by T. C. Boyle
I didn’t want to bet anything. I wanted another drink, that was all. And after that, I wanted to have maybe one more, at this place up the street I’d been to a couple of times, just to see what was happening, because it was Saturday night and you never knew.
—
A week later—it was the next Friday, actually—I went into a place down at the marina for cocktails with a woman I’d almost picked up after I left Jimmy at the steakhouse the previous Saturday. Her name was Steena, she was five-ten, blond, and just getting over a major breakup with a guy named Steve whose name dropped from her lips with the frequency of a speech impediment. She’d agreed to “have a drink” with me, and though I’d hoped for more, I had to assume, after we’d had two glasses each of Piper-Heidsieck at twelve and a half dollars per and a plate of oysters, that I wasn’t her type either. The whole time she kept glancing at her watch, and finally her cell phone rang and she got up from the table and went out into the anteroom to take the call. It was Steve. She was sorry, but he wanted to meet her later, for dinner, and he sounded so sad and heartbroken and shot through with misery and contrition she couldn’t refuse. I had nothing to say. I just stared at her, the plate of desecrated oysters between us. “So,” she said, hovering over the table as if she were afraid to sit back down, “I guess I’m going to have to say goodbye. It’s been nice, though. Really.”
I paid the waitress and moved up to the bar, idly watching the Lakers go through their paces with the sound muted and gazing out the window on the pale bleached forest of the ships’ masts gathered there against the night. I was drinking brandy and water, picking through a bowl of artificial snack food and waiting for something to happen, when I ran into the other man I wanted to tell you about. Shaq’s monumental head loomed up on the screen and then faded away again, and I turned around and there he was, just settling into the seat beside me. For a minute I thought he was Jimmy—he had the same hangdog look, the rangy height, the air of an athlete gone to seed—and it gave me a start, because the last thing I needed the way I was feeling was another bout of one-way commiseration. He nodded a greeting, then looked up at the screen. “What’s the score?”
“The Lakers are killing them,” I said. “I think. I’m pretty sure anyway.” But this was Jimmy, had to be, Jimmy all dressed up and with his hair combed and looking satisfied with himself. It was then that I remembered the brother. “You wouldn’t be Jimmy’s brother, would you?” I said. “By any chance?”
“Whose brother?”
I felt foolish then. Obviously Jimmy hadn’t given me his real name, and why would he? The alcohol bloomed in my brain, petals unfolding like a rosebud in time-lapse photography. “It’s nothing,” I said, “I just thought . . .” and let it die. I went back to watching the game. Helped myself to the artificial snacks. Had another brandy and water. After a while the man beside me ordered dinner at the bar, and I got into a conversation about recycling and the crime of waste with a startled-looking woman and her martini-fueled husband. Gradually, the bar filled up. The startled-looking woman and her husband went in to dinner and somebody else took their place. Nothing was happening. Absolutely nothing. I was thinking I should move on, pick up a pizza, some takeout, make it an early night, and I could envision myself standing at the supercharged counter of Paniagua’s Pizza Palace, where you could get two slices with chorizo and jalapeños for three dollars and fifty cents, but instead I found myself turning to the man on my left. “You do have a brother, though, right?” I said.
He gave me a long, slow, deliberate look, then shrugged. “What, does he owe you money?”
So we talked about Jimmy, Jimmy’s tragedy, Jimmy’s refusal to accept facts and the way Jimmy was running hard up against the sharp edges of the world and was sure to wind up in a coffin just like his father before him and his son too if he didn’t get himself into rehab as his number one priority. Then we talked about me, but I didn’t reveal much, and then it was general subjects, the look of the people on TV as opposed to the look of the flesh-and-blood people sitting at the tables at our feet like an undiscovered tribe, and then, inevitably, we came back to alcohol. I told him of some of my escapades, he told me of his. I was probably on my sixth or seventh brandy and water when we got back as far as our mutual childhoods lived mutually under the shadow of booze, though on opposite coasts. The brother was in an expansive mood, his wife and six-year-old daughter gone for the weekend to a Little Miss pageant in Sacramento, and the four walls of his house—or eight or sixteen or however many there were—inadequate to contain him. I took a sip of my drink and let him fly.
He was three years older than Jimmy, and they had two other brothers and a sister, all younger. They moved around a lot as kids, but one winter they were living out in the country in Dutchess County, at the junction of two blacktop roads where there were a handful of summer cabins that had been converted to cheap year-round housing, a two-pump gas station where you could get milk, bread and Coke in the eight-ounce bottle, and a five-stool roadhouse with a jukebox and a griddle called the Pine Top Tavern. The weather turned nasty, their father was out of work and about a month from bailing out for good, and neither of their parents left the tavern for more than a shower or a shave or to put a couple cans of chicken broth in a saucepan and dump a handful of rice and sliced wieners in on top of it so the kids would have something to eat. Jimmy’s brother had a cough that wouldn’t go away. Their little sister had burned her arm on the stove trying to make herself a can of tomato soup and the brother had to change her bandage twice a day and rub ointment into the exfoliated skin. Jimmy spent his time out in the weed-blistered lot behind the house, kicking a football as close to vertical as he could, over and over again, then slanting off to retrieve it before it could hit the ground. Their dog—Gomer, named after the TV character—had been killed crossing the road on Christmas Eve, and their father blamed one of the drunks leaving the tavern, but nobody did anything about it.
It was just after Christmas—or maybe after New Year’s, because school had started up again—when a cold front came down out of Hudson Bay and froze everything so thoroughly nobody could stand to be out of doors more than five minutes at a time. The birds huddled under the eaves of the tavern, looking distressed; the squirrels hung like ornaments in the stripped trees. Everybody in the family drank hot tea thick with honey and the oily residue of the bitter lemon juice that came out of the plastic squeeze bottle, and that was the only time their hands seemed to warm up. When they went outside, the bare ground crackled underfoot as if it were crusted with snow, and for a few days there none of the converted cabins had water because the lines from the well had frozen underground. Jimmy’s brother, though he had a cough that wouldn’t go away, had to take a pail across the road to the pond and break the ice to get water for the stove.
He remembered his father, wizened forearms propped up on the bar in a stained khaki parka he’d worn in Korea, a sheaf of hair canted the wrong way because it hadn’t seen a comb in days, the smoke of his cigarette fuming in the dark forge of the bar. And his mother, happiest woman in the world, laughing at anything, laughing till all the glasses were drained and the lights went out and the big-bellied bartender with the caved-in face shooed them out the door and locked the place up for the night. It was cold. The space heater did nothing, less than nothing, and Jimmy’s brother could have earned his merit badge as a fire-starter that winter because all he did was comb the skeletal forest for fallen branches, rotten stumps and fence posts, anything that would burn, managing to keep at least a continuous smolder going day and night. And then he got up for school one morning and there was an old woman—or a woman his mother’s age anyway—laid out snoring on the couch in front of the fireplace where the dog used to sleep. He went into his parents’ room and shook his mother awake. “There’s somebody sleeping out there on the couch,” he told her, and watched her gather her features together and assess the day. He had to repeat himself twice, the smell of her, o
f her warmth and the warmth of his father beside her, rising up to him with a sweet-sick odor of sex and infirmity, and then she murmured through her cracked lips, “Oh, that’s only Grace. You know Grace—from the tavern? Her car won’t start, that’s all. Be a good boy, huh, and don’t wake her?”
He didn’t wake her. He got his brothers and sister out of bed, then huddled with them at the bus stop in the dark, jumping from foot to foot to keep warm and imagining himself on a polar expedition with Amundsen, sled dogs howling at the stars and the ice plates shifting like dominoes beneath their worn and bleeding paws. There was a pot on the stove when he got home from school, some sort of incarnadine stew with a smell of the exotic spices his mother never used—mace, cloves, fennel—and he thought of Grace, with her scraggle of gray-black hair and her face that was like a dried-up field plowed in both directions. He tasted it—they all sampled it, just to see if it was going to be worth eating—and somehow it even managed to taste of Grace, though how could anybody know what Grace tasted like unless they were a cannibal?
His parents weren’t at home. They were three hundred feet away, in the tavern, with Grace and the rest of their good-time buddies. A few dispirited snowflakes sifted down out of the sky. He made himself a sandwich of peanut butter and sliced banana, then went into the tavern to see if his parents or anybody else there was in that phase of rhapsodic drunkenness where they gave up their loose change as if they were philanthropists rolling down Park Avenue in an open Rolls-Royce. One guy, hearty, younger than the rest, in a pair of galoshes with the buckles torn off, gave him a fifty-cent piece, and then his father told him to get the hell out of the bar and stay out till he was of legal age or he’d kick his ass for him but good.
The next morning was even colder, and Jimmy’s brother was up early, shivering despite the rancid warmth generated by his three brothers and the cheap sleeping bag advertised for comfort even at five below zero, which might as well have been made of shredded newspaper for all the good it did. He put the kettle on to boil so they could have hot tea and instant oatmeal to fortify them out there in the wind while they were waiting for the school bus to come shunting down the hill with its headlights reduced to vestigial eyes and the driver propped up behind the black windshield like a blind cavefish given human form. The house was dark but for the overhead light in the kitchen. There was no sound anywhere, nothing from his parents or his brothers and sister, everybody locked in a sleep that was like a spell in a fairy tale, and he missed the dog then, if only to see it stretch and yawn and nose around in its dish. The kettle came to a boil and he’d actually put three tea bags in the pot and begun pouring the water before he realized that something was wrong. What was it? He strained his ears but there was nothing to hear. Not even the tick of the stove or the creak and whine of the house settling into the cold, no sound of stirring birds or tires revolving on the blacktop road. It was then that he thought to check the time.
There was a clock built into the stove, foreshortened hands painted gold behind a greased-over plastic lens. It read 3:35 a.m. Jimmy’s brother could have kicked himself. He sat in the kitchen, shivering, and had a cup of tea, wishing it would snow so they’d call off school and he could sleep all day. After a while he decided to build up the fire in the living room and sit there on the couch and terrify himself with Dracula—he was halfway through, though he’d started it at Halloween—and then maybe he’d drift off for a while till it was time to get up. He shrugged into his coat and went to the kitchen door, thinking of the punky wood he and Jimmy had stacked in the shed over the weekend.
But then—and I was ahead of him here, because you’d have to be as blind as a cavefish yourself not to see where this was going—the storm door wouldn’t give. There was something there, an immovable shadow stretched long and dark across the doorstep, and it took everything the brother had to wedge the door open enough to squeeze out into the night. And when he did pull himself out into the cold, and the killing, antipathetic breath of it hit him full in the face, he willed the shadow at his feet to take shape until he could distinguish the human form there, with her dried-out skin and fixed eyes and the dirty scraggle of gray-black hair.
“Grace?” I said.
Jimmy’s brother nodded.
“Jesus,” I said. “And your brother—did he see her there?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t remember. She was a drunk, that was all, just another drunk.”
—
We sat for a moment, looking past our drinks to the marina and the black unbroken plane of the sea beyond it. I had an impulse to open up to him, to tell him my story, or one of my stories, as if we were clasping hands at an AA meeting, but I didn’t. I made a clucking sound, meant to signify sympathy and understanding, threw some money on the bar and went out the door, feeling for my keys. What I didn’t tell him, though he might have known it himself, was that Jimmy had put his son in a crematory box at the hospital and he put the box in the back of his Suburban and drove it home and into the garage, and all night, while his wife lay stiff and sedated in the big queen-sized bed upstairs, Jimmy hugged the coffin to him. I didn’t tell him that life is a struggle against weakness, fought not in the brain or in the will but in the cells, in the enzymes, in the key the DNA inserts into the tumbler of our personalities. And I didn’t tell him that I had a son myself, just like Jimmy, though I didn’t see him as much as I would have wanted to, not anymore.
The fact was that I hadn’t wanted a son, hadn’t planned on it or asked or prayed or hoped for or even imagined it. I was twenty-four. My wife was pregnant and I raged at her, Get rid of it, you’re ruining my life, we can’t afford it, you’re crazy, get rid of it, get rid of it. She was complete in herself, sweet-faced and hard-willed, and mine was a voice she couldn’t hear. She went to Lamaze classes, quit drinking, quit smoking, did her exercises, read all the books. My son was born in the Kaiser hospital in Panorama City, eight pounds, six ounces, as healthy as a rat and beautiful in his own way, and I was his father, though I wasn’t ready to be. He was nine months old when one of my drinking buddies—call him Chris, why not?—came for the weekend and we went on a tear. My wife put up with it, even joined in a bit, and on Monday morning, when she had to go in early to work, Chris and I took her out for breakfast.
The day beat down like a hammer and everything in the visible world shone as if it had been lit from within. We’d been up till four, and now it was seven, and while we were waiting for a table Chris and I ducked into the men’s room and alternated hits from a pint of Smirnoff we were planning to doctor our fresh-squeezed orange juice with. So we were feeling fine as we chased the waffles around our plates and my wife smiled and joked and the baby unfurled his arms and grabbed at things in high baby spirits. Then my wife touched up her makeup and left, and right away the mood changed—here was this baby, my son, with his multiplicity of needs, his diapers and his stroller and all the rest of it, and I was in charge.
We finally hit upon the plan of taking him to the beach, to get a little sun, throw a Frisbee, let the sand mold itself to us through the long, slow-simmering morning and into the afternoon and the barbecue I was planning for Chris’ send-off. The beach was deserted, a board-stretched canvas for gulls and pelicans and snapping blue waves, and as soon as we stepped out of the car I felt everything was all right again. My son was wearing nothing but his diaper, and Chris and I were laughing over something, and I tossed my son up in the air, a game we played, and he loved it, squealing and crying out in baby ecstasy. I tossed him again, and then I tossed him to Chris and Chris tossed him back, and that was when I lost my balance and the black sea-honed beak of a half-buried rock loomed up on me and I saw my future in that instant: I was going to drop my son, let him slip through my fingers in a moment of aberration, and he was going to be damaged in a way that nobody could repair.
It didn’t happen. I caught him, and held on, and I never let go.
(2002)
Swept Away
People can talk, they can gossip and cavil and run down this one or the other, and certainly we have our faults, our black funks and suicides and crofters’ wives running off with the first man who’ll have them and a winter’s night that stretches on through the days and weeks like a foretaste of the grave, but in the end the only real story here is the wind. The puff and blow of it. The ceaselessness. The squelched keening of air in movement, running with its currents like a new sea clamped atop the old, winnowing, harrowing, pinching everything down to nothing. It rakes the islands day and night, without respect to season, though if you polled the denizens of Yell, Funzie and Papa Stour, to a man, woman, lamb and pony they would account winter the worst for the bite of it and the sheer frenzy of its coming. One January within living memory the wind blew at gale force for twenty-nine days without remit, and on New Year’s Eve back in ’92 the gusts were estimated at 201 mph at the Muckle Flugga lighthouse here on the northernmost tip of the Isle of Unst. But that was only an estimate: the weather service’s wind gauge was torn from its moorings and launched into eternity that day, along with a host of other things, stony and animate alike.
Junie Ooley should have known better. She was an American woman—the American ornithological woman is the way people around town came to refer to her, or sometimes just the bird woman—and she hadn’t just barely alighted from the ferry when she was blindsided by Robbie Baikie’s old one-eyed tom, which had been trying to inveigle itself across the roof tiles of the kirk after an imaginary pigeon. Or perhaps the pigeon wasn’t imaginary, but by the time the cat blinked his eyes whatever he had seen was gone with the wind. At any rate, Junie Ooley, who was at this juncture a stranger to us all, came banking up the high street in a store-bought tartan skirt and a pair of black tights climbing her queenly legs, a rucksack flailing at the small of her back and both hands clamped firmly to her knit hat, and she never saw the cat coming, for all her visual acuity and the fine-ground photographic lenses she trucked with her everywhere. The cat—his name was Tiger and he must have carried a good ten or twelve pounds of pigeon-fed flesh on his bones—caught a gust and flew off the kirk tiles like a heat-seeking missile locked in on Junie Ooley’s hunched and flapping form.
