He was in a brightly lit place, voices swelling round him, an undercurrent of jaunty guitar and country baritone washing through the speakers at either end of the room. The man from the local SAR team—mid-forties, squat, carrying a big breadbasket of flesh round his waist like a badge of authority—had told him they’d be on the case as soon as they could, volunteers and sheriff’s department people driving up the mountain even as they spoke, but that they really couldn’t expect to do much till first light in the morning. The temperature was likely to go down into the teens overnight—that was what he’d heard on the radio anyway—but the snow was expected to hold off, so there was that. Were they dressed for the elements, these two? Did they have a space blanket? A tent? The means to make a fire?
Brice had just shaken his head. He had everything he needed for an emergency in his pack, but who knew what Syl was carrying? Or Mal. Mal should have known better, should have been prepared, but then he’d always been a free spirit—give him a minute and he’d tell you all about it—and whether he’d thought beyond a couple sandwiches and a bottle of water for a routine day hike, who could say? And then he was picturing them up there on the mountain in the fastness of the night, lost and cold and hungry, huddling together for warmth, maybe injured—maybe that was it, maybe Mal had broken a leg or knocked himself unconscious doing the butterfly face-first into a tree—and then he was staring down at the plate set on the bar before him, a sandwich there, untouched, and the drink beside that, bourbon and water, no ice. “I don’t blame you,” Beverly was saying, “because if I was in your place the last thing I’d be thinking about is food, but you’ve got to keep yourself up.”
She was perched on the stool beside him, the remains of a steak and salad scattered about the plate at her elbow, a drink in one hand. She’d gone to the ladies’ and cleaned herself up, the smear of mud gone now, her makeup freshened, her legs crossed at the knee. He saw Syl again, up there in the dark. Huddling. With Mal. And then he saw himself in bed with this woman, with Beverly, who’d confessed to him in a breathless voice that she’d signed up for the hike under false pretenses: “I’m really only fifty-three, and that’s the truth. But then you didn’t exactly I.D. me, did you?”
He kept telling himself that everything was going to turn out all right, that Mal and Syl must have missed the turnoff and taken the trail that led in the other direction altogether, eight miles down to Coy Flat, and that once it got dark they would have seen it was too late to retrace their steps—and he’d told the Search and Rescue man the same thing. They must have missed the fork, that’s all, but the man had just said, How old did you say they were?
What if she died? What if Syl died up there?
He tried to put the thought out of his head, tried to focus: here was the emergency he’d always thought he was prepared for, but when it came to it, he wasn’t prepared for anything. How could he be? How could anybody? The whole world was just chance and misstep, that was all. A bear wandered too far afield and wound up gutted and dead, you took the wrong turn and died of exposure on the flank of a mountain under a thin black sky that was no covering at all. The truth was, he hadn’t taken Syl away from Mal. Mal hadn’t wanted her. He’d gone to South America, to the Andes and Tierra del Fuego, to climb mountains and tramp the wide world, but he couldn’t wait for Syl to finish college and so he left her behind. And Brice had been there for her. Every Friday, no matter the weather or how beaten down he was from the shit job he’d taken out of college just to pay the bills, he drove the two hundred miles up the cleft of the San Joaquin Valley to take her to dinner or a movie or to cruise the student bars and then sit in the lounge of the dorm sucking at her tongue and feeling for her breasts till the lights flickered for curfew. Then they were together. Then they were married. And then, childless by design because children were an extravagance in a world already stressed to the limits, they devoted themselves to right living and ecology, to education and preservation. They grew old together. Older.
Beverly leaned into him, the toe of her hiking boot grazing his leg. He saw that she’d removed the knee socks so that her legs were bare, solid legs, smooth, descending to the sculpted hollows of her ankles. “So what do you want to do?” she asked, and they might have been on a date in some anonymous place, not a care in the world that wasn’t immediate and erotic. “You can’t sit up in your car all night long, you’re not going to do that, are you?”
He was. That was the least he could do. There was a sleeping bag in the trunk. He’d wrap himself in that.
“Because, well, you’re going to have to drive me back to get my car, and I’m perfectly willing to sit there with you for as long as you want and we can honk the horn every once in a while, to signal, but you should know I took a room here for the night, very reasonable actually, and you’re welcome—I mean, no strings attached—if you want to get some sleep, that is . . .”
In some way it was Syl’s own fault, trusting Mal like that, keeping up the chatter—the flirtation—till neither of them was paying the slightest bit of attention to the trail or where it went or what had happened to the rest of the group, which must have been around the next turn, sure it was, and why worry? It wouldn’t have fazed Mal. Or Syl. He would have liked a bed—and whatever else Beverly was offering—but he could already foresee exactly what was going to happen.
He was going to drive her to her car where it sat beneath the trees in the impenetrable dark and he was going to say no to her, but gently, and there’d be a kiss and maybe a bit more—he wasn’t dead yet—but then she’d get in her car and the brake lights would flash and she’d be gone, back to the lodge and the lights and the music. And he’d sit there wrapped up in the sleeping bag, stiff and miserable, till dawn broke and the Search and Rescue team hurried up the path he was too drained to negotiate and within the hour they’d be back, bearing Mal on a stretcher because Mal was too far gone with cold and disorientation to stand upright on his own. A few minutes—five, ten?—would elapse, each one thunderous, dropping down on him like a series of explosions. He’d be out of the car, moving toward the trailhead, and there she’d be, dehydrated maybe, suffering from exposure, but tall still, and erect, her head held high and her step firm, Syl, the old lady he was married to.
(2011)
Sic Transit
There was a foul odor coming from the house—the odor, as it turned out, of rotting flesh—but nobody did anything about it, at least not at first. I was away at the time, my business taking me to the East Coast for a series of fruitless meetings with a consortium of inadequate and unserious people whose names I forgot the minute I settled into the first-class cabin for the trip back home, and so I had the story from my wife’s walking partner, Mary Ellen Stovall, who makes her living in real estate. We’d always wondered about that house, which was something of an eyesore in the neighborhood—or would have been an eyesore, that is, if it was visible from the street. We went by the place nearly every day, my wife Chrissie and I, running errands or strolling down to the beach club or one of the shops and restaurants on the main road. The houses around it—tasteful, well-kept and very, very pricey—were what you’d expect from a California coastal community, in styles ranging from craftsman to Spanish mission to contemporary, most of them older homes that had been extensively remodeled, in some cases taken right down to the frame or even the original slab. But what this one looked like was anybody’s guess because the trees and shrubbery had long since gone wild so that all you saw was a curtain of green enclosing a gravel drive, in the center of which stood—or rather, listed—an ancient, rust-spattered Buick the size of our two Priuses combined.
As it happened, the man who lived there—had lived there—was a recluse in his early sixties whom no one, not even the next-door neighbors, could recall ever having seen. The properties on either side of him featured eight-foot walls topped with bougainvillea that twisted toward the sun in great puffed-up balls of leaf and thorn and flame-red flower, and as I say, his p
roperty had reverted to nature so that his flat acre on a bluff with ocean views might as well have been sectioned out of the Amazonian jungle for all anybody could see into—or out of—it. Isolation, that was what he had. Isolation so absolute it took that odor and a span of eight full days after he’d expired for the police and firemen, who’d arrived simultaneously in response to the neighbors’ complaints, to force open the door and find him sunk into his bed, his mouth thrown open and the mattress so stained with his fluids it had to be burned once the coroner and the forensics people had got done with him.
Why am I telling you all this? Because of what came next, of what I discovered both on my own and with Mary Ellen Stovall’s help, and because I’m in a period of my life—I just turned fifty—when I’ve begun to think less about the daily struggle and more of what awaits us all in the end. Here was an anonymous death, unattended, unmourned, and the thought of it, of this man, whoever he was, drawing his last breath in a run-down house on a very valuable piece of property not two blocks from where Chrissie and I had bought in at top dollar during the very crest of the boom, spoke to me in some deep way I couldn’t define. Had he suffered? Had he lain there for days, weeks, a month, too ill or derelict in his soul to call for help? Had he slowly starved? Mary Ellen—who was to get the listing once the surviving relative, a brother, equally bereft, in some godforsaken place like Nebraska or Oklahoma, had given her the go-ahead—claimed that the body had been practically engulfed in a litter of soda cans, half-filled containers of microwave noodles, and (this really got to me) blackened avocado skins from the tree out back.
According to the ten-line story that appeared in the local paper the day after I got back, the dead man had been identified as Carey Fortunoff, and he’d once been a member of an obscure rock band called Metalavox, after which he disappeared from public view, though he continued to write the occasional song for other bands and singers, a few of whom were named in the article, but they must have been equally obscure since neither Chrissie nor I had ever heard of them. Out of curiosity I googled the band and came up with a single paragraph that was virtually a duplicate of what the paper had run. There was a photo, in black and white, of the five band members in a typical pose of the era, which looked to be late seventies, early eighties, judging from their haircuts and regalia. They were in a cemetery, variously slouching against one tombstone or another, wearing mirror sunglasses and wasp-waisted jackets, their hair judiciously mussed. As to which one was Carey Fortunoff—the dead man—I couldn’t say, though for the two or three minutes I invested in staring at the photo I imagined he was the one standing—slouching—just slightly to the left of the four others and staring out away from the camera as if he had better things on his mind than posing for a cheesy promotional shot. And that was it. I clicked on something else, which led me to another thing altogether and before I knew it half an hour had vanished from my life. Then I went down to see what Chrissie wanted to do about dinner.
—
The next day was Sunday and I was up early, still running on East Coast time. I awakened in the dark and for a long while just lay there on my side watching the numbers mutate on the face of the ancient digital clock Chrissie’s mother had left behind when she’d died the previous year. I hadn’t wanted that clock—I always tried to sleep through the night and didn’t like knowing what time it was if I woke to use the bathroom, which was increasingly common now that I’d reached the age when the prostate seems programmed to enlarge—but, of course, out of sensitivity to Chrissie and her loss, I’d given in. “It reminds me of her,” Chrissie had claimed the day she’d cleared space on the bureau and knelt to plug the thing in. “I know it’s crazy,” she added, turning to give me a plaintive look, “but it’s like she’s right here watching over me.” Again, out of sensitivity, I didn’t point out to my wife that she couldn’t see the thing anyway since she wore a sleep mask to bed (along with a medieval-looking dental appliance designed to prevent her from snoring, which, occasionally, it did). At any rate, I watched the numbers reorganize themselves until the window took on a grayish glow that reminded me of the test pattern on the TV we’d had when I was a boy, then I pushed myself up, pulled on a pair of shorts, a T-shirt and sandals, and slipped out the door, thinking to walk down to the village for croissants and coffee.
It was utterly still, the new-made light just touching the tops of the trees in a glad, dependable way. There was no sound but for the distant hiss of the freeway, a kind of white noise we all get so used to we barely know it’s there. A crow started up somewhere and then the other birds chimed in, variously clucking and whistling, but hidden from view. I wasn’t thinking about Carey Fortunoff or anything else for that matter beyond maybe the way the smell of fresh coffee and croissants hot from the oven hit you when you stepped in the door of the bakery, but then I found myself passing by his house—or jungle, that is—and I couldn’t help stopping right there in the street to wonder all over again about the kind of person who could let his property deteriorate like that.
The car was still there, still listing, still enclosed in a shadowy pocket of vegetation. The bushes were woven as tight as thatch, the trees—eucalyptus, black acacia, oak and Catalina cherry—struggling above them. Looking closer, I could see the bright globes of oranges and—what was it, Meyer lemon?—choked in the gloom, and there, to the side of the car, a splash of pink begonias run wild. I glanced over my shoulder. Did I feel guilty? Ghoulish, even? Yes. But a moment later I was trespassing on a dead man’s property.
It was nothing to duck down the tunnel of the drive to where a crude path twisted through the undergrowth in the direction of what must have been the house itself. The shadows congealed. I felt a chill. People always describe the odor of dead things as being vaguely sweetish, but the smell here was more of the earth, the smell of compost or what’s left at the bottom of the trash can on a summer morning. I’d gone maybe a hundred feet before I spotted a window up ahead, the light puddled there, dense and gray, and then the front of the house emerged from the tangle like a stage prop, single story, flat roof, stucco in a shade of brown so dark it was almost black. Coffee grounds, that was what I thought of, a house the color of coffee grounds, and what was wrong with beige or white or even lime green for that matter? But now the path widened, branches broken off, bushes trampled, and it came to me that this was where the police had gone in to bundle up the corpse in some sort of plastic sheet or body bag, something impervious to leakage.
I could have stopped there. I suppose I should have. But I was curious—and I’d come this far, Chrissie asleep still, the croissants on the warming tray in the display case at the bakery and the coffee brewing, and, as I say, I felt some deeper compulsion, no man an island and all that—and without even thinking I went right up the front steps and tried the door. It was locked, as I’d expected it to be, though in this neighborhood we have an exceptionally low incidence of crime and people have grown pretty casual about security. Half the time—and I’m at fault here, I know it, because you’ve got to be prepared for the unexpected—Chrissie and I forget to set the house alarm when we turn in at night. Still, there I was on the front porch of Carey Fortunoff’s house and the door was locked—and whether he’d locked it himself before climbing into bed for the final time or the firemen had secured it after breaking in was something I didn’t want to think about. Next thing I knew, I was fighting my way through jasmine and oleander gone mad, clinging to the skin of the house and trying the windows successively till I reached the back and found the door there, a windowless slab of pine painted the same color as the house, only two shades lighter. I tried the knob. It turned in my hand till it clicked and the door eased open.
Inside, the smell was more intense, as you might expect, but it wasn’t overpowering—there was a chemical component to it, an astringency, and I realized that the firemen must have used some sort of dispersal agent to contain the odor. Everything was dim, the windows overgrown, the shades pulled
, the shadows intact. Very gradually—and it was absolutely still in that room, which turned out to be the kitchen—my eyes began to adjust and I was surprised to see that things were orderly enough, no cascading bags of garbage, no blackened pans piled up in a grease-smeared sink, no avocado skins strewn across the floor. Orderly—and ordinary too. He had the same sort of things in his kitchen we did, dishwasher, Viking range, coffee maker, refrigerator.
For a long while I just stood there, ignoring the voice in my head that advised me to get out, screamed at me to get out while I could, because if anybody should catch me here the humiliation factor would be off the scale, Neighbor Caught Looting Dead Rocker’s House, but then, almost as if I were working from a script, I crossed the room and pulled open the refrigerator door. The light blinked on and I saw the usual stuff arrayed there—catsup, mayonnaise, Dijon mustard, horseradish, chunky peanut butter, pickles, a six-pack of Hires root beer. Half a dozen eggs resided in the sculpted plastic container built into the door. There was butter in the butter compartment and in the rack on the door a carton of one percent milk, expired. Did I actually unscrew the lid of the pickle jar, pluck one out with thumb and forefinger and savor the cold crunch of it between my teeth? I’m not sure. Maybe. Maybe I did.
Again, there was something operating in me here that I’m not proud of—that I wasn’t even in control of—and I’m telling you about it simply to get it down, get it straight, but really, what was the harm? I was curious, all right? Is curiosity a crime? And sympathetic too, don’t forget that. A thought flashed through my head—if those East Coast people could see me now they’d be the ones vetoing the arrangement and not me—but the thought crumpled like foil and in the next moment I was moving down the hall to the living room, or great room, as the realtors like to call it. Great or not, it was an expansive space with a raised ceiling that must have taken up a third of the square footage of the place and had once featured a view out to sea, where water and sky met in a shimmering translucent band that shrank and enlarged and changed color through all the phases of the day, the same view Chrissie and I enjoy, albeit more distantly, from our upstairs bedroom window. The shades hadn’t been drawn here, but there was nothing to see beyond the cascading leaves and the bare branchless knuckles of the shrubs pressed up against the glass.
T.C. Boyle Stories II: The Collected Stories of T. Coraghessan Boyle, Volume II Page 122
