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

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  So Philip. He lived in Detroit, a place I’d never been to, a place where it gets cold in winter and the only palm trees are under glass in the botanical gardens. It would be a change, a real change. But a change is what I needed, and the judge liked the idea that he wouldn’t have to see me in Pasadena anymore and that I’d have a room in Philip’s house with Philip’s wife and my nephews, Josh and Jeff, and that I would be gainfully employed doing lab work at Philip’s obstetrical clinic for the princely sum of six dollars and twenty-five cents an hour.

  So Philip. He met me at the airport, his thirty-eight-year-old face as trenched with anal-retentive misery as our father’s was in the year before he died. His hair was going, I saw that right away, and his glasses were too big for his head. And his shoes—he was wearing a pair of brown suede boatlike things that would have had people running for the exits at the Rainbow Club. I hadn’t seen him in six years, not since the funeral, that is, and I wouldn’t have even recognized him if it wasn’t for his eyes—they were just like mine, as blue and icy as a bottle of Aqua Velva. “Little brother,” he said, and he tried to gather a smile around the thin flaps of his lips while he stood there gaping at me like somebody who hadn’t come to the airport specifically to fetch his down-on-his-luck brother and was bewildered to discover him there.

  “Philip,” I said, and I set down my two carry-on bags to pull him to me in a full-body, back-thumping, chest-to-chest embrace, as if I was glad to see him. But I wasn’t glad to see him. Not particularly. Philip was ten years older than me, and ten years is a lot when you’re a kid. By the time I knew his name he was in college, and when I was expressing myself with my father’s vintage Mustang, a Ziploc baggie of marijuana, and a can of high-gloss spray paint, he was in medical school. I’d never much liked him, and he felt about the same toward me, and as I embraced him there in the Detroit airport I wondered how that was going to play out over the course of the six months the judge had given me to stay out of trouble and make full restitution or serve the next six in jail.

  “Have a good flight?” Philip asked when I was done embracing him.

  I stood back from him a moment, the bags at my feet, and couldn’t help being honest with him; that’s just the way I am. “You look like shit, Philip,” I said. “You look like Dad just before he died—or maybe after he died.”

  A woman with a big shining planetoid of a face stopped to give me a look, then hitched up her skirt and stamped on by in her heels. The carpeting smelled of chemicals. Outside the dirt-splotched windows was snow, a substance I’d had precious little experience of. “Don’t start, Rick,” Philip said. “I’m in no mood. Believe me.”

  I shouldered my bags, stooped over a cigarette, and lit it just to irritate him. I was hoping he’d tell me there was a county ordinance against smoking in public places and that smoking was slow suicide, from a physician’s point of view, but he didn’t rise to the bait. He just stood there, looking harassed. “I’m not starting,” I said. “I’m just . . . I don’t know. I’m just concerned, that’s all. I mean, you look like shit. I’m your brother. Shouldn’t I be concerned?”

  I thought he was going to start wondering aloud why I should be concerned about him, since I was the one on the run from an exasperated judicial system and twelve thousand and some-odd dollars in outstanding checks, but he surprised me. He just shrugged and shifted that lipless smile around a bit and said, “Maybe I’ve been working too hard.”

  —

  Philip lived on Washtenaw Street, in an upscale housing development called Washtenaw Acres, big houses set back from the street and clustered around a lake glistening with black ice under a weak sky and weaker sun. The trees were stripped and ugly, like dead sticks rammed into the ground, and the snow wasn’t what I’d expected. Somehow I’d thought it would be fluffy and soft, movie snow, big pillows of it cushioning the ground while kids whooshed through it on their sleds, but it wasn’t like that at all. It lay on the ground like a scab, clots of dirt and yellow weed showing through in mangy patches. Bleak, that’s what it was, but I told myself it was better than the Honor Rancho, a whole lot better, and as we pulled into the long sweeping driveway to Philip’s house I put everything I had into feeling optimistic.

  Denise had put on weight. She was waiting for us inside the door that led from the three-car garage into the kitchen. I didn’t know her well enough to embrace her the way I’d embraced Philip, and I have to admit I was taken aback by the change in her—she was fat, there was nothing else to say about it—so I just filtered out the squeals of welcome and shook her hand as if it was something I’d found in the street. Besides which, the smell of dinner hit me square in the face, so overpowering it almost brought me to my knees. I hadn’t been in a real kitchen with a real dinner in the oven since I was a kid and my mother was alive, because after she died, and with Philip away, it was just my father and me, and we tended to go out a lot, especially on Sundays.

  “You hungry?” Denise asked while we did an awkward little dance around the gleaming island of stainless steel and tile in the middle of the kitchen. “I’ll bet you’re starved,” she said, “after all that bachelor cooking and the airplane food. And look at you—you’re shivering. He’s shivering, Philip.”

  I was, and no denying it.

  “You can’t run around in a T-shirt and leather jacket and expect to survive a Michigan winter—it might be all right for L.A. maybe, but not here.” She turned to Philip, who’d been standing there as if someone had crept up on him and nailed his shoes to the floor. “Philip, haven’t you got a parka for Rick? How about that blue one with the red lining you never wear anymore? And a pair of gloves, for God’s sake. Get him a pair of gloves, will you?” She came back to me then, all smiles: “We can’t have our California boy getting frostbite now, can we?”

  Philip agreed that we couldn’t, and we all stood there smiling at one another till I said, “Isn’t anybody going to offer me a drink?”

  Then it was my nephews—red-faced howling babies in dirty yellow diapers the last time I’d seen them, at the funeral that had left me an orphan at twenty-three, little fists glomming onto the cold cuts while drool descended toward the dip—but here they were, eight and six, edging up to me in high-tops and oversized sweatshirts while I threw back my brother’s scotch. “Hey,” I said, grinning till I thought my head would burst, “remember me? I’m your Uncle Rick.”

  They didn’t remember me—how could they?—but they brightened at the sight of the two yellow bags of M&M’s peanut candies I’d thought to pick up at the airport newsstand. Josh, the eight-year-old, took the candy gingerly from my hand, while his brother looked on to see if I was going to sprout fangs and start puking up black vomit. We were all sitting around the living room, very clean, very Home & Garden, getting acquainted. Philip and Denise held on to their drinks as if they were afraid somebody was going to steal them. We were all grinning. “What’s that on your eyebrow?” Josh said.

  I reached up and fingered the thin gold loop. “It’s a ring,” I said. “You know, like an earring, only it’s in my eyebrow.”

  No one said anything for a long moment. Jeff, the younger one, looked as if he was going to start crying. “Why?” Josh said finally, and Philip laughed and I couldn’t help myself—I laughed too. It was all right. Everything was all right. Philip was my brother and Denise was my sister-in-law and these kids with their wide-open faces and miniature Guess jeans were my nephews. I shrugged, laughing still. “Because it’s cool,” I said, and I didn’t even mind the look Philip gave me.

  Later, after I’d actually crawled into the top bunk and read the kids a Dr. Seuss story that set off all sorts of bells in my head, Philip and Denise and I discussed my future over coffee and homemade cinnamon rolls. My immediate future, that is—as in tomorrow morning, 8 a.m., at the clinic. I was going to be an entry-level drudge despite my three years of college, my musical background and family connections, rinsing out tes
t tubes and sweeping the floors and disposing of whatever was left in the stainless-steel trays when my brother and his colleagues finished with their “procedures.”

  “All right,” I said. “Fine. I’ve got no problem with that.”

  Denise had tucked her legs up under her on the couch. She was wearing a striped caftan that could have sheltered armies. “Philip had a black man on full time, just till a week ago, nicest man you’d ever want to meet—and bright too, very bright—but he, uh, didn’t feel . . .”

  Philip’s voice came out of the shadows at the end of the couch, picking up where she’d left off. “He went on to something better,” he said, regarding me steadily through the clear walls of his glasses. “I’m afraid the work isn’t all that mentally demanding—or stimulating, for that matter—but, you know, little brother, it’s a start, and, well—”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said, “beggars can’t be choosers.” I wanted to add to that, to maybe soften it a bit—I didn’t want him to get the idea I wasn’t grateful, because I was—but I never got the opportunity. Just then the phone rang. I looked up at the sound—it wasn’t a ring exactly, more like a bleat, eh-eh-eh-eh-eh—and saw that my brother and his wife were staring into each other’s eyes in shock, as if a bomb had just gone off. Nobody moved. I counted two more rings before Denise said, “I wonder who that could be at this hour?” and Philip, my brother with the receding hairline and the too-big glasses and his own eponymous clinic in suburban Detroit, said, “Forget it, ignore it, it’s nobody.”

  And that was strange, because we sat there in silence and listened to that phone ring over and over—twenty times, twenty times at least—until whoever it was on the other end finally gave up. Another minute ticked by, the silence howling in our ears, and then Philip stood, looked at his watch, and said, “What do you think—time to turn in?”

  —

  I wasn’t stupid, not particularly—no stupider than anybody else anyway—and I was no criminal either. I’d just drifted into a kind of thick sludge of hopelessness after I dropped out of school for a band I put my whole being into, a band that disintegrated within the year, and one thing led to another. Jobs came and went. I spent a lot of time on the couch, channel-surfing and thumbing through books that used to mean something to me. I found women and lost them. And I learned that a line up your nose is a dilettante’s thing, wasteful and extravagant. I started smoking, two or three nights a week, and then it was five or six nights a week, and then it was every day, all day, and why not? That was how I felt. Sure. And now I was in Michigan, starting over.

  Anyway, it wouldn’t have taken a genius to understand why my brother and his wife had let that phone ring—not after Philip and I swung into the parking lot behind the clinic at seven forty-five the next morning. I wasn’t even awake, really—it was four forty-five West Coast time, an hour that gave me a headache even to imagine, much less live through. Beyond the misted-up windows, everything was gloom, a kind of frozen fog hanging in air the color of lemon ice. The trees, I saw, hadn’t sprouted leaves overnight. Every curb was a repository of frozen trash.

  Philip and I had been making small talk on the way into town, very small talk, out of consideration for the way I was feeling. Denise had given me coffee, which was about all I could take at that hour, but Philip had gobbled a big bowl of bran flakes and sunflower seeds with skim milk, and the boys, shy around me all over again, spooned up Lucky Charms and Frosted Flakes in silence. I came out of my daze the minute the tires hit the concrete apron separating the private property of the lot from the public space of the street: there were people there, a whole shadowy mass of shoulders and hats and steaming faces that converged on us with a shout. At first I didn’t know what was going on—I thought I was trapped in a bad movie, Night of the Living Dead or Zombies on Parade. The faces were barking at us, teeth bared, eyes sunk back in their heads, hot breath boiling from their throats. “Murderers!” they were shouting. “Nazis!” “Baby-killers!”

  We inched our way across the sidewalk and into the lot, working through the mass of them as if we were on a narrow lane in a dense forest, and Philip gave me a look that explained it all, from the lines in his face to Denise’s fat to the phone that rang in the middle of the night no matter how many times he changed the number. This was war. I climbed out of the car with my heart hammering, and as the cold knife of the air cut into me I looked back to where they stood clustered at the gate, lumpish and solid, people you’d see anywhere. They were singing now. Some hymn, some self-righteous churchy Jesus-thumping hymn that bludgeoned the traffic noise and the deep-frozen air with the force of a weapon. I didn’t have time to sort it out, but I could feel the slow burn of anger and humiliation coming up in me. Philip’s hand was on my arm. “Come on,” he said. “We’ve got work to do, little brother.”

  —

  That day, the first day, was a real trial. Yes, I was turning over a new leaf, and yes, I was determined to succeed and thankful to my brother and the judge and the great giving, forgiving society I belonged to, but this was more than I’d bargained for. I had no illusions about the job—I knew it would be dull and diminishing, and I knew life with Philip and Denise would be one long snooze—but I wasn’t used to being called a baby-killer. Liar, thief, crackhead—those were names I’d answered to at one time or another. Murderer was something else.

  My brother wouldn’t talk about it. He was busy. Wired. Hurtling around the clinic like a gymnast on the parallel bars. By nine I’d met his two associates (another doctor and a counsellor, both female, both unattractive); his receptionist; Nurses Tsing and Hempfield; and Fred. Fred was a big rabbity-looking guy in his early thirties with a pale reddish mustache and hair of the same color climbing up out of his head in all directions. He had the official title of “technician,” though the most technical things I saw him do were drawing blood and divining urine for signs of pregnancy, clap, or worse. None of them—not my brother, the nurses, the counsellor, or even Fred—wanted to discuss what was going on at the far end of the parking lot and on the sidewalk out front. The zombies with the signs—yes, signs, I could see them out the window, ABORTION KILLS and SAVE THE PREBORNS and I WILL ADOPT YOUR BABY—were of no more concern to them than mosquitoes in June or a sniffle in December. Or at least that was how they acted.

  I tried to draw Fred out on the subject as we sat together at lunch in the back room. We were surrounded by shadowy things in jars of formalin, gleaming stainless-steel sinks, racks of test tubes, reference books, cardboard boxes full of drug samples and syringes and gauze pads and all the rest of the clinic’s paraphernalia. “So what do you think of all this, Fred?” I said, gesturing toward the window with the ham-and-Swiss on rye Denise had made me in the dark hours of the morning.

  Fred was hunched over a newspaper, doing the acrostic puzzle and sucking on his teeth. His lunch consisted of a microwave chili-and-cheese burrito and a quart of root beer. He gave me a quizzical look.

  “The protesters, I mean. The Jesus-thumpers out there. Is it like this all the time?” And then I added a little joke, so he wouldn’t think I was intimidated: “Or did I just get lucky?”

  “Who, them?” Fred did something with his nose and his upper teeth, something rabbity, as if he were tasting the air. “They’re nobody. They’re nothing.”

  “Yeah?” I said, hoping for more, hoping for some details, some explanation, something to assuage the creeping sense of guilt and shame that had been building in me all morning. Those people had pigeonholed me before I’d even set foot in the door, and that hurt. They were wrong. I was no baby-killer—I was just the little brother of a big brother, trying to make a new start. And Philip was no baby-killer either—he was a guy doing his job, that was all. Shit, somebody had to do it. Up to this point I guess I’d never really given the issue much thought—my girlfriends, when there were girlfriends, had taken care of the preventative end of things on their own, and we never really discussed it—b
ut my feeling was that there were too many babies in the world already, too many adults, too many suet-faced Jesus-thumping jerks ready to point the finger, and didn’t any of these people have better things to do? Like a job, for instance? But Fred wasn’t much help. He just sighed, nibbled at the wilted stem of his burrito, and said, “You get used to it.”

  I wondered about that as the afternoon crept by, and then my mind went numb from jet lag and the general wash of misery and I let my body take over. I scrubbed out empty jars and test tubes with Clorox, labeled and filed the full ones on the racks that lined the walls, stood at Fred’s elbow and watched as he squeezed drops of urine onto strips of litmus paper and made notations in a ledger. My white lab coat got progressively dirtier. Every once in a while I’d come to and catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror over the sinks, the mad scientist exposed, the baby-killer, the rinser of test tubes and secreter of urine, and have an ironic little laugh at my own expense. And then it started to get dark, Fred vanished, and I was introduced to mop and squeegee. It was around then, when I just happened to be taking a cigarette break by the only window in the room, that I caught a glimpse of one of our last tardy patients of the day hurrying up the sidewalk elbow to elbow with a grim middle-aged woman whose face screamed I am her mother!

  The girl was sixteen, seventeen maybe, a pale face, pale as a bulb, and nothing showing on her, at least not with the big white doughboy parka she was wearing. She looked scared, her little mouth clamped tight, her eyes fixed on her feet. She was wearing black leggings that seemed to sprout from the folds of the parka and a pair of furry white ankle boots that were like house slippers. I watched her glide through the dead world on the flowing stalks of her legs, a spoiled pouty chalk-cheeked sweetness to her face, and it moved something in me, something long buried beneath a mountain of grainy little yellow-white rocks. Maybe she was just coming in for an examination, I thought, maybe that was it. Or she’d just become sexually active—or was thinking of it—and her mother was one step ahead of her. Either way, that was what I wanted to believe. With this girl, with her quick fluid step and downcast eyes and all the hope and misery they implied, I didn’t want to think of “procedures.”