but dancing.

  “Épatant!” sang Klaus.

  My name is Zoë. I grinned. We had our piéce de résistance.

  Two days later I flew into Entebbe via Pan African Airways. Big Daddy met me at the airport. I was wearing my thigh-high boots, striped culottes. His head was like a medicine ball. He embraced me, buried his nose in my hair. “I love Americans!” he said. Then he gave me a medal.

  At the house in Kampala he stood among his twenty-two children like a sleepy brontosaur among the first tiny quick-blooded mammals. One of the children wore a white tutu and pink ribbons. “This one,” he said, his hand on the child’s head, “a girl.” Then he held out his broad pink palm and panned across the yard where the rest of the brood rolled and leaped, pinched, climbed and burrowed like dark little insects. He grinned and asked me to marry him. I was cagey. “After the Fair,” I said.

  “The Fair,” he repeated. His eyes were sliced melons.

  “Dada,” I said.

  The plane was part of a convoy of three Ugandan 747s. All across Zaire, Cameroon and Mali, across Mauritania and the rocky Atlantic, my ears sang with the keen of infants, the cluck of chickens, the stringy flatulence of goats and pigs. I looked out the window: the wing was streaked with rust. To the right and left, fore and aft, Big Daddy’s bodyguards reclined in their reclining seats, limp as cooked spaghetti. High-heeled boots, shades and wristwatches, guns. Each held a transistor radio to his ear. Big Daddy sat beside me, sweating, caressing my fingers in a hand like a boxing glove. I was wearing two hundred necklaces and a turban. I am twenty-six. My hair is white, shag-cut. He was wearing a jumbo jumpsuit, khaki and camouflage, a stiff chest full of medals. I began to laugh.

  “Why you laugh?” he said.

  I was thinking of Bergson. I explained to him that the comical consists of something mechanical encrusted on the living. He stared at me, blank, his face misshapen as a decaying jack-o’-lantern.

  “Dada,” I said, by way of shorthand explication.

  He grinned. Lit a cigarette. “They do me honor,” he said finally, “to name such a movement for me.”

  The Fair was already under way when we landed at Kennedy. Big Daddy’s wives, cattle and attendants boarded five rented buses and headed for Harlem, where he had reserved the fourth floor of the Hotel Theresa. His Excellency himself made a forty-five-minute impromptu speech at Gate 19E, touching on solutions to the energy crisis, inflation and overcrowded zoos, after which I hustled him into a cab and made for Klaus’s loft on Elizabeth Street.

  We rattled up Park Avenue, dipping and jolting, lights raining past the windows. Big Daddy told me of his athletic and military prowess, nuzzled my ear, pinned a medal to my breast. “Two hundred cattle,” he said. “A thousand acres.” I looked straight ahead. He patted my hand. “Twenty bondmaids, a mountain of emeralds, fresh fish three days a week.”

  I turned to look into the shifting deeps of his eyes, the lights filming his face, yellow, green, red, bright, dark. “After the Fair,” I said.

  The street outside Klaus’s was thronged, the hallway choked. The haut monde emerged from taxis and limousines in black tie and jacket, Halston, Saint-Laurent, mink. “Fantastic!” I said. Big D. looked baleful. “What your people need in this country is savannah and hippo,” he said. “But your palace very fine.”

  I knotted a gold brocade DADA sign around his neck and led him up the stairs to a burst of applause from the spectators. Friedrich met us at the door. He’d arranged everything. Duchamp’s Urinal stood in the corner; DeGroffs soiled diapers decorated the walls; Werther’s own Soir de l’Uganda dominated the second floor. Big Daddy squeezed my hand, beamed like a tame Kong. There were champagne, canapés, espresso, women with bare backs. A man was strapped to a bicycle suspended from the ceiling.

  Friedrich pumped Big Daddy’s hand and then showed him to the seat prepared for him as part of the Soir de l’Uganda exhibit. It was magnificent. A thousand and one copper tulips against a backdrop of severed heads and crocodiles. Big D. affixed a medal to Friedrich’s sweatshirt and settled into his seat with a glass of champagne. Then he began his “People Must Love Their Leaders” speech.

  A reporter took me by the arm and asked me to explain the controlling concept of the Fair and of our principal exhibit. It was a textbook question. I gave him a textbook answer. “Any object is a work of art if the artist proclaims it one,” I said. “There is static, cerebral art and there is living art, monuments of absurdity—acts of art. And actors.” Then he asked me if it was true that I had agreed to become Bid Daddy’s fifth wife. The question surprised me. I looked over at the Soir de l’Uganda exhibit. Two of the bodyguards were shooting craps against the bank of papier-mâché heads. Big Daddy slouched in his chair, elephantine and black, beleaguered by lords and ladies, photographers, reporters, envious artists. I could hear his voice over the natter of the crowd—a basso profundo that crept into the blood and punched at the kidneys. “I am a pure son of Africa,” he was saying. Overhead the bicycle wheels whirred. I turne
d back to the reporter, an idea forming in my head—an idea so outré that it shot out to scrape at the black heart of the universe. The ultimate act of art. Dada sacrifice!

  He stood there, pen poised over the paper.

  “Da,” I said. “Da.”

  (1977)

  TWO SHIPS

  I saw him today. At the side of the road, head down, walking. There were the full-leafed trees, the maples, elms, and oaks I see every day, the snarl of the wild berry bushes, sumac, milkweed, and thistle, the snaking hot macadam road, sun-flecked shadows. And him. An apparition: squat, bow-legged, in shorts, T-shirt, and sandals, his head shaved to the bone, biceps like legs of lamb. I slowed with the shock of seeing him there, with the recognition that worked in my ankles and fingertips like sap, and for a stunned second or two I stared, fixated, as the car pulled me closer and then swept past him in a rush. I was dressed in white, on my way to crack stinging serves and return treacherous backhands in sweet arcing loops. He never looked up.

  When I got home I made some phone calls. He was back in the country—legally—the government forgiving, his mind like damaged fruit. Thirty-one years old, he was staying with his parents, living in the basement, doing God knows what—strumming a guitar, lifting weights, putting pieces of wood together—the things he’d been doing since he was fourteen. Erica listened as I pried information from the receiver, a cigarette in the corner of her mouth, polished surfaces behind her.

  I was pouring Haig & Haig over a hard white knot of ice cubes. The last of my informants had got off the subject of Casper and was filling me in on the pains in her neck, lips, toes, and groin as I cradled the receiver between ear and shoulder. The smile I gave Erica was weak. When the whiskey-cracked voice on the other end of the line paused to snatch a quick breath, I changed the subject, whispered a word of encouragement, and hung up.

  “Well?” Erica was on her feet.

  “We’ve got to move,” I said.

  I was overdramatizing. For effect. Overdramatizing because humor resides in exaggeration, and humor is a quick cover for alarm and bewilderment. I was alarmed. He could stay indefinitely, permanently. He could show up at the tennis courts, at the lake, at my front door. And then what would I do? Turn my back, look through him, crouch behind the door and listen to the interminable sharp intercourse of knuckle and wood?

  “Is it really that bad?” Erica said.

  I sipped at my Scotch and nodded. It was really that bad.

  Twelve years ago we’d been friends. Close friends. We’d known each other from the dawn of consciousness on. We played in the cradle, in the schoolyard, went to camp together, listened to the same teachers, blocked and batted for the same teams. When we were sixteen we declared war on the bourgeois state and its material and canonical manifestations. That is, we were horny adolescents sublimating glandular frustrations in the most vicious and mindless acts of vandalism. We smoked pot, gulped stolen vodka, and drove our parents’ cars at a hundred miles an hour. Each night we cruised the back streets till three or four, assaulting religious statues, churches, the slick curvilinear windshields of Porsches and Cadillacs. Indiscriminate, we burned crosses and six-pointed stars. We tore down fences, smashed picture windows, filled Jacuzzis with sand. Once we climbed a treacherous three-hundred-foot cliff in utter darkness so we could drop raw eggs on the patrons of the chic restaurant nestled at its base.

  Casper saw the whole thing as a crusade. He was given to diatribe, and his diatribes had suddenly begun to bloom with the rhetoric of Marxism. We would annihilate a dentist’s plaster lawn ornaments—flamingoes and lantern-wielding pickaninnies—and he’d call it class warfare. Privately, I saw our acts of destruction as a way of pissing in my father’s eye.

  We ran away from home at one point—I think we were fifteen or so—and it was then that I had my first intimation of just how fanatical and intransigent Casper could be. I’d never considered him abnormal, had never thought about it. There was his obsession with the bodily functions, the vehement disgust he felt over his parents’ lovemaking—I could hear them, he would say, his features pinched with contempt, grunting and slobbering, humping like pigs—the fact that he went to a shrink twice a week. But none of this was very different from what other fifteen-year-olds did and said and felt, myself included. Now, running away, I saw that Casper’s behavior went beyond the pale of wise-guyism or healthy adolescent rebellion. I recognized the spark of madness in him, and I was both drawn to it and repelled by it. He was serious, he was committed, his was the rapture of saints and martyrs, both feet over the line. He went too far; I drew back from him.

  We’d planned this excursion with all the secrecy and precision of prison breakers. Twenty miles away, tucked deep in the leafy recesses of Fahnestock State Park, was a huge cache of canned food, an ax, two six-packs of Jaguar malt liquor, sleeping bags, and a tent. We signed in at school, ducked out the back door, hitchhiked the twenty miles, and experienced freedom. The following day, while we were exploring the park, my father stalked up to the campsite (my brother had broken down under interrogation and given us away) and settled down to wait. My father is a powerful and unforgiving man. He tapped a birch switch against a rock for an hour, then packed up everything he could carry—food, tent, sleeping bags, canteens—and hiked out to the highway. The sight of the barren campsite made my blood leap. At first I thought we were in the wrong spot, the trees all alike, dusk falling, but then Casper pointed out the blackened circle of rocks we’d cooked a triumphant dinner over the night before. I found my father’s note pinned to a tree. It was curt and minatory, the script an angry flail.

  Casper refused to give in. Between us we had four dollars and twenty cents. He dragged me through swamps and brambles, the darkening stalks of the trees, past ponds, down hills, and out to the highway. Afraid to hitch—my father could be glaring behind each pair of headlights—we skirted the road and made our way to a clapboard grocery where we purchased a twenty-five-pound bag of Ken-L Ration. Outside, it was 29°F. We hiked back up into the woods, drank from a swamp, crunched the kibbled nuggets of glyceryl monostearate and animal fat preserved with BHA, and slept in our jackets. In the morning I slipped away, walked out to the road, and hitchhiked back home.

  The state police were called in to track Casper down. They employed specially trained trackers and bloodhounds. Casper’s parents hired a helicopter search team for eighty-five dollars an hour. The helicopter spotted Casper twice. Whirring, kicking up a cyclone, the machine hovered over the treetops while Casper’s mother shouted stentorian pleas through a bullhorn. He ran. Two weeks later he turned up at home, in bed, asleep.

  It was just after this that Casper began to talk incessantly of repression and the police state. He shuffled round the corridors at school with a huge, distended satchel full of poorly printed pamphlets in faded greens and grays: The Speeches of V. I. Lenin; State and Anarchy; Das Kapital. The rhetoric never appealed to me, but the idea of throwing off the yoke, of discounting and discrediting all authority, was a breath of fresh air.

  He quit college at nineteen and went to live among the revolutionary workers of the Meachum Brothers Tool & Die Works in Queens. Six months later he was drafted. How they accepted him or why he agreed to report, I’ll never know. He was mad as a loon, fixated in his Marxist-Leninist phase, gibbering nonstop about imperialist aggressors and the heroic struggle of the revolutionary democratic peoples of the Republic of Vietnam. It was summer. I was living in Lake George with Erica and he came up for a day or two before they inducted him.

  He was worked up—I could see that the minute he got off the bus. His feet shuffled, but his limbs and torso danced, elbows jerking as if they were wired, the big knapsack trembling on his back, a cord pulsing under his left eye. He was wearing a cap that clung to his head like something alive, and the first thing he did was remove it with a flourish to show off his bald scalp: he’d shaved himself—denuded himself—every hair plucked out, right down to his mustache and eyebrows. From the neck up he l
ooked like a space invader; from the neck down, rigidly muscled, he was Charles Atlas. He couldn’t stop talking. Couldn’t sit down, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat. Said he was going into the army all right, but that he’d do everything in his power to subvert them, and that when they shipped him to Vietnam he’d turn his weapon on his own platoon and then join the NLF. I tried to joke with him, distract him—if only for a moment. But he was immovable. He played his one note till Erica and I just wanted to jump into the car and leave him there with the house, the books, the stereo, everything. Someone pulled a knife out of my ribs when he left.

  I never saw him again. Until today.

  Rumor had it that he’d disappeared from Fort Dix the first week. He was in Canada, he was in Sweden. The Finns had jailed him for entering the country illegally, the Swiss had expelled him. He was in Belize City stirring up the locals, the British had got hold of him and the United States was pressing for his extradition. Rumors. They sifted back to me through my mother, friends, people who claimed they’d seen him or talked to someone who had. I was in law school, student-deferred. There were exams, the seasons changed, Erica visited on weekends, and there were long breathy phone calls in between. In my second year, the packages began to show up in my mailbox. Big; crudely bundled manuscripts—manuscripts the size of phone books—sent from an address in London, Ontario.

  There were no cover letters. But, then, cover letters would have been superfluous: the moment I saw the crabbed scrawl across the flat surface of the first package (lettering so small it could have been written with the aid of magnification), I knew who had sent it. Inside these packages were poems. Or, rather, loosely organized snatches of enjambed invective in strident upper-case letters:

  THE FASCIST NAZI ABORTIONIST LOBBY THAT FEEDS