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

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  “How about Ilta?” Hunter heard himself say. “She get any?”

  Mark drew a face. “She’s not feeling so well, I guess. She’s in the head. Been in the head for the past fifteen minutes.”

  “Green in the gills,” Damian said with a joyful grin, and Hunter felt his stomach clench around the tiniest morsel of burger and bun.

  “Something like that,” Mark said, gazing off into the distance.

  “She just needs to get her sea legs, is all.”

  “I shouldn’t have brought her. She only did it for me—to please me, you know? The only time she’s been on a boat before this was the ferry between Copenhagen and Göteborg and she said she vomited the whole time—but that was years ago and I figured, we both figured, this would be different. Plus, we got her the patch.”

  Hunter thought about that a moment, even as Damian started in weighing the relative merits of patch and pill as if he’d just stepped out of pharmacy school. He was feeling bitter. Bitter over the day, the place, the fish, the lack of fish, over Cee Cee and Ilta and Julie and all the rest of the unattainable women of the world. He was picturing Mark’s wife in the cramped stinking head, cradling the stainless steel toilet, alone and needful while her husband gnawed his burger and guzzled beer, and he was about to say something cutting like “I guess that just proves the sea’s no place for a woman,” when the captain’s voice droned through the speakers. Haul in, the captain commanded, and Hunter went to his pole and began to crank the reel, the weight of the sinker floating free, and the hook, when it was revealed, picked clean of the wriggling anchovy that Julie, in her bikini, had threaded there for him.

  Mark didn’t move. “I’m already in,” he said, by way of explanation. “But you watch, he’s going to take us southeast now, nearer the tip of the island.” He paused, chewing. “That’s Anacapa, you know. It’s the only one of the Channel Islands with an Indian name—the rest are all Spanish.”

  Hunter didn’t resent him showing off his knowledge, or not exactly—after all, Mark was the authority here, the regular, the veteran of scute and scale and the cold wet guts and staring eyes of the poor brainless things hauled up out of the depths for the sake of machismo, buddyhood, the fraternity of hook, line and sinker—but he didn’t want to be here and his stomach was fluttering and for all he knew he’d be next in the head, like a woman, like a girl, and so he said, “Don’t tell me—it means Soupcan in the Indian language, right? Or no: Microwave, Microwave Oven.”

  “Come on, Hunt, you know they didn’t have any of that shit.” Damian had set down his burger to reel in, the plastic cup clenched between his teeth so that his words were blunted. He was warning him off, but Hunter didn’t care.

  “It means illusion,” Mark said, as the boat swung round and everybody, as one, fought for balance. “Like a mirage, you know? Because of the fog that clings to it—you can never be sure it’s really there.”

  “Sounds like my marriage,” Hunter said, and then, as casually as if he were bending over the coffee table in his own living room to pick up a magazine or the TV remote, he leaned over the rail, the sudden breeze catching his hair and fanning it across his forehead, and let it all heave out of him, the burger and bun, the beer, the coffee and brandy and Dramamine, and right there at the end of it, summoned up from the deepest recess, the metallic dregs of the gin.

  —

  The next spot, which as Mark had predicted, was closer to the island, didn’t look much different from the last—waves, birds, the distant oil rigs like old men wading with their pants rolled up—but almost immediately after the captain dropped anchor, people began to hook up and a pulse of excitement beat through the crowd. One after another, the rods dipped and bent and the fish started coming over the rail. In the confusion, Hunter dropped his burger to the deck, even as Damian’s rod bowed and his own began to jerk as if it were alive. “You got one!” Damian shouted, stepping back to play his own fish. “Go ahead, grab it, set the hook!”

  Hunter snatched up the rod and felt something there. He pulled and it pulled back, and so what if he’d inadvertently slipped on the catsup-soaked bun with its extruded tongue of meat and very nearly pitched overboard—this was what he’d come for. A fish. A fish on the line! But it was tugging hard, moving toward the front of the boat, and he moved with it, awkwardly fumbling his way around the others crowding the rail, only to realize, finally, that this was no fish at all—he was snagged on somebody else’s line. In that moment, three people up from him, the spider man was coming to the same realization.

  “Jesus Christ, can’t you watch your own fucking line?” the man snarled as they separately reeled in and the tangle of their conjoined rigs rose shakily from the water. “I mean you’re down the other fucking end of the boat, aren’t you?”

  Yeah, he was. But this moron was down on his fucking end too. It wasn’t as if it was Hunter’s fault. It was nobody’s fault. It was the fault of fishing and lines and the puke-green heaving ocean that should have stayed on the front of a postcard where it belonged. Still, when he’d finally made his way down the deck and was staring the guy in the face, he ducked his head and said only, “I’ll get my knife.”

  That decision—to shuffle back alongside the glassed-in cabin and across the open area at the stern of the boat, to dig into the tackle box Damian had brought along and come up with the bare blade of the gleaming Swiss-made knife there and measure it in his hand while everyone on the boat was hooking up and the deck had turned to fish and a wave bigger than any of the others that had yet hit rocked the boat like a potato in a pot—was regrettable. Because the captain, hooded above, outraged, pressed to the very limit, let his voice of wrath tear through the speakers: “You with the knife—you, yeah, you! You trying to stab somebody’s eye out?”

  Hunter lurched like a drunken man. He squinted against the sun and up into the dark windows that wrapped round the wheelhouse till it seemed as if the boat were wearing a gigantic pair of sunglasses. He saw the sky reflected there. Clouds. The pale disc of the sun. “No, I’m just—” he began, but the captain’s voice cut him off. “Put that goddamned thing away before I come down there and throw it in the goddamned ocean!”

  Everyone was looking at him while they pumped their bent rods or hustled across the deck with one writhing fish or another suspended by the gills, and he wanted to protest, wanted to be the bad guy, wanted to throw it all right back at the dark god in his wheelhouse who could have been Darth Vader for all he knew, but he held himself back. Shamefaced, he staggered to the tackle box and slammed the knife into it, the very knife Damian had insisted on bringing along because men in the outdoors always had knives because knives were essential, for cutting, hewing, stabbing, pinning things down, and when he turned round, one hand snatching at the rail for balance—and missing—Julie was there. The wind took her hair—dark at the roots, bleached by the sun on the ends—and threw it across her face. She gave him a wary look. “What’s the problem?” she asked.

  “I didn’t do anything,” he said. “I just wanted to cut a tangle, that’s all, and he—this guy up there, your precious captain, whoever he is, unloads on me . . .” He could hear the self-pity in his voice and knew it was all wrong.

  “No open knives allowed on deck,” she said, looking stern. Or as stern as a half-naked woman with minute fish scales glittering on her hands and feet could manage to look on the deck of a party boat in the middle of a party.

  He could have blown it, could have been a jerk, but he felt the tension go out of him. He gave her a smile that was meant to be winning and apologetic at the same time. “I’m sorry, I guess I didn’t know any better. I’m not a regular, but you already knew that, didn’t you—just from looking at me, right? Tell you the truth, I feel a whole lot better experiencing the mighty sea from a barstool in that place back at the wharf—Spinnakers, you know Spinnakers?—with a cocktail in my hand and the fish served up on a plate, and maybe a little
butter-lemon sauce? To dip? And lick off your fingers?”

  When he mentioned Spinnakers, she’d nodded, and now she was smiling too. “It’s all right,” she said. “Here, let me help you.” She took him by the sleeve then and led him across the deck to where the spider man, his face at war with itself, stood waiting.

  —

  What happened next remained a bit fuzzy, but as it turned out Hunter wasn’t destined to be the bad actor, not on this trip. The spider man stepped forward to claim that role, and his transformation from bit player to full-blown menace needed no rehearsal. There was Julie, quick and efficient, her legs flexed and breasts swaying with the motion of the boat as she pulled in the tangle and cut the lines free with a pair of nail clippers she’d magically produced, and in the next moment she was handing each of them their rigs. She looked to Hunter first—and he was deep inside himself, fixated on the question of the nail clippers and where she could possibly have kept them given those two thin strips of cloth and the way they seemed to grow out of her flesh—and asked if he needed help rigging up again. Before he could say yes, because he did need her help in unraveling the mystery of the sinker so that it would swing away from the leader instead of snarling up the minute he dropped it overboard, and because he liked the proximity to her, liked looking at her and hearing her voice in the desert of this floating locker room, the spider man spoke up. His voice was ragged, jumping up the scale. “What about me?” he demanded. “This dickhead’s the one that snagged me and I’m the one losing out on fishing time. You going to give me a refund? Huh? He can wait. He doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing anyway.”

  The boat lurched and Hunter grabbed the rail to steady himself. “Go ahead,” he said, “do him first, I don’t care. Really. I don’t.”

  The spider man looked away, muttering curses, as she bent to retie his rig. “What about bait,” he said. “This clown”—he jerked a thumb at Hunter—“fucked up my bait. I need bait. Fresh bait.”

  She could have told him to fetch it himself—she was there to help and smile and show off her physique in the hope and expectation of tips, sure, but she was nobody’s slave and any five-year-old could bait a hook—and yet she just gave him a look, padded over to the bait well and came back with a live anchovy cradled in one hand. But he was off now and there was no bringing him back, his harsh cracked voice running through its variations—she was wasting his time, and the whole thing, the whole fucking boat, was a conspiracy and he wanted a refund and he was damned fucking well going to get it too and they could all kiss his ass if they thought he was going to put up with this kind of cheat and fraud because that’s what it was, screwing over the customer, eight bucks for a goddamned burger that tasted like warmed-over shit—and when finally she’d threaded the anchovy on his hook he said, loud enough for everybody to hear, “Hey, thanks for nothing. But I guess you’re peddling your little ass for tips, right, so here you go”—and before she could react he stabbed a rolled-up bill into the gap between her breasts.

  It wasn’t a happy moment. Because Julie wasn’t frail and wilting, wasn’t like Ilta, whose sweet suffering face stared out of the vacancy of the head every time one of the sportsmen pulled back the door in an attempt to go in and relieve himself. She was lean and muscular, knots in her calves and upper arms, her shoulders pulled tight. In a single motion she dug out the bill and threw it in his face without even looking at it, and then she slapped him, and this was no ordinary slap, but an openhanded blow that sent him back against the rail.

  For a split second it looked as if he was going to go for her and Hunter braced himself because there was no way he was going to let this asshole attack a woman in front of him, even if he had to take a beating for it, and he would, he would take a beating for Julie. Gladly. But the spider man, a froth of spittle caught in the corners of his mouth, just glared at her. “All right!” he shouted. “All right, fuck it,” and he swung round, whirled the rented pole over his head like a lariat and flung it out into the chop, where gravity took it down just as if it had never existed.

  —

  Later, after the captain had come down personally from his perch to restrain the spider man and the command went up to haul in and the engines revved and the boat began hammering the waves on the way back to the dock, Hunter took a seat in the cabin to get out of the wind and for the first time since the night before he felt a kind of equilibrium settle over him. Mark and Damian were at the counter, leaning back on their elbows and sipping beer out of their plastic cups. Ilta was stretched out on a bench in the far corner, her face to the wall, a blanket pulled up over her shoulders. The others milled round in a happy mob, eating sandwiches, ordering up cocktails, reliving their exploits and speculating on who was going to win the pool, because apparently it wasn’t over yet. In announcing the problem that had arisen with one of the passengers, the captain had promised to make up the lost time with a little inshore fishing—an hour or so, for halibut—once they’d deposited the unhappy sportsman back at the dock. An hour more. Hunter would have preferred an hour less, but he found himself drifting up to the counter to order a gin and tonic—as a calmative, strictly as a calmative—and then taking it outside, in the breeze, to where Julie stood over a pitted slab of wood at the rear of the boat, filleting the day’s catch.

  Behind her, a whole squadron of gulls, interspersed with half a dozen pelicans, cried havoc over the scraps. She looked tired. Gooseflesh stippled her shoulders and upper arms. Her makeup was fading. She dipped mechanically to the burlap sacks to extract the fish, slamming them down one after another before gutting them with an expert flick of her knife, half of them alive still and feebly working their tails. Next she ran the blade against the grain to remove the scales, a whole hurricane of translucent discs suddenly animated and dancing on the breeze as if by some feat of prestidigitation, and then she teased out the fillets and shook them into plastic bags, dumping the refuse overboard with a clean sweep of the knife. A few sportsmen stood around watching her. The engines whined at full throttle, the wake unraveling from the stern as if from an infinite spool, the birds vanishing in the froth. Hunter steadied himself against the rail and lifted the plastic cup to his lips, his fingers stinking of baitfish, wishing he had a dripping sack of plunder to hand her, but he didn’t. Or not yet anyway. “You look like you’ve done that a time or two before,” he said.

  She looked up with a smile. “Yeah,” she said. “One or two.” Up close, he saw that her torso glittered with the thin wafers of the scales, scales everywhere, caught in the ends of her hair, fastened between her breasts, on her calves and the place where her thighs came together.

  “Could I get you a drink?” he asked, and when she didn’t answer, he added, “I’m having a gin and tonic. You like gin?”

  The knife moved as if it had a life of its own. The fish gave in, lost their heads, ribs and tails, while the fillets, white and yielding, disappeared into ice chests, all ready for freezer or pan. And here was Damian’s bag, #12, laid out before her like an offering. He could hear Damian crowing even now because Damian had hooked a lingcod that was bigger by a pound and a half than his nearest competitor’s catch and he hadn’t been shy about letting everybody know it—“I’m going to win that pool, you wait and see,” he’d said before sidling up to the bar with Mark, “and I’m going to tip Julie a hundred and ask her to have a drink with us later, for your sake, your sake only, buddy, believe me.” The thought of it made him feel queasy all over again. “Sure,” Julie said. “I like gin, who doesn’t? But I can’t drink while I’m on duty—it’s against regulations. And plus, the captain—”

  “Yeah,” he said, “the captain.”

  The boat slammed down hard and jerked back up so that he had to brace himself, but the knife never paused. After a moment he said, “Well, what about afterwards then, after we’re back in, I mean? Would you like to have a drink then? Or dinner? After you get cleaned up and all?”

  �
��That might be nice,” she allowed. “But we’ve still got a whole lot of fishing to do. So let’s not get premature here—”

  He leaned back and let the gin wet his lips. He could see the way things would unfold—he was going to fish like the greatest fisherman on earth, like Lucky Jim himself, and he was going to catch a fish twice the size of Damian’s. A hundred dollars? He’d tip her the whole thing, all three hundred, and she’d hold on to his arm while the spider man stalked off to haunt some other ship and Anacapa faded away in the mist and Damian went back home to sleep on the couch. That was the scenario, that was what was going to happen, he was sure of it. Of course, on the other hand, she must have had a dozen propositions a day, a girl as pretty as that, doing what she did for a living, and besides what would he do with all that fish? Was there room for it in the freezer even? Or would it just sit on a shelf in the refrigerator, turning color, till he dropped it in the trash?

  “Right?” she said. “Agreed?”

  He took another sip of his drink, felt the alcohol quicken in him even as his stomach sank and sank again. The gulls screeched. The knife flashed. And the shore, dense with its pavement and the clustered roof tiles and the sun caught in the solid weave of the palms, came up on him so quickly it startled him. “Yeah,” he said, “yeah, sure. Agreed.” He held to the rail as the captain gunned the engines and the boat leaned into an arc of exploding light, then tipped the cup back till he could feel the ice cold against his front teeth. “And just you wait,” he said, grinning now. “I’m going to nail the granddaddy of all the halibut from here to Oxnard and back.”

  —

  Of course, given the vicissitudes of the day, that wasn’t how it turned out. If there was a granddaddy out there cruising the murk of the bottom, he kept his whereabouts to himself. Still, Hunter took a real and expanding satisfaction in watching the spider man, his wallet lightened by the price of the rod, reel and rigging he’d tossed, slink off the boat with his head down, while the rest of them—the true sportsmen, the obedient and fully sanctioned—got their extra hour of bobbing off the coast on a sea reduced to the gentlest of swells while the sun warmed their backs and almost everybody took their shirts off to enjoy it. A few people hooked up, Damian among them, and then the captain gave the order to haul in and Damian was declared winner of the pool for his lingcod and he got his picture taken with his arm around Julie in her bikini. As it happened, Hunter and Damian were the last ones off the boat, Julie standing there at the rail in her official capacity to help people up onto the gangplank and receive her tips. “It was awesome,” Damian told her, his plastic bag of fish fillets in one hand, five twenties fanned out in the other, “really awesome. Best trip we’ve ever had—right, Hunt?”