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

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  In all the time I’d been coming here for groceries, I’d never seen a soul, not even Sarai or one of the six or seven other survivors who were out there occupying the mansions in the hills. Every once in a while I’d see lights shining in the wall of the night—someone had even managed to fire up a generator at Las Tejas, a big Italianate villa half a mile away—and every so often a car would go helling up the distant freeway, but basically we survivors were shy of one another and kept to ourselves. It was fear, of course, the little spark of panic that told you the contagion was abroad again and that the best way to avoid it was to avoid all human contact. So we did. Strenuously.

  But I couldn’t ignore the squeak and rattle of a shopping cart wheeling up the bottled water aisle, and when I turned the corner, there she was, Felicia, with her flowing hair and her scared and sorry eyes. I didn’t know her name then, not at first, but I recognized her—she was one of the tellers at the Bank of America branch where I cashed my checks. Formerly cashed them, that is. My first impulse was to back wordlessly away, but I mastered it—how could I be afraid of what was human, so palpably human, and appealing? “Hello,” I said, to break the tension, and then I was going to say something stupid like “I see you made it too” or “Tough times, huh?” but instead I settled for “Remember me?”

  She looked stricken. Looked as if she were about to bolt—or die on the spot. But her lips were brave and they came together and uttered my name. “Mr. Halloran?” she said, and it was so ordinary, so plebeian, so real.

  I smiled and nodded. My name is—was—Francis Xavier Halloran III, a name I’ve hated since Tyrone Johnson (now presumably dead) tormented me with it in kindergarten, chanting “Francis, Francis, Francis” till I wanted to sink through the floor. But it was a new world now, a world burgeoning and bursting at the seams to discover the lineaments of its new forms and rituals. “Call me Jed,” I said.

  Nothing happens overnight, especially not in plague times. We were wary of each other, and every banal phrase and stultifying cliché of the small talk we made as I helped her load her groceries into the back of her Range Rover reverberated hugely with the absence of all the multitudes who’d used those phrases before us. Still, I got her address that afternoon—she’d moved into Villa Ruscello, a mammoth place set against the mountains, with a creek, pond and Jacuzzi for fresh water—and I picked her up two nights later in a Rolls Silver Cloud and took her to my favorite French restaurant. The place was untouched and pristine, with a sweeping view of the sea, and I lit some candles and poured us each a glass of twenty-year-old Bordeaux, after which we feasted on canned crab, truffles, cashews and marinated artichoke hearts.

  I’d like to tell you that she was beautiful, because that’s the way it should be, the way of the fable and the fairy tale, but she wasn’t—or not conventionally anyway. She was a little heavier than she might have been ideally, but that was a relief after stringy Sarai, and her eyes were ever so slightly crossed. Yet she was decent and kind, sweet even, and more important, she was available.

  We took walks together, raided overgrown gardens for lettuce, tomatoes and zucchini, planted strawberries and snow peas in the middle of the waist-high lawn at Villa Ruscello. One day we drove to the mountains and brought back the generator so we could have lights and refrigeration in the cottage—ice cubes, now there was a luxury—and begin to work our way through the eight thousand titles at the local video store. It was nearly a month before anything happened between us—anything sexual, that is. And when it did, she first felt obligated, out of a sense of survivor’s guilt, I suppose, to explain to me how she came to be alive and breathing still when everyone she’d ever known had vanished off the face of the earth. We were in the beamed living room of my cottage, sharing a bottle of Dom Pérignon 1970, with the three-hundred-ten-dollar price tag still on it, and I’d started a fire against the gathering night and the wet raw smell of rain on the air. “You’re going to think I’m an idiot,” she said.

  I made a noise of demurral and put my arm round her.

  “Did you ever hear of a sensory deprivation tank?” She was peering up at me through the scrim of her hair, gold and red highlights, health in a bottle.

  “Yeah, sure,” I said. “But you don’t mean—?”

  “It was an older one, a model that’s not on the market anymore—one of the originals. My roommate’s sister—Julie Angier?—she had it out in her garage on Padaro, and she was really into it. You could get in touch with your inner self, relax, maybe even have an out-of-body experience, that’s what she said, and I figured why not?” She gave me a look, shy and passionate at once, to let me know that she was the kind of girl who took experience seriously. “They put salt water in it, three hundred gallons, heated to your body temperature, and then they shut the lid on you and there’s nothing, absolutely nothing there—it’s like going to outer space. Or inner space. Inside yourself.”

  “And you were in there when—?”

  She nodded. There was something in her eyes I couldn’t read—pride, triumph, embarrassment, a spark of sheer lunacy. I gave her an encouraging smile.

  “For days, I guess,” she said. “I just sort of lost track of everything, who I was, where I was—you know? And I didn’t wake up till the water started getting cold”—she looked at her feet—“which I guess is when the electricity went out because there was nobody left to run the power plants. And then I pushed open the lid and the sunlight through the window was like an atom bomb, and then, then I called out Julie’s name, and she . . . well, she never answered.”

  Her voice died in her throat and she turned those sorrowful eyes on me. I put my other arm around her and held her. “Hush,” I whispered, “it’s all right now, everything’s all right.” It was a conventional thing to say, and it was a lie, but I said it, and I held her and felt her relax in my arms.

  It was then, almost to the precise moment, that Sarai’s naked sliver of a face appeared at the window, framed by her two uplifted hands and a rock the size of my Webster’s unabridged. “What about me, you son of a bitch!” she shouted, and there it was again, everlasting stone and frangible glass, and not a glazier left alive on the planet.

  —

  I wanted to kill her. It was amazing—three people I knew of had survived the end of everything, and it was one too many. I felt vengeful. Biblical. I felt like storming Sarai’s ostentatious castle and wringing her chicken neck for her, and I think I might have if it weren’t for Felicia. “Don’t let her spoil it for us,” she murmured, the gentle pressure of her fingers on the back of my neck suddenly holding my full attention, and we went into the bedroom and closed the door on all that mess of emotion and glass.

  In the morning, I stepped into the living room and was outraged all over again. I cursed and stomped and made a fool of myself over heaving the rock back through the window and attacking the shattered glass as if it were alive—I admit I was upset out of all proportion to the crime. This was a new world, a new beginning, and Sarai’s nastiness and negativity had no place in it. Christ, there were only three of us—couldn’t we get along?

  Felicia had repaired dozens of windows in her time. Her little brothers (dead now) and her fiancé (dead too) were forever throwing balls around the house, and she assured me that a shattered window was nothing to get upset over (though she bit her lip and let her eyes fill at the mention of her fiancé, and who could blame her?). So we consulted the Yellow Pages, drove to the nearest window glass shop and broke in as gently as possible. Within the hour, the new pane had been installed and the putty was drying in the sun, and watching Felicia at work had so elevated my spirits I suggested a little shopping spree to celebrate.

  “Celebrate what?” She was wearing a No Fear T-shirt and an Anaheim Angels cap and there was a smudge of off-white putty on her chin.

  “You,” I said. “The simple miracle of you.”

  And that was fine. We parked on the deserted streets o
f downtown Santa Barbara and had the stores to ourselves—clothes, the latest (and last) bestsellers, CDs, a new disc player to go with our newly electrified house. Others had visited some of the stores before us, of course, but they’d been polite and neat about it, almost as if they were afraid to betray their presence, and they always closed the door behind them. We saw deer feeding in the courtyards and one magnificent tawny mountain lion stalking the wrong way up a one-way street. By the time we got home, I was elated. Everything was going to work out, I was sure of it.

  The mood didn’t last long. As I swung into the drive, the first thing I saw was the yawning gap where the new window had been, and beyond it, the undifferentiated heap of rubble that used to be my living room. Sarai had been back. And this time she’d done a thorough job, smashing lamps and pottery, poking holes in our cans of beef stew and chili con carne, scattering coffee, flour and sugar all over everything and dumping sand in the generator’s fuel tank. Worst of all, she’d taken half a dozen pairs of Felicia’s panties and nailed them to the living room wall, a crude X slashed across the crotch of each pair. It was hateful and savage—human, that’s what it was, human—and it killed all the joy we’d taken in the afternoon and the animals and the infinite and various riches of the mall. Sarai had turned it all to shit.

  “We’ll move to my place,” Felicia said. “Or any place you want. How about an oceanfront house—didn’t you say you’d always wanted to live right on the ocean?”

  I had. But I didn’t want to admit it. I stood in the middle of the desecrated kitchen and clenched my fists. “I don’t want any other place. This is my home. I’ve lived here for ten years and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let her drive me out.”

  It was an irrational attitude—again, childish—and Felicia persuaded me to pack up a few personal items (my high school yearbook, my reggae albums, a signed first edition of For Whom the Bell Tolls, a pair of deer antlers I’d found in the woods when I was eight) and move into a place on the ocean for a few days. We drove along the coast road at a slow, stately pace, looking over this house or that, until we finally settled on a grand modern place that was all angles and glass and broad sprawling decks. I got lucky and caught a few perch in the surf, and we barbecued them on the beach and watched the sun sink into the western bluffs.

  The next few days were idyllic, and we thought about little beyond love and food and the way the water felt on our skin at one hour of the day or another, but still, the question of Sarai nagged at me. I was reminded of her every time I wanted a cold drink, for instance, or when the sun set and we had to make do with candles and kerosene lanterns—we’d have to go out and dig up another generator, we knew that, but they weren’t exactly in demand in a place like Santa Barbara (in the old days, that is) and we didn’t know where to look. And so yes, I couldn’t shake the image of Sarai and the look on her face and the things she’d said and done. And I missed my house, because I’m a creature of habit, like anybody else. Or more so. Definitely more so.

  Anyway, the solution came to us a week later, and it came in human form—at least it appeared in human form, but it was a miracle and no doubt about it. Felicia and I were both on the beach—naked, of course, as naked and without shame or knowledge of it as Eve and Adam—when we saw a figure marching resolutely up the long curving finger of sand that stretched away into the haze of infinity. As the figure drew closer, we saw that it was a man, a man with a scraggly salt-and-pepper beard and hair the same color trailing away from a bald spot worn into his crown. He was dressed in hiking clothes, big-grid boots, a bright blue pack riding his back like a second set of shoulders. We stood there, naked, and greeted him.

  “Hello,” he said, stopping a few feet from us and staring first at my face, then at Felicia’s breasts, and finally, with an effort, bending to check the laces of his boots. “Glad to see you two made it,” he said, speaking to the sand.

  “Likewise,” I returned.

  Over lunch on the deck—shrimp salad sandwiches on Felicia-baked bread—we traded stories. It seems he was hiking in the mountains when the pestilence descended—“The mountains?” I interrupted. “Whereabouts?”

  “Oh,” he said, waving a dismissive hand, “up in the Sierras, just above this little town—you’ve probably never heard of it—Fish Fry Flats?”

  I let him go on awhile, explaining how he’d lost his girlfriend and wandered for days before he finally came out on a mountain road and appropriated a car to go on down to Los Angeles—“One big cemetery”—and how he’d come up the coast and had been wandering ever since. I don’t think I’ve ever felt such exhilaration, such a rush of excitement, such perfect and inimitable a sense of closure.

  I couldn’t keep from interrupting him again. “I’m clairvoyant,” I said, raising my glass to the man sitting opposite me, to Felicia and her breasts, to the happy fishes in the teeming seas and the birds flocking without number in the unencumbered skies. “Your name’s Howard, right?”

  Howard was stunned. He set down his sandwich and wiped a fleck of mayonnaise from his lips. “How did you guess?” he said, gaping up at me out of eyes that were innocent and pure, the newest eyes in the world.

  I just smiled and shrugged, as if it were my secret. “After lunch,” I said, “I’ve got somebody I want you to meet.”

  (1997)

  PART II

  Tooth and Claw

  When I Woke Up This Morning, Everything I Had Was Gone

  The man I want to tell you about, the one I met at the bar at Jimmy’s Steak House, was on a tear. Hardly surprising, since this was a bar, after all, and what do people do at bars except drink, and one drink leads to another—and if you’re in a certain frame of mind, I suppose, you don’t stop for a day or two or maybe more. But this man—he was in his forties, tall, no fat on him, dressed in a pair of stained Dockers and a navy blue sweatshirt cut off raggedly at the elbows—seemed to have been going at it steadily for weeks, months even.

  It was a Saturday night, rain sizzling in the streets and steaming the windows, the dinner crowd beginning to rouse themselves over decaf, cheesecake and V.S.O.P. and the regulars drifting in to look the women over and wait for the band to set up in the corner. I was new in town. I had no date, no wife, no friends. I was on something of a tear myself—a mini-tear, I guess you’d call it. The night before I’d gone out with one of my co-workers from the office, who, like me, was recently divorced, and we had dinner, went to a couple places afterward. But nothing came of it—she didn’t like me, and I could see that before we were halfway through dinner. I wasn’t her type, whatever that might have been—and I started feeling sorry for myself, I guess, and drank too much. When I got up in the morning, I made myself a Bloody Mary with a can of Snap-E-Tom, a teaspoon of horseradish and two jiggers of vodka, just to clear my head, then went out to breakfast at a place by the water and drank a glass or two of chardonnay with my frittata and homemade duck sausage with fennel, and then I wandered over to a sports bar and then another place after that, and I never got any of the errands done I’d been putting off all week—and I didn’t have any lunch either. Or dinner. And so I drifted into Jimmy’s and there he was, the man in the sweatshirt, on his tear.

  There was a space around him at the bar. He was standing there, the stool shoved back and away from him as if he had no use for comfort, and his lips were moving, though nobody I could see was talking to him. A flashlight, a notebook and a cigarette lighter were laid out in front of him on the mahogany bar, and though Jimmy’s specialized in margaritas—there were eighteen different types of margaritas offered on the drinks menu—this man was apparently going the direct route. Half a glass of beer sat on the counter just south of the flashlight and he was guarding three empty shot glasses as if he was afraid someone was going to run off with them. The bar was filling up. There were only two seats available in the place, one on either side of him. I was feeling a little washed out, my legs gone heavy on me all o
f a sudden, and I was thinking I might get a burger or a steak and fries at the bar. I studied him a moment, considered, then took the seat to his right and ordered a drink.

  Our first communication came half a second later. He tapped my arm, gave me a long, tunneled look, and made the universal two-fingered gesture for a smoke. Normally this would have irritated me—the law says you can no longer smoke in a public place in this state, and in any case I don’t smoke and never have—but I was on a tear myself, I guess, and just gave him a smile and shrugged my shoulders. He turned away from me then to flag down the bartender and order another shot—he was drinking Herradura Gold—and a beer chaser. There was a ritualistic moment during which he took a bite from the wedge of lime the bartender provided, sprinkled salt onto the webbing between the thumb and index finger of his left hand, licked it off and threw back the shot, after which the beer came into play. He exhaled deeply, and then his eyes migrated back to me. “Nice to see you,” he said, as if we’d known each other for years.

  I said it was nice to see him too. The gabble of voices around us seemed to go up a notch. A woman at the end of the bar began to laugh with a thick, dredging sound, as if she were bringing something up with great reluctance.

  He leaned in confidentially. “You know,” he said, “people drink for a lot of reasons. You know why I drink? Because I like the taste of it. Sweet and simple. I like the taste.”

  I told him I liked the taste of it too, and then he made a fist and cuffed me lightly on the meat of the arm. “You’re all right, you know that?” He held out his hand as if we’d just closed a deal, and I took it. I’ve been in business for years—for all but one of the years since I left college—and it was just a reflex to give him my name. He didn’t say anything in response, just stared into my eyes, grinning, until I said, “And what do I call you?”