by T. C. Boyle
The postmaster let out a little bark of a laugh. “Home? Don’t you get it? That’s Hurricane Leroy out there—you’ll be lucky if you got a home left to go to—and whatever possessed you to come out in this mess? I mean, don’t you listen to the TV? Christ,” he said, as if that summed it all up.
There was a silence, and then, with a sigh, Bob eased himself back into a cradle of folded cardboard boxes. “Well,” he said, and the faint red light glinted off the face of the pint bottle he extracted from his shirt, “we might as well enjoy ourselves—looks like we’re going to be here a while.”
Willis must have dozed. They’d passed the bottle and he’d got a good deep burning taste of whiskey—a taste Muriel denied him; she was worse than the Schick Center when it came to that, though she sipped wine all day herself—and then Bob had begun to drone on in a stopped-up, back-of-the-throat sort of voice, complaining about his marriage, his bad back, his sister on welfare and the way the cat sprayed the bedposts and the legs of the kitchen table, and Willis had found it increasingly difficult to focus on the glowing red beacon of the light. He was slouched over in a folding chair the postmaster had dragged in from one of the offices, and when awareness gripped him, Bob was enumerating the tragic flaws of the auto-insurance industry, his face ghastly in the hellish light. For a moment Willis didn’t know where he was, but then he heard the wind in the distance and it all came back to him.
“With only two accidents, Bob? I can’t believe it,” the postmaster said.
“Hell,” Bob countered, “I’ll show you the damn bill.”
Willis tried to get up but his hips wouldn’t allow it. “Muriel,” he said.
The two faces turned to him then, the bearded one and the one that should have been bearded, and they looked strange and menacing in that unnatural light. “You all right, old-timer?” the postmaster asked.
Willis felt like Rip Van Winkle, like Methuselah; he felt tired and hopeless, felt as if everything he’d known and done in his life had been wasted. “I’ve got to”—he caught himself; he’d been about to say I’ve got to go home, but they’d probably try to stop him and he didn’t want any arguments. “I’ve got to take a leak,” he said.
The postmaster studied him a moment. “It’s still blowing out there,” he said, “but the radio says the worst of it’s past.” Willis heard the faint whisper of the radio then—one of those little transistors the kids all wear; it was tucked into the postmaster’s breast pocket. “Give it another hour,” the postmaster said, “and we’ll make sure you get home all right. And your car’s okay, if that’s what’s worrying you. Nothing worse than maybe a branch on the roof.”
Willis said nothing.
“Down the hall and to your left,” the postmaster said.
It took him a moment to fight the inertia of his hips, and then he was emerging from the shadows of the storage room and into the somber gray twilight of the hallway. Nuggets of glass crunched and skittered underfoot and everything was wet. It was raining hard outside and there was that rank smell in the air still, but the wind seemed to have tapered off. He found the toilet and he kept on going.
The lobby was a mess of wet clinging paper and leaves, but the doors swung open without a hitch, and in the next moment Willis was out on the front steps and the rain was driving down with a vengeance on his bare bald head. He reached automatically for the Mets cap, but then he remembered it was gone, and he hunched his shoulders and started off across the parking lot. He moved cautiously, wary of the slick green welter of leaves and windblown debris underfoot, and he was wet through by the time he reached the car. A single crippled branch was draped over the windshield, but there was no damage; he swept it to the ground and ducked into the driver’s seat.
His mind wasn’t working well at this point—perhaps it was the shock of the storm or the effects of the whiskey and his nap in the folding chair. The keys. He fumbled twice through his pants and jacket before he finally found them, and then he flooded the engine and had to hold his foot to the floor while the starter whined and the rain smeared the windshield. Finally he got the thing going with a roar and jerked it into gear; it was then that he discovered the tree blocking the exit. And now what? The specter of Muriel rose before him, pale and trembling, and then he glanced up to see the postmaster and Bob planted on the steps and gawking at him as if he’d just dropped down from another planet. What the hell, he thought, and he gave them a jaunty wave, revved the engine and shot up over the curb and into the street.
But here the world was truly transformed. It was as if a big hand had swept the street, slapping down trees and telephone poles, obliterating windows, stripping shingles from the roofs. The road that led out to the highway was impassable, churning with shit-brown water and one of those little Japanese cars awash in it, overturned on its roof. Willis tried Meridian Street and then Seaboard, but both were blocked. An oak tree that must have been five hundred years old had taken the veranda out of the house where Joe Diggs had lived before he passed on, and there were live wires thrashing the shattered shaft of a telephone pole out front. Even through the tattoo of the rain on the roof Willis could hear the sirens, a continuous, drawn-out wail of grief.
He was worried now—this was as bad as Corpus Christi, worse—and his hands trembled on the wheel when he turned into his own street and found the entrance buried in rubble and vegetation. The house on the corner—the Needlemans’—was untouched, but across the street, on his side, the Stovers’ place had lost its roof. And the street itself, the placid tree-lined street that had attracted Muriel in the first place, was unrecognizable, a double row of maples laid down flat like a deck of cards. Willis backed out of the street, water running up to his hubcaps, and made a left on Susan and then another left on Massapequa, trying to make it around the block and come up on the house from the far side.
He was in luck. Neither street seemed to have suffered much damage, and he was able to make his way round a fallen telephone pole at the entrance to Massapequa by climbing up over the curb as he’d done at the post office. And then he was turning into Laurel, his own street, dodging refuse and swinging wide to avoid the clogged storm drain at the corner. People were out on their lawns now, assessing the damage—he saw Mrs. Tilden or Tillotson or whatever her name was trying to brace up a cypress that clung to her front porch like a wet mustache. It was almost comical, that little woman and that big limp tree, and he began to relax—everything was going to be okay, it was, there was hardly any damage on this end—and there was the fat guy—what was his name?—holding his head and dancing round the carcass of his crushed Cadillac. Yes, he said aloud, everything’s going to be all right, and he repeated it to himself, making a little prayer of it.
He was more afraid of Muriel now than of the storm—he could hear her already: how could he leave her in the middle of a hurricane? Where had he been? Was that liquor on his breath? The damage he could take care of—he was a builder, wasn’t he? It was just a matter of materials, that was all—bricks, lumber, drywall, shingles. And glass. The glaziers would be busy, that was for sure. As he eased past a lawn mower standing forlornly in the middle of the street and crept round the big sweeping curve that gave him his first view of the house, he was expecting the worst—shutters gone, a hole in the roof, the elm lying atop the garage like a crippled beast—but the reality made his heart seize.
There was nothing there. Nothing. Where the house had stood not two hours ago, the elm towering over it, the two-car garage in back with his tools and workbench and all the rest, there was now a vacant lot. The yard had been swept clean but for the torn and crenellated foundation, filled with rubble like some ancient ruin. Panic seized him, shock, and he hit the brake instinctively, sending the car into a fishtail that carried him across the street and slammed him into the curb with a jolt.
Trembling, he pried his fingers from the wheel. There was a throb of pain above his right eye where he’d hit the rearview mirror. His hands were shaking. But no, he thought, looking
up again, it couldn’t be. He was on the wrong street, that was it—he’d got turned around and fetched up in front of somebody else’s place. It took him a moment, but then he swung the door open and stepped tentatively into the litter of the street, and there was the number on the curb to refute him, there the mailbox with his name stenciled across it in neat white letters, untouched, the red flag still standing tall. And that was the Novaks’ place next door, no doubt about it, a sick lime green with pink trim….
Then he thought of Muriel. Muriel. She was, she was…he couldn’t form the thought, and he staggered across the lawn like a drunk to stand gaping into that terrible hole in the ground. “Muriel,” he bleated, “Muriel!” and the rain drove down at him.
He stood there a long while, head bowed, feeling as old as the stones themselves, as old as the gashed earth and the dead gray sky. And then, the car still rumbling and stuttering behind him, he had the very first intimation of a thought that sparked and swelled till it glowed like a torch in his brain: Dewar’s and water. He saw himself as he was when Muriel first found him, wedded to the leatherette stool at the Dew Drop Inn, and his lips formed the words involuntarily: “Make mine a Dewar’s and water.” The house was gone, but he’d lost houses before—mainly to wives, which were a sort of natural disaster anyway; that he could live with—and he’d lost wives, too, but never like this.
It hit him then, a wave of grief that started in his hips and crested in his throat: Muriel. He saw her vividly, the lunchtime Muriel who rubbed his shoulders and fussed over him, making those little crackers with anchovy paste and avocado…he saw her turning down the sheets on the bed at night, saw her frowning over a crossword puzzle, the glasses perched on the end of her nose—little things, homey things. With a pang he remembered the way she’d kid him over the TV programs or a football game and how she’d dance round the kitchen with a bottle of wine and a beef brisket studded with cloves of garlic…and now it was over. He was seventy-five—seventy-six, come October—and he stared into that pit and felt the icy breath of eternity on his face.
His jacket was wet through and his arms hung limp at his sides by the time he turned away and limped back over the sodden lawn, a soldier returning from the wars. He dragged himself across the street to the car, and all he could think of was Ted Casselman, down at the Dew Drop—he would know what to do—and he actually had the door open, one foot poised on the rocker panel, when he glanced up for a final bewildered look, and a movement on the Novaks’ porch caught his eye. All at once the storm door swung back with a dull flash of light and there she was, Muriel, rescued from oblivion. She was in her housecoat still and it was bedraggled and wet, and her long white hair hung tangled round her shoulders so that she was like some old woman of the woods in a children’s tale. Anna Novak hovered behind her, a tragic look pressed into the immobile Slavic folds of her eyes. Muriel just stood there, gazing across the street to where he hovered at the door of the car, half a beat from release.
The wind came up then and rattled the branches of the trees that were still standing. Someone was calling a dog up the street: “Hermie, Hermie! Here, baby!” The rain slackened. “Willis!” Muriel suddenly cried, “Willis!” and the spell was broken. She was coming down the steps, grand and invincible, her arms spread wide.
What could he do? He dropped his foot to the pavement, ignoring the pain that shot through his hip, and opened his arms to receive her.
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 rompt; 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 a
nd 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.”
