by T. C. Boyle
Long night, long, long night. Everybody made a fuss over him, people called him crazy for going out there, but they knew he had heart and they knew he’d done it for his mother, to try and help, to save her. His father chafed his limbs and helped him into dry clothes and he sat right by the furnace for the longest time and Mrs. Nashookluk, the school nurse, bandaged his hand. His mother was asleep on her back on the floor of the gymnasium, snoring the way she did, and when he looked down on her he had to smile because under any other conditions he would have been embarrassed for her, but not now. She’s going to be okay, his father said. Just let her sleep. And his father chewed him out in front of everybody, but you could see it was just for show. Cherry came and sat with him for a while, but then it was one o’clock in the morning and her mother came to get her because it was time for everybody to settle down to bed and listen to the wind scream and the dogs howl and the waves crash against the windows of Mrs. Koonook’s classroom until the next day broke and they could see if there was anything left out there except water.
He closed his eyes for a while, trying to sink down into sleep, but it was too strange with the whole village sprawled all around him and everybody snoring in their own key till it was like one of the atonal compositions Mrs. Cato made them listen to in Music Appreciation. It was hot, too hot, and if there was irony in that, he was way beyond it. His father was asleep beside his mother, spooning into her, their faces gone slack, and Corinne lay just beyond them, her cheek pressed to her pillow and her mouth squeezed like a fish’s, softly snoring to her own rhythm. In the morning, first thing, no matter what, he was going to go get his mother her medicine because she would need it then more than ever and he was thinking about the times when she overslept and her blood sugar plummeted and she was like a crazy woman, fighting everybody with her eyes dilated and the veins standing up in her neck till they got some juice in her and she balanced out. The wind blew—kept on blowing. Somebody moaned in their sleep.
The gymnasium was the biggest room in the school, and most people had set up in here, but they were scattered around in the classrooms, the library and the cafeteria too. Cherry’s family was camped in the library with maybe six or seven other families, including—and this got him—the other A.J. and his father. That was nothing intentional, just luck of the draw, but it rankled him anyway and that was another reason he couldn’t sleep. Not that he was worried. The last thing she’d said to him, just as her mother came picking her way across the room to come fetch her, was, Two o’clock, okay? If you can stay awake that long. Think you can? For me?
He’d kissed her then, a public kiss, just a quick brushing of the lips, but he had an instant hard-on and he lifted his head to watch her all the way across the floor and out the door before he bent to set the alarm on his watch, because here was the deal: she was going to get up to go to the bathroom at two and so was he. Except they weren’t going to go to the bathroom at all but cruise right past the doors marked “Girls” and “Boys” and on down to the end of the hall, where the janitor’s closet was. If nobody was looking—and why would they be at two o’clock in the morning?—they were going to go in there and be together for as long as they could. The promise of that, of what she might let him do, kept everything else at a distance, because the house was wrecked, he knew that in his heart, and the island was doomed and Cherry was going away, but not now, not tonight, not when they had the janitor’s closet all to themselves and nobody the wiser.
In his dream, the whole school and everybody in it was lifted off the pilings and swept up into the sky on the tractor beam of an alien spacecraft that hovered over him like a bird beating against the sun, and whether the aliens were going to put them down in Hawaii or Tahiti or even California, he never knew because his alarm was going with a soft ping, ping, ping, and his eyes flashed open on the darkened room and the shadows humped there like seals pulled out on the ice in the twilight. Cherry, he thought, and he was already pushing himself stealthily up, thinking of the last time—at her house—when they had half an hour before her mother came home from her card game and how they’d both got naked and she’d let him touch her everywhere.
The only illumination was from the emergency lights glowing red at both ends of the room, but it was enough to see by so he could avoid stepping on anybody, though that was a trick in itself because people slept in all sorts of bizarre positions and they moved in their sleep too. He was almost at the door when he lost his balance and came down square on somebody’s stretched-out arm—one of the men, he couldn’t see who it was—and there was a curse in the dark and he froze and whispered Sorry, and was going to add, Just going to the bathroom, but then there came a quick sharp snort of air that was like a gunshot and whoever it was was asleep again.
The hallway was as strange at this hour as if he was still in his dream, time frozen, nobody there, no kids, no teachers, no shouts and taunts and girls giggling and lockers slamming, but then the door to the boys’ room opened and out came Jimmy Norton rubbing his eyes. A.J. murmured Hi, but Jimmy didn’t say anything, dead on his feet. He waited till Jimmy brushed by him before he pulled open the door to the bathroom, but that was just for show, and he stood there, his heart beating fast, watching Jimmy out of sight, then eased the door shut and tiptoed the length of the hall to the janitor’s closet.
She was already there. He opened the door and the faint light of the hall seeped in and there she was, in her white flannel nightgown that was like the ones his mother wore, only smaller, a whole lot smaller, and she said, Shhhhhh. Come on. Come in. Shut the door.
He was confused—electrified, yes, so excited he was trembling, but there was no light in the closet and he’d forgotten to bring a flashlight or even matches. Or no, he hadn’t forgotten—he’d never even thought of it.
But there’s no light in there.
Shhhhh! Just shut the door!
Her eyes were red flecks that gave back the glow of the emergency light at the end of the hall. He couldn’t see her face or her hair or anything else but her voice was right there front and center, impatient now—exasperated—and he realized she was as excited as he was. Which excited him all the more.
He did as he was told, the door pulling shut behind him with an audible click that was like a thunderclap, and then he had hold of her and they were kissing and he could feel her breasts flattening against his chest. Usually, when they were kissing, he had his eyes closed and it was like when he sang along with a song he liked, just feeling it, but now his eyes were open wide and he couldn’t see a thing and it made him feel strange, as if he wasn’t anyplace at all.
I want to see you, he said.
No.
Come on, just let me open the door a crack, I mean, an inch, just an inch, and he reached back for the knob but she took hold of his wrist and her grip was like iron because she was strong and beautiful and like nobody else on the island and he loved her, he really loved her more than anything. He could have thought of all the things they’d done together, a whole DVD of their life, of wrestling on the shore when they were kids, hiking to the end of the island and back, playing board games, video games, racing their ATVs on the airstrip, of their first kiss and the first time he told her he loved her, could have reminded her, but all he could say, there in the blackness, were two words he thought he’d never utter: I’m scared.
Scared? Of what—the dark?
No, he said, and faintly, beneath the floorboards, he could feel the slap and slash of the waves. Not the dark. Just, I don’t know, scared.
Of me? She let out a laugh and now it was his turn to shush her. You didn’t seem so scared at my house the other day.
He could feel her breath on his face. Don’t be scared, she said, liking the word, liking the notion of it, and she moved into him and they kissed again, the deepest kiss, the warmth of her all there was in the world, but he broke away and said, Please? Just a crack?
In answer, she pulled the nightgown over her head—he could hear the soft whisper of
the material letting go of her skin—and pressed herself to him. Feel me, she said, feel me here.
There was a smell of the janitor’s things—bleach, floor wax—and when they went to lie down, using her nightgown and his shirt as protection against the cold of the floor, their limbs kept banging into things in the dark—brooms, he guessed. Mops, buckets. She had never let him go all the way with her and she wasn’t going to do it this time, he knew it, and he didn’t have a condom anyway, but her skin was on fire and so was his and he kissed her all over. He kept closing his eyes and opening them again, the whole universe spinning there in the dark with him, the flecks of light Mr. Adams called floaters strung out like constellations in a depthless black void. He came twice, both times on her belly, and she squeezed him so hard it was like he was back out there again in the crush of the water gasping for air.
He lay there awake after she fell asleep with her head pressed to his chest and her nightgown wrapped around them like a sheet. It took him the longest while to make out the faint sliver of light at the bottom of the door, which must have been there all along because it couldn’t be morning yet, could it? Soon he would have to wake her so they could both sneak back before they were missed. But not yet. For now he just lay there, letting the night spin round him, his mother drifting there in his consciousness and the dogs too, the dogs that were quiet now so that the only sound was the keening of the wind and the hiss of the water running on and on, unstoppable, in the darkness beneath them.
He felt her breathe, in and out, rhythmically, and tried to time his own breathing to hers and that made him feel strong again, in control, no matter how dark it was or what came next. His mother was going to die and his house and the village and the school were all going to die too and Cherry was going away. The whole thing was too depressing and it would have brought him back down again, except that just then the image of Surtsey came into his head, Surtsey, the island that had risen up out of the sea fifty years ago off the coast of Iceland, in the other ocean, the Atlantic. He had to smile at the thought. Mr. Adams had done an entire lesson on it, on how the underwater volcano erupted and made this new place high above the waves, and how things had blown across the water—seed pods, insects, pollen—to make it alive, a whole new island, a whole new world. That was something, Surtsey, and maybe he would go there one day, he thought, maybe he would.
He shifted his arm ever so slightly and Cherry snuggled in closer. He listened to the wind, listened to the waves, and then he was asleep.
THEFT AND OTHER ISSUES
THE DOG
The dog was old, arthritic and fat, and she belonged to my live-in girlfriend, Leah, who’d had her for eight years before we met. The dog’s name was Bidderbells (don’t ask) and you couldn’t really leave her at home for long stretches because of her tendency to chew up the cushions on the couch, or at least gum them, and then take a dump on the kitchen floor. So I had her with me the day I brought my laptop to the library to work in peace (they’re renovating the building across the street from the apartment and the noise is multidimensional) and, of course, I couldn’t park on the street because the sun would make a furnace of the car. I got lucky at the parking garage. Just as I took my ticket and the gate lifted I spotted an SUV backing out of a prime space on the left-hand side and I eased right in, feeling good about myself and the little unexpected rewards of life. I cracked the windows, gave the dog a rawhide bone to gum and walked down the ramp and out into the sunshine.
The library is one of my favorite buildings in town, a sandstone monument to culture and learning built in a time when people cared about such things. Of course, it’s principally a repository of bums these days, men mostly, who crowd the armchairs and big oak tables with their oozing bags of possessions and idle away the hours bringing up porn sites on the computers, scribbling in their journals or snoozing with their heads thrown back and their mouths hanging open. Not that I’m complaining. They’ve got a right to live too and we’ve got a lot of bleeding hearts in this town (read: bum advocates) and though I’m not really one of them I guess you’d have to say I’m tolerant, at least.
At any rate, I worked for maybe an hour and a half, then packed up and headed back out into the sun for the stroll across the street to the parking structure. Was I thinking I was about to be violated? No. I was thinking nothing—or just, I suppose, that it was a nice day, it was time for lunch and the world was an equable place.
THE ABSENCE
The car wasn’t there. I walked directly to the spot where I’d left it and found a motorcycle parked there instead. The motorcycle was a handsome thing, a chopper actually, with high handlebars and a dragon decal on the fuel tank, but it wasn’t my car and I was at least ninety-nine percent sure that this was where I’d parked. Now I began to exercise my neck, looking up and down the row of parked vehicles, wondering if I was somehow mistaken, if my internal compass had confused this trip to the library with the last and that it was on the last visit I’d parked here and today elsewhere. Like up there at the top of the ramp. I started walking up the gradual incline, scanning the vehicles on both sides, and when I got to the point where the ramp gave on to the second floor of the garage, I went back down again, rechecking every spot. Still no car. So back up the ramp I went, turning the corner to Level 2, and I checked every space there as well before continuing on to ascend all the levels, including the sixth and top floor, which was outside in the glare of the sun and no possibility at all because I was certain I would never have parked there with the dog in the car, not on this day or any other.
I didn’t really know how much time dribbled away in this wasted effort, this idiotic obsessive-compulsive tramping through the entire parking structure checking and rechecking the same cars over and over as if one of them would magically morph into mine. Half an hour? More? And wasn’t this the definition of true idiocy, repeating the same behavior and expecting a different result? It was at this point that I realized the car must have been towed—and yet why I couldn’t imagine, since this wasn’t metered parking and the gate wouldn’t have admitted me in the first place if I hadn’t taken a ticket. Suddenly I was in a hurry, thinking of what this was going to cost me—and of the dog, of course, who at the very least would have been confused if not disturbed or even frightened by the clanking of the tow truck and the unnatural elevation of the car—and I was practically jogging as I descended through the levels and made my way back down to the exit. Here was a sharp curve and a narrow lane that led from the mouth of the parking structure to a kiosk and gate, and I found myself squeezed between the unforgiving concrete pillars on the one side and the autos backed up at the ticket kiosk, feeling awkward and vulnerable on foot in the domain of big-grid tires and steel.
The ticket taker was a high school kid in a hoodie who looked startled when I popped my head in the door. In his idle moments he’d been underlining passages in a creased paperback of Crime and Punishment, which lay on the scratched aluminum counter before him. I was beginning, deep in that place of flap and panic in the center of my chest, to see a theme revealed here. “Did you guys tow any cars today?” I asked him, hopefully, and I must have looked confused or disoriented, like one of the bums he no doubt had to negotiate at regular intervals.
There was the screech of tires somewhere above and behind us. A sweetish smell of exhaust hung in the air. He gave me a wary look. “We don’t tow cars out of here,” he said. “Unless they’re like left for a week or something . . .”
“No, no,” I said. “I just parked two hours ago”—I flipped my wrist to consult my watch—“at ten past ten or so.”
He was shaking his head so that the flaps of the hoodie generated their own little breeze. “I’ve been on since eight and I definitely haven’t seen any tow trucks.”
That gave me pause. I looked off across the street to the courthouse and saw the way the sun drew radiant lines across the sandstone blocks a previous generation had stacked up there in defiance of time, temblors and the depredations
of weather. Then I brought my gaze back to the kiosk, to which a shining white Lexus was just pulling up. The driver of the Lexus, a faux blonde with a reconstructed face, gave me a look, then handed the ticket to the kid in the hoodie, and I stood there observing the gate rise and listening to their parting remarks (“Have a nice day now”; “You too”), feeling helpless and embarrassed.
“That’s a camera there, right?” I said, after the Lexus had wheeled off down the street.
The kid looked to where I was pointing, just to his right and above his head. “Yeah, I guess,” he said.
“So if anybody”—and here the word caught in my throat for just a moment—“stole my car, you’d have it on film, right?”
UNRAVELING THE MYSTERY
The kid called his supervisor, a lean, gum-chewing athlete in his forties with a little pencil mustache and a name tag affixed to his sportcoat that read GREG. Greg shook my hand and asked, “What seems to be the problem?”
“I think somebody stole my car.”
“You parked it here?”
I said yes.
“You’re sure? Absolutely sure?” Greg had been through this before, you could see that. And you could see that in ninety percent of the cases it turned out that people had parked on the street or in another lot or had simply walked right by their own vehicle without recognizing it because people got confused, especially if they’d been in the library focused on a page or computer screen and not on the real and actual.
I nodded. A slow pounding had started up in my chest and quickly migrated to my head, where it began to beat like a big bass drum. “And my dog was in the car,” I said. “My girlfriend’s dog, I mean.” Here a vision of Leah rose before me, Leah when she was perplexed by the spill of coffee grounds leading across the kitchen floor from the counter to the trash or upset over something she’d heard on the radio, her brow contorted and her eyes coiled, ready to strike. How was I going to break the news to her?
