T. C. Boyle Stories

by T. C. Boyle

  I held out for a week. Changing diapers, heating formula, snuggling up with Marie and little Nathaniel, trying to feel whole again. But I couldn’t. Every time I looked at my son I saw Wendy, the curl of the lips, the hair, the eyes, the pout—in my distraction, I even thought I heard something of her voice in his gasping howls. Marie was asleep, the baby in her arms. I backed the car out and headed for Depew Street.

  The first thing I saw when I rounded the corner onto Depew was the doctor’s Mercedes, unmistakable, gunmetal gray, gleaming at the curb like a slap in the face. I was so startled to see it there I almost ran into it. What was this, some kind of postpartum emergency or something? It was 10:00 A.M. Wendy’s curtains were drawn. As I stamped across the lawn my fingers began to tremble like they do when I’m tugging at the net and I can feel something tugging back.

  The door was open. Ziss was sitting there in T-shirt and jeans, watching cartoons on TV and sipping at a glass of milk. He pushed the hair back from his brow and gave me a sheepish grin. “David?” Wendy called from the back room. “David? Are you going out?” I must have looked like the big loser on a quiz show or something, because Ziss, for once, didn’t have anything to say. He just shrugged his shoulders. Wendy’s voice, breathy as a flute, came at us again: “Because if you are, get me some sweetcakes and yogurt, and maybe a couple of corn muffins, okay? I’m hungry as a bear.”

  Ziss got up and walked to the bedroom door, mumbled something I couldn’t hear, strode past me without a glance and went on out the back door. I watched him bend for a basketball, dribble around in the dirt, and then cock his arm for a shot at an imaginary basket. On the TV, Sylvester the cat reached into a trash can and pulled out a fish stripped to the bones. Wendy was standing in the doorway. She had nothing to say.

  “Look, Wendy,” I began. I felt betrayed, cheated, felt as if I was the brunt of a joke between this girl in the housecoat and the curly-headed hotshot fooling around on the lawn. What was his angle, I wondered, heart pounding at my chest, what was hers? “I suppose you two had a good laugh over me, huh?” She was pouting, the spoiled child. “I fulfilled my part of the bargain.” She had. I got what I’d paid for. But all that had changed, couldn’t she see that? I didn’t want a son, I didn’t want Marie; I wanted her. I told her so. She said nothing. “You’ve got something going with Ziss, right?” I said, my voice rising. “All along, right?”

  She looked tired, looked as if she’d been up for a hundred nights running. I watched her shuffle across the room into the kitchenette, glance into the refrigerator, and come up with a jar of jam. She made herself a sandwich, licking the goo from her fingers, and then she told me I stank of fish. She said she couldn’t have a lasting relationship with me because of Marie.

  “That’s a lot of crap, and you know it.” I was shouting. Ziss, fifty feet away, turned to look through the open door.

  “All right. It’s because we’re—” She put the sandwich down, wiped a smear of jelly from her lip. “Because we move in different circles.”

  “You mean because I’m not some fancy-ass doctor, because I didn’t go to college.”

  She nodded. Slow and deliberate, no room for argument, she held my eyes and nodded.

  I couldn’t help it. Something just came loose in my head, and the next second I was out the door, knocking Ziss into the dirt. He kicked and scratched, tried to bite me on the wrist, but I just took hold of his hair and laid into his face while Wendy ran around in her Japanese housecoat, screeching like a cat in heat. By the time the police got there I’d pretty well closed up both his eyes and rearranged his dental work. Wendy was bending over him with a bottle of rubbing alcohol when they put the cuffs on me.

  Next morning there was a story in the paper. Marie sent Alex DeFazio down with the bail money, and then she wouldn’t let me in the house. I banged on the door halfheartedly, then tried one of the windows, only to find she’d nailed it shut. When I saw that, I was just about ready to explode, but then I figured what the hell and fired up the Rambler in a cloud of blue smoke. Cops, dogs, kids, and pedestrians be damned, I ran it like a stock car eight blocks down to the dock and left it steaming in the parking lot. Five minutes later I was planing across the river, a wide brown furrow fanning out behind me.

  This was my element, sun, wind, water, life pared down to the basics. Gulls hung in the air like puppets on a wire, spray flew up in my face, the shore sank back into my wake until docks and pleasure boats and clapboard houses were swallowed up and I was alone on the broad gray back of the river. After a while I eased up on the throttle and began scanning the surface for the buoys that marked my gill nets, working by rote, the tight-wound spool in my chest finally beginning to pay out. Then I spotted them, white and red, jogged by the waves. I cut the engine, coasted in and caught hold of the nearest float.

  Wendy, I thought, as I hauled at the ropes, ten years, twenty-five, a lifetime: every time I look at my son I’ll see your face. Hand over hand, Wendy, Wendy, Wendy, the net heaving up out of the swirling brown depths with its pounds of flesh. But then I wasn’t thinking about Wendy anymore, or Marie or Nathaniel Jr.—I was thinking about the bottom of the river, I was thinking about fins and scales and cold lidless eyes. The instant I touched the lead rope I knew I was on to something. This time of year it would be sturgeon, big as logs, long-nosed and barbeled, coasting up the riverbed out of some dim watery past, anadromous, preprogrammed, homing in on their spawning grounds like guided missiles. Just then I felt a pulsing in the soles of my sneakers and turned to glance up at the Day Liner, steaming by on its way to Bear Mountain, hundreds of people with picnic baskets and coolers, waving. I jerked at the net like a penitent.

  There was a single sturgeon in the net, tangled up like a ball of string. It was dead. I strained to haul the thing aboard, six feet long, two hundred pounds. Cold from the depths, still supple, it hadn’t been dead more than an hour—while I banged at my own front door, locked out, it had been thrashing in the dark, locked in. The gulls swooped low, mocking me. I had to cut it out of the net.

  Back at the dock I got one of the beer drinkers to give me a hand and we dragged the fish over to the skinning pole. With sturgeon, we hang them by the gills from the top of a ten-foot pole, and then we peel back the scutes like you’d peel a banana. Four or five of the guys stood there watching me, nobody saying anything. I cut all the way round the skin just below the big stiff gill plates and then made five vertical slits the length of the fish. Flies settled on the blade of the knife. The sun beat at the back of my head. I remember there was a guy standing there, somebody I’d never seen before, a guy in a white shirt with a kid about eight or so. The kid was holding a fishing pole. They stepped back, both of them, when I tore the first strip of skin from the fish.

  Sturgeon peels back with a raspy, nails-on-the-blackboard sort of sound, reminds me of tearing up sheets or ripping bark from a tree. I tossed the curling strips of leather in a pile, flies sawing away at the air, the big glistening pink carcass hanging there like a skinned deer, blood and flesh. Somebody handed me a beer: it stuck to my hand and I drained it in a gulp. Then I turned to gut the fish, me a doctor, the knife a scalpel, and suddenly I was digging into the vent like Jack the Ripper, slitting it all the way up to the gills in a single violent motion.

  “How do you like that?” the man in the white shirt said. “She’s got eggs in her.”

  I glanced down. There they were, wet, beaded and gray, millions of them, the big clusters tearing free and dropping to the ground like ripe fruit. I cupped my hands and held the trembling mass of it there against the gashed belly, fifty or sixty pounds of the stuff, slippery roe running through my fingers like the silver coins from a slot machine, like a jackpot.

  (1981)

  ALL SHOOK UP

  About a week after the FOR RENT sign disappeared from the window of the place next door, a van the color of cough syrup swung off the blacktop road and into the driveway. The color didn’t do much for me, nor the oversize tires with the
raised white letters, but the side panel was a real eye-catcher. It featured a life-size portrait of a man with high-piled hair and a guitar, beneath which appeared the legend Young Elvis, The Boy Who Dared To Rock. When the van pulled in I was sitting in the kitchen, rereading the newspaper and blowing into my eighth cup of coffee. I was on vacation. My wife was on vacation too. Only she was in Mill Valley, California, with a guy named Fred, and I was in Shrub Oak, New York.

  The door of the van eased open and a kid about nineteen stepped out. He was wearing a black leather jacket with the collar turned up, even though it must have been ninety, and his hair was a glistening, blue-black construction of grease and hair spray that rose from the crown of his head like a bird’s nest perched atop a cliff. The girl got out on the far side and then ducked round the van to stand gaping at the paint-blistered Cape Cod as if it were Graceland itself. She was small-boned and tentative, her big black-rimmed eyes like puncture wounds. In her arms, as slack and yielding as a bag of oranges, was a baby. It couldn’t have been more than six months old.

  I fished three beers out of the refrigerator, slapped through the screen door, and crossed the lawn to where they stood huddled in the driveway, looking lost. “Welcome to the neighborhood,” I said, proffering the beers.

  The kid was wearing black ankle boots. He ground the toe of the right one into the pavement as if stubbing out a cigarette, then glanced up and said, “I don’t drink.”

  “How about you?” I said, grinning at the girl.

  “Sure, thanks,” she said, reaching out a slim, veiny hand bright with lacquered nails. She gave the kid a glance, then took the beer, saluted me with a wink, and raised it to her lips. The baby never stirred.

  I felt awkward with the two open bottles, so I gingerly set one down on the grass, then straightened up and took a hit from the other. “Patrick,” I said, extending my free hand.

  The kid took my hand and nodded, a bright wet spit curl swaying loose over his forehead. “Joey Greco,” he said. “Glad to meet you. This here is Cindy.”

  There was something peculiar about his voice—tone and accent both. For one thing, it was surprisingly deep, as if he were throwing his voice or doing an impersonation. Then too, I couldn’t quite place the accent. I gave Cindy a big welcoming smile and turned back to him. “You from down South?” I said.

  The toe began to grind again and the hint of a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth, but he suppressed it. When he looked up at me his eyes were alive. “No,” he said. “Not really.”

  A jay flew screaming out of the maple in back of the house, wheeled overhead, and disappeared in the hedge. I took another sip of beer. My face was beginning to ache from grinning so much and I could feel the sweat leaching out of my armpit and into my last clean T-shirt.

  “No,” he said again, and his voice was pitched a shade higher. “I’m from Brooklyn.”

  Two days later I was out back in the hammock, reading a thriller about a double agent who turns triple agent for a while, is discovered, pursued, captured, and finally persuaded under torture to become a quadruple agent, at which point his wife leaves him and his children change their surname. I was also drinking my way through a bottle of Chivas Regal Fred had given my wife for Christmas, and contemplatively rubbing tanning butter into my navel. The doorbell took me by surprise. I sat up, plucked a leaf from the maple for a bookmark, and padded round the house in bare feet and paint-stained cutoffs.

  Cindy was standing at the front door, her back to me, peering through the screen. At first I didn’t recognize her: she looked waifish, lost, a Girl Scout peddling cookies in a strange neighborhood. Just as I was about to say something, she pushed the doorbell again. “Hello,” she called, cupping her hands and leaning into the screen.

  The chimes tinnily reproduced the first seven notes of “Camptown Races,” an effect my wife had found endearing; I made a mental note to disconnect them first thing in the morning. “Anybody home?” Cindy called.

  “Hello,” I said, and watched her jump. “Looking for me?”

  “Oh,” she gasped, swinging round with a laugh. “Hi.” She was wearing a halter top and gym shorts, her hair was pinned up, and her perfect little toes looked freshly painted. “Patrick, right?” she said. “That’s right,” I said. “And you’re Cindy.”

  She nodded, and gave me the sort of look you get from a haberdasher when you go in to buy a suit. “Nice tan.”

  I glanced down at my feet, rubbed a slick hand across my chest. “I’m on vacation.”

  “That’s great,” she said. “From what?”

  “I work up at the high school? I’m in Guidance.”

  “Oh, wow,” she said, “that’s really great.” She stepped down off the porch. “I really mean it—that’s something.” And then: “Aren’t you kind of young to be a guidance counselor?”

  “I’m twenty-nine.”

  “You’re kidding, right? You don’t look it. Really. I would’ve thought you were twenty-five, maybe, or something.” She patted her hair tentatively, once around, as if to make sure it was all still there. “Anyway, what I came over to ask is if you’d like to come to dinner over at our place tonight.”

  I was half drunk, the thriller wasn’t all that thrilling, and I hadn’t been out of the yard in four days. “What time?” I said.

  “About six.”

  There was a silence, during which the birds could be heard cursing one another in the trees. Down the block someone fired up a rotary mower. “Well, listen, I got to go put the meat up,” she said, turning to leave. But then she swung round with an afterthought. “I forgot to ask: are you married?”

  She must have seen the hesitation on my face.

  “Because if you are, I mean, we want to invite her too.” She stood there watching me. Her eyes were gray, and there was a violet clock in the right one. The hands pointed to three-thirty.

  “Yes,” I said finally, “I am.” There was the sound of a stinging ricochet and a heartfelt guttural curse as the unseen mower hit a stone. “But my wife’s away. On vacation.”

  I’d been in the house only once before, nearly eight years back. The McCareys had lived there then, and Judy and I had just graduated from the state teachers’ college. We’d been married two weeks, the world had been freshly created from out of the void, and we were moving into our new house. I was standing in the driveway, unloading boxes of wedding loot from the trunk of the car, when Henry McCarey ambled across the lawn to introduce himself. He must have been around seventy-five. His pale, bald brow swept up and back from his eyes like a helmet, square and imposing, but the flesh had fallen in on itself from the cheekbones down, giving his face a mismatched look. He wore wire-rim glasses. “If you’ve got a minute there,” he said, “we’d like to show you and your wife something.” I looked up. Henry’s wife, Irma, stood framed in the doorway behind him. Her hair was pulled back in a bun and she wore a print dress that fell to the tops of her white sweat socks.

  I called Judy. She smiled, I smiled, Henry smiled; Irma, smiling, held the door for us, and we found ourselves in the dark, cluttered living room with its excess furniture, its framed photographs of eras gone by, and its bric-a-brac. Irma asked us if we’d like a cup of tea. “Over here,” Henry said, gesturing from the far corner of the room.

  We edged forward, smiling but ill at ease. We were twenty-two, besotted with passion and confidence, and these people made our grandparents look young. I didn’t know what to say to them, didn’t know how to act: I wanted to get back to the car and the boxes piled on the lawn.

  Henry was standing before a glass case that stood atop a mound of doilies on a rickety-looking corner table. He fumbled behind it for a moment, and then a little white Christmas bulb flickered on inside the case. I saw a silver trowellike thing with an inscription on it and a rippled, petrified chunk of something that looked as if it might once have been organic. It was a moment before I realized it was a piece of wedding cake.

  “It’s from our golden anniversary,
” Henry said, “six years ago. And that there is the cake knife—can you read what it says?”

  I felt numb, felt as if I’d been poking around in the dirt and unearthed the traces of a forgotten civilization. I stole a look at Judy. She was transfixed, her face drawn up as if she were about to cry: she was so beautiful, so rapt, so moved by the moment and its auguries, that I began to feel choked up myself. She took my hand.

  “It says ‘Henry and Irma, 1926-1976, Semper Fidelis.’ That last bit, that’s Latin,” Henry added, and then he translated for us.

  Things were different now.

  I rapped at the flimsy aluminum storm door and Joey bobbed into view through the dark mesh of the screen. He was wearing a tight black sportcoat with the collar turned up, a pink shirt, and black pants with jagged pink lightning bolts ascending the outer seam. At first he didn’t seem to recognize me, and for an instant, standing there in my cutoffs and T-shirt with half a bottle of Chivas in my hand, I felt more like an interloper than an honored guest—she had said tonight, hadn’t she?—but then he was ducking his head in greeting and swinging back the door to admit me.

  “Glad you could make it,” he said without enthusiasm.

  “Yeah, me too,” I breathed, wondering if I was making a mistake.

  I followed him into the living room, where spavined boxes and green plastic trash bags stuffed with underwear and sweaters gave testimony to an ongoing adventure in moving. The place was as close and dark as I’d remembered, but where before there’d been doilies, bric-a-brac, and end tables with carved feet, now there was a plaid sofa, an exercycle, and a dirty off-white beanbag lounger. Gone was the shrine to marital fidelity, replaced by a Fender amp, a microphone stand, and an acoustic guitar with capo and pickup. (Henry was gone too, dead of emphysema, and Irma was in a nursing home on the other side of town.) There was a stereo with great black monolithic speakers, and the walls were hung with posters of Elvis. I looked at Joey. He was posed beside a sneering young Elvis, rocking back and forth on the heels of his boots. “Pretty slick,” I said, indicating his get-up.