T.C. Boyle Stories II: Volume II

by T. C. Boyle

  “‘Dog’? You’ve named him ‘dog’? What kind of a name is that?”

  He was on the doorstep now, proffering the fur, which smelled of ancient history. His ears shone. He was grinning through the gap in his beard, which seemed to have grown even thicker and grayer overnight. Then he took her in his arms, hard arms, lean and muscular, not an old man’s arms at all, and squeezed her to him. “What kind of name? The perfect name. Maybe, just maybe, if you behave yourself, Maryska Shyshylayeva, I’ll call you ‘woman.’ What do you think of that?”

  And when night came and the lantern burned low, they slept together again, only this time there was no euphemism interposed between them.

  *

  Time went on. The days broadened. Her garden, planted from the seed packets she’d brought with her from Kiev, grew straight and true, as if it had arisen from virgin soil. Leonid put up wire fencing borrowed from a derelict field to discourage the rabbits and used his rifle on the hogs that stole in to dig up her potatoes, so that the smell of smoking meat hung thick over the yard and attracted a whole menagerie of fox, lynx, raccoon dog, bear and wolf. When the wolves came, and they came as much for the deer crowding the meadows as for the scent of Leonid’s meat, Sobaka kept close to the house, and in time he began to thicken around the ribs and haunches and his bark rang out in defiance of the interlopers. He was a superior mouser, better even than the big striped cat—Grusha, that was her name—she’d had to leave behind. Three years was an eon in a cat’s life. As soft and old as she’d become, the cat would have been an easy target for a fox or hawk or one of the big white-tailed eagles that had reappeared to soar over the Zone on motionless wings—or the poison, the poison would have gotten her by now, sure it would. Still, if this dog had survived, she couldn’t help thinking, maybe Grusha had too. Maybe one day she’d be there meowing at the door as if the calendar had stood still. And wouldn’t that be a miracle, among so many others?

  The thing was—and she couldn’t put this out of her mind—the fact of the poison increasingly seemed less a liability than a benefit. The government that had collectivized all the big farms to the north and east of them and suppressed any notion of individual effort and freedom was gone, withdrawn to the safety of its eternal offices in all the sanitized regions of the country. And the people who for centuries had tamed and beaten and leached the land were gone too, while in their absence the animals had come back to thrive in all their abundance. Neither she nor Leonid had been sick a day—he was leaner now, his shoulders thrust back, his face tanned, and the work of the place had hardened her too so that she’d lost the excess flesh she’d put on in the apartments—and the dire warnings, the predictions of cancers and mutations and all the rest seemed nothing more than wives’ tales now. What more would she want? A cow, so they could have dairy. And Grusha returned to her. But she was content, and when she served Leonid a plate of dumplings or holubtsi, she saw nothing but love in his face. About his wife, he never spoke a word.

  And then one morning as they were lingering over breakfast—porridge, a fresh loaf she’d baked the night before, strawberry preserves she’d put up all those years ago and a pot of the good rich China tea Leonid had discovered in an abandoned house on one of his jaunts through the woods—a strange terrible mechanical sound suddenly erupted out of nowhere and drove down the chatter of the birds and the symphony of the bees. At first she thought the reactor had blown again, thought they were doomed, but then the noise began to settle into a pattern she recognized from long ago: somebody was driving a vehicle down the forgotten street out front of the house.

  In the next moment they were both on their feet. They moved as if entranced to the door that stood open to admit the breeze and saw a car there, a jeep with battered fenders and no top and a single man behind the wheel, turning that wheel now and pulling right on up to the door. They couldn’t have been more astonished if the premier himself had showed up—or a man from space. Her heart sank. They were going to be evicted, that was it, she was sure of it. But then she got a good look at the man behind the wheel and understood in a flash: it was Nikolai, his face flushed, his blond hair in a tangle, his eyes obscured behind a pair of dark glasses.

  “Mama,” he said, stepping down from the jeep and coming to her embrace, holding her tight to him in a mad whirling hug. Then there was the awkward introduction to Leonid, whom he knew, of course, from his days here as a boy before he went off to the state school and never returned, and then he was handing her packages, gifts of food from the city and a book by William Faulkner, the American agrarian writer he was forever translating, though she’d told him years ago that the Bible and Chekhov were enough for her.

  Oh, but he was fat! Ushering him to the table and fussing over the loaf and his tea, she couldn’t help noticing the girth of him that wouldn’t allow him to button his shirt around the midsection and the way his cheeks sagged with the weight of easy living. He was thirty-six years old. He was her son, the professor. And in all those days, weeks and months of the three years she was entombed in those apartments, he had visited her exactly once.

  At first, they talked of the little things—the weather, the strikes and movements and tragedies of the outside world, the health of his fragile and childless wife—but then, within minutes of his stepping through the door, he started in on the subject he’d come expressly to address, or not simply to address, but to harangue her with: the poison. Did she know the danger she was exposing herself to? Did she understand? Could she imagine? His hands were like balls of butter, his eyes sunk to glittering blue slits in the reddened globe of his face. He pushed the bread aside. He wouldn’t touch the tea.

  After a moment he snatched up the jar of honey—wild honey, honey they’d collected themselves, with the comb intact—and waved it in her face. “Do you have any idea how radioactive this is? You couldn’t poison yourself more thoroughly if you stirred arsenic into your tea. Bees collect pollen, don’t you know that? Every grain of it shot through with radionuclides—they concentrate it, Mama, don’t you understand?”

  There was something attached to his belt, a little machine with a white plastic cover, and he took it up now, depressed the button on top and held it to the jar. Immediately, it began to release a quick breathless high-pitched chirp, as if a field of crickets were trapped inside. “Do you hear that?” he demanded, and he got up from the table to run the little machine across the walls, the plates, the food in the cupboard, and all the while it chirped and chirped again. “That,” he said, “is the sound of cancer, Mama, of disease. You’re getting it from the environment, from everything you touch, but more than that from the food, the meat, the vegetables in your garden. It’s suicide to be here, Mama, suicide, slow and sure.”

  It was then that Leonid pushed himself up from the table with a sigh and ambled out the door, his bulky frame shimmering in the wash of golden summer light. She was left with her son, the professor, and his little white machine. He ran it over the antlers of the deer Leonid had hung on the wall above the sofa and it screeched out its insectoid warning—“Strontium-90, concentrated in the bones, Mama, in your bones too”—and then over the ashes in the bucket by the stove. “The worst,” he said, “the very worst, because the radionuclides are bound up in the wood and when you burn it they’re released all over again into the atmosphere. To breathe. For you to breathe. And Leonid. And your dog.”

  She looked at him bitterly. What was he trying to do—terrify her? Ruin her life? Give her bad dreams so she couldn’t sleep at night?

  “Mama,” he said, and he had his hand on her arm now, “I’ve come to take you back.”

  And now she spoke for the first time since he’d brandished his little chirping machine: “I won’t go.”

  “You will.”

  Suddenly Leonid was back in the room, the dog at his side. He seemed to have something in his hand, an axe handle, as it turned out. Sobaka, who’d slunk away when the jeep approache
d, stood his ground now and showed his teeth. Leonid said: “You heard your mother.”

  *

  She couldn’t sleep that night, imagining the poison in her bones, illuminating her from the inside out like in the X-rays they took of her lungs when she was in the apartments. The rot was working in her and she’d been fooling herself all along. Any day now she’d fall sick—or Leonid would, sinking into himself till the flesh dropped away and she would have to haul him out by his attenuated ankles and bury him beside Oleski. She saw that, saw him dead, even as he lay next to her, oblivious, stretched out like a fallen tree, snoring mightily. She listened to him in the dark and heard the creatures of the night rustling outside the window, and finally, near dawn, fell asleep to the ancient sound of the wolves on their hunt.

  Next morning she was up as usual, working in the garden, and when she was done, she cooked, washed and cleaned, no different from any other day, but the heaviness stayed with her. Leonid was tentative around her, as if sensing her thoughts. He brought her a pair of rabbits he’d caught in his snares and then went about doing what he did best: repairing things. She tried to drive down her uneasiness, but it wasn’t till late in the day, the rabbits roasting on a bed of onions, carrots and potatoes and the breeze as sweet as a hand on your cheek, that she began to relax. She took a chair out into the yard and sat there in the sun with Leonid, sipping a glass of the zubrovka he’d very patiently distilled from bison grass, drop by drop, and thought about one of the stories he’d told her from his time when he’d slipped across the border into Turkey and gone to sea as a merchantman.

  He’d had a shipmate from a place called Tobago, an island in a tropical sea, and this man—his skin as weathered and black as an old bicycle horn—had a disease called ciguatera. It came from eating certain reef fishes from his native waters, fishes that accumulated poison in them, and it attacked his nervous system so that he was always twitching and jerking about. All his teeth but one had fallen out and his eyes were affected too, so that he wore the thickest lenses just to see. One day, when they were all on shore leave in a tropical port, Leonid and another shipmate were strolling by a café and saw this man there, a beer in hand, a plate of barracuda set before him. “What are you doing, my friend?” Leonid said. “Don’t you realize that barra is the very fish that gives you the disease?” And the man just smiled at him, his mouth full now, and said, “Yes, this I know, but it’s de sweetest fish in de sea.”

  That was it, exactly. And she glanced at Leonid, at his big ears and drooping stolid features, and raised her glass to him. His own glass rose to click the rim of hers and he gave her his broad toothy grin. “To your health,” she said.

  *

  The first frost arrived late that year and when it came to swab the trees with color and shrivel the leaves of her tomato plants, it was immediately succeeded by a brief return to summer, one of those autumn idylls that comes round every once in a lucky year. She was out in her garden under the full force of the sun, harvesting her squash and cucumbers and beans while the pots boiled away on the stove and Leonid gave up all his time to her and the canning that consumed their every waking moment, when she heard the sound of hooves on the road out front. She glanced up, expecting one of the moose or big strutting red deer that thronged the woods and gave her pleasure every time she saw one, but she was surprised. There was a man on the road, a young man in his twenties with the same look as the hoodlum who’d driven the car for them last spring, and for a moment she caught her breath, expecting trouble. But then she saw he was dressed in simple clothes—no boots and leather jacket—and that his face was shaded by the broad-brimmed felt hat of a farmer. Even more surprising—startling, amazing—he was leading two milk cows on a tether, both of them laden with his possessions wrapped up in burlap.

  He started when he saw her there, rising from her knees and wiping her hands on her skirts, but then he called out a greeting and in the next moment he was in the yard, coming up the path to her. She didn’t know what to do. They’d seen no one since Nikolai, all sense of grace and propriety lost to her, and even as she called out a hello in response, her voice seemed out of practice.

  He was no more than twenty feet from her, the cows lurching this way and that on their tether and finally dipping their heads to the grass, when she saw that he wasn’t alone. Coming round the bend in the road was a young woman hunched under the weight of a backpack, her blond hair wrapped high on her head and shining in the sun, and behind her were two children, lean and long-legged and striding right along, though they couldn’t have been more than seven or eight. “Hello,” the man called out again, and now Sobaka was there, barking and showing his teeth, and the figure of Leonid shadowed the doorway, his rifle in hand. “I didn’t know anyone was living out here now,” the man said, and if the dog intimidated him—or the sight of Leonid in the doorway—he didn’t let it show. In fact, he seemed so relaxed he might have been standing in his own yard, with his own dog, and she and Leonid the outsiders.

  One of the children let out a cry and then both of them were running across the yard in a bright flash of bare knees and working arms as Sobaka danced round their heels and the young woman strode into the yard behind them to shrug out from under her backpack and set it down in the high grass. “Do you know if the Ilyenok place is still standing?” the woman asked, coming forward till she stood shoulder to shoulder with her husband.

  “Ilyenok?” Maryska echoed stupidly, but she could feel something opening up inside her—the notion of what was going on here, what this promised, settling into her brain like a little bird winged down from the trees.

  “Aren’t you Maryska Shyshylayeva?” the man said, but he was hardly a man—he was an overgrown boy, that was what he was. “I’m Sava, Sava Ilyenok—don’t you recognize me?”

  In the next moment, Leonid was out of the house, the rifle forgotten, embracing this boy, son of deceased parents, son of the earth, son of the village, come home again. “Yes,” Leonid boomed, rocking back from the boy to take in the sight of the pretty young wife and the two children, who were frolicking with the dog now, “we know you, of course we know you, and welcome, welcome!”

  And Maryska, coming back to herself, held out her hands in delight. “You must be exhausted,” she said. “Come, come in. I’ve got soup on the stove, hot tea, bread and jam for the children.” She paused to gaze longingly on the cows. “But no cheese, I’m afraid.”

  Husband and wife exchanged a glance, then turned their faces to her. He was the one who spoke. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said, shrugging his shoulders, “I think we can fix that.”

  *

  When the snow came, the first snow, it was light and wet, limning the bare branches of the poplars and bowing the evergreens. The stove ticked and hissed throughout the day. Everything was still. In the oven was the pheasant Leonid had shot that morning, which she planned to serve with potato dumplings and sour cream. She was reading, for the tenth time, the tenth time at least, the Chekhov story about the peasants and their miserable lives and how one misery propagates another, when she set the book aside and went out into the yard to smell the air and watch the heavy snowflakes whirl down out of the sky.

  The trees stood sentinel, black lines etched against the accumulation of snow. A pair of squirrels were busy at the base of the apple tree, darkening the whiteness with their miniature digging. She wasn’t worried about herself any longer or about Leonid either, but she did worry for the children, for Ilya and Nadia Ilyenok, and what the days might bring them. What of their bones? What of the strontium-90 in the grass the cows chewed all day long? What would Nikolai say about it? He would say that they were crazy, suicidal, that to live in nature under the open sky and walk the earth that gave up everything, even its poisons, was somehow unnatural—as if the apartments, with their crush and stink of humanity, were some sort of heaven.

  She was about to turn and go back into the house, to her roasting bird and Leonid
and the zubrovka they would sip over the chessboard before dinner, when a movement beside the woodshed caught her eye. There was something there, small, compact, lithe, and at first she thought it was the weasel come back to them, but then she saw her mistake: it was a cat. Gray, striped, with a long fluff of hair and a tail tipped in white.

  “Grusha,” she called softly, “can it really be you?” The cat—Grusha had been darker, hadn’t she?—gave her a long steady gaze before melting away behind the shed. She didn’t want to spook it, and so she moved forward very slowly, step by step, but by the time she got there, it was gone, nothing left but fading tracks in a wet snow.

  (2010)

  Los Gigantes

  At first they kept us in cages like zoo animals, but that was too depressing. After a while we began to lose interest in what we’d been brought there to do. We didn’t think about it, or not much anyway. We were just depressed, that was all, and when they brought the women to us it was inevitable that we went about the business in a halfhearted way. In any case, it was soon over and then it was time for a meal, another meal. They fed us well, I’ll say that for them. No expense was spared. And the food was good, the best I’d ever tasted, prepared for us by a man who was rumored to have been first assistant to the pastry chef at the presidential palace before he was replaced by a Frenchman who didn’t speak a word of Spanish.

  Originally we were ten, but one of our number was suspect and soon rooted out. It happened that a woman refused to go with him and when Corporal Carrera, who held the keys, wanted to know why, she said, Just look at him. And he did. We all did. (This was during the first week when we really hadn’t had a chance to get to know one another yet and no one had given the man much thought. Why would we? We were being fed. We had women. Life was good.) Anyway, once this woman had spoken up we all began to scrutinize him and saw what she meant: he was damaged goods. He was tall enough, three or four inches taller than me, in fact, and thick in the limbs, but his face was like an anvil and his eyes couldn’t seem to focus. And when he talked it was in disconnected monosyllables that seemed to dredge themselves up out of some deep fissure in his digestive tract. The man in the cage beside mine whispered, “Pituitary freak,” and in that instant I saw what I’d missed. Yes: damaged goods. No sense in wasting the stipend, the ex-assistant pastry chef’s culinary concoctions and all those prescribed women on him. I felt a sense of outrage that was as much about my own humiliation as anything else: whoever had chosen him had chosen me too, and what did that say about me?