T.C. Boyle Stories

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  The pans rattle. A knife shoots across the expanse of the cutting board and lodges in the wall. I grab hold of the counter to keep from pitching face forward into the dessert. “Yes?” I prompt.

  Sancerre’s face is like an old boot. The swell doesn’t faze him—he might as well be a fly clinging to the wall. “We want to go home,” he says finally.

  Relief washes over me. I can feel the tears coming to my eyes as I take the blistered hide of Sancerre’s hand in mine and give it an affirmative squeeze. “Me too,” I say, “me too,” and I can hardly contain my emotion.

  Sancerre glances over his shoulder, furtive and sly, then comes back to me with a wink. “We were just thinking,” he whispers, and it’s a strain to hear him over the habitual roar of the sea and the brouhaha of the crew at their sorry dinner, “about what you said last night over coffee, standing up to Cousteau like that—”

  The ship dips to port, then jerks back at the long leash of its anchor, which is mired in the muck on top of a submerged mountain five hundred feet down. “Yes,” I say, afraid of moving too fast, afraid of scaring him off, “go on.”

  But he just shrugs, the big idiot, and jams his hands into his pockets even as the swell rocks the deck under his feet.

  “Listen,” I say, “Sancerre, old friend, could you find room for another little morsel of sausage? And some cheese I’ve been saving—some Gruyere?”

  Sancerre’s eyes leap at me like caged beasts. The ship heaves back again and there’s a sharp curse from the main cabin followed by the sound of breaking glass. “Cheese? Did you say cheese?”

  I am expansive, generous to a fault. Not only do I break out the cheese and sausage but two neat little glasses of the culinary pastis as well, and in the next minute we’re seated side by side atop the deep freeze like two old cronies on a country picnic. I wait till he’s wolfed down half a dozen wedges of the Gruyere and three plump slices of sausage before I say anything, and when I say it I am already pouring his second glass full to the brim with the clear fragrant liquor. “How many of you are in on it?” I whisper.

  “Six of us,” he says before he can think.

  “And the American?”

  A look of disgust creeps across his features, settling finally into the ropy bulge of his lower lip. “The American,” he spits, and I know exactly what he means: if push comes to shove, the American will have to be sacrificed, along with anyone else who gets in our way.

  “Falco?” I ask.

  “He’s with the Captain, you should know that. They’re like two peas in a pod.”

  Am I trembling—or is it just the boat rocking under my feet? Are we really sitting here in the galley over a bottomless pit in a rolling swell, contemplating mutiny? The thought thrills me till I feel as if I’ve been rung like a bell. Strange to say, though, I’m not thinking of Cousteau or fathomless depths or crashing waves or even courts of inquiry, but of forest mushrooms—forest mushrooms growing in sweet pale clumps among the ferns in a deep pool of shade.

  It is then that Saôut slips in the door with his old woman’s tits and a broken plate held out conspicuously before him, looking secretive, looking like a spy—or a conspirator. His eyes take in the scene and without a word he goes straight for the sausage. One bite, two: he doesn’t bother with the knife. I watch his jaws work around the bleached-out bristle of his beard. The ship lurches, but he’s glued to the floor. “Are you with us?” he says finally, and as the sea lashes at the porthole and the ship comes back up and shakes itself like an old dog emerging from a bath, I can only nod.

  In the morning, though it hurts me to do it, though it goes against every principle I’ve held sacrosanct since I successfully reduced my first Béarnaise some forty years ago, I serve a breakfast even an American wouldn’t eat. The coffee—strained through yesterday’s grounds—is the color of turpentine, watery and thin and without benefit of cream. There is no bread. Instead of baking, I made use of the old crusts I’ve been saving for croûtons, dipping them in a paste made of powdered egg and water and then frying them hard in twice-used oil and serving them with an accompaniment of flying fish poached in sea water and nothing else, not even a dash of pepper or a pass of the bouquet garni. I feel like an imp, a demon, a saboteur. I set out the plates in the main cabin, ring the breakfast bell, and slink away to my berth, heart pounding in my chest.

  It doesn’t take long. The rumble of outrage spreads through the ship like some seismic event, radiating outward from the epicenter of the main cabin till every last bolt and iron plate thrums with it. I’m taking a calculated risk, and I know it. For the moment, at least, the gastronomic outrage is directed at me, and I’m not surprised when fifteen minutes later a deputation of the crew seeks me out in my bunk. It is led by Piccard and one of the scientists—Laffite, the sponge man—but to my relief, as I look up long-faced from my pillow, I see that Sancerre and Saôut are hovering protectively in the background.

  “What’s the matter with you, Bernard?” Piccard demands. “Are you sick, is that it? Dizzy spells again?”

  The sponge man is more direct: “How could you serve such, such”—he’s so overwrought he can barely get the words out—“such offal? It’s nothing short of criminal.”

  I gaze up at them with a composed face, calm as the sacrificial lamb. “Sick, yes,” I say. “But not in the body—in my heart.”

  Laffite is a bomb choking on its own fuse. He is a big man, bloated with his cravings, a priest worshipping at the temple of the gustatory pleasures. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” he cries. “Get out of that bed, you slacker, you assassin!”

  Fortunately, Saôut is able to wrestle hold of his arms, or the first blood might have been spilled right then and there—and it would have been mine. “Calm yourself, Laffite,” he growls, and only I detect the quick slice of his wink. I let my eyes fall shut, and the sea, quiet now, rocks me in my cradle. A minute passes, the four of them squabbling like schoolchildren, and then I listen to the retreat of their footsteps. But my ears deceive me: when I open my eyes I see that Sancerre has stayed behind. He is grinning, and his jaundiced face seems to be lit from within, glowing like a freshly picked lemon. “We are eight,” he whispers, and I give him a look. Who? I silently mouth.

  Sancerre glances over his shoulder. “It’s all a charade,” he says. “Piccard has capitulated.”

  Lunch is a triumph of negativity: the selfsame flying fish, baked to the texture of wood pulp, their veiny winglike fins dried to stumps and served in a crimson jacket of American catsup, with canned niblet corn and sweet gherkins desecrating the rest of the plate under a garnish of seaweed. Again I retreat to my berth, again an incensed mob seeks me out. This time Sancerre shepherds Borchardt, Pépin and Fasquelle into my presence, and by the time they leave, we are eleven.

  And then the pièce de résistance, the straw that breaks the camel’s back, our ticket to freedom: dinner. During the course of the afternoon, Cousteau and Dr. Mazzy Gort have descended again, ever deeper, seeking their solutions in the eternal muck. The crew has worked doggedly beneath an unsympathetic sun, their wizened biceps and arthritic backs straining, stomachs rumbling, the taste of mutiny burning like some bitter potion in their throats. And I? I have made my slow deliberate way through the reefs and shoals of my saucepans, my cruets, my knives and sieves and whisks. For the first time in as long as I can remember, I am working from a recipe, a curiosity from a thin volume left behind ten or fifteen years ago by a scientist from a place called Missouri: The Show Me State Cookbook. I do not have the butter, the crème fraîche, the milk, the champignons or the Parmesan, but the tinned tuna, the yellow wax beans and the packets of egg noodles exist in a sedimentary layer at the very bottom of the larder in a box labeled Emergency Rations.

  Fair enough. I wouldn’t want to spoil the thing with any hint of flavor, after all. The sun slides across the porthole. I whistle while I work.

  It is past seven by the time the bathyscaph is back on deck and Cousteau and Dr. Mazzy G
ort have extricated their cramped limbs from its bowels. The crew steps lively, working furiously to secure everything against the night, lurching across the deck on aching feet, their noses turned optimistically to the air in the hope of catching a whiff of what the prandial hour promises to bring them. I overhear snatches of conversation, Cousteau’s voice raised in giddy triumph—they’ve found something, but not the bottom, not yet—and as the sun swells on the horizon the first cigarettes are lit, the first glasses of wine circulated. This is the hour when an air of festivity prevails aboard the Calypso, a time when labors are set aside and the mind drifts toward the simple pleasures to come. And so it is tonight, and yet, as bits and pieces of hushed dialogue float in through the open porthole and as this man or that sticks his head in the galley for a premonitory sniff, I can sense the tension underlying it all, the nasty nagging collective memory of that unforgivable breakfast and the obscenity of a lunch that followed it. They tread lightly. They are afraid. Deeply afraid.

  This time I stand my ground. With a grand flourish I set the three big steaming pans down in the center of the table for each man to serve himself: the moment of truth is at hand. I note the sly, guilty looks of my co-conspirators as they suck at their wine glasses like condemned men, resigned to going hungry, and it props up my resolve. A lull falls over the conversation, hands fiddling with cutlery, with napkins, reaching out for the salt shaker, the pepper, the quietly oozing pans of my chef d’oeuvre. And now I have eyes only for the head of the table, where Cousteau sits absorbed in talk of the deeps with Dr. Mazzy Gort, Falco and Laffite. They retract unconsciously into the shells of their bent heads and bunched shoulders; their noses sniff the air warily. Steam rises. The first pan is breached, then the second and third, and all but the conspirators dig in.

  Laffite is the first to react. “Good Christ!” he explodes, coughing up a mouthful of the stuff.

  “I’m poisoned!” gasps Falco, and all round the table men lurch back from their plates in shock and horror. Even the Captain, whose taste buds must have withered and died long ago, lifts his head to give me a look of astonishment. Only Mazzy Gort seems unaffected, feeding the mucilaginous paste into the slot of his mouth as unconcernedly as if he were at a hot dog stand in some fantastical place like Peoria or Oshkosh.

  Through the general tumult that ensues, one voice begins to take command: Laffite’s. “Murderer!” he cries, leaping from his seat in a frenzy. “And what do you call this, this, this shit?!“

  I am a rock, a pillar, the statue of a man in a crisp white toque, arms folded across my chest. “Tuna noodle casserole,” I announce, and the place erupts.

  Later, after the walls of the main cabin have been scrubbed down and the belligerents separated and sent wheezing to their bunks, Sancerre appears in the doorway to the galley to inform me that the Captain would like to have a word with me. Poor Sancerre. His dried yellow fig of a face is as mournful as a Greek mask, but his bloodied nose and the flapping rags of his eyes show that he isn’t licked yet. “What happened?” I ask, not bothering to look up or offer him a portion of the sausage I’m feeding into my mouth, one compulsive slice after another. “I thought you said we were eleven?”

  “Son of a bitch,” he mutters. “It was Piccard. Did you see him?”

  Only too clearly. Piccard stood with the Captain when the fight broke out, and when the food began to fly it wasn’t Cousteau who took the brunt of the abuse, but me, as if everything I’d done wasn’t for the general good and benefit of all. “What next?” I want to know, my voice a miserable croak. “I’ve given it everything I have.”

  Framed in the doorway like some ghost of the larder, Sancerre replies in a voice as miserable as mine. “Give it time,” he says. “The men can’t hold out much longer. They can’t.” He steps closer, eyeing my sausage, his hands spread wide in extenuation. “They’re sucking on hard candy and drinking wine like it was gravy, they’re cracking jars of peanuts, raiding the emergency supplies in the lifeboats. They’re in an ugly mood, Bernard. I tell you, if it wasn’t for the wine—”

  Suddenly we lock eyes. The wine. Of course: the wine. Deny a Frenchman his bread and he is angry, deny him his foie gras and his truffles and he is savage, but deny him his wine and he is nothing short of homicidal. Sancerre is grinning, and his grin has a country village in it, a kitchen garden, fruit trees, rabbits on a hook. I am grinning too, and my grin contains all that and more. “The wine,” I repeat, and though Cousteau awaits and my stomach plunges and everywhere the stink of fish infests my nostrils, I find myself laughing, laughing till the tears begin to stream down my face.

  “Bernard,” Cousteau intones, and there is nothing left of his face but nose and two huge and liquidly suffering eyes, “I am chagrined. And puzzled too. It almost seems as if you’re deliberately trying to provoke the crew.”

  We are in Cousteau’s cabin, a dark void rocking on the night of the sea and lit only by the subaquatic glow of the TV monitor. Finned legs kick across the screen, fish appear. Coral. The deeps. There is a plea on my tongue, a plea for our thirty years, for understanding and compassion, a mon vieux and a mon ami, but I kill it. “That’s right,” I say. “I am.”

  “But what are you thinking?” Here the nose becomes a slash of shadow, the eyes luminous with the reflection of the screen—in this moment he looks like nothing so much as a fish himself. “Don’t you realize that we’ve almost reached our objective?”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Don’t care? But what of the kaleidoscopic wonders, what of the fishes in their undersea grottoes?”

  The sea is calm, the ship motionless beneath us, held fast in a liquid vise. “I’m too old for exploring,” I say finally. “My feet hurt. There are no more wonders for me.” I look him dead in the eye. “I’ve cooked my last meal aboard this ship.”

  And now the look of surprise, of consternation, of a befuddlement so deep you would have thought I was a talking eel or a puffer fish reciting La Nymphe de la Seine. “But you can’t do that—you’ve signed the articles. I’d have to, to put you in chains….”

  I feel myself giving way—I can’t take this anymore, not another minute. I spit my words out, vomit them up, and I don’t care, I don’t. “Spanish Rice!” I shout. “Chuck Wagon Beans, Tuna Surprise, Macaroni and Cheese!”

  And so, the next morning, as dawn breaks over the sea, I find myself confined to quarters, Laffite, the sponge man, standing guard over me as if I were some shipwrecked loon or common provocateur. I can smell from afar the sordid amateur attempts at breakfast, the blackened and fallen bread, the ruined coffee. My stomach stirs as I watch Laffite slump over the farce of his pistol, his heavy face drawn with hunger and fatigue. “What would you give, Laffite,” I say, as the morning swell drops us into a trough and buffets us back up again, “for a nice crisply presented caneton Tour d’Argent or a filet de boeuf en croûte? Eh? How many baskets of your precious sponges? Or would you prefer to eat them?“

  The big man, with his big head and suffering eyes, looks queasy. “I warn you,” he says, and he clutches at the pistol with fat sweating fingers.

  “Remember the petites brioches I used to make in the mornings, still hot from the oven? The way the butter would sink into them? Or the pain de campagne, a loaf per man?”

  “Madman,” he snarls. “Fiend. Shut up!”

  But I go on and on till he’s at the breaking point, till he’s either going to have to shoot me or give up the charade and let me climb above decks and guide the misguided. He’s giving way, I can see it, but then, right in the middle of my loving re-creation of the recipe for roast leg of venison with poivrade sauce, there’s a shout from above followed almost immediately by the most piteous outpouring of shock and lament I’ve ever heard. Laffite drops the pistol as if it’s suddenly come to life and bitten him and we leap simultaneously to our feet and fling ourselves out the door and up the companionway. A moment later, out of breath, we emerge on deck to a scene of purgatorial despair. Borchardt is beatin
g his head against the rail, Falco striding up and down the boards shouting “All hands on deck!,” Piccard hiding his face and weeping like a schoolgirl. The Captain and Dr. Mazzy Gort, huddled by the babyscaph in their deep-sea explorer’s costumes, can only blink and stare—they couldn’t look any more confused if the ship had hit a reef.

  There in the water, all round the ship, is a deep red stain, a stain that might have been the life’s blood of a hundred crews, already paling to dissolution in the brine. I look to Sancerre and his reckless smile, to Saôut and his suicidal eyes, and I know that this is not blood, but wine, cru bourgeois, five hundred gallons at least. The voyage is over. The bottom will remain inviolate, the fishes undisturbed. Cousteau is defeated.

  It is my moment, and I seize it. “Rally round, men!” I cry, my heart contracting like a fist. “Weigh anchor! We’re going home!”

  No one moves. The wind lifts the hair over our ears, the wine-dark sea heaves at the hull. All eyes turn to Cousteau. Wearily, sunk into the pouches and wrinkles of his obsession, he takes a step forward and burns us all with his eyes.

  “Deeper,” he says, “we must go deeper.”

  Falco is the first to fracture the tableau. Stooped and sun-blasted, his face unreadable, he breaks ranks with the men to stride across the deck and stand with the Captain. Dr. Mazzy Gort is next. He looks from Falco to Cousteau and then to the rest of us and can’t suppress a whinny of apprehension: he may be an American, but he can see what’s coming. “It’s all over!” I shout. “Give it up!”

  Cousteau ignores me. He just pulls on his hood and thermal jacket and climbs into the bathyscaph, that fat sputnik of the deeps suspended from the crane at the stern of the ship. I can see him there, in hawkish profile, fiddling with the controls through the rictus of the open door. He gestures impatiently to Mazzy Gort, but the American hesitates, and in the moment of his hesitation Falco moves to the Captain’s side, disappearing aloft in the shadows of the diving capsule. The steel doors crank shut.