by T. C. Boyle
I count four rings, five, and just when I think she’s not going to pick up, she’s there saying, “What do you want?”
“What do you mean, what do I want? I want to talk to you.”
“Well, I don’t want to talk to you.”
“Don’t give me that shit, because I want to talk to you, hear me?”
She doesn’t answer.
“All right, fine—I don’t want to talk to you either,” I say, but still she doesn’t say anything and it takes me a minute to realize the phone’s gone dead.
A spread now. You see Him way in the distance with all the turmoil and quasars and all the rest diminishing behind Him till He’s back in the scene out front of the cantina and stepping through the doors all over again, and for a minute you think nothing’s changed, the panel almost identical to the one two pages back, until you realize Satan, with his goat’s eyes and mercury tattoo, is gone. And then you realize that the rest of them, everybody in the room, though they draw their weapons and start blazing away, are doomed, just like bad guys everywhere. Warrior Jesus points His finger, the narcos vanish and their weapons clatter to the floor. There’s nobody left in the room now but a bartender, a couple waitresses and the whores, maybe fifteen or twenty of them. These are innocents, the whores, that’s what we’re thinking—forced into the trade, sold into it—and He will free them from their chains and restore them to what they once were, sisters, daughters, mothers, just like He took the burden of retardation off the two Syrian girls.
We’re wrong, though. The whores are beyond redemption, we can see that in their faces, cheaters, sinners, betrayers, riddled with every kind of STD known to man, and we linger on them in a panel that takes in the whole scene. The one in the middle, the prettiest one, I give her Asia’s face, and I don’t need a photograph to work from, just the implant in my memory, and I give her Asia’s green eyes too, though I shade them more toward olive so as to take nothing away from His eyes. It’s a moment of tension. He lifts His finger, but the whores don’t turn to dust—no, that would be too easy. What happens is they begin to melt, like wax, and we see the one in the middle screaming out her pain with every waxy drop of her flesh that sizzles on the floor beneath her. Then a full-page spread: Warrior Jesus’ face in closeup, so huge it bleeds off the edges of both pages, and for the first time since He’s come on the scene, He’s smiling. It’s not a happy smile, that wouldn’t work, not at all—He’s still got a job to do—but more rueful, as if He’s just about to shake His head in a go-figure kind of way. And then the final image, and I’m still not sure about this, though it could work as a branding icon and I could see it on a line of tees, easily, you get a closeup of His finger, just His finger, pointed right at you.
So what do you think? Is it a go?
THE FUGITIVE
They told him he had to wear a mask in public. Which was ridiculous. It made him feel like he had a target painted on his back—or his face, actually, right in the middle of his face. But if he wanted to walk out the door of the clinic he was going to walk out with that mask on—either that or go to jail. Outside it was raining, which made everything all that much harder, because what were you going to do with a wet mask? How could you even breathe? Here, inside the office, with the doctor and his caseworker from health services, there was no sound of the rain, or if there was, he couldn’t hear it—all he could hear was the rasp and wheeze of his own compromised breathing as he sucked air through the fibers of the mask.
The doctor was saying something to him now and Marciano watched him frame the words with his hands before they both looked to the caseworker, a short slim woman with a big bust and liquid eyes he would have liked to fuck if he wasn’t so sick. She was named Rosa Hinojosa, and he kept saying her name in his head because of the way it rhymed, which somehow made him feel better.
“You understand what the doctor is telling you?” she asked in her clipped north-of-the-border Spanish he could have listened to all day under other circumstances. But these were the circumstances and until he got better he would have to play their game, Dr. Rosen’s game and Rosa Hinojosa’s too.
He nodded.
“No more lapses, you understand that? You will report here each morning when the clinic opens at eight for your intravenous medication, and”—she held up two plastic pill containers—“you will take your oral medication, without fail, every night at dinner. And you must wear your mask at all times.”
“Even when I’m alone?”
She looked to the doctor, said something to him in English, nodded, then turned back to Marciano, her breasts straining at the fabric of her blouse, a pink blouse that made her look even younger than she was, which, he guessed, was maybe twenty-four or -five. “You have your own room in this house”—she glanced down at the clipboard in her lap—“at 519 West Haley Street? Is that right?”
“Yes.”
“There are other roomers there?”
“Yes.”
“All right. When you’re alone in your room, you can remove the mask, but only then and never if you’re in the common area, in the kitchen or the living room or even the bathroom, except to brush your teeth and wash your face. You’re highly contagious and if you were to cough without the mask on, the bacteria could get into the air and infect your roommates, and you wouldn’t want that, would you?”
No, he agreed, he wouldn’t, but now the doctor was saying something more, his tone harsh and hectoring, and though Marciano didn’t register what he was saying, or not exactly, he got the gist of it: this was his warning, his final warning, and now there could be no appeal. He watched the doctor’s eyes that looked at him as if he were less than human, something to step on in the street and crush, angry eyes, hateful, and what had he done to deserve this? He’d gotten sick, that was all—and couldn’t anybody get sick?
Rosa Hinojosa (her lips were fascinating—plump and adhesive—and he wanted desperately in that moment to get well if for no other reason than to kiss them or even for the promise of kissing them) told him what he already knew, that because he’d stopped taking his medication a year ago, his case of tuberculosis had mutated into the multi-drug-resistant form and his life was at risk because after this there were no more drugs. That was it. They didn’t exist. But more, and worse: if he did not comply fully—no lapses—Dr. Rosen would get a court order and incarcerate him to be sure he got the full round of treatment. And why? Not out of charity, entertain no illusions about that, but to protect society, and at a cost—did he even have any idea of the cost?—of as much as two hundred thousand dollars for him alone. She paused. Compressed her lips. Looked to the doctor. Then, as if she were tracking the drift of the very microbes hanging invisibly in the air, she brought her eyes back to him. “You agree?” she demanded.
He wanted to say yes, of course he did—he wanted to be cured, but he was already feeling better, much better, and this whole business was so cold, so hard, he honestly didn’t know if he could go through with it, and wasn’t that the problem last time? He’d taken the medicine, which was no easy thing because it made him sick to his stomach and itch as if there were something under his skin clawing its way out. They said he’d have to stay on the regimen anywhere from six to thirty months, but within three months he’d felt fine, his cough nearly gone and his arms and chest filling out again, so he started selling the pills because he didn’t need them anymore and then he stopped coming to the clinic altogether and that would have been fine until the disease returned to shake him like a rat in a cage and he spat up blood and came back here to their contempt and their antiseptic smells and their masks and dictates and ultimatums. He wanted to say yes, and he tried to, but at that moment the cough came up on him, the long dredging cough that was like the sea drawing back over the stones at low tide, and the inside of the mask was suddenly crimson and he couldn’t seem to stop coughing.
When finally he looked up, both the doctor and Rosa Hinojosa were wearing masks of their own and Rosa Hinojosa was pushing a box of d
isposable surgical masks across the desk to him. He couldn’t see her lips now, only her eyes, and her eyes—as rich and brown as two chocolates in the dark wrappers of her lashes—didn’t have an ounce of sympathy left in them.
Before he got sick the second time, he’d been working as part of a crew that did landscaping and gardening for the big estates strung out along the beach and carved out of the hills, a good job, steady, and with a patrón who didn’t try to cheat you. One of his jobs was to trap and dispose of the animals that infested these places, rats, gophers, possums, raccoons and whatever else tore up the lawns or raided the orchards. His patrón wouldn’t allow the use of poison of any kind—the owners didn’t like it and it worked its way up the food chain and killed everything out there, which to Marciano’s mind didn’t seem like such a bad proposition, but it wasn’t his job to think. His job was to do as he was told. The gophers weren’t a problem—they died underground, transfixed on the spikes of the Macabee traps he set in the dark cool dirt of their runs—but the possums and raccoons and even the rats had to be captured alive in Havahart traps of varying sizes depending on the species. Which raised the question of what to do with them once you’d caught them.
The first time he did actually catch something—a raccoon—it was on a big thirty-acre estate with its own avocado grove and a fish pond stocked with Japanese koi that cost a thousand dollars each. It was early, misty yet, and when he went to check the cage he’d baited with a dab of peanut butter and half a sardine it was a shock to see the dark shadow compressed inside it, the robber itself with its black mask and tense fingers grasping the mesh as if it were a monkey and not a mapache at all. In the next moment he was running down the slope to where the patrón was assembling the sprinkler system for a new flowerbed, crying out, “I got one, I got one!”
The patrón, big-bellied but tough, a man who must have been as old as Marciano’s father yet could work alongside the men on the hottest day without even breathing hard, glanced up from what he was doing. “One what?”
“A raccoon.”
“Okay, good. Get rid of it and reset the trap. Is it a female?”
A female? What was he talking about? It was a raccoon, that was all, and what did he expect him to do? Flip it over and inspect its equipment?
“Because if it’s a female, there’ll be more.”
Breathless, excited, the microbes working in him though he didn’t yet know it, he just stood there, puzzled. “Get rid of it how?”
“I thought you were a trapper?”
“I am, it’s just I want to be sure to do things the way you want them, that’s all.”
A steady look. A sigh. “Okay, listen, because I’m only going to tell you once. Take one of those plastic trash cans lined up there behind the garage and fill it with water, right to the top, you understand? Then just drop the cage in and it’ll be over in three minutes.”
“You mean drown it, just like that?”
“What are you going to do, take it home and train it to walk on a leash?” The patrón was grinning now, pleased with his own joke, but there was work to do and already he was turning back to it. “And do me a favor,” he added, glancing over his shoulder. “Bury it out in the weeds where Mrs. Lewis won’t have to see it.”
Why he was thinking of that, he couldn’t say, except that he missed the job—and the money—and as he walked to the bus in the rain, the box of face masks tucked under one arm, he wanted to be back there again, under the sun, working, just that, working. They’d scared him at the clinic, they always scared him, and he was feeling light-headed on top of it. The blood was bad, he knew that, he could see it in their eyes. Thirty months. He was twenty-three years old and thirty months was like a lifetime sentence, and even then, there were no guarantees—Rosa Hinojosa had made that clear. He was sick from the intravenous. His arm was sore. His throat ached. Even his feet didn’t seem to want to cooperate, zigging and zagging so he was walking like a drunk, and what was that all about?
The sidewalk before him was strewn with the worms that were coming up out of the earth because if they stayed down there they’d drown, whereas up here, in the rain, they’d have a chance at life before somebody stepped on them or the birds got to them. He liked worms, nature’s recyclers, and he was playing a little game with himself, trying to avoid them and hold in the next cough at the same time, watching his feet and the pattern the worms made on the pavement, loops and triangles of pale bleached-out flesh, and when he looked up he was right in front of the bar—Herlihy’s—he’d seen from the bus stop but had never been inside of. It was just past ten in the morning and he wasn’t working today—his new job, strictly gardening, was with an old white-haired campesino who booked the clients and sat in his beater truck and read spy novels while Marciano did all the work—and his ESL class at the community college wasn’t till five, so there really wasn’t anything to do with himself but sit in front of the television in his room. That had something to do with it. That and the fact that his new boss—Rudy—had just paid him the day before.
He didn’t go directly in, but walked by the place as if he was on an errand elsewhere, then stripped off the mask and stuffed it in his pocket, doubled back and pushed open the door. Inside were all the usual things, neon signs for Budweiser and Coors, a jukebox that might once have worked, the honey-colored bottles lined up behind the bar and the head of a deer—or no, an elk—jammed into one wall as if this was Alaska and somebody had just shot it. There were three customers, all white, strung together on three adjoining barstools, and the bartender, also white, but fat, with big buttery arms in a short-sleeve shirt. They all turned to look at him as he came in and that made him nervous so he chose a stool at the far end of the bar, rehearsing in his head the phrase he was going to give the bartender, “Please, a beer,” which made use of his favorite word in English and the word wasn’t “please.”
The bartender heaved himself up off his own stool and came down the bar to him, put two thick white hands on the counter and asked him something, which must have been “What do you want?” and Marciano uttered his phrase. There was a moment of ambiguity, the man poised there still instead of bending to the cooler, and then there was a further question, which he didn’t grasp until the man began rattling off the names of the beers he stocked, pointing as he did so to a line of bottles on the top row, ten or twelve different brands. “Corona,” Marciano said, unfolding a five-dollar bill on the bar, and all at once he was coughing and he put his hand up to cover his mouth, but he couldn’t seem to stop until he had the bottle to his lips, draining it in three swallows as if he were a nomad who’d just come in off the desert.
One of the men at the end of the bar said something then and the other two looked at Marciano and broke out laughing, and whether it was good-natured or not, a little joke at his expense, it made him feel tight in his chest and the cough came up again, so severe this time he thought he was going to pass out. But here was the bartender, saying something more, and what it was he couldn’t imagine, because it wasn’t illegal to cough, was it? But no, that wasn’t it. The bartender was pointing at the empty bottle and so Marciano repeated his phrase, “Please, a beer,” and the heavy man bent to the cooler, extracted a fresh Corona, snapped off the cap and set it before him.
He sipped the second beer and watched the rain spatter the dirty windows and run off in streaks. At some point he saw his bus pull up at the stop across the street, a vivid panel of color that made him think of what was waiting for him at home—nothing, zero, exactly zero—and he watched it pull away again as he tried to fight down the scratch in his throat. He was scared. He was angry. And he sat there, staring out into the gloom, drinking one beer after another, and when he coughed, really coughed, they all looked at him and at the wet cardboard box of face masks, then looked away again. Nobody said another word to him, which was all right with him—he just focused on the television behind the bar, some news channel, and tried to interpret the words the people were saying there while
the backdrop shifted from warplanes and explosions to some sort of pageant with models on a runway looking raccoon-eyed and haughty and not half as good as Rosa Hinojosa. The bloody mask remained in his pocket, and the box of masks, the new ones, stayed right where it was on the stool beside him.
All that week he went into the clinic at eight as instructed and all that week he felt nauseous and skipped breakfast and went to work with Rudy anyway, and the only good thing there was that Rudy didn’t like to start early—and he didn’t ask questions either. Still, Marciano was lagging and he knew it and knew it was only a matter of time before Rudy said something. Which he did, that Friday, TGIF, end of the week, the first week of his new life with the new cocktail of antibiotics running through his veins and making him nauseous, one week down and how many more to go? He did a quick calculation in his head: fifty-two weeks in a year, double that and then add twenty-six more. It was like climbing a mountain backwards—no matter how many steps you took you never got to see the peak.
They were on their third or fourth house of the day, everything gray and wet with the fog off the ocean and the sun nowhere in sight. His chest felt sore. He was hungry, but the idea of food—a taco or burger or anything—made his stomach turn. “Jesus,” Rudy said, startling him out of a daydream, “you’re like one of the walking dead. I mean, at that last place I couldn’t tell whether you were pushing the mower or the mower was pushing you.” The best Marciano could do was give him a tired grin. “What,” Rudy said, staring now, “late night last night?”
