T.C. Boyle Stories II: The Collected Stories of T. Coraghessan Boyle, Volume II

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  I pulled into Boynton in record time, foot to the floor all the way, and skidded to a halt in the gravel lot out front of my store. There were only three other cars there, each as familiar as my own, and Ronnie Perrault, who I’d asked to help out for the weekend, was presiding over a very quiet bar (half the men in town had gone to Anchorage for the big event, thanks to Peter and his unflagging salesmanship). “Ronnie,” I said, coming into the bar to the strains of Lyle Lovett singing “Mack the Knife” like he was half dead, “you seen Bud?”

  Ronnie was hunched lovingly over a cigarette and a Meyers and Coke, holding hands with Louise. He was wearing a Seattle Mariners cap backwards on his head, and his eyes were distant, the eyes of a man in rum nirvana. Howard Walpole, seventy years old and with a bad back and runny eyes, was at the far end of the bar, and Roy Treadwell and Richie Oliver were playing cards at the table by the stove. Ronnie was slow, barely flowing, like the grenadine in the back pantry that hardly gets any heat. “I thought,” he said, chewing over the words, “I thought you wasn’t going to be back till Tuesday?”

  “Hey, Neddy,” Doug shouted, squeezing out the diminutive until it was like a screech, “how many you bring back?”

  “Bud,” I repeated, addressing the room at large. “Anybody seen Bud?”

  Well, they had to think about that. They were all pretty hazy, while the cat’s away the mice will play, but it was Howard who came out of it first. “Sure,” he said, “I seen him,” and he leaned so far forward over his drink I thought he was going to fall into it, “early this morning, in a brand-new Toyota Land Cruiser, which I don’t know where he got, and he had a woman with him.” And then, as if remembering some distant bit of trivia: “How was that flesh bazaar anyway? You married yet?”

  Louise snickered, Ronnie guffawed, but I was in no mood. “Where’d he go?” I said, hopeful, always hopeful, but I already knew the answer.

  Howard did something with his leg, a twitch he’d developed to ease the pain in his back. “I didn’t talk to him,” he said. “But I think he was going downriver.”

  —

  The river wasn’t too rough this time of year, but it was still moving at a pretty good clip, and I have to admit I’m not exactly an ace with the canoe. I’m too big for anything that small—give me a runabout with an Evinrude engine any day—and I always feel awkward and top-heavy. But there I was, moving along with the current, thinking one thing and one thing only: Jordy. It would be a bitch coming back up, but there’d be two of us paddling, and I kept focusing on how grateful she was going to be for getting her out of there, more grateful than if I’d bid a thousand dollars for her and took her out for steak three nights in a row. But then the strangest thing happened: the sky went gray and it began to snow.

  It just doesn’t snow that early in the year, not ever, or hardly ever. But there it was. The wind came up the channel of the river and threw these dry little pellets of ice in my face and I realized how stupid I’d been. I was already a couple miles downriver from town, and though I had a light parka and mittens with me, a chunk of cheese, loaf of bread, couple Cokes, that sort of thing, I really hadn’t planned on any weather. It was a surprise, a real surprise. Of course, at that point I was sure it was only a squall, something to whiten the ground for a day and then melt off, but I still felt stupid out there on the river without any real protection, and I began to wonder how Jordy would see it, the way she was worried about all the names for snow and how sick at heart she must have been just about then with Bud’s shithole of a cabin and no escape and the snow coming down like a life sentence, and I leaned into the paddle.

  It was after dark when I came round the bend and saw the lights of the cabin off through the scrim of snow. I was wearing my parka and mittens now, and I must have looked like a snowman propped up in the white envelope of the canoe and I could feel the ice forming in my beard where the breath froze coming out of my nostrils. I smelled woodsmoke and watched the soft tumbling sky. Was I angry? Not really. Not yet. I’d hardly thought about what I was doing up to this point—it all just seemed so obvious. The son of a bitch had gotten her, whether it was under false pretenses or not, and Jordy, sweet Jordy with Emily Brontë tucked under her arm, couldn’t have imagined in her wildest dreams what she was getting into. No one would have blamed me. For all intents and purposes, Bud had abducted her. He had.

  Still, when I actually got there, when I could smell the smoke and see the lamps burning, I felt shy suddenly. I couldn’t just burst in and announce that I’d come to rescue her, could I? And I could hardly pretend I just happened to be in the neighborhood . . . plus, that was Bud in there, and he was as purely nasty as a rattlesnake with a hand clamped round the back of its head. There was no way he was going to like this, no matter how you looked at it.

  So what I did was pull the canoe up on the bank about a hundred yards from the cabin, the scrape of the gravel masked by the snow, and creep up on the place, as stealthy as a big man can be—I didn’t want to alert Bud’s dog and blow the whole thing. But that was just it, I realized, tiptoeing through the snow like an ice statue come to life—what thing would I blow? I didn’t have a plan. Not even a clue.

  In the end, I did the obvious: snuck up to the window and peered in. I couldn’t see much at first, the window all smeared with grime, but I gingerly rubbed the pane with the wet heel of my mitten, and things came into focus. The stove in the corner was going, a mouth of flame with the door flung open wide for the fireplace effect. Next to the stove was a table with a bottle of wine on it and two glasses, one of them half full, and I saw the dog then—a malamute-looking thing—asleep underneath it. There was some homemade furniture—a sort of couch with an old single mattress thrown over it, a couple of crude chairs of bent aspen with the bark still on it. Four or five white plastic buckets of water were lined up against the wall, which was festooned with the usual backcountry junk: snowshoes, traps, hides, the mangy stuffed head of a caribou Bud must have picked up at a fire sale someplace. But I didn’t see Bud. Or Jordy. And then I realized they must be in the back room—the bedroom—and that made me feel strange, choked up in the pit of my throat as if somebody was trying to strangle me.

  It was snowing pretty steadily, six inches on the ground at least, and it muffled my footsteps as I worked my way around the cabin to the back window. The night was absolute, the sky so close it was breathing for me, in and out, in and out, and the snow held everything in the grip of silence. A candle was burning in the back window—I could tell it was a candle from the way the light wavered even before I got there—and I heard the music then, violins all playing in unison, the sort of thing I wouldn’t have expected from a lowlife like Bud, and voices, a low, intimate murmur of voices. That almost stopped me right there, that whispery blur of Jordy’s voice and the deeper resonance of Bud’s, and for a moment everything hung in the balance. A part of me wanted to back away from that window, creep back to the canoe, and forget all about it. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I’d seen her first—I’d squeezed her hand and given her the corsage and admired the hand-lettered nametag—and it wasn’t right. The murmur of those voices rose up in my head like a scream, and there was nothing more to think about.

  My shoulder hit the back door just above the latch and blew the thing off the hinges like it was a toy, and there I was, breathing hard and white to the eyebrows. I saw them in the bed together and heard this little birdlike cry from Jordy and a curse from Bud, and then the dog came hurtling in from the front room as if he’d been launched from a cannon. (And I should say here that I like dogs and that I’ve never lifted a finger to hurt any dog I’ve ever owned, but I had to put this one down. I didn’t have any choice.) I caught him as he left the floor and slammed him into the wall behind me till he collapsed in a heap. Jordy was screaming now, actually screaming, and you would have thought that I was the bad guy, but I tried to calm her, her arms bare and the comforter pulled up over her breasts and Bud’s plasti
c feet set there like slippers on the floor, telling her a mile a minute that I’d protect her, it was all right, and I’d see that Bud was prosecuted to the fullest extent, the fullest extent, but then Bud was fumbling under the mattress for something like the snake he was, and I took hold of his puny slip of a wrist with the blue-black snubnose .22 in it and just squeezed till his other hand came up and I caught that one and squeezed it too.

  Jordy made a bolt for the other room and I could see she was naked, and I knew right then he must have raped her because there was no way she’d ever consent to anything with a slime like that, not Jordy, not my Jordy, and the thought of what Bud had done to her made me angry. The gun was on the floor now and I kicked it under the bed and let go of Bud’s wrists and shut up his stream of curses and vile foul language with a quick stab to the bridge of his nose, and it was almost like a reflex. He went limp under the force of that blow and I was upset, I admit it, I was furious over what he’d done to that girl, and it just seemed like the most natural thing in the world to reach out and put a little pressure on his throat till the raw-looking stumps of his legs lay still on the blanket.

  That was when I became aware of the music again, the violins swelling up and out of a black plastic boombox on the shelf till they filled the room and the wind blew through the doorway and the splintered door groaned on its broken latch. Jordy, I was thinking, Jordy needs me, needs me to get her out of this, and I went into the front room to tell her about the snow and how it was coming down out of season and what that meant. She was crouched in the corner across from the stove and her face was wet and she was shivering. Her sweater was clutched up around her neck, and she’d got one leg of her jeans on, but the other leg was bare, sculpted bare and white all the way from her little painted toenails to the curve of her thigh and beyond. It was a hard moment. And I tried to explain to her, I did. “Look outside,” I said. “Look out there into the night. You see that?”

  She lifted her chin then and looked, out beyond the doorway to the back room, beyond Bud on his bed and the dog on the floor and into the gaping hole where the door had been. And there it was, coming down like the end of everything, snow, and there was only one name for it now. I tried to tell her that. Because we weren’t going anywhere.

  (1994)

  She Wasn’t Soft

  She wasn’t tender, she wasn’t soft, she wasn’t sweetly yielding or coquettish, and she was nobody’s little woman and never would be. That had been her mother’s role, and look at the sad sack of neuroses and alcoholic dysfunction she’d become. And her father. He’d been the pasha of the living room, the sultan of the kitchen, and the emperor of the bedroom, and what had it got him? A stab in the chest, a tender liver, and two feet that might as well have been stumps. Paula Turk wasn’t born for that sort of life, with its domestic melodrama and greedy sucking babies—no, she was destined for something richer and more complex, something that would define and elevate her, something great. She wanted to compete and she wanted to win—always, shining before her like some numinous icon was the glittering image of triumph. And whenever she flagged, whenever a sniffle or the flu ate at her reserves and she hit the wall in the numbing waters of the Pacific or the devilish winds at the top of San Marcos Pass, she pushed herself through it, drove herself with an internal whip that accepted no excuses and made no allowances for the limitations of the flesh. She was twenty-eight years old, and she was going to conquer the world.

  On the other hand, Jason Barre, the thirty-three-year-old surf-and-dive shop proprietor she’d been seeing pretty steadily over the past nine months, didn’t really seem to have the fire of competition in him. Both his parents were doctors (and that, as much as anything, had swayed Paula in his favor when they first met), and they’d set him up in his own business, a business that had continuously lost money since its grand opening three years ago. When the waves were breaking, Jason would be at the beach, and when the surf was flat he’d be stationed behind the counter on his tall swivel stool, selling wax remover to bleached-out adolescents who said things like “gnarly” and “killer” in their penetrating adenoidal tones. Jason liked to surf, and he liked to breathe the cigarette haze in sports bars, a permanent sleepy-eyed, widemouthed California grin on his face, flip-flops on his feet, and his waist encircled by a pair of faded baggy shorts barely held in place by the gentle sag of his belly and the twin anchors of his hipbones.

  That was all right with Paula. She told him he should quit smoking, cut down on his drinking, but she didn’t harp on it. In truth, she really didn’t care all that much—one world-beater in a relationship was enough. When she was in training, which was all the time now, she couldn’t help feeling a kind of moral superiority to anyone who wasn’t—and Jason most emphatically wasn’t. He was no threat, and he didn’t want to be—his mind just didn’t work that way. He was cute, that was all, and just as she got a little frisson of pleasure from the swell of his paunch beneath the oversized T-shirt and his sleepy eyes and his laid-back ways, he admired her for her drive and the lean, hard triumph of her beauty and her strength. She never took drugs or alcohol—or hardly ever—but he persuaded her to try just a puff or two of marijuana before they made love, and it seemed to relax her, open up her pores till she could feel her nerve ends poking through them, and their love-making was like nothing she’d ever experienced, except maybe breaking the tape at the end of the twenty-six-mile marathon.

  It was a Friday night in August, half-past seven, the sun hanging in the window like a piñata, and she’d just stepped out of the shower after a two-hour tuneup for Sunday’s triathlon, when the phone rang. Jason’s voice came over the wire, low and soft. “Hey, babe,” he said, breathing into the phone like a sex maniac (he always called her babe, and she loved it, precisely because she wasn’t a babe and never would be—it was their little way of mocking the troglodytes molded into the barstools beside him). “Listen, I was just wondering if you might want to join me down at Clubber’s for a while. Yeah, I know, you need your sleep and the big day’s the day after tomorrow and Zinny Bauer’s probably already asleep, but how about it. Come on. It’s my birthday.”

  “Your birthday? I thought your birthday was in December?”

  There was the ghost of a pause during which she could detect the usual wash of background noise, drunken voices crying out as if from the netherworld, the competing announcers of the six different games unfolding simultaneously on the twelve big-screen TVs, the insistent pulse of the jukebox thumping faintly beneath it all. “No,” he said, “my birthday’s today, August twenty-sixth—it is. I don’t know where you got the idea it was in December . . . but come on, babe, don’t you have to load up on carbohydrates?”

  She did. She admitted it. “I was going to make pancakes and penne,” she said, “with a little cheese sauce and maybe a loaf of that brown-and-serve bread. . . .”

  “I’ll take you to the Pasta Bowl, all you can eat—and I swear I’ll have you back by eleven.” He lowered his voice. “And no sex, I know—I wouldn’t want to drain you or anything.”

  —

  She wasn’t soft because she ran forty-five miles a week, biked two hundred and fifty, and slashed through fifteen thousand yards of the crawl in the Baños del Mar pool. She was in the best shape of her life, and Sunday’s event was nothing, less than half the total distance of the big one—the Hawaii Ironman—in October. She wasn’t soft because she’d finished second in the women’s division last year in Hawaii and forty-fourth over all, beating out one thousand three hundred and fifty other contestants, twelve hundred of whom, give or take a few, were men. Like Jason. Only fitter. A whole lot fitter.

  She swung by Clubber’s to pick him up—he wasn’t driving, not since his last D.U.I. anyway—and though parking was no problem, she had to endure the stench of cigarettes and the faint sour odor of yesterday’s vomit while he finished his cocktail and wrapped up his ongoing analysis of the Dodgers’ chances with an abstract point ab
out a blister on somebody or other’s middle finger. The guy they called Little Drake, white-haired at thirty-six and with a face that reminded her of one of those naked drooping dogs, leaned out of his Hawaiian shirt and into the radius of Jason’s gesticulating hands as if he’d never heard such wisdom in his life. And Paula? She stood there at the bar in her shorts and Lycra halter top, sucking an Evian through a straw while the sports fans furtively admired her pecs and lats and the hard hammered musculature of her legs, for all the world a babe. She didn’t mind. In fact, it made her feel luminous and alive, not to mention vastly superior to all those pale lumps of flesh sprouting out of the corners like toadstools and the sagging abrasive girlfriends who hung on their arms and tried to feign interest in whatever sport happened to be on the tube.

  But somebody was talking to her, Little Drake, it was Little Drake, leaning across Jason and addressing her as if she were one of them. “So Paula,” he was saying. “Paula?”

  She swiveled her head toward him, hungry now, impatient. She didn’t want to hang around the bar and schmooze about Tommy Lasorda and O.J. and Proposition 187 and how Phil Aguirre had broken both legs and his collarbone in the surf at Rincon; she wanted to go to the Pasta Bowl and carbo-load. “Yes?” she said, trying to be civil, for Jason’s sake.

  “You going to put them to shame on Sunday, or what?”

  Jason was snubbing out his cigarette in the ashtray, collecting his money from the bar. They were on their way out the door—in ten minutes she’d be forking up fettucine or angel hair with black olives and sun-dried tomatoes while Jason regaled her with a satiric portrait of his day and all the crazies who’d passed through his shop. The little man with the white hair didn’t require a dissertation, and besides, he couldn’t begin to appreciate the difference between what she was doing and the ritualistic farce of the tobacco-spitting, crotch-grabbing “athletes” all tricked out in their pretty unblemished uniforms up on the screen over his head, so she just smiled, like a babe, and said, “Yeah.”