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

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  I wasn’t a cynic, or I tried not to be, because a pioneer can’t afford cynicism. Look on the bright side, that was what I maintained—there was no alternative. “Okay, fine, but have you seen my wrist? I mean, should I be concerned? Should I go to the doctor, do you think?”

  She took my wrist in her cool grip, traced the bumps there with her index finger. She gave a little laugh. “Chigger bites, that’s all. Nothing to worry about. And the mosquitoes’ll just be a bad memory in a week or two, I guarantee it.”

  There was a moment of silence, during which we both gazed out the window on the marsh—or swamp, as I’d mistakenly called it before Vicki corrected me. We watched an egret rise up out of nowhere and sail off into the trees. Clouds massed on the horizon in a swell of pure, unadulterated white; the palmettos gathered and released the faintest trace of a breeze. Next door, the wraparound porch of my neighbors—the black couple, Sam and Ernesta Fills—was deserted. Ditto the porch of the house on the other side, into which Mark and Leonard, having traded $2,500 of the cash I’d given them for number 632 and a prime chance at a Casual Contempo, had recently moved. “No,” she said finally, draining her wine glass and holding it out in one delicate hand so that I could refill it for her, “what I’d be concerned about if I was you is your neighbors across the street—the Weekses?”

  I gave her a dumb stare.

  “You know them—July and Fili Weeks and their three sons?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “sure.” Everybody knew everybody else here. It was a rule.

  From the TV in the other room came the sound of canned laughter, followed by Ethan’s stuttering high whinny of an underdeveloped laugh. “What about the red curtains?” she said. “And that car? That whatever it is, that race car painted in the three ugliest shades of magenta they keep parked out there on the street where the whole world can see it? They’re in violation of the code on something like eight counts already and they haven’t been here a month yet.”

  I felt a prickle of alarm. We were all in this together, and if everybody didn’t pitch in—if everybody didn’t subscribe to the letter as far as the Covenants and Restrictions were concerned—what was going to happen to our property values? “Red curtains?” I said.

  Her eyes were steely. “Just like in a whorehouse. And you know the rules—white, off-white, beige and taupe only.”

  “Has anybody talked to them? Can’t anybody do anything?”

  She set the glass down, drew her gaze away from the window and looked into my eyes. “You mean the Citizens’ Committee?”

  I shrugged. “Yeah. Sure. I guess.”

  She leaned in close. I could smell the rinse she used in her hair, and it was faintly intoxicating. I loved her eyes, loved the shape of her, loved the way she aspirated her h’s like an elocution teacher. “Don’t you worry,” she whispered. “We’re already on it.”

  —

  Once Vicki had mentioned the Weekses and the way they were flouting the code, I couldn’t get them out of my head. July Weeks was a salesman of some sort, aviation parts, I think it was—he worked for Cessna—and he seemed to spend most of his time, despite the mosquito scare, buried deep in his own white wicker chaise longue out on the wraparound porch of his Courteous Coastal directly across the street from me. He was a Southerner, and that was all right because this was the South, after all, but he had one of those accents that just went on clanging and jarring till you could barely understand a word he was saying. Not that I harbor any prejudices—he was my neighbor, and if he wanted to sound like an extra from Deliverance, that was his privilege. But I looked out the front window and saw that race car—No excessive or unsightly vehicles, including campers, RVs, moving vans or trailers, shall be parked on the public streets for a period exceeding forty-eight continuous hours, Section III, Article 12, Declaration of Covenants, Deeds and Restrictions—and the sight of it became an active irritation. Which was compounded by the fact that the eldest son, August, pulled up one afternoon in a pickup truck that sat about six feet up off its Bayou Crawler tires and deposited a boat trailer at the curb. The boat was painted puce with lime-green trim and it had a staved-in hull. Plus, there were those curtains.

  A week went by. Two weeks. I got updates from Vicki—we were seeing each other just about every day now—and of course the Citizens’ Committee, as an arm of the TJC, was threatening the Weekses with a lawsuit and the Weekses had hired an attorney and were threatening back, but nothing happened. I couldn’t enjoy my wraparound porch or the view out my mullioned Craftsman windows. Every time I looked up, there was the boat, there was the car, and beyond them, the curtains. The situation began to weigh on me, so one night after dinner I strolled down the three broad inviting steps of my wraparound porch, waved a greeting to the Fills on my right and Mark and Leonard on my left, and crossed the street to mount the equally inviting steps of the Weekses’ wraparound porch with the intention of setting Mr. Weeks straight on a few things. Or no, that sounds too harsh. I wanted to block out a couple issues with him and see if we couldn’t resolve things amicably for all concerned.

  He was sitting in the chaise longue, his wife in the wicker armchair beside him. An Atlanta Braves cap that looked as if it had just come off the shelf at Gulpy’s Sports Emporium hid his brow and the crown of his head and he was wearing a pair of those squared-off black sunglasses for people with cataracts, and that reduced the sum of his expression to the sharp beak of his nose and an immobile mouth. The wife was a squat Korean woman whose name I could never remember. She was peeling the husk off of a dark pungent pod or tuber. It was a homey scene, and the moment couldn’t have been more neighborly.

  “Hi,” I said (or maybe, prompted by the ambience, I might even have managed a “Howdy”).

  Neither of them said a word.

  “Listen,” I began, after standing there for an awkward moment (and what had I been expecting—mint juleps?). “Listen, about the curtains and the car and all that—the boat—I just wanted to say, well, I mean, it might seem like a small thing, it’s ridiculous, really, but—”

  He cut me off then. I don’t know what he said, but it sounded something like “Rabid rabid gurtz.”

  The wife—her name came to me suddenly: Fili—translated. She carefully set aside the root or pod or whatever it was and gave me a flowering smile that revealed a set of the whitest and evenest teeth I’d ever seen. “He say you can blow it out you ass.”

  “No, no,” I said, brushing right by it, “you misunderstand me. I’m not here to complain, or even to convince you of anything. It’s just that, well, I’m your neighbor, and I thought if we—”

  Here he spoke again, a low rumble of concatenated sounds that might have been expressive of digestive trouble, but the wife—Fili—seeing my blank expression, dutifully translated: “He say his gun—you know gun?—he say he keep gun loaded.”

  —

  Things are not perfect. I never claimed they were. And if you’re going to have a free and open town and not one of these gated neo-racist enclaves, you’ve got to be willing to accept that. The TJC sued the Weekses and the Weekses sued them back, and still the curtains flamed behind the windows and the garish race car and the unseaworthy boat sat at the curb across the street. So what I did to make myself feel better, was buy a dog. A Scottie. Lauren would never let me have a dog—she claimed to be allergic, but in fact she was pathologically averse to any intrusion on the rigid order she maintained around the house—and we never had any children either, which didn’t affect me one way or the other, though I should say I was one of the few single men in Jubilation who didn’t view Vicki’s kids as a liability. I grew to like them, in fact—or Ethan anyway; the baby was just a baby, practically inert if it wasn’t shrieking as if it had just had the skin stripped from its limbs. But Ethan was something else. I liked the feel of his tiny bunched little sweating hand in mine as we strolled down to the Benny Tarpon Old Tyme Ice Cream Parlor in t
he evening or took a turn round Lake Allagash. He was always tugging me one way or the other, chattering, pointing like a tour director: “Look,” he would say. “Look!”

  I named the dog Bruce, after my grandfather on my mother’s side. He was a year old and housetrained, and I loved the way the fur hid his paws so that he seemed to glide over the grass of the village green as if he had no means of locomotion beyond willpower and magic.

  That was around the time we began to feel the effects of the three-year drought that none of the TJC salespeople had bothered to mention in their all-day seminars and living-color brochures. The wind came up out of the south carrying a freight of smoke (apparently the Everglades were on fire) and a fine brown dust that obliterated our lawns and flowerbeds and made a desert of the village green. The heat seemed to increase too, as if the fires had somehow turned up the thermostat, but the worst of it was the smell. Everywhere you went, whether you were standing on line at the bank, sunk into one of the magic-fingers lounge chairs at the movie theater or pulling your head up off the pillow in the morning, the stale smell of old smoke assaulted your nostrils.

  I was walking Bruce up on Golfpark Drive one afternoon, where our select million-dollar-plus homes back up onto the golf course—and you have to realize that this is part of the Contash vision too, millionaires living cheek by jowl with single mothers like Vicki and all the others struggling to pay mortgages that were thirty-five percent higher than those in the surrounding area, not to mention special assessments and maintenance fees—when a man with a camera slung round his neck stopped me and asked if he could take my picture. The sky was marbled with smoke. Dust fled across the pavement. The birds were actually shrieking in the trees. “Me?” I said. “Why me?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, snapping the picture. “I like your dog.”

  “You do?” I was flattered, I admit it, but I was on my guard too. Journalists from all over the world had descended on the town en masse, mainly to cook up dismissive articles about a legion of Stepford wives and robotic husbands living on a Contash movie set and doing daily obeisance to Gulpy Gator. None of them ever bothered to mention our equanimity, our openness and shared ideals. Why would they? Hard work and sacrifice never have made for good copy.

  “Yeah, sure,” he said, “and would you mind posing over there, by the gate to that gingerbread mansion? That’s good. Nice.” He took a series of shots, the camera whirring through its motions. He wore a buzz cut, a two-day growth of nearly translucent beard and a pair of tri-colored Nikes. “You do live here, don’t you?” he asked finally. “I mean, you’re an actual resident, right, and not a tourist?”

  I felt a surge of pride. “That’s right,” I said. “I’m one of the originals.”

  He gave me an odd look, as if he were trying to sniff out an impostor. “Do they really pay you to walk the dog around the village green six times a day?”

  “Pay me? Who?”

  “You know, the town, the company. You can’t have a town without people in it, right?” He looked down at Bruce, who was sniffing attentively at a dust-coated leaf. “Or dogs?” The camera clicked again, several times in succession. “I hear they pay that old lady on the moped too—and the guy that sets up his easel in front of the Gulpy monument every morning.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. You’re out of your mind.”

  “And I’ll tell you another thing—don’t think just because you bought into the Contash lifestyle you’re immune from all the shit that comes down in the real world, because you’re not. In fact, I’d watch that dog if I were you—”

  Somewhere the fires were burning. A rag of smoke flapped at my face and I began to cough. “You’re one of those media types, aren’t you?” I said, pounding at my breastbone. “You people disgust me. You don’t even make a pretense of unbiased reporting—you just want to ridicule us and tear us down, isn’t that right?” My dander was up. Who were these people to come in here and try to undermine everything we’d been working for? I shot him a look of impatience. “It wouldn’t be jealousy, would it? By any chance?”

  He shrugged, shifted the camera to one side and dug a cigarette out of his breast pocket. I watched him cup his hands against the breeze and light it. He flung the match in the bushes, a symbolic act, surely. “We used to have a Scottie when I was a kid,” he said, exhaling. “So I’m just telling you—you’d be surprised what I know about this town, what goes on behind closed doors, the double-dealing, the payoffs, the flouting of the environmental regs, all the dirt the TJC and Charles Contash don’t want you to know about. View me as a resource, your diligent representative of the fourth estate. Keep the dog away from the lake, that’s all.”

  I was stubborn. I wasn’t listening. “He can swim.”

  The man let out a short, unpleasant laugh. “I’m talking about alligators, my friend, and not the cuddly little cartoon kind. You might or might not know it because I’m sure it’s not advertised in any of the TJC brochures, but when they built Contash World back in the sixties they evicted all the alligators, not to mention the coral snakes and cane rattlers and snapping turtles—and where do you think they put them?”

  —

  All right. I was forewarned. And what happened should never have happened, I know that, but there are hazards in any community, whether it be South Central L.A. or Scarsdale or Kuala Lumpur. I took Bruce around Lake Allagash—twice—and then went home and barbecued a platter of wings and ribs for Vicki and the kids and I thought no more about it. Alligators. They were there, sure they were, but so were the mosquitoes and the poison toads that looked like deflated kick balls and chased the dogs off their kibble. This was Florida. It was muggy. It was hot. We had our share of sand fleas and whatnot. But at least we didn’t have to worry about bronchial pneumonia or snow tires.

  The rains came in mid-September, a series of thunderstorms that rolled in off the Gulf and put out the fires. We had problems with snails and slugs for a while there, armadillos crawling up half-drowned on the lawn, snakes in the garage, walking catfish, that sort of thing—I even found a opossum curled up in the dryer one morning amidst my socks and boxer shorts. But the Citizens’ Committee was active in picking up strays, nursing them back to health and restoring them to the ecosystem, so it wasn’t as bad as you’d think. And after that, the sun came out and the earth just seemed to steam till every trace of mold and mud was erased and the flowers went mad with the glory of it. The smoke was gone, the snails had crawled back into their holes or dens or wherever they lived when they weren’t smearing the windows with slime, and the air was scented so sweetly it was as if the Contash Corp had hired a fleet of crop dusters to spray air freshener over the town. Even the thermometer cooperated, the temperature holding at a nice equitable seventy-eight degrees for three days running. Tear the page out of the brochure: this was what we’d all come for.

  I was sitting out on my wraparound porch, trying to ignore the decrepit boat and magenta car across the street, Crime and Punishment spread open in my lap (Raskolnikov was just climbing the steps to the old lady’s place and I was waiting for the axe to fall), when Vicki called and proposed a picnic. She’d made up some sandwiches on the brown nut bread I like, Asiago cheese, sweet onion and roasted red pepper, and she’d picked up a nice bottle of Chilean white at the Contash Liquor Mart. Was I ready for some sun? And maybe a little backrub afterward at her place?

  Ethan wanted to go out on the water, but when we got to the Jubilation dock the sound of the ratcheting motors scared him, so we settled on an aluminum rowboat, and that was better—or would have been better—because we could hear ourselves think and didn’t have to worry about all that spew of fumes, and that was a real concern for Vicki. We might have been raised in houses where our parents smoked two packs a day and sprayed Raid on the kitchen counter every time an ant or roach showed its face—or head or feelers or whatever—but there was no way any toxins were entering her children’s systems,
not if she could help it. So I rented the rowboat. “No problem,” I told Vicki, who was looking terrific in a sunbonnet, her bikini top and a pair of skimpy shorts that showed off her smooth solid legs and the Gulpy tattoo on her ankle. The fact was I hadn’t been kayaking since the rains started and the exercise was something I was looking forward to.

  It took me a few strokes to reacquaint myself with the apparatus of oars and oarlocks, and we lurched away from the dock as if we’d been torpedoed, but I got into the rhythm of it soon enough and we glided cleanly out across the mirrored surface of the lake. Vicki didn’t want me to go more than twenty or thirty feet from shore, and that was all right too, except that I found myself dredging up noxious-smelling clumps of pondweed that seemed to cast a powerful olfactory spell over Bruce. He kept snapping at the weed as I lifted first one oar and then the other to try to shake it off, and once or twice I had to drop the oars and discipline him because he was leaning so far out over the bow I thought we were going to lose him. Still, we saw birdlife everywhere we looked, herons, egrets, cormorants and anhingas, and Ethan got a real kick out of a clutch of painted turtles stacked up like dinner plates on a half-submerged log.

  We’d gone half a mile or so, I guess, to the far side of the lake where the wake of the motorboats wouldn’t interfere overmuch with the mustarding of the sandwiches and the delicate operation of pouring the wine into long-stemmed crystal glasses. The baby, wrapped up like a sausage in her life jacket—or life-cradle, might be more accurate—was asleep, a blissful baby smile painted on her lips. Bruce curled up at my feet in the brown swill at the bottom of the boat and Vicki sipped wine and gave me a look of contentment so deep and pure I was beginning to think I wouldn’t mind seeing it across the breakfast table for the rest of my life. It was tranquil. Dragonflies hovering, fish rising, not a mosquito in sight. Even little Ethan, normally such a clingy kid, seemed to be enjoying himself tracing the pattern of his finger in the water as the boat rocked and drifted in a gentle airy dance.