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

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  It was raining again, a pulsing hard-driven rain that sheathed the car and ran slick over the pavement till the parking lot gleamed like the sea beyond it. He didn’t want to go back to the cottage in the motor court, not yet anyway—the thought of it entered his mind like a closed box floating in the void, and he had to squeeze his eyes shut to make it disappear—and he wasn’t much of a drinker, so there wasn’t any solace in the lights of the bar across the street. Finally, he decided to do what he’d known he was going to do all along: drive out to the house and have a last look at it. Things would have to be sold, he told himself, things stored, winnowed, tossed into the trash.

  As soon as he pulled into the dirt drive that dropped off the road and into the trees, he could see he’d been fooling himself. The place was an eyesore, vandalized and vandalized again, the paint gone, windows shattered, the porch skewed away from the foundation as if it had been shoved by the hand of a giant. He switched off the ignition and stepped out into the rain. Inside, there was nothing of value: graffiti on the walls, a stained mattress in the center of the living room, every stick of furniture broken down and fed to the fire, the toilet bowl smashed and something dead in the pit of it, rodent or bird, it didn’t matter. He wandered through the rooms, stooping to pick things up and then drop them again. For a long while he stood at the kitchen sink, staring out into the rain.

  The summer the Rastrows drowned, he’d lived primitive, out on the water all day every day, swimming, fishing, crabbing, racing from island to shore and back again under the belly of his sail. That was the year his parents had their friends from the city out to stay, the Morses—Mr. Morse, ventricose and roaring, with his head set tenuously atop the shaft of his neck, as if they’d given him the wrong size at birth, and Mrs. Morse, her face drawn to a point beneath the bleached bird fluff of her hair—and a woman who worked with his mother as a secretary, a divorcée with two shy pretty daughters his own age. And what was the woman’s name? Jean. And the daughters? He could no longer remember, but they wore sunsuits that left their legs and midriffs bare, the field of their taut browned flesh a thrill and revelation to him. He couldn’t look them in the face, couldn’t even pretend. But they went off after a week to be with their father, and the Morses—and Jean—stayed on with his parents, sunning outside in the vinyl lawn chairs, drinking and playing cards so late in the night that their voices—murmurous, shrill suddenly, murmurous again—were like the disquisitions of the birds that wakened him at dawn to go down to the shore and the boat and the sun that burned the chill off the water.

  There was something tumultuous going on among them—all five of them—but he didn’t understand what it was till he looked back on it years later. It was something sexual, that much he knew, something forbidden and shameful and emotionally wrought. He lay in his bed upstairs, twelve years old and discovering his own body, and they shouted recriminations at each other a floor down. Mr. Morse took him and Jean out fishing for pollack one afternoon, the big man shirtless and rowing, Jean in the bow, an ice bucket sprouting a bristle of green-necked bottles between them. He fished. Baited his hook with squid and dropped the weighted line into the shifting gray deep. Behind him, Mr. Morse slipped his hand up under Jean’s blouse and they kissed and wriggled against each other until they couldn’t seem to catch their breath, even as he peered down into the water and pretended he didn’t notice. He remembered a single voice raised in agony that night, a voice caught between a sob and a shriek, and in the morning Mrs. Morse was gone. A few days later, her husband got behind the wheel of Jean’s car and the two of them pulled out of the drive. Nobody said a word. He sat with his parents at dinner—coleslaw, corn on the cob, hamburgers his father seared on the grill—and nobody said a word.

  He was back at the motor court by five and he called Ruth just to hear the sound of her voice and to lie to her about the old lady’s offer. Yes, he told her, yes, it was just what he’d expected and he’d close the deal tomorrow, no problem. Yes, he loved her. Yes, good night. Then, though he wasn’t a drinker, he walked into the village and sat at the bar while the Celtics went through the motions up on the television screen and the six or seven patrons gathered there either cheered or groaned as the occasion demanded. He let two beers grow warm by the time he got to the bottom of them and he had a handful of saltines to steady his stomach. He was hoping someone would mention Mrs. Rastrow, offer up some information about her, some gossip about what she was doing to the island, about Rose, but nobody spoke to him, nobody even looked at him. By seven-thirty he was back in the cottage paging through half a dozen back issues of a news magazine the woman at the desk had given him with an apologetic thrust of her hand, and she was sorry they didn’t have any TV for him to watch but maybe he’d be interested in these magazines?

  He was reading of things that had happened five years ago—big stories, crises, and he couldn’t for the life of him remember how any of them had turned out—when there was a knock at the door. It was Rose, dressed in a bulky sweater and blue jeans. The black patent-leather pumps she’d been wearing earlier had been replaced by tennis shoes. Her ankles were bare. “Hi,” she said. “I thought I’d drop by to see how you were doing.”

  Everything in him seemed to seize up. How he was doing? He was doing poorly, feeling trapped and bereft, pressed for money, for luck, for hope, so worried about Ruth and her doctors and the tests and prescriptions and bills he didn’t know how he was going to survive the night ahead, let alone the rest of the winter and the long unspooling year to come. Mrs. Rastrow—her employer, her ally—had cut the heart out of him. So how was he doing? He couldn’t even open his mouth to tell her.

  They were both standing at the open door. The night smelled like an old dishrag that had been frozen and defrosted again. “Because I felt bad this afternoon,” she said, “I mean, not even offering you something to drink or a sandwich. Alice can be pretty abrupt, and I wanted to apologize.”

  “Okay,” he said, “sure, I appreciate that.” He was in his stocking feet, his shirt open at the collar to reveal the T-shirt beneath, and was it clean? His hair. Had he combed his hair? “Okay,” he said again, not knowing what else to do.

  “Do you have a minute?” She peered into the room as if it might conceal something she needed to be wary of. Her shoulders were bunched, her eyes gone wide. The night air leaked in around her, carrying a sour lingering odor now of panic and attrition—a skunk, somebody had surprised a skunk somewhere out on the road. Suddenly she was smiling. “I guess I’m the potato peeler salesman now, huh?”

  “No,” he said, “no,” too forcefully, and he didn’t know what he was up to—what she was up to, a young woman who lived with an old woman and wore tight silk Chinese dresses on an island that had no Chinese restaurants and no need of them—and then he was pulling the door back and inviting her in, their bodies pressed close in passing, and the door shutting behind them.

  She took the chair, he the bed. “I’d offer you something,” he said, “but—” and he threw up his hands and they both laughed. Was he drunk—two beers on an empty stomach? Was that it?

  “I brought you something,” she said, snapping open her purse to remove a brown paper bag and set it on the night table. There were oil stains on the bag, translucent continents, headlands, isthmuses painted across the surface in a random geography. “Tuna,” she said. “Tuna on rye. I made them myself. And these”—lifting the sandwiches in their opaque paper from the bag and holding two cans of beer aloft. “I thought you’d be hungry. With the diner closing early, I mean.” She pushed a beer across the table and handed him a sandwich. “I didn’t know if you’d know that—that they close early this time of year?”

  He told her he hadn’t known, or he’d forgotten—or hadn’t even thought of it, really—and he thanked her for thinking of him. They sipped their beers in silence a moment, the light on the night table the only illumination in the room, and then he said, “You know, that house belonged to m
y father. That’s his signature on the deed. We spent summers here when I was a kid, best summers of my life. I was here when Mrs. Rastrow’s—when Ronald and Elyse drowned. I was maybe twelve at the time, and I didn’t really—I didn’t understand you could die. Not if you were young. Up till that point it was old people who’d died, the lady next door—Mrs. Jennings—my grandmother, a great-aunt.”

  She just nodded, but he could see she was right there with him, the brightness in her eyes, the way she chewed, sipped. He felt the beer go to his head. He wanted to ask about her, how she’d come to the island—was it an ad in the paper, lumber heiress in need of a companion to wear silk Chinese dresses in a remote cottage, room and board and stipend and all the time in the world to paint, write, dream?—but he didn’t want to be obvious. She was exotic. Chinese. The only Chinese person on the island, and it would be rude, maybe even faintly racist, to ask.

  He watched her tuck the last corner of the sandwich in her mouth and tilt back the can to drain it. She wiped her lips with a paper napkin, then settled her hands over her knees and said, “You know, it’s no use. She’s never going to go any higher.”

  He was embarrassed suddenly—to bring all that into this?—and he just shrugged. It was a fait accompli. He was defeated and he knew it.

  “She knows about your wife. And you know she could pay a fair price, even though the place is run-down, because it’s not the money—she has all the money anybody could want—but she won’t. I know her. She won’t budge.” She lifted her face so that the light cut it in two, the ridge of her nose and one eye shining, the rest in shadow. “She’s just going to let it rot anyway. That’s what she’s doing with all of them.”

  “Spoils her view?”

  She smiled. “Something like that.”

  Then the question he’d been swallowing since she’d appeared at the door, finally pried up off his tongue by the beer: “This isn’t some kind of negotiation, is it? I mean, she didn’t send you, did she?”

  The question left a space for all the little sounds of the night to creep in: the cry of a shorebird, the wind scouring the beach, something ticking in the depths of the heater. She dropped her eyes. “No, that’s not it at all,” she murmured.

  Well, what is it then? he wanted to say—almost said—but he felt a tightening across the surface of him, his flesh prickling and contracting as if all his defenses were going down at once, and the answer came to him. She was here for him, for a quick fix for loneliness and despair, here to listen to a voice besides Mrs. Rastrow’s, to sleep in another bed, any bed, make contact where before there had been none. He got up from the bed, moved awkwardly toward her, and she got up too. They were as close as they’d been at the door. He could smell her, a sweet heat rising from the folds of the sweater, caught in the coils of her hair. “Did you want to maybe go over to the tavern?” she said. “For another beer, I mean? I only brought the two.”

  He didn’t want another beer, hadn’t wanted the first one. “No,” he said in a whisper, and then he was holding her, pulling her to him as if she had no bones in her body, everything new and soft and started from scratch. Her cheek was pressed to his, scintillating, electric, her cheek, and she let him kiss her and her bones were gone and she was melting down away from the chair and into the bed. She didn’t taste like Ruth. Didn’t feel like her. Didn’t conform to him the way Ruth had through all those years when she was well and alive and lit up like a meteor, and he had to say something, he didn’t have any choice. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I’m sorry. I really don’t.”

  She was beneath him on the bed, her hair in a sprawl. He pulled away from her—pushed himself up as if he were doing some sort of exercise, calisthenics of the will, the heaviest of heavy lifting—and before he knew what he was doing he was out the door and into the night. He thought he heard her call out his name, but the surf took it away. He was furious, raging, pounding his way down the dark strand as if every step was a murder—That dried-up old bitch, and who does she think she is anyway?

  A sudden wind came up off the shore to rake the trees, the branches rattling like claws, and the smell assaulted him again, the smell of rottenness and corruption, of animals and their glands. He kept walking, the wind in his face. Head down, shoulders pumping, he followed his legs till he got beyond the lights of the farthest house and the sky closed down and melded with the shore. There was something there ahead on the beach, a shape spawned from the shadows, and it took him a moment to see what it was: a trash can, let’s all pitch in and keep the island clean, turned on its side in a spill of litter. And inside the can, the animal itself, coiled round the wedge of its head and the twin lights of its eyes. “Get out of that!” he shouted, looking for something to throw. “Get out!”

  —

  In the morning he made his way back up the long dirt drive and signed away the property. By noon, he was gone.

  (2002)

  Chicxulub

  My daughter is walking along the roadside late at night—too late, really, for a seventeen-year-old to be out alone even in a town as safe as this—and it is raining, the first rain of the season, the streets slick with a fine immiscible glaze of water and petrochemicals so that even a driver in full possession of her faculties, a driver who hasn’t consumed two apple martinis and three glasses of Hitching Post pinot noir before she gets behind the wheel of the car, will have trouble keeping the thing off the sidewalk and out of the gutters, the shrubbery, the highway median, for Christ’s sake. . . . But that’s not really what I want to talk about, or not yet anyway.

  Have you heard of Tunguska? In Russia?

  This was the site of the last-known large-body impact on the earth’s surface, nearly a hundred years ago. Or that’s not strictly accurate—the meteor, an estimated sixty yards across, never actually touched down. The force of its entry—the compression and superheating of the air beneath it—caused it to explode some twenty-five thousand feet above the ground, but then the term “explode” hardly does justice to the event. There was a detonation—a flash, a thunderclap—equal to the explosive power of eight hundred Hiroshima bombs. Thirty miles away, reindeer in their loping herds were struck dead by the blast wave, and the clothes of a hunter another thirty miles beyond that burst into flame even as he was poleaxed to the ground. Seven hundred square miles of Siberian forest were leveled in an instant. If the meteor had hit only four hours later it would have exploded over St. Petersburg and annihilated every living thing in that glorious and baroque city. And this was only a rock. And it was only sixty yards across.

  My point? You’d better get down on your knees and pray to your gods, because each year this big spinning globe we ride intersects the orbits of some twenty million asteroids, at least a thousand of which are bigger than a mile in diameter.

  But my daughter. She’s out there in the dark and the rain, walking home. Maureen and I bought her a car, a Honda Civic, the safest thing on four wheels, but the car was used—pre-owned, in dealer-speak—and as it happens it’s in the shop with transmission problems and, because she just had to see her friends and gossip and giggle and balance slick multicolored clumps of raw fish and pickled ginger on conjoined chopsticks at the mall, Kimberly picked her up and Kimberly will bring her home. Maddy has a cell phone and theoretically she could have called us, but she didn’t—or that’s how it appears. And so she’s walking. In the rain. And Alice K. Petermann of 16 Briar Lane, white, divorced, a realtor with Hyperion who has picked at a salad and left her glasses on the bar, loses control of her car.

  It is just past midnight. I am in bed with a book, naked, and hardly able to focus on the clustered words and rigid descending paragraphs, because Maureen is in the bathroom slipping into the sheer black negligee I bought her at Victoria’s Secret for her birthday, and her every sound—the creak of the medicine cabinet on its hinges, the susurrus of the brush at her teeth, the tap running—electrifies me. I’ve lit a candle and am wa
iting for Maureen to step into the room so I can flick off the light. We had cocktails earlier, a bottle of wine with dinner, and we sat close on the couch and shared a joint in front of the fire because our daughter was out and we could do that and no one the wiser. I listen to the little sounds from the bathroom, seductive sounds, maddening. I am ready. More than ready. “Hey,” I call, pitching my voice low, “are you coming or not? You don’t expect me to wait all night, do you?”

  Her face appears in the doorway, the pale lobes of her breasts and the dark nipples visible through the clinging black silk. “Oh, are you waiting for me?” she says, making a game of it. She hovers at the door, and I can see the smile creep across her lips, the pleasure of the moment, drawing it out. “Because I thought I might go down and work in the garden for a while—it won’t take long, couple hours, maybe. You know, spread a little manure, bank up some of the mulch on the roses. You’ll wait for me, won’t you?”

  Then the phone rings.

  We stare blankly at each other through the first two rings and then Maureen says, “I better get it,” and I say, “No, no, forget it—it’s nothing. It’s nobody.”

  But she’s already moving.

  “Forget it!” I shout, and her voice drifts back to me—“What if it’s Maddy?”—and then I watch her put her lips to the receiver and whisper, “Hello?”

  —

  The night of the Tunguska explosion the skies were unnaturally bright across Europe—as far away as London people strolled in the parks past midnight and read novels out of doors while the sheep kept right on grazing and the birds stirred uneasily in the trees. There were no stars visible, no moon—just a pale, quivering light, as if all the color had been bleached out of the sky. But of course that midnight glow and the fate of those unhappy Siberian reindeer were nothing at all compared to what would have happened if a larger object had invaded the earth’s atmosphere. On average, objects greater than a hundred yards in diameter strike the planet once every five thousand years and asteroids half a mile across thunder down at intervals of three hundred thousand years. Three hundred thousand years is a long time in anybody’s book. But if—when—such a collision occurs, the explosion will be in the million megaton range and will cloak the atmosphere in dust, thrusting the entire planet into a deep freeze and effectively stifling all plant growth for a period of a year or more. There will be no crops. No forage. No sun.