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

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  They were silent a moment, so he took up the eels again—just to hear his own voice by way of distraction. “So I suppose there’s an upside—the villagers must have enjoyed a little fried eel and plantains. Or maybe they smoked them.”

  “You’d get awfully sick of eel after a couple days, don’t you think?” She wasn’t staring out the windshield into the white fury of the headlights, but watching him as if they were cruising down the Coast Highway under a ripe and delicate sun. “No, I think they went ahead and buried them—the ones that were too injured to crawl off.”

  “The stink, huh?”

  “Or slither off. Did you know that eels—the American eel, which is what these were—can crawl overland? Like a snake?”

  He squinted into the sleet, reached out to flick the radio back on, but thought better of it. “No, I don’t think so. Or maybe. Maybe I did. I remember they used to be in every creek when I was a kid—you’d fish for trout and catch this big slick whipping thing that always seemed to swallow the hook and then you couldn’t do anything but cut it loose. Because of the slime factor.”

  “They’re all born in the Sargasso Sea, you know that, right? And that it’s the females that migrate inland?”

  He did. Because he was something of a nature buff himself, hiking up the canyons on weekends, poking under rocks and in the willows along the streambeds, trying to learn the lore, and his own bookshelves featured many of the same titles he’d found on hers. Which was one of the reasons they were going to Big Timber for the weekend—so he could show her the trails he’d discovered the past summer, take her on the Trail of a Hundred Giants and then down the Freeman Creek Trail to the Freeman Grove. She was from Boston and she’d never seen the redwoods and sequoias except in photographs. When she’d told him that, over a plate of mussels marinara at a semi-hip, overpriced place on Wilshire with red banquette seats and votive candles on the tables, he began to rhapsodize Big Timber till he’d made it out to be the earthly paradise itself. Which it was, for all he knew. He’d only been there twice, both times with Jared, on their mountain bikes, but it was as wild and beautiful as it must have been in Muir’s time—sure it was—and he’d persuaded her to have her girlfriend babysit for the weekend so they could hike the trails and cross-country ski if there was enough snow, and then sit at the bar at the lodge till it was time to go to bed.

  And that was the other reason for the trip, the unspoken promise percolating beneath the simple monosyllable of her assent—going to bed. On their first date she’d told him she was feeling fragile still—her word, not his—and wanted to take things slowly. All right. He respected that. But three weeks had gone by and when she’d agreed to come with him—for two days and two nights—he felt something pull loose inside of him.

  “Right,” he said, “and then they all return to the Sargasso Sea to mate.”

  “Amazing, isn’t it?”

  “All those eels,” he said. “Eels from Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas”—he gave her a look—“Ontario even.”

  That was when the wheels got away from him and the car spun across the road to glance off a white-capped boulder and into a glistening white ditch that undulated gracefully away from the hidden surface of the road, which was where he really and truly wanted to be.

  —

  That they were stuck was a given. The passenger’s side wheels were in the ditch, canting the car at an unfortunate angle, and beneath the furiously accumulating snow there was a glaze of ice that gave no purchase. He cursed under his breath—“Shit, shit, shit”—and slammed the wheel with his fist, and she said, “Are we stuck?” For a long moment he didn’t respond, the wipers stupidly beating, the snow glossy in the headlights and driving down like a hard white rain. “Are you all right?” he said finally. “Because I—I mean, it just got away from me there. The road—it’s like a skating rink or something.” Her face was ghost-lit. He couldn’t see her eyes. “Yeah,” she said softly, “I’m fine.”

  When he cracked the door to get out and have a look, the snow stung his eyes and drove the breath from his lips. He caught a quick glimpse of her, huddled there in the passenger’s seat—and there was the smell of her perfume too, of the heat of her body and the sleepy warmth of the car’s interior—and then he slammed the door and walked round the car to assess the damage. The front fender on the passenger’s side had been staved in where it had hit the boulder, but it didn’t seem to be interfering with the wheel at all—and that was the good news. For the rest of it, the rear tires had dug themselves a pair of craters in the ice beneath the snow and the axle was resting on a scraped-bald patch of dirt just beneath the tailpipe. And the snow. The snow was coming down and the road was certain to be closed—till spring maybe—and he wasn’t sure how many miles yet it was to the lodge. Five? Ten? Twenty? He couldn’t begin to guess, and as he looked up into the thin streaming avenue of illumination the car’s headlights afforded him, he realized he didn’t recognize a thing. There were just trees. Trees and more trees.

  Then the car door slammed and she was standing there beside him, the hood of her parka drawn tight over the oval of her face. “You know, I grew up in snow, so this is nothing to me.” She was grinning, actually grinning, the glow of the taillights giving her features a weird pinkish cast. “I’ll tell you what we have to do, we have to jack up this back wheel here and put something under it.”

  “Like what?” The engine coughed softly, twice, three times, and then settled into its own rhythm. There was the smell of the exhaust and the sound of the miniature ice pellets in all their trillion permutations hissing off the hood of his jacket, off the trunk of the car, off her hood and the boughs of the trees. He looked round him bleakly—there was nothing, absolutely nothing, to see but for the hummocks of the snow, white fading to gray and then to a drifting pale nullity beyond the range of the headlights.

  “I don’t know,” she said, “a log or something. You have a shovel in the trunk?”

  He didn’t have a shovel in the trunk—no shovel and no chains. He began to feel less a risk taker and more a fool, callow, rash, without foresight or calculation, the sort of blighted individual whose genetic infirmities get swallowed up in the food chain before he can reproduce and pass them on to vitiate the species. That was the way an evolutionist would see it—that was the way she would see it. “No, uh-uh, no shovel,” he breathed, and then he was slogging round the car to reach in the driver’s door, cut the engine and retrieve the keys—the jack was in the trunk anyway. Or at least it had been, the last time he’d looked, but who obsessed over the contents of the trunk of their car? It was a place to put groceries, luggage, the big purchase at the mall.

  Without the rumble of the engine, the night seemed to close in, the ceaseless hiss of the snow the only sound in the universe. He left the lights on, though the buzzer warned him against it, and then he was back with her, flinging open the trunk of the car, the interior of which immediately began to whiten with the descending snow. There were their bags—his black, hers pink—and there was the jack laid in against the inner panel where he’d flung it after changing a flat last summer. Or was it summer before last?

  “Okay, great,” she said, the pale puff of her breath clinging at her lips, “why don’t you jack it up and I’ll look for something to—pine boughs, we could use pine boughs. Do you have a knife with you? A hatchet? Anything to cut with?”

  He was standing there, two feet from her, staring into the whitening trunk. There were two plastic quarts of motor oil in the back, a grease-stained T-shirt, half a dozen CDs he was afraid the valet at the Italian restaurant might have wanted to appropriate for himself, but no knives, no tools of any kind, other than the jack handle. “No, I don’t think so.”

  She gave him a look then—the dark slits of her glasses, the pursed lips—but all she said was, “We could use the carpet. I mean, look”—and she was reaching in, experimentally lifting the fitted square of it from the m
ottled steel beneath.

  The car was two years old and he was making monthly payments on it. It was the first car he’d ever bought new in his life and he’d picked it out over Christine’s objections. He liked the sportiness of it, the power—he could blow by most cars on the freeway without really pushing it—and the color, a magnetic red that stood out a hundred yards away. He didn’t want to tear out the carpeting—that was not an option, because they’d get out of this and laugh about it over drinks at the lodge, and there was no sense in getting panicky, no sense in destroying things unnecessarily—but she already had hold of it with one hand and was shoving the bags back away from it with the other, and he had no choice but to pitch in and help.

  —

  Inside the car with the engine running, he was in a dream, a trance, as if he’d plunged to the bottom of the sea with Cousteau in his bathyscaphe and all the world had been reduced to this dim cab with the faint green glow of the dash lights and the hum of the heater. Ontario was there beside him, a dark presence in the passenger’s seat, her head nestled in the crook of his arm. They’d agreed to run the car every fifteen minutes or so—and then only briefly—in order to conserve gas and still keep the engine warm enough to deliver up heat. And that was all right, though he kept waking from his dream to a kind of frantic beating in his chest because they were in trouble here, deep trouble, he knew that no matter how much he told himself the storm would tail off and they could wade through the snow to the lodge. And what of the car? With this heavy a snowfall the road would be closed till spring and the car would be abandoned until the snow melted away and revealed it there at the side of the road, in the ditch, and he’d have to beg a ride to work or squeeze onto one of those noxious buses with all the dregs of humanity. Still, it could be worse—at least he’d filled the gas tank before they’d started up the hill.

  “Zach?” Her voice was murmurous with sleep.

  “Yeah?”

  “There’s nothing to worry about, you know. I’ve got two strong legs. We can walk out in the morning and get somebody to help—snowmobilers. There’s sure to be snowmobilers out—”

  “Yeah,” he said, “yeah, I’m sure,” and he wanted to add, gloomily, that this wasn’t suburban Massachusetts, that this was the wild, or at least as wild as it got in Southern California. There were mountain lions here, bears, pine martens, the ring-tailed cat. Last summer, with Jared, he’d seen a bear cub—a yearling, he guessed, a pretty substantial animal—out on the highway, this very highway, scraping the carcass of a crushed squirrel off the pavement with its teeth. They averaged twenty-plus feet of snow per season at this altitude and as much as forty during an El Niño year, and with his luck this would turn out to be an El Niño, no doubt about it, because it was coming down as if it wasn’t going to stop till May. Snowmobilers. Fat chance. Still, there was the lodge, and if they could get there—when they got there—they’d be all right. And the car would keep—he felt sick about it and he’d need a new battery maybe, but that was something he could live with. The cold he didn’t think about. Or the killing effort of slogging through knee-deep snow. That was for tomorrow. That was for daylight.

  They’d spent a good hour or more trying to get the car out, the carpets expendable, his Thomas Guide, even his spare jacket and two back issues of Nature she’d brought along to pore over by the fire, but the best they’d been able to do was give the rear wheels a moment’s purchase in order to shove the front end in deeper. By the time they gave up, he’d lost all sensation in his toes and fingertips, and that was when she thought of her cell phone—and he let her take it out and dial 911 because he didn’t have the heart to tell her that cell phones were useless up here, out of range, just like the radio.

  “Tell me a story,” she said now. “Talk to me.”

  He cut the engine. The snow had long since turned to powder and it fell silently, the only sound the creak and groan of the automobile shutting down. The dark was all-embracing and the humps of the gathering snow clung to it. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know any stories.”

  “Tell me about the animals. Tell me about the bears.”

  He shrugged in the darkness, drew her to him. “They’re all asleep now. But last summer—at the lodge?—there was one out back, a big cinnamon sow they said that must have weighed three hundred pounds or more. Jared and I were playing eight ball—there’s a nice table there, by the way, and I’m challenging you to the world championship tomorrow afternoon, so you better limber up your fingers—and somebody said, The bear’s out there again, and we must have watched the thing for half an hour before it lumbered off, and lumber it did. I mean, now I can understand the meaning of that word in a whole new way.”

  She was silent a moment, then she said, “The California grizzly’s extinct, but you knew that, right?”

  “Oh, yeah, yeah, I meant this was a black bear.”

  “They shot the last grizzly in Fresno, probably sniffing around somebody’s sheep ranch, in 1922. Boom. And it was gone forever.” There was a hitch in her voice, a sort of downbeat, as she settled into the arena of certainty, of what is and what was. The snow sifted down around them, a white sea in fragments—the dandruff of God, as his father used to call it when they went skiing at Mammoth over Christmas break each year. She paused a beat, then her voice came to him, soft as a prayer. “Did I ever tell you about the Carolina parakeet?”

  —

  It was still snowing at first light and the wind had come up in the night and sculpted a drift that rose as high as the driver’s side window, though he didn’t know that yet. He woke from a dream that dissolved as soon as he opened his eyes, replaced by a sudden sharp apprehension of loss: his car to be abandoned, the indeterminate walk ahead of them, the promise of the weekend crushed like a bag full of nothing. All because he was an idiot. Because he’d taken a chance and the chance had failed him. He thought back to yesterday afternoon, the unalloyed pleasure in her face as she tucked her bag into the trunk and settled in beside him, the palms nodding in a breeze off the ocean, the traffic light—lighter than he’d ever seen it—one great tune after another on the radio, all beat and attitude, his fingertips drumming on the steering wheel and how was work and did the boss say anything about ducking out early? He wished he could go back there, back to that moment when she slid in beside him and the precipitation hadn’t started in yet and he could have chosen the main road, the one he knew would get them there, snow or no snow. He wished he’d sprung for chains too. He wished a lot of things. Wished he was at the lodge, waking up beside her in bed. Or lingering over breakfast by the fire, big white oval plates of eggs and ham and home fries, mimosas, Bloody Marys, the snow hanging in the windows like a wraparound mural . . .

  The car was cold—he could see the breath trailing from his lips—and the windshield was opaque with the accumulation of snow and the intricate frozen swirls of condensation that clung to the inner surface of the glass. Ontario was asleep, the hood framing her face, her lips parted to expose the neat arc of her upper teeth, and for a long moment he just stared at her, afraid to wake her, afraid to start whatever was to come. What had she told him the night before? That the wild was shrinking away and the major species of the earth were headed for oblivion and there was nothing anyone could do about it. He tried to dissuade her, pointing to the reintroduction of the wolf in Yellowstone, the resilience of the puma and black bear populations in these woods, the urban invasion of deer, opossums and raccoons, but she wouldn’t listen. This was her obsession, everything dead or dying, the oceans depleted, the skies bereft, the plains and the forests gone preternaturally silent, and she fell asleep in his arms reciting the names of the creatures gone down as if she were saying her prayers.

  He listened to her breathing, the soft rattle of the air circulating through her nostrils and lifting and deflating her chest in a slow regular rhythm, and he watched her face, composed around dreams of the animals deserting their ni
ches one by one. He didn’t want to wake her. But he was cold and he had to relieve himself and then formulate some sort of plan or at least figure out where they were and how far they were going to have to walk, and so he turned over the engine to get some heat and cracked his door to discover the drift and the chill blue light trapped within it.

  She sat up with a start, even as he put his shoulder to the door and the breath of the storm rode in on a cold whip of wind-flung snow. “Where are we?” she murmured, as if they could have been anyplace else, and then, vaguely pushing at the hood of her parka as if to run her fingers through her hair, “Is it still snowing?”

  They relieved themselves privately, he on his side of the car—after planing off the drift with the dull knife-edge of the door—and she on hers. He stood there, the snow in his face, whiteness unrelieved, and drilled a steaming cavity into the drift while she squatted out of sight and the road revealed itself as a featureless river flowing away between the cleft banks of the trees. It took them a while to divide up their things—anything left behind, extra clothes, toiletry articles, makeup, jewelry, would go into the trunk, where they’d recover it next spring as if they were digging up a time capsule—and they shared one of the two power bars she’d brought along in her purse and a stick each of the beef jerky he found in his backpack. They ate in the car, talking softly, warming their fingers in the blast of the heater, the gas gauge run nearly all the way down now, but he’d worry about that later. Much later. He brooded as he worked his jaws over a plug of dried meat, kicking himself all over again, but she was unfazed. In fact, given the circumstances, given how miserable he was, she seemed inordinately cheerful, as if this was a big adventure—but then it wasn’t her car, was it?

  “Oh, come on, Zach,” she said, her eyes startled and wide behind the constricting lenses, a faint trace of chocolate defining her upper lip, “we’ll make the most of it. We were going to hike anyway, weren’t we? And when we get to the lodge we’ll see if maybe somebody can tow the car out—all right? And then we can play that game of pool you promised me.”