It was a ridiculous question, but I answered it. “Something like that,” I said, my voice thick with alcohol and methaqualone.
“Sure you’re not hurt? You want to go to the hospital or anything?”
I took a minute to pat myself down, the night air like the breath of some expiring beast. “No,” I said, slowly shaking my head in the glare of the headlights, “I’m not hurt. Not that I know of anyway.”
We stood there in silence a moment, contemplating the overturned hulk of the car. One wheel, persistent to the point of absurdity, kept spinning at the center of a gulf of shadow. “Listen,” I said finally, “can you give me a lift?”
“A lift? But what about—?”
“Tomorrow,” I said, and I let one hand rise and then drop.
There was another silence, and he was thinking it over, I could see that. From his point of view, this was no happy occasion. I wasn’t bleeding, but I stank like a corpse and I was leaving the scene of an accident and he was a witness and all the rest of it. But he was a good man, and he surprised me. “Yeah, sure,” he said, after a minute. “Climb in.”
That was when things got very strange. Because as I directed him to my house at the end of the lane by the side of the soon-to-be-refrozen lake, a curtain fell over my mind. It was a dense curtain, weighted at the ends, and it admitted no glimmer of light. “Here,” I said, “stop here,” and the curtain fell over that part of my life that played itself out at Phil Cherniske’s house.
A moment later, I found myself alone in the night, the taillights of the good samaritan’s car winking once at the corner and then vanishing. I walked down the dark lane thinking of Helen, Helen with her silver-foil eyes and smooth sweet smile, and I mounted the steps and turned the handle of the door thinking of her, but it wouldn’t turn, because it was locked. I knocked then, knocked at my own door, knocked until my knuckles bled, but there was no one home.
(1998)
Blinded by the Light
So the sky is falling. Or, to be more precise, the sky is emitting poisonous rays, rays that have sprinkled the stigmata of skin cancer across both of Manuel Banquedano’s cheeks and the tip of his nose and sprouted the cataracts in Slobodan Abarca’s rheumy old eyes. That is what the tireless Mr. John Longworth, of Long Beach, California, U.S.A., would have us believe. I have been to Long Beach, California, on two occasions, and I give no credence whatever to a man who would consciously assent to live in a place like that. He is, in fact, just what my neighbors say he is—an alarmist, like the chicken in the children’s tale who thinks the sky is falling just because something hit him on the head. On his head. On his individual and prejudicial head. And so the barnyard goes into a panic—and to what end? Nothing. A big fat zero.
But let me tell you about him, about Mr. John Longworth, Ph.D., and how he came to us with his theories, and you can judge for yourself. First, though, introductions are in order. I am Bob Fernando Castillo and I own an estancia of 50,000 acres to the south of Punta Arenas, on which I graze some 9,000 sheep, for wool and mutton both. My father, God rest his soul, owned Estancia Castillo before me and his father before him, all the way back to the time Punta Arenas was a penal colony and then one of the great trading towns of the world—that is, until the Americans of the North broke through the Isthmus of Panama and the ships stopped rounding Cape Horn. In any case, that is a long and venerable ownership in anybody’s book. I am fifty-three years old and in good health and vigor and I am married to the former Isabela Mackenzie, who has given me seven fine children, the eldest of whom, Bob Fernando Jr., is now twenty-two years old.
It was September last, when Don Pablo Antofagasta gave his annual three-day fiesta primavera to welcome in the spring, that Mr. John Longworth first appeared among us. We don’t have much society out here, unless we take the long and killing drive into Punta Arenas, a city of 110,000 souls, and we look forward with keen anticipation to such entertainments—and not only the adults, but the children too. The landowners from several of the estancias, even the most far-flung, gather annually for Don Pablo’s extravaganza and they bring their children and some of the house servants as well (and even, as in the case of Don Benedicto Braun, their dogs and horses). None of this presents a problem for Don Pablo, one of the wealthiest and most generous among us. As we say, the size of his purse is exceeded only by the size of his heart.
I arrived on the Thursday preceding the big weekend, flying over the pampas in the Piper Super Cub with my daughter, Paloma, to get a jump on the others and have a quiet night sitting by the fire with Don Pablo and his eighty-year-old Iberian jerez. Isabela, Bob Fernando Jr. and the rest of the family would be making the twelve-hour drive over washboard roads and tortured gullies the following morning, and frankly, my kidneys can no longer stand that sort of pounding. I still ride—horseback, that is—but I leave the Suburban and the Range Rover to Isabela and to Bob Fernando Jr. At any rate, the flight was a joy, soaring on the back of the implacable wind that rakes our country day and night, and I taxied right up to the big house on the airstrip Don Pablo scrupulously maintains.
Don Pablo emerged from the house to greet us even before the prop had stopped spinning, as eager for our company as we were for his. (Paloma has always been his favorite, and she’s grown into a tall, straight-backed girl of eighteen with intelligent eyes and a mane of hair so thick and luxuriant it almost seems unnatural, and I don’t mind saying how proud I am of her.) My old friend strode across the struggling lawn in boots and puttees and one of those plaid flannel shirts he mail-orders from Boston, Teresa and two of the children in tow. It took me half a moment to shut down the engine and stow away my aeronautical sunglasses for the return flight, and when I looked up again, a fourth figure had appeared at Don Pablo’s side, matching him stride for stride.
“Cómo estás, mi amigo estimado?” Don Pablo cried, taking my hand and embracing me, and then he turned to Paloma to kiss her cheek and exclaim on her beauty and how she’d grown. Then it was my turn to embrace Teresa and the children and press some sweets into the little ones’ hands. Finally, I looked up into an untethered North American face, red hair and a red mustache and six feet six inches of raw bone and sinew ending in a little bony afterthought of a head no bigger than a tropical coconut and weighted down by a nose to end all noses. This nose was an affliction and nothing less, a tool for probing and rooting, and I instinctively looked away from it as I took the man’s knotty gangling hand in my own and heard Don Pablo pronounce, “Mr. John Longworth, a scientist from North America who has come to us to study our exemplary skies.”
“Mucho gusto en conocerle,” he said, and his Spanish was very good indeed, but for the North American twang and his maddening tendency to over-pronounce the consonants till you felt as if he were battering both sides of your head with a wet root. He was dressed in a fashion I can only call bizarre, all cultural differences aside, his hands gloved, his frame draped in an ankle-length London Fog trenchcoat and his disproportionately small head dwarfed by a pair of wraparound sunglasses and a deerstalker cap. His nose, cheeks and hard horny chin were nearly fluorescent with what I later learned was sunblock, applied in layers.
“A pleasure,” I assured him, stretching the truth for the sake of politesse, after which he made his introductions to my daughter with a sort of slobbering formality, and we all went in to dinner.
—
There was, as I soon discovered, to be one topic of conversation and one topic only throughout the meal—indeed, throughout the entire three days of the fiesta, whenever and wherever Mr. John Longworth was able to insinuate himself, and he seemed to have an almost supernatural ability to appear everywhere at once, as ubiquitous as a cockroach. And what was this penetrating and all-devouring topic? The sky. Or rather the hole he perceived in the sky over Magallanes, Tierra del Fuego and the Antarctic, a hole that would admit all the poisons of the universe and ultimately lead to the destruction of man and nature. He tal
ked of algae and krill, of acid rain and carbon dioxide and storms that would sweep the earth with a fury unknown since creation. I took him for an enthusiast at best, but deep down I wondered what asylum he’d escaped from and when they’d be coming to reclaim him.
He began over the soup course, addressing the table at large as if he were standing at a podium and interrupting Don Pablo and me in a reminiscence of a salmon-fishing excursion to the Penitente River undertaken in our youth. “None of you,” he said, battering us with those consonants, “especially someone with such fair skin as Paloma here or Señora Antofagasta, should leave the house this time of year without the maximum of protection. We’re talking ultraviolet-B, radiation that increases by as much as one thousand percent over Punta Arenas in the spring because of the hole in the ozone layer.”
Paloma, a perspicacious girl educated by the nuns in Santiago and on her way to the university in the fall, gave him a deadpan look. “But, Mr. Longworth,” she said, her voice as clear as a bell and without a trace of intimidation or awe, “if what you say is true, we’ll have to give up our string bikinis.”
I couldn’t help myself—I laughed aloud and Don Pablo joined me. Tierra del Fuego is hardly the place for sunbathers—or bikinis either. But John Longworth didn’t seem to appreciate my daughter’s satiric intent, nor was he to be deterred. “If you were to go out there now, right outside this window, for one hour unprotected under the sun, that is, without clothing—or, er, in a bikini, I mean—I can guarantee you that your skin would blister and that those blisters could and would constitute the incipient stages of melanoma, not to mention the damage to your eyes and immune system.”
“Such beautiful eyes,” Don Pablo observed with his customary gallantry. “And is Paloma to incarcerate them behind dark glasses, and my wife too?”
“If you don’t want to see them go blind,” he retorted without pausing to draw breath.
The thought, as we say, brought my kettle to a boil: who was this insufferable person with his stabbing nose and deformed head to lecture us? And on what authority? “I’m sorry, señor,” I said, “but I’ve heard some far-fetched pronouncements of doom in my time, and this one takes the cake. Millenarian hysteria is what I say it is. Proof, sir. What proof do you offer?”
I realized immediately that I’d made a serious miscalculation. I could see it in the man’s pale leaping eyes, in the way his brow contracted and that ponderous instrument of his nose began to sniff at the air as if he were a bloodhound off after a scent. For the next hour and a half, or until I retreated to my room, begging indigestion, I was carpet-bombed with statistics, chemical analyses, papers, studies, obscure terms and obscurer texts, until all I could think was that the end of the planet would be a relief if only because it would put an end to the incessant, nagging, pontificating, consonant-battering voice of the first-class bore across the table from me.
—
At the time, I couldn’t foresee what was coming, though if I’d had my wits about me it would have been a different story. Then I could have made plans, could have arranged to be in Paris, Rio or Long Beach, could have been in the hospital, for that matter, having my trick knee repaired after all these years. Anything, even dental work, would have been preferable to what fell out. But before I go any further I should tell you that there are no hotels in the Magallanes region, once you leave the city, and that we have consequently developed among us a strong and enduring tradition of hospitality—no stranger, no matter how personally obnoxious or undeserving, is turned away from the door. This is open range, overflown by caracara and condor and haunted by ñandú, guanaco and puma, a waste of dwarf trees and merciless winds where the unfamiliar and the unfortunate collide in the face of the wanderer. This is to say that three weeks to the day from the conclusion of Don Pablo’s fiesta, Mr. John Longworth arrived at the Estancia Castillo in all his long-nosed splendor, and he arrived to stay.
We were all just sitting down to a supper of lamb chops and new potatoes with a relish of chiles and onions in a white sauce I myself had instructed the cook to prepare, when Slobodan Abarca, my foreman and one of the most respected huasos in the province, came to the door with the news that he’d heard a plane approaching from the east and that it sounded like Don Pablo’s Cessna. We hurried outside, all of us, even the servants, and scanned the iron slab of the sky. Don Pablo’s plane appeared as a speck on the horizon, and I was astonished at the acuity of Slobodan Abarca’s hearing, a sense he’s developed since his eyes began to go bad on him, and before we knew it the plane was passing over the house and banking for the runway. We watched the little craft fight the winds that threatened to flip it over on its back at every maneuver, and suddenly it was on the ground, leaping and ratcheting over the greening turf. Don Pablo emerged from the cockpit, the lank raw form of John Longworth uncoiling itself behind him.
I was stunned. So stunned I was barely able to croak out a greeting as the wind beat the hair about my ears and the food went cold on the table, but Bob Fernando Jr., who’d apparently struck up a friendship with the North American during the fiesta, rushed to welcome him. I embraced Don Pablo and numbly took John Longworth’s hand in my own as Isabela looked on with a serene smile and Paloma gave our guest a look that would have frozen my blood had I only suspected its meaning. “Welcome,” I said, the words rattling in my throat.
Don Pablo, my old friend, wasn’t himself, I could see that at a glance. He had the shamed and defeated look of Señora Whiskers, our black Labrador, when she does her business in the corner behind the stove instead of outside in the infinite grass. I asked him what was wrong, but he didn’t answer—or perhaps he didn’t hear, what with the wind. A few of the men helped unload Mr. John Longworth’s baggage, which was wound so tightly inside the aircraft I was amazed it had been able to get off the ground, and I took Don Pablo by the arm to escort him into the house, but he shook me off. “I can’t stay,” he said, staring at his shoes.
“Can’t stay?”
“Don Bob,” he said, and still he wouldn’t look me in the eye, “I hate to do this to you, but Teresa’s expecting me and I can’t—” He glanced up then at John Longworth, towering and skeletal in his huge flapping trenchcoat, and he repeated “I can’t” once more, and turned his back on me.
Half an hour later I sat glumly at the head of the table, the departing whine of Don Pablo’s engine humming in my ears, the desiccated remains of my reheated chops and reconstituted white sauce laid out like burnt offerings on my plate, while John Longworth addressed himself to the meal before him as if he’d spent the past three weeks lashed to a pole on the pampas. He had, I noticed, the rare ability to eat and talk at the same time, as if he were a ventriloquist, and with every bite of lamb and potatoes he tied off the strings of one breathless sentence and unleashed the next. The children were all ears as he and Bob Fernando Jr. spoke mysteriously of the sport of basketball, which my son had come to appreciate during his junior year abroad at the University of Akron, in Ohio, and even Isabela and Paloma leaned imperceptibly toward him as if to catch every precious twist and turn of his speech. This depressed me, not that I felt left out or that I wasn’t pleased on their account to have the rare guest among us as a sort of linguistic treat, but I knew that it was only a matter of time before he switched from the esoterica of an obscure and I’m sure tedious game to his one and true subject—after all, what sense was there in discussing a mere sport when the sky itself was corrupted?
I didn’t have long to wait. There was a pause just after my son had expressed his exact agreement with something John Longworth had said regarding the “three-point shot,” whatever that might be, and John Longworth took advantage of the caesura to abruptly change the subject. “I found an entire population of blind rabbits on Don Pablo’s ranch,” he said, apropos of nothing and without visibly pausing to chew or swallow.
I shifted uneasily in my chair. Serafina crept noiselessly into the room to clear away the p
lates and serve dessert, port wine and brandy. I could hear the wind at the panes. Paloma was the first to respond, and at the time I thought she was goading him on, but as I was to discover it was another thing altogether. “Inheritance?” she asked. “Or mutation?”
That was all the encouragement he needed, this windbag, this doomsayer, this howling bore with the pointed nose and coconut head, and the lecture it precipitated was to last through dessert, cocoa and maté in front of the fire and the first, second and third strokes of the niñitos’ bedtime. “Neither,” he said, “though if they were to survive blind through countless generations—not very likely, I’m afraid—they might well develop a genetic protection of some sort, just as the sub-Saharan Africans developed an increase of melanin in their skin to combat the sun. But, of course, we’ve so radically altered these creatures’ environment that it’s too late for that.” He paused over an enormous forkful of cheesecake. “Don Bob,” he said, looking me squarely in the eye over the clutter of the table and the dimpled faces of my little ones, “those rabbits were blinded by the sun’s radiation, though you refuse to see it, and I could just stroll up to them and pluck them up by the ears, as many as you could count in a day, and they had no more defense than a stone.”
The challenge was mine to accept, and though I’d heard rumors of blind salmon in the upper reaches of the rivers and birds blinded and game too, I wasn’t about to let him have his way at my own table in my own house. “Yes,” I observed drily, “and I suppose you’ll be prescribing smoked lenses for all the creatures of the pampas now, am I right?”
He made no answer, which surprised me. Had he finally been stumped, bested, caught in his web of intrigue and hyperbole? But no: I’d been too sanguine. Calamities never end—they just go on spinning out disaster from their own imperturbable centers. “Maybe not for the rabbits,” he said finally, “but certainly this creature here could do with a pair . . .”
T.C. Boyle Stories II: The Collected Stories of T. Coraghessan Boyle, Volume II Page 55
