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

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  He read of somebody’s elaborate wedding (“fifteen thousand dollars on sushi alone”), the booming real estate market, and the latest movie star to buy up one of the estates in the hills, browsed the wine column (“a dramatic nose of dried cherries and smoked meat with a nicely defined mineral finish”), then settled on an item about a discerning burglar who operated by daylight, entering area homes through unlocked doors and ground-floor windows to make off with all the jewelry he could carry—as long as it was of the very highest quality, that is. Paste didn’t interest him, nor apparently did carpets, electronics, vases or artwork. Edison mulled that over: a burglar, a discerning burglar. The brazenness it must take—just strolling up the walk and knocking on the front door, hello, is anybody home? And if they were, he was selling magazine subscriptions or looking for a lost cat. What a way to make a living. Something for those little shits on the beach to aspire to.

  By the time he looked up to order his fourth drink, the place had begun to fill up. The cocktail waitress—Elise, he had to remember her name, and the bartender’s too, but what was it?—was striding back and forth on her long legs, a tray of drinks held high above the jostling crowd. Up on the TV in the corner the scene had shifted from golf to baseball, fairways and greens giving way to the long, dense grass of the outfield—or was it artificial turf, a big foam mat with Easter basket fluff laid over it? He was thinking he should just eat and get it over with, ask what’s his name for the menu and order something right at the bar and then hang out for a while and see what developed. Home was too depressing. All that was waiting for him at home was the channel changer and a thirty-two-ounce packet of frozen peas to wrap around his bad knee. And that killed him: where was Kim when he needed her, when he was in pain and could barely get around? What did she care? She had her car and her credit cards and probably by now some new sucker to take to the dance—

  “Excuse me,” somebody was saying at his elbow, and he looked up into the face of one of the men who’d come in earlier, the one the big blonde had reacted to. “I don’t mean to bother you, but aren’t you Edison Banks?”

  The codeine was sludge in his veins, and his knee—he’d forgotten he had a knee—but he peeled off his sunglasses and gave the man a smile. “That’s right,” he said, and he would never admit to himself that he was pleased, but he was. He’d lived here three years now, and nobody knew who he was, not even the mailman or the girl who counted out his money at the bank.

  “I’m Lyle,” the man was saying, and then they were locked palm to palm in a rollicking soul shake, “Lyle Hansen, and I can’t tell you how cool this is. I mean, I’m a big fan. Savage Street was the coolest thing in the history of TV, and I mean that—it got me through high school, and that was a bad time for me, real adolescent hell, with like all the rules and the regimentation and my parents coming down on me for every little minor thing—shit, Savage Street was my life.”

  Edison took hold of his drink, the comforting feel of the glass in his hand, the faces at the bar, dark blue shadows leaning into the building across the street. There was a trip-hop tune playing on the jukebox, a languid slow female vocal over an industrial storm of guitars and percussion that managed to be poignant and ominous at the same time, and it felt right. Just right.

  “Listen, I didn’t mean to intrude or anything—”

  Edison waved a hand. “No problem, man, it’s cool, it’s all right.”

  Lyle looked to be about the same age as the bartender, which meant he would have been out of high school for ten or twelve years. He wore his hair longer than the bartender’s, combed back up off his forehead with enough mousse to sustain it and the odd strand dangling loose in front. He kept shifting from foot to foot, rattling the keys in his pocket, tugging at his tie, and his smile flashed and flashed again. “Hey, Carlton,” he spoke into the din, “give me another one, will you—and one for Mr. Banks here too. On me.”

  “No, no,” Edison protested, “you don’t have to do that,” but the money was on the bar, and the drink appeared in a fresh glass.

  “So you wrote and produced that show, right?”

  “Shit, I created it. You know, when you see the titles and it says ‘Created By’? I wrote the first two seasons, then left it to them. Why work when you can play, right?”

  Lyle was drinking shooters of Herradura out of a slim tube of a glass. He threw back the current one, then slapped his forehead as if he’d been stung. “I can’t believe it. Here I am talking to Edison Banks. You know, when you moved into town, like what was it, three, four years ago?”

  “Three.”

  “Yeah, I read that article in the paper about you and I thought wow—you were the guitarist for Edison Banks too, right? I had both their albums, New Wave, right? But what I really dig is jazz. Miles Davis. Monk. That era stuff.”

  Edison felt a weight lift off him. “I’ve been a jazz fan all my life,” he said, the alcohol flaring up in him till the whole place was on fire with it, mystical fire, burning out of the bottles and the light fixtures and the golden shining faces lined up at the bar. “Since I was a kid of fifteen anyway, hopping the subway up to Harlem and bullshitting my way into the clubs. I’ve got everything—Birth of the Cool, Sketches, all the Coltrane stuff, Sonny Rollins, Charles Lloyd, Ornette, Mulligan—and all of it on the original LPs too.”

  Lyle set both hands down on the bar, as if to brace himself. He was wearing a pinkie ring that featured a silver skull, and the rough edge of a tattoo showed at the base of his left wrist where the cuff climbed up his arm. “You might think I’m just some suit or something,” he said, “but that’s not me at all.” He plucked at his lapels. “See this? This is my first day on the job. Real estate. That’s where the money is. But I tell you, I’d love to hear some of that shit with you—I mean, Miles. Wow. And I know what you’re saying—CDs just don’t cut it like vinyl.”

  And Edison, in the shank of a bad evening that had begun to turn clement after all, turned to him and said, “I’m up at the corner of Dolores and San Ignacio—big Spanish place with the tile roof? Come by anytime, man—anytime, no problem.” And then he looked up to see the waitress—Elise—glide by like a ballerina, that’s what she was like, a ballerina, with her bare arms held high and the tray levitating above her head. He had to get home. Had to eat. Feed the cat. Collapse in front of the tube. “Just don’t come between maybe one and four—that’s when I’m down at the beach.”

  —

  In the morning, the dryness in the back of his throat told him he’d drunk too much the night before—that and a fuzziness between his ears, as if his head were a radio caught between stations—and he took two of the Tylenol-codeine tabs to ease his transition into the day. Theoretically, he was working on a screenplay about the adventures of a rock band on the road as seen through the eyes of the drummer’s dog, but the work had stalled even before Kim walked out, and now there was nothing there on the screen but words. He took the newspaper and a glass of orange juice out on the patio, and then he swam a couple of laps and began to feel better. The maid came at eleven and fixed him a plate of eggs and chorizo before settling into her routine with the bucket, the mop and the vacuum cleaner. Two hours later, as he sat frozen at his desk, playing his eighteenth game of computer solitaire, there was a tap at the door.

  It was Orbalina, the maid. “Mr. Banks,” she said, poking her head into the room, “I don’t want to bother you, but I can’t, I can’t—” He saw that she was crying, her face creased with the geography of her grief, tears wetting her cheeks. This was nothing new—she was always sobbing over one thing or another, the tragedies that constantly befell her extended family, the way a man on TV had looked right at her as if he’d come alive right there in her own living room, the hollowness of the sky over the graveyard in Culiacán where her mother lay buried under a wooden cross. Kim used to handle her moods with a mixture of compassion and firmness that bordered on savagery; now it was up to hi
m. “What is it?” he said. “What’s the matter?”

  She was in the room now, a whittled-down woman in her thirties whose weight had migrated to her haunches. “The elephants,” she sobbed.

  “Elephants? What elephants?”

  “You know what they do to them, to the elephants?” She buried her face in her hands, then looked up at him out of eyes that were like two pools of blood. “Do you?” she demanded, her frame shaken with the winds of an unceasing emotional storm.

  He didn’t. His knee hurt. He had a headache. And his screenplay was shit.

  “They beat them. With big, with big sticks!” Her hands flailed at the air. “Like this! And this! And when they get too old to work, when they fall down in the jungle with their big trees in their noses, you know what they do then? They beat them more! They do! They do! And I know what I’m saying because I saw it on the, on the”—and here her voice failed her, till her final words were so soft and muted they might have been a prayer—“on the TV.”

  He was on his feet now, the screen behind him displaying seven neat rows of electronic cards, a subtle crepitating pain invading his knee, as if a rodent were trapped beneath the patella and gnawing to get out. “Listen,” he said, “it’s okay, don’t worry about it.” He wanted to take her in his arms and press her to him, but he couldn’t do that because she was the maid and he the employer, so he limped past her to the door and said, “Look, I’m going to the beach, okay? You finish up here and take the rest of the day off—and tomorrow, tomorrow too.”

  —

  The morning haze had burned off by the time he stepped out into the drive. The sky was a clear, depthless blue, the blue of childhood adventures, picnics, outings to Bear Mountain and the Island, the blue of good times, and he was thinking of his first wife, Sarah, thinking of Cap d’Antibes, Isla Mujeres, Molokai. They traveled in those days, on the beaten path and off it. There was no end to what he wanted to see: the Taj Mahal, the snow monkeys of Hokkaido, prayer wheels spinning idly on the naked slopes above Lhasa. They went everywhere. Saw it all. But that turned sour too, like everything else. He took a minute to duck behind a bank of Bougainvillea and empty his bladder—there was no place to pee on the beach, unless you did it surreptitiously in the flat water beyond the breakers, and since he’d hit forty he couldn’t seem to go more than an hour at a time without feeling that nagging pressure in his lower abdomen. And was that cool? No, no part of it was even remotely cool—it was called getting old.

  There was a discolored place on the floor of the garage where Kim’s car had been, a kind of permanent shadow, but he didn’t dwell on it. He decided to take the sports car—a mint Austin-Healey 3000 he’d bought from a guy in the movie business with a garage full of them—because it made him feel good, and feeling good had been in short supply lately. The top was down, so he took a moment to rub a palmful of sunblock into the soft flesh under his eyes—no reason to wind up looking like one of the unwrapped mummies nodding over their white wine and appetizers in every café and trattoria in town. Then he adjusted his sunglasses, turned his cap backwards, and shot down the street with a modulated roar.

  He’d nearly got to the beach—had actually turned into the broad, palm-lined boulevard that fronted it—before he remembered the three kids from yesterday. What if they showed up again? What if they were already there? The thought made him brake inappropriately, and the next thing he knew some jerk in a four-by-four with the frame jacked up eight feet off the ground was giving him the horn—and the finger. Normally, he would have had a fit—it was a New York thing, turf wars, attitude—but he was so put out he just pulled over meekly and let the jerk go by.

  But then he told himself he wasn’t about to be chased off his own beach by anybody, especially not some punk-ass kids who wouldn’t know one end of hip from the other. He found a spot to park right across from the steps down to the beach and pulled his things out of the trunk with a quick angry jerk of his arm—if he could run, if he could only run, he’d chase them down till their stinking weed-choked little punk lungs gave out, even if it took miles. The shits. The little shits. He was breathing hard, sweating under the band of the cap.

  Then he was on the concrete steps, the Pacific opening up before him in an endless array of waves, that cool, fathomless smell on the air, the white crescent of the beach, blankets and umbrellas spread out across the sand as far as he could see in either direction. There was something about the scene that always lightened his mood, no matter how sorry for himself he was feeling. That was one thing he could never understand about Kim. Kim didn’t like the beach. Too much sun. Bad for the skin. And the sand—the sand was just another kind of grit, and she always bitched when she found a white spill of it on the carpet in the hall. But she liked it when he came home to her all aflame because he’d just watched a hundred women strip down to the essentials and rub themselves all over with the sweetest unguents and emollients an eight-ounce tube could hold. She liked that, all right.

  He was halfway down the steps, studying a pair of girls descending ahead of him, when he heard the high, frenzied barking of the dog. There they were, the three of them, in their boxcar shorts and thatch haircuts, laughing and jiving, throwing the stick as if nothing had happened. And nothing had, not to them anyway. Edison froze, right there, six steps down. It was as if he were paralyzed, as if he’d suffered a stroke as he reached for the iron rail and set one gimpy leg down in front of the other. An older couple, trainwrecks of the flesh, brushed past him, then a young mother trailing kids and plastic buckets. He could not move. The dog barked. There was a shout from down the beach. The stick flew.

  And then, patting down his pockets as if he’d forgotten something, he swung slowly round and limped up the steps. For a long moment he sat in the car, fiddling with the tuner until he found a rap station, and he cranked it as loud as it would go, though he hated the music, hated it. Finally he slammed the car in gear and took off with a lurch, the thunderous bass and hammering lyrics thrusting a dagger into the corpse of the afternoon, over and over, all the way down the street.

  He thought of the bar—of lunch at the bar and a cocktail to pull the codeine up out of whatever hole it was hiding in—but he didn’t have the heart for it. He was Edison Banks. He’d had his own band. He’d created Savage Street. He didn’t eat lunch at one-thirty in the afternoon, and he didn’t eat lunch alone either—or drink anything, even wine, before five o’clock. That was what the rest of them did, all his hopeless washed-out diamond-encrusted neighbors: they ate lunch. And then they had a couple of cocktails and bought flowers from the flower girl in the short skirt before picking up their prescriptions at the drugstore, and by then it was cocktail hour and they drank cocktails and ate dinner. Or ordered it anyway.

  He burned up the tires for the next half hour, taking the turns like a suicide—or a teenager, a thatch-headed, flat-stomached, stick-throwing teenager—and then the engine started to overheat and he switched off the radio and crawled back home like one of the living dead in their ancient Jags and Benzes. A nap, that was what he was thinking, elevate the knee, wrap the frozen peas round it, and doze over a book by the pool—where at least it was private. He winced when he climbed out of the car and put some weight on his right leg, but the peas and another codeine tab would take care of that, and he came up the back walk feeling nothing. He was digging for his keys, the sun pushing down like a weight on his shoulders while a pair of hummingbirds stitched the air with iridescent feints and dodges and the palms along the walk nodded in the faintest stirrings of a breeze, when he saw that the back door was open.

  And that was odd, because he was sure he’d shut and locked it when he left. Kim might have been clueless about security, leaving her handbag on the front seat of the car where anybody could see it, running out of the house with her makeup half on and never thinking twice about the door gaping behind her, but he was a rock. He never forgot anything, even when his brain was fuzzed with the
little white pills the doctor kept feeding him. He wouldn’t have left the door open. He couldn’t have. His next thought was for the maid—she must not have left yet. But then he glanced over his shoulder, down the slope and past the fence to the spot out on the public road where she always parked her dirt-brown Corolla. It wasn’t there.

  He shut the door behind him, thinking he’d have to talk to her about that, about walking off and leaving the place wide open—there was no excuse for it, even if she was distraught about the fate of the elephants or her sister’s latest lumpectomy. In the kitchen, he fought the childproof cap of the prescription bottle and chased down a pill with a glass of cranberry juice. He’d just pulled open the freezer to reach for the peas when a sound from above made him catch his breath. It was a furtive sound, the soft friction of wood on wood—as of a dresser drawer, antique oak, slightly balky, sliding open. He didn’t breathe again until he heard the faint squeal of the drawer going back in, and the answering echo of the next one falling open.

  Edison kept three guns in the house, identical Smith & Wesson 9mm stainless steel pistols, two of which had never been fired, and he went now for the one he kept in a cubicle in the pantry, behind the old telephone books. He held it in his hand a long while, listening, then made sure it was loaded, flicked off the safety, and started up the stairs. It was very quiet. Shadows collided on the walls above him, and the air was thick with motes of dust and the lazy circling attentions of the flies at the upstairs window. He was in his own house, among familiar things, but everything seemed distorted and unfamiliar, because he’d never before gone up these stairs with a gun in his hand—and yet he didn’t feel nervous or tense, or not particularly. He felt like a hunter in an air-conditioned forest.