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

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  But wasn’t that the old woman? Wasn’t that her, laid out on her back like a corpse, her flabby legs spread in a V and the straw hat pulled down over her face? He was on her in the next instant, snatching the hat away. “Where is she?” he demanded. “My daughter. What did you do with her?”

  The old lady blinked under the harshness of the sun. It was hot. Mid-afternoon. She was glazed in sweat. “Who?”

  “My daughter. Terri. The little girl you had in your lap. Terri!”

  Something like recognition slid across the woman’s face, the faintest spark, and he realized she was drunk, no grandmother, no schoolteacher, just a drunken fat old slut he could have choked to death right there on the beach and nobody would have blamed him. And what did he get out of her? Blinking, holding up a hand to shield her eyes, her voice cracked and the fat of her arms shining like grease, she came up on one elbow and gave him a grimace. “I thought she was with you.”

  He was making promises to himself as he ran up and down the beach, wading now, calling out his daughter’s name over and over—he’d been wrong, he’d sinned, he’d been selfish, stupid, stupid, stupid, and if they found her, if she was all right, saved, fine, whole, he would change his ways, he swore it. If only—

  That was when Pamela let out a cry from the far end of the beach where the trail wound through a scrub of bushes and low trees and he ran toward the sound of it, people jerking their heads around, Jim just behind him and Francie too, the sand burning under his feet and the sun knifing at him. In the next moment, Pamela was stepping out of the shadows as if out of an old photograph, and he saw the smaller figure there beside her, Terri, in her pink playsuit and with her face clownishly smeared with the juice of the huckleberries she’d been picking all by herself.

  —

  What happened next? I didn’t know. Curiously, there were no entries after that, the year drawn down in a succession of blank white pages. It happened that I had to go back east again on business in any case (not with the first group—I had no patience with them—but for another investment opportunity, which ultimately turned a nice little profit for Chrissie and me), and when I got back I treated her to a week at a resort in Cabo we like to use as a getaway. Time passed. I forgot about the journal, forgot about Carey Fortunoff and his unplumbed life. And then one day Mary Ellen stopped by to pick up Chrissie for their afternoon walk just as I was coming in the door, and it all came back to me.

  “So what’s new?” I asked. “Anything interesting out there?”

  “Well, duh,” she said. “Haven’t you been reading the paper? Things are going through the roof—my last two listings sold the day they came on the market. For above asking.” She was wearing a yellow sun visor and a white cotton tennis dress. Her eyes jumped out at me as if they held more than they could contain. She wasn’t aggressive, or not exactly, but she never seemed far off message.

  “What about that place on Runyon?” I asked. “That ever sell?”

  “Why? You interested?” She was giving me a coy look, dropping one hand to tug at the hem of her skirt as if to draw my attention there. She had great legs, her best asset, tanned and honed by countless hours of tennis and power-walking. I realized I’d never seen her in a pair of pants, but then why would I? Her standard outfit was a skirt and heels and a blouse cut just low enough to keep the husbands interested while the wives paced off the living room to determine where the hutch was going to go.

  She held the look just a beat too long. “Because Chrissie never said a word. But that’s a prime piece of property, two blocks closer to the beach than your place, and with better views—or potential views. I’ll tell you, that’s where I’d build my dream house if I had the wherewithal. Or the peace of mind.” This was a reference to the fact that her life was unsettled now that she’d separated from her husband and moved into a condo with views of nothing.

  I shrugged. “Just curious.”

  “I’ll show it to you if you want.” A door eased shut upstairs and here was Chrissie coming down the staircase in her walking shorts, her own legs long and bare and shining like tapered candles in the light from the open doorway. Mary Ellen shot me a look. “Tomorrow? Say, four?”

  —

  I went in the front door this time, Mary Ellen Stovall leading the way. The first room we entered, just off the hallway, was a den, wood-paneled, with floor-to-ceiling bookcases filled not with books but CDs, thousands of them, and on the bottom two shelves, running along all four walls, records—old-fashioned vinyl records in their original jackets. Mary Ellen flicked on an overhead light and the spines leapt out at me, dazzling slashes of color in every shade conceivable. There were speakers, an amp, turntable and CD player, and a single ergonomic chair covered in black velvet. This was his sanctum, I realized, the place where he came to listen.

  “He had quite a collection,” Mary Ellen said, clicking across the parquet floor in her heels to pull out a CD at random. “‘Throbbing Gristle,’” she read, turning it over in her hand so that the cover flashed like a beacon. “Ever hear of them?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Not your kind of music, is it?”

  “Not so much, no.”

  “But listen, if you see anything you want, go ahead and take it, because aside from the piano, which I’ve got somebody coming in to pick up—and the appliances for the recycler—the rest is going to the dump. I mean, the brother doesn’t want it and since there’s no other heirs . . .” She gestured with the CD to complete the thought, then slid it back in its place on the shelf.

  “I thought he had a daughter?”

  “Not that I know of. But don’t you want to see the rest of the place? Just out of curiosity?” She paused, took a moment to cross one ankle in front of the other and tap her heel so that the sound, faint as it was, seemed to etch its way into the silence. “Of course, the house has got to go—that goes without saying. But it’s a steal, a real steal at the price. And you can’t beat the location.”

  “Yes, definitely,” I said. “But give me a minute—you go on ahead.”

  What I was thinking was that the 1982 volume of Carey Fortunoff’s journals didn’t have to go back at all and that if I wanted to I could just waltz out the door with any one I liked. Or better yet, now that I had a legitimate purpose in being here, I could come in at my leisure and read through them all. But then why would I want to? He was nothing to me. In fact—and here I bent to leaf through the records—I’d never even heard his music, not a note. The records, incidentally, were alphabetized, and I went through the M’s pretty thoroughly (Metallica, Montrose, Motörhead and the like), thinking to put the Metalavox album on the turntable, just for my own interest, but I couldn’t find it. What I did find, up above on a separate shelf, was a complete set of CDs labeled by year in magic marker, each one featuring multiple discs with the names of the compositions neatly written out, Carey Fortunoff’s music ordered in the way he’d ordered the events of his life in the journals. I even found one that was called Alnilam.

  Mary Ellen tapped down the hall, stuck her head in the door. “Come on, I want to show you the grand room, because that’s where the views are going to be once we get rid of all the undergrowth—or overgrowth or whatever you want to call it—and isn’t that just the worst shame about this place, that he let it go like that?” She sighed, ran a hand through her hair. “But to each his own, huh?”

  I followed her up the hallway, her hips swaying over the high heels, until she paused at a closed doorway. “You might want to hold your nose,” she whispered, as if Carey Fortunoff were still in there, still doing whatever he’d been doing before the breath went out of him. “The master bedroom,” she mouthed. “I’ve never even opened the door. Really, I think I’m afraid to.”

  And then we were in the grand room, the light muted and leafy. Mary Ellen went to the window as if she could see out across the channel to the islands, the million-dollar view
(or in this case, more likely three- or four-million-dollar view) she would earn her commission on. I stood in the doorway, gazing at the bookcase, where the gap for the 1982 volume stood out like a missing tooth. I tried to be casual, moving toward it as if I’d never seen it before, as if I were a potential buyer contemplating a move to a better location, as if I weren’t some sort of hyena sniffing out the death of a neighbor I never knew, but then time seemed to compress and two things happened that continue to trouble me to this day.

  The first was my discovery, in the gap on the shelf where it must have slipped out of the volume I’d removed, of a newspaper clipping, yellowed with age and dated August 16, 1982. The headline read, “Toddler Drowns in Russian River,” and below it: “The body of Teresa Fortunoff, age 3, was found by sheriff’s deputies late yesterday afternoon. The current had apparently swept the girl nearly a mile downriver from where she was first reported missing. The cause of death was given as drowning. She is survived by her parents, Carey Fortunoff, former member of the rock group Metalavox, and Pamela Perry Fortunoff, both of Los Angeles.”

  Before I could absorb the shock of it—Carey had lied to me, to himself, to posterity—the purposive clack of Mary Ellen’s heels made me turn my head and I had a second shock (or surprise, I suppose, would be a better word). She’d stripped off her blouse and dropped her skirt right there on the floor. I saw that she was wearing an elaborate set of undergarments, in black lace, with matching garters, an arrangement that had taken some forethought. “I’m so lonely since Todd left,” she whispered, wrapping her arms around me. I felt the heat of her, smelled her perfume that rose and wafted and overwhelmed every other odor there was or ever had been. “Hold me,” she said, whispering still. And then, because I hadn’t reciprocated—or not yet—she added, “I won’t breathe a word.”

  —

  Carey Fortunoff’s last year wasn’t at all like what I’d imagined. He was in good health (but for a knee injury he’d sustained in a motorcycle accident twenty years back that left him with a slight limp), he was composing the score for a film being shot in Bulgaria and a record label was interested in bringing out an album that would collect the best of his songs, both the ones he’d written for himself and for other artists, including “Alnilam,” which had apparently been a top twenty hit for a band called Mucilage. He was sixty-two. Pamela was long gone. Francie too. But he had a new girlfriend he’d met online and he wrote passionately about her, in love—genuine love that went beyond the quick fix of sex, or at least that’s how I read it—for the first time in years. (Just to be with her is all the heaven I need, put on a record, an old movie, just sit there holding hands. All gravy.) If he had a problem it was with people, with society, with all the hurry and the wash of images, strange faces, the jabber of day-to-day life. Increasingly, he’d withdrawn into himself and his music, sleeping through the day and emerging only at night and only then to take care of the necessities, groceries and the like. Pickles. One percent milk. Root beer. He wore a hooded sweatshirt and dark glasses to hide his face. He let the trees and shrubs go mad.

  I really can’t say if it was the death of his daughter that broke him, but he marked the anniversary of the day in subsequent volumes and wrote what from its description seemed to be a symphony called “The Terri Variations,” though, as far as I know, no one ever heard it. Thirty years passed before he admitted the truth of what had happened that day on the Russian River—in the 2012 volume, which he had no idea of knowing would be his last. Or maybe he did. Maybe he had some intuition of what was coming, of the common cold his new girlfriend would give him on one of her conjugal visits, the cold he ignored till it turned to pneumonia and cost him his life in a dark neglected house.

  There was no lifeguard on that beach. It wasn’t much of a beach even, just an irregular strip of sand spat up by the river during the winter rains, its configuration changing year to year so that one summer it would be a hundred yards across and the next fifty. Daytime temperatures reached into the nineties and sometimes higher, but the river remained cold, flowing swiftly, dark with its freight of sediment. Carey found the old woman and the old woman was drunk. She didn’t know what he was talking about. Little girl? She hadn’t seen any little girl. She cursed him and he cursed her back. Then he and Jim—the cuckold—chased up and down the shore, calling out till they had no breath left in them, while the women, Pamela and Francie, searched the parking lot and the street out front where the speed limit was posted at thirty-five but people tended to do fifty or more. Twenty minutes after Pamela first looked up and saw that their daughter was missing, they called the police.

  What were they hoping? That Terri had been found wandering and been picked up by a good Samaritan, a real schoolteacher, an actual grandmother, someone with a stake in things, someone who cared, someone who would deliver her to the authorities—who was driving her to the police station even then. They didn’t want to think about abduction, didn’t want to think about the river. But they had to. And so Carey was up to his waist in the water, beating along the shore, ducking under obstructions, feeling with bare feet in the mud that blossomed in dark plumes to the surface and just as quickly dissolved in the current. He was wet through. Chilled. Exhausted. Even when the police and firemen arrived and they sent boats out onto the river with nets to drag and hooks to poke under obstructions, he kept at it, kept going through all the plummeting hours and all the horror and futility of it. And when they found her, still in her pink playsuit and with her limbs so white and bloodless they might have been bleached right on down to the bone, he pressed her to him though she was as cold as the river in its deepest and darkest hole.

  —

  Mary Ellen Stovall was right about the house. We didn’t bid on it, of course, Chrissie and I, because that was only the thought of the moment and we’re content where we are. In fact, I never even told Chrissie about the afternoon I’d gone over there and what had happened between her walking partner and me, which I’m not proud of, believe me, and when Mary Ellen stops by these days I always find that I seem to be busy elsewhere. I look at Chrissie and the way the light shines in her hair or how her smile opens up when I come in the door and I know that I love her and only her.

  The bulldozers—there were two of them—came in and leveled everything on that lot, the car hauled off to the wrecking yard, the trees splintered, the walls of the house collapsing as if they’d been made of paperboard and all that was Carey Fortunoff’s life—his journals, his music, the things on the shelves and the room where they’d found him—lifted into an array of clanking trucks and carted off to the landfill so that only the bare scraped dirt remained. And the views, of course.

  Why I kept that volume of his journal, the one I pulled off the shelf on a hushed Sunday morning nearly a year ago now, and why it’s still out there in the garage behind a barricade of National Geographics no one will ever look at again, I can’t really say. Call it a memento, call it testimony. After all, you might ask, who was he, Carey Fortunoff, and why should anyone care? The answer is simple: he was you, he was me, he was any of us, and his life was important, all-important, the only life anybody ever lived, and when his eyes closed for the final time, the last half-eaten carton of noodles slipping from his hand, we all disappeared, all of us, and every creature alive too, and the earth and the light of the sun and all the grace of our collective being. That was Carey Fortunoff. That was who he was.

  (2012)

  Burning Bright

  Tara

  She was born in captivity at an English zoo in 1978, one of a litter of three Bengal tiger cubs. Once she was weaned, she was tranquilized, lifted into a cage and flown across Europe, the Middle East and the Indian Ocean to Delhi, where she was put in the back of a pickup truck and driven north to the Dudhwa National Park in Uttar Pradesh, not far from the Nepalese border. There she came under the care of Billy Arjan Singh, hunter turned conservationist, who’d had success in rewilding leopards and now
wanted to try his hand with tigers—and not out of any sort of vanity, as with the maharajahs and nouveaux riches who bred tigers for their own sport, but as a practical measure to reinvigorate the gene pool and save the species from extinction. The sad truth was that there were more tigers in captivity than in the wild.

  He gave Tara the run of his house and yard, which was hemmed in by the serried vegetation of the park surrounding it, and he took her for excursions into the jungle in order to acclimate her. The first time the superintendent saw her ambling along at Billy’s side, he called out, “Why, she’s just like a dog.” And Billy, grinning, ran a hand through the soft fur at her throat. “Yes,” he called back, “but she’s just a big kitty, aren’t you, darling?” and then he bent to her and let her lick the side of his face with the hot wet rasp of her tongue. At first he fed her slabs of meat hacked from donated carcasses, then progressed to living game—rats, geese, francolin, civets—working up the food chain till she was stalking and running down the swamp deer and sambar that would constitute her natural prey. When she came into maturity—into heat—she left him to mate with one of the males he’d heard coughing and roaring in the night, but she allowed him to follow her to her den beneath the trunk of a downed sal tree and examine her first litter, four cubs, all apparently healthy.

  What the tiger felt can only be imagined, but certainly to be removed from an enclosure in a cold alien place and released into the wild where her ancestors had roamed free through all the millennia before roads and zoos and even humans existed, must have been gratifying in some deep atavistic way. Billy’s feelings are easier to divine. He felt proud, felt vindicated, and for all the naysayers who claimed that captive-bred animals could never be reintegrated into the wild, here was Tara—and her cubs—to prove them wrong. Unfortunately, two problems arose that Billy hadn’t foreseen. The first was that the zoo in England had kept inaccurate stud records—shoddy, that is—so that genetic testing of her siblings would eventually show that Tara was not in fact a pure-bred Bengal but rather a hybrid whose father was of a different subspecies altogether—a Siberian. Billy’s critics rose up in condemnation: he’d polluted the gene pool, whether intentionally or inadvertently, and there was no going back because the animals were at large and the damage was done.