T. C. Boyle Stories

by T. C. Boyle

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And a brother, Leland Orem, Junior—is that right?”

  “That’s right,” Ormand says. “And like I said, we were all in last night and didn’t hear a thing.”

  “Mother deceased?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And your father?”

  “What’s that got to do with the price of beans?” Ormand’s expression has gone nasty suddenly, as if he’s bitten into something rotten.

  For a moment, the patrolman is silent, and Calvin becomes aware of the radio again: the hiss of static, and a bored, disembodied voice responding to a second voice, equally bored and disembodied. “Do you know a Jaime Luis Torres?” the patrolman asks.

  Ormand hesitates, shuffling his feet on the weathered boards a minute before answering. His voice is small. “Yes,” he says.

  “Have you seen him recently?”

  “No,” Ormand lies. His voice is a whisper.

  “What was that?”

  “I said no.”

  There is another pause, the patrolman looking into Ormand’s eyes, Ormand looking back. “Mrs. Henckle’s place has been burglarized four times in the last three months. She thinks you and your brother might be responsible. What do you say?”

  “I say she’s crazy.” Ormand’s face is big with indignation. The officer says nothing. “She’s had it in for us ever since we were in junior high and she says Lee took a bottle of beer out of the cooler—which he never did. She’s just a crazy bitch and we never had nothin’ to do with her.”

  The patrolman seems to mull over this information a moment, thoughtfully stroking the neat clipped crescent of his mustache. Then he says, “She claims she’s seen you and your brother out here on the porch drinking types of German beer and soda you can’t get anywhere else around here—except at her place.”

  “Yeah?” Ormand snarls. “And what does that prove? You want to know, I bought that stuff in downtown L.A.”

  “Where?”

  “This place I know, I’m not sure of the street, but I could drive you right to it, no sweat. She’s just crazy, is all. She don’t have a leg to stand on.”

  “Okay, Ormand,” the officer says, snapping shut his notepad. “I’ve got it all down here. Mind if I step inside a minute and look around?”

  “You got a search warrant?”

  It’s a long morning. Calvin sits up in bed, trying to read an article in The Senior Citizen about looking and feeling younger—“Get Out and Dance!” the headline admonishes—but he has trouble concentrating. The house is preternaturally quiet. Ormand and Lee Junior, who rarely rise before noon, slammed out the door half an hour after the patrolman left, and they haven’t been back since. Jewel is asleep. Calvin can hear the harsh ratcheting snores from her room up the hall.

  The thing that motivates him to pull on a flannel shirt and a pair of threadbare khaki pants and lower himself into the wheelchair is hunger—or at least that’s what he tells himself. Most times when Jewel overindulges her taste for red wine and sleeps through the morning, Calvin stays put until he hears her moving about in the kitchen, but today is different. It’s not just that he’s feeling out of sorts physically, the cheap wine having scoured his digestive tract as relentlessly as a dose of the cathartic his mother used to give him when he had worms as a boy, but he’s disturbed by the events of the preceding night and early morning as well. “She could use another lesson,” Ormand had said, and then, first thing in the morning, the patrolman had shown up. Down deep, deeper even than the lowest stratum of excuses and denials he can dredge up, Calvin knows it’s no coincidence.

  The wheels rotate under his hands as he moves out into the hallway and eases past Jewel’s room. He can see her through the half-open door, still in her dress and sneakers, her head buried in a litter of bedclothes. Next door is the bathroom—he’s been in there three times already—and then, on the left, the kitchen. He rolls off the carpet and onto the smooth, spattered linoleum, gliding now, pulling right to skirt an overturned bag of garbage, and wheeling up to the sink for a sip of water.

  The place is a mess. Unwashed cups, glasses, plates, and silverware litter the counter, and beer bottles too—the black ones. A jar of peanut butter stands open on the kitchen table, attracting flies. There’s a smear of something on the wall, the wastebasket hasn’t been emptied in a week, and the room reeks of sick-sweet decay. Calvin gulps a swallow or two of water from a cup scored with black rings. Eleven A.M. and hot already. He can feel the sweat where the glasses lie flat against his temples as he glides over to the refrigerator and swings back the door.

  He’d been hoping for a leftover hamburger or a hard-boiled egg, but he isn’t ready for this: the thing is packed, top to bottom, with cold cuts, big blocks of cheese, bratwurst and Tiroler. Käse, reads the label on a wedge of white cheese, Product of Germany. Tilsiter, reads another. Schmelzkäse, Mainauer, Westfälischer Schinken. For a long moment Calvin merely sits there, the cold air in his face, the meats and blocks of cheese wrapped in white butcher’s paper, stacked up taller than his head. Somehow, he doesn’t feel hungry anymore. And then it hits him: something like anger, something like fear.

  The refrigerator door closes behind him with an airtight hiss, flies scatter, an overturned cup on the floor spins wildly away from his right wheel, and he’s back in the hallway again, but this time he’s turning left into the living room. Bottles, ashtrays, crumpled newspapers, he ignores them all. On the far side of the room stands a cheap plywood door, a door he’s never been through: the door to Ormand and Lee Junior’s room. Sitting there evenings, watching TV, he’s caught a glimpse of the cluttered gloom beyond the doorway as one or the other of the boys slams in or out, but that’s about it. They’ve never invited him in, and he’s never much cared. But now, without hesitation, he wheels himself across the room, shoves down on the door latch with the heel of his hand, and pushes his way in.

  He’s no fool. He knew what he would find. But still, the magnitude of it chokes up his throat and makes the blood beat in his head like a big bass drum. From one end of the room to the other, stacked up to the ceiling as if the place were a warehouse or something, are stereo sets, radios, TVs, power tools, toaster ovens, and half a dozen things Calvin doesn’t even recognize except to know that they cost an arm and a leg. In one corner are cases of beer—and, yes, Patio soda—and in the other, beneath a pair of huge PA speakers, guns. Shotguns, rifles, semiautomatics, a sack full of handguns with pearly and nickel-plated grips spilled on the floor like treasure. He can’t believe it. Or no, worse, he can. Shaken, he backs out of the room and pulls the door shut.

  The house is silent as a tomb. But wait: is that Jewel? Calvin’s underarms are soaked through, a bead of sweat drops from his nose. The house stirs itself, floorboards creak of their own accord, the refrigerator starts up with a sigh. Is that Ormand? No, there: he can hear Jewel’s snores again, stutter and wheeze, faint as the hum of the flies. This is his chance: he knows what he must do.

  Outside, the sun hits him like a slap in the face. Already his shoulder sockets are on fire and the cast feels like an anchor twisted round his arm. For an instant he sits there beside the door as if debating with himself, the watery old eyes scanning the street for Ormand’s pickup. Then all at once he’s in motion, rocking across the loose floorboards, past the mounds of debris, and down the ramp Ormand fixed up for him at the back end of the porch. Below, the ground is littered with tires and machine parts, with rags and branches and refuse, and almost immediately he finds himself hung up on something—part of an auto transmission, it looks like—but he leans over to wrestle with it, heart in his throat, fingers clawing at grease and metal, until he frees himself. Then he’s out the ramshackle gate and into the street.

  It’s not much of a hill—a five-degree grade maybe, and fifty or sixty yards up—but to the old man it seems like Everest. So hot, his seat stuck to the chair with his own wetness, salt sweat stinging his eyes, arms pumping and elbows stabbing, on he goes. A
station wagon full of kids thunders by him, and then one of those little beetle cars; up ahead, at the intersection of Tully and Commerce, he can see a man on a bicycle waiting for the light to change. Up, up, up, he chants to himself, everything clear, not a number in his head, the good and bad of his life laid out before him like an EKG chart. The next thing he knows, the hill begins to even off and he’s negotiating the sidewalk and turning the corner into the merciful shade of the store fronts. It’s almost a shock when he looks up and finds himself staring numbly at his gaunt, wild-haired image in the dark window of Eva’s European Deli.

  The door stands open. For a long moment he hesitates, watching himself in the window. His face is crazy, the glint of his glasses masking his eyes, a black spot of grease on his forehead. What am I doing? he thinks. Then he wipes his hands on his pants and swings his legs through the doorway.

  At first he can see nothing: the lights are out, the interior dim. There are sounds from the rear of the shop, the scrape of objects being dragged across the floor, a thump, voices. “I got no insurance, I tell you.” Plaintive, halting, the voice of the German woman. “No money. And now I owe nearly two thousand dollars for all this stock”—more heavy, percussive sounds—“all gone to waste.”

  Now he begins to locate himself, objects emerging from the gloom, shades drawn, a door open to the sun all the way down the corridor in back. Christ, he thinks, looking round him. The display racks are on the floor, toppled like trees, cans and boxes and plastic packages torn open and strewn from one end of the place to the other. He can make out the beer cooler against the back wall, its glass doors shattered and wrenched from the hinges. And here, directly in front of him, like something out of a newsreel about flooding along the Mississippi, a clutter of overturned tables, smashed chairs, tangled rolls of butcher’s paper, the battered cash register and belly-up meat locker. But all this is nothing when compared with the swastikas. Black, bold, stark, they blot everything like some killing fungus. The ruined equipment, the walls, ceiling, floors, even the bleary reproductions of the Rhine and the big hand-lettered menu in the window: nothing has escaped the spray can.

  “I am gone,” the German woman says. “Finished. Four times is enough.”

  “Eva, Eva, Ea.” The second voice is thick and doleful, a woman’s voice, sympathy like going to the bathroom. “What can you do? You know how Mike and I would like to see those people in jail where they belong—”

  “Animals,” the German woman says.

  “We know it’s them—everybody on the block knows it—but we don’t have the proof and the police won’t do a thing. Honestly, I must watch that house ten hours a day but I’ve never seen a thing proof positive.” At that moment, Mrs. Tuxton’s head comes into view over the gutted meat locker. The hair lies flat against her temples, beauty-parlor silver. Her lips are pursed. “What we need is an eyewitness.”

  Now the German woman swings into view, a carton in her arms. “Yah,” she says, the flesh trembling at her throat, “and you find me one in this … this stinking community. You’re a bunch of cowards—and you’ll forgive me for this, Laura—but to let criminals run scot-free on your own block, I just don’t understand it. Do you know when I was a girl in Karlsruhe after the war and we found out who was the man breaking into houses on my street, what we did? Huh?”

  Calvin wants to cry out for absolution: I know, I know who did it! But he doesn’t. All of a sudden he’s afraid. The vehemence of this woman, the utter shambles of her shop, Ormand, Lee Junior, the squawk of the police radio: his head is filling up. It is then that Mrs. Tuxton swivels round and lets out a theatrical little gasp. “My God, there’s someone here!”

  In the next moment they’re advancing on him, the German woman in a tentlike dress, the mean little eyes sunk into her face until he can’t see them, Mrs. Tuxton wringing her hands and jabbing her pointy nose at him as if it were a knife. “You!” the German woman exclaims, her fists working, the little feet in their worn shoes kneading the floor in agitation. “What are you doing here?”

  Calvin doesn’t know what to say, his head crowded with numbers all of a sudden. Twenty thousand leagues under the sea, a hundred and twenty pesos in a dollar, sixteen men on a dead man’s chest, yo-ho-ho and one-point-oh-five quarts to a liter. “I … I—” he stammers.

  “The nerve,” Mrs. Tuxton says.

  “Well?” The German woman is poised over him now, just as she was on the day she slapped the soda from his hand—he can smell her, a smell like liverwurst, and it turns his stomach. “Do you know anything about this, eh? Do you?”

  He does. He knows all about it. Jewel knows, Lee Junior knows, Ormand knows. They’ll go to jail, all of them. And Calvin? He’s just an old man, tired, worn out, an old man in a wheelchair. He looks into the German woman’s face and tries to feel pity, tries to feel brave, righteous, good. But instead he has a vision of himself farmed out to some nursing home, the women in the white caps prodding him and humiliating him, the stink of fatality on the air, the hacking and moaning in the night—

  “I’m … I’m sorry,” he says.

  Her face goes numb, flesh the color of raw dough. “Sorry?” she echoes. “Sorry?”

  But he’s already backing out the door.

  (1983)

  GREEN HELL

  There has been a collision (with birds, black flocks of them), an announcement from the pilot’s cabin, a moment of abeyed hysteria, and then the downward rush. The plane is nosing for the ground at a forty-five-degree angle, engines wheezing, spewing smoke and feathers. Lights flash, breathing apparatus drops and dangles. Our drinks become lariats, the glasses knives. Lunch (chicken croquettes, gravy, reconstituted potatoes and imitation cranberry sauce) decorates our shirts and vests. Outside there is the shriek of the air over the wings; inside, the rock-dust rumble of grinding teeth, molar on molar. My face seems to be slipping over my head like a rubber mask. And then, horribly, the first trees become visible beyond the windows. We gasp once and then we’re down, skidding through the greenery, jolted from our seats, panicked, repentant, savage. Windows strain and pop like light bulbs. We lose our bowels. The plane grates through the trees, the shriek of branches like the keen of harpies along the fuselage, our bodies jarred, dashed and knocked like the silver balls in a pinball machine. And then suddenly it’s over: we are stopped (think of a high diver meeting the board on the way down). I expect (have expected) flames.

  There are no flames. There is blood. Thick clots of it, puddles, ponds, lakes. We count heads. Eight of us still have them: myself, the professor, the pilot (his arm already bound up in a sparkling white sling), the mime, Tanqueray with a twist (nothing worse than a gin drinker), the man allergic to cats (runny eyes, red nose), the cat breeder, and Andrea, the stewardess. The cats, to a one, have survived. They crouch in their cages, coated with wet kitty litter like tempura shrimp. The rugby players, all twelve of them (dark-faced, scowling sorts), are dead. Perhaps just as well.

  Dazed, palms pressed to bruised organs, handkerchiefs dabbing at wounds, we hobble from the wreckage. Tanqueray is sniveling, a soft moan and gargle like rain on the roof and down the gutter. The mime makes an Emmett Kelly face. The professor limps, cradling a black briefcase with Fiskeridirektoratets Havforskningsinstitutt engraved in the corner. The cats, left aboard, begin to yowl. The allergic man throws back his head, sneezes.

  We look around: trees that go up three hundred feet, lianas, leaves the size of shower curtains, weeds thick as a knit sweater. Step back ten feet and the plane disappears. The pilot breaks the news: we’ve come down in the heart of the Amazon basin, hundreds, perhaps thousands of miles from the nearest toilet.

  The radio, of course, is dead.

  Evening

  We are back in the plane. They’ve sopped up the gore, switched the seats with palm fronds, buried the rugby players. Air freshener has been sprayed. The punctures (sardine tin, church key) have been plugged with life preservers, rubber life rafts. This then, will be our shelter.
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br />   Andrea, her uniform torn over the breast and slit up the leg, portions out our dinner: two of those plastic thimbles of nondairy creamer, a petrified brioche, two plastic packets of Thousand Island dressing, a cup of water and Bloody Mary mix. Apiece.

  “Life has its little rewards,” says Tanqueray, smacking his lips. He is a man of sagging flesh, torrid complexion, drooping into his sixth decade. There are two empty gin bottles (miniatures) on his tray.

  The professor looks up at him. He pages rapidly through a Norwegian-English dictionary. “Good evening,” he says. “I am well. And you?”

  Tanqueray nods.

  “I sink we come rain,” the professor says.

  The allergic man rattles a bottle of pills.

  The mime makes a show of licking the plastic recesses of his Thousand Island packet.

  “Foreigner, eh?” says Tanqueray.

  Suddenly the pilot is on his feet. “Now listen, everybody,” he booms. “I’m going to lay it on the line. No mincing words, no pussyfooting. We’re in a jam. No food, no water, no medical supplies. I’m not saying we’re not lucky to be alive and I’m not saying that me and the prof here ain’t going to try our damnedest to get this crate in the air again … but I am saying we’re in a jam. If we stick together, if we fight this thing—if we work like a team—we’ll make it.”

  I watch him: the curls at his temple, sharp nose, white teeth, the set of his jaw (prognathic). I realize that we have a leader. I further realize that I detest him. I doubt that we will make it.

  “A team,” he repeats.

  The mime makes his George-Washington-crossing-the-Delaware face.

  Night

  Chiggers, ticks, gnats, nits. Cicadas. Millipedes, centipedes, omnipedes, mini-pedes, pincerheads, poison toads, land leeches, skinks. Palmetto bugs. Iguanas, fer-de-lance, wolf spiders, diggers, buzzers, hissers, stinkers. Oonipids. Spitting spiders. Ants. Mites. Flits. Whips. Mosquitoes.