T.C. Boyle Stories II: Volume II

by T. C. Boyle

  I didn’t know where I was going, I had no idea beyond the vague notion of putting some miles behind me, heading north maybe till the corn gave way to forest, to pines as fragrant as the air that went cold at night and seeped in through the open window so you had to pull a blanket over you when you went to sleep. The car—the rusted-out Volvo wagon Mallory’s mother used to drive to work back in Connecticut—shuddered and let out a grinding mechanical whine as I pulled up in front of the bank. I got out, mounted the three steps to the concrete walkway where the ATM was and waited the requisite six feet, six inches away from the middle-aged woman in the inflated khaki shorts who was just then feeding in her card. The heat was staggering. My shirt was wet as a dishrag, my hair hanging limp. I wasn’t thinking, just doing.

  It was then that I glanced up and noticed the silver Toyota parked in the lot of the ice-cream parlor next door. A woman and two kids emerged from the building, licking cones, and went off down the street, and then the door swung open again and there was the blond girl, her own cone—the pale green of pistachio—held high and her face twisted in a grimace as she said something over her shoulder to the man behind her. He was wearing the same T-shirt he’d worn that day on the road and he didn’t have an ice cream of his own, but as he came through the door he twisted his face too and jerked hold of the girl’s arm. She let out a cry, and then the ice cream, double scoop, which had already begun to melt in green streaks across the back of her hand, slipped from the cone to plop wetly at her feet, just like anything else subject to the law of gravity.

  “You creep,” she said. “Look what you did.” And he said something back. And then she said something. And then I was no longer watching them because as far as I was concerned they could go careering around the world on any orbit they wanted, just so long as it never intersected mine again. Space debris collides in two wide bands of low earth orbit, at 620 and 930 miles up, fragmenting and fragmenting again, things as big as satellites and rocket boosters and as small as the glove the astronaut Ed White lost on the first U.S. spacewalk. Eventually, it’s all going to come down, and whether it’ll burn up or crush a house or tap somebody on the shoulder in a dark field on a dark night is anybody’s guess.

  The woman at the ATM seemed to be having trouble with her card—no bills had yet appeared and she kept punching at the keys and reinserting the card as if sheer repetition would wear the machine down. I had time. I was very calm. I pulled out my cell and called Mallory. She answered on the first ring. “Yeah?” she snapped, angry still. “What do you want?”

  I didn’t say anything, not a word. I just pressed my thumb to the off switch and broke the connection. But what I’d wanted to say was that I’d taken the car and that I’d be back, I was pretty sure I’d be back, and that she should feed the dog and pay the rent, which was due the first of the month, and if she went out at night—if she went out at all—she should remember to look up, look up high, way up there where the stars burn and the space junk roams, because you never can tell what’s going to come down next.

  (2012)

  Slate Mountain

  The sun was a little gift from the gods, pale as a nectarine and hanging just above the treetops on a morning the weatherman on the local NPR affiliate had assured him would begin with a cold misting drizzle and progress to rain. Well, the weatherman—or actually, she was a woman, a weatherwoman, with a soft whispery voice that made you think of a whole range of activities that had nothing whatever to do with the weather—had been wrong before. More times than he could count. Satellites, ocean sensors, hygrometers, anemometers, barometers—they were all right in their way, relaying messages to people stuck in cities who might want to know when to break out their galoshes and umbrellas, but more often than not he could just step out the back door, take a sniff of the air and tell you with ninety-five percent accuracy what the day was going to bring. Of course he could. And he did it now, riding a rush of endorphins as he shifted the coffee cup from his right hand to his left to swing open the back door, stroll out onto the deck with its unimpaired views of the humped yellow fields and freestanding oaks and the blue-black mountains hanging above them, and take in the air. It was damp, no doubt about that, but the sky was clear, or mostly clear, and even if it did spit a little rain—even if it snowed up there at the higher elevations—there was no way in the world he was going to cancel the hike.

  It was a Saturday at the end of October, the leaves bronzing on the lower slopes, deer season safely in the can and the mosquitoes gone to mosquito hell till spring at least, and seventeen people had signed up, including Mal Warner, who’d been a member of the group executive committee of the Los Padres Chapter for as long as Brice could remember. “So we’ll have two executives along for this little stroll,” Syl had pointed out at dinner last night. It hadn’t really occurred to him to think of it in those terms—he and Mal went back forty-five years, to the time of Brower and the fight over the Grand Canyon, though they’d grown apart in recent years—but he’d looked up from his vegetarian lasagna and salad of nopal and field greens to give her a little nod of recognition. “Yes,” he’d said, acknowledging the point—he was on the executive committee of the Kern-Kaweah Chapter, after all, not to mention leader of a dozen or more group hikes a year—“I guess so.”

  He’d set down his fork and gazed across the room, beyond Syl and the calendar on the wall and out the window to where the evening sun burnished the top rail of the fence till it shone as if it had been waxed, wondering all over again why Mal had decided to drive all this way to join them—and not for dinner or a drink or a night of reminiscence out on the deck but for a routine day hike up a mountain that held no challenges for either of them. Plus, Mal had chosen to e-mail rather than telephone, as if he couldn’t bother to waste his breath, though the message itself was amiable enough: See you’re leading one of your 60-plus hikes up Slate Mt. next week and thought I’d come join you. You’ve got to admit I qualify. And some. Looking forward. Yours, Mal. P.S. Say hi to Syl.

  Now, as the breeze shifted and a high vanguard of cirrostratus crept into place around the sun like dirty wash, he sipped his coffee and thought of the pleasures of the trail. It had been over a month since he’d been up in the mountains because of what he liked to call the special use tax of the hunting season, Fish and Game making their pile out of it and everybody else left to duck for cover. You’d have to be suicidal to leave the paved roads when the hunters were on the loose, whether you were dressed in Day-Glo orange and carrying an air-raid siren strapped to your back or not—Christ, if it was up to him he’d impose a ban on all hunting, even of rodents, and make it permanent. Over a month. He was looking forward to stretching his legs.

  Just as he was about to go in and urge Syl to get a move on—it took nearly an hour to drive the switchbacks up to the seven-thousand-foot elevation of the trailhead where the group would assemble, and he, as leader, had to be there first to reassure them as they emerged from their vehicles in a confusion of coolers, daypacks and binoculars and the like, no dogs allowed, thank you, and alcoholic beverages discouraged—a glint of light caught his eye and he looked up to see a boxy silver car swing off the main road and start up the drive toward him. It took him a moment—the flash of wire-frame spectacles, the outsized head, the gleam of a perfect set of old man’s choppers working over a wad of gum—to realize that this was Mal behind the wheel, and it took him a further moment to recollect and replay the unhappy occasion of their last meeting, which had nearly brought them to blows over the very pettiest of things, so petty it embarrassed him to recall it: a dinner check.

  How long ago was it? Five or six years anyway. They’d been entertaining a party of Angels—donors in excess of the $100,000 range—after a horseback trip into the Golden Trout Wilderness, regaling them with a feast at the local lodge, no expense spared and everybody aglow with the camaraderie of the trail, when the check came. It was pretty hefty, but that was only to be expected, the overheate
d faces up and down the table glutted with filet mignon and lobster tail and the cocktails and wine and desserts and after-dinner drinks that preceded and rounded out the meal, but he and Mal had agreed beforehand to split the cost between their chapters. The waitress had brought the check to him, and while he was fumbling with his reading glasses and frowning over the figures that seemed to swell and recede in the candlelight, Mal had pushed himself up to come jauntily round the table, lean in and whisper in his good ear, “You’re going to have to cover this—I must have left my wallet in my other pants.” Which was exactly what he’d said, word for word, the last time. And the time before that. The upshot was a discussion out in the parking lot that managed to exhume some buried resentments, not the least of which involved Syl, who’d been Mal’s lean leggy golden-braided hiking companion before Brice had ever met her, on a hike, with Mal, some forty years ago. He’d said some harsh things. So had Mal.

  And now here he was, easing out of the car and slinging a daypack over his shoulder in one fluid motion, looking not a minute older than he had in the parking lot that day, though he must have been, what? Sixty-eight? Or no: sixty-nine. Sixty-nine and loping up the walk without the slightest hesitation, no hitch in his stride, no tics or palsies or spastic readjustment of the lower back muscles after the long drive, just forward momentum. When he reached the bottom step, Brice came down to him and they shared a solemn handshake. “Brice,” Mal said.

  “Mal.”

  “Hope you don’t mind my stopping off here instead of meeting you up top. Thought it’d be nice to drive up with you. Plus”—and here he grinned, as if in acknowledgment of what had come between them—“it sure saves fuel.”

  Before he could respond, Syl came tearing out the door. “Mal!” she cried, scooting across the porch in her hiking boots, no-nonsense jeans and down vest to fall into his arms for a sisterly embrace that might have lasted just a beat too long. “It’s so good to see you.”

  “Yeah,” Mal said, his jaws working and his eyes shining, “you too.”

  —

  Hiking wasn’t a competitive activity, or that was the party line anyway, but of course it was. It was about endurance, about knowledge, wisdom, woodcraft, and it was as testosterone-fueled as any other sport, which was why he liked leading the sixty-and-up groups—it eliminated the young studs with their calf-length shorts and condescending attitudes, the kind who were always pressing to pass you on the trail. He could really get worked up about that if he let himself, because the first rule of the group hike, to which they’d all sworn allegiance beforehand, was never to pass the leader (or, for their opposite number, the bloated ex-athletes and desk jockeys and their top-heavy wives, never to lag behind the rear leader). Now, as they stood assembled at the trailhead, he went over the printed rules for the twelve hikers who’d showed up: four couples in their early to late sixties, a single man wearing lace-up knee boots who looked to be seventy-five or so and three stocky women in matching pastel hoodies he took to be widows or divorcées. “And remember,” he said, “always keep in sight of the person ahead of you in case there’re forks in the trail and you’re not sure which way to go. Any questions?”

  “What about bears?” one of the stocky women asked.

  He shrugged, gave her a slow smile. “Oh, I don’t know—what did you bring for lunch?”

  “Tuna. On rye.”

  “Uh-huh, well that just happens to be their favorite. They’re probably all lifting their muzzles in the air right now, taking a sniff.” He waited for laughter, but there was none. “But seriously, it shouldn’t be a problem. I rarely see bears up here, especially this time of year after the hunters have got through with them. But if a bear should come for you, you know the drill: stand up tall, wave your arms and shout. And if that doesn’t do it, abandon your pack. And lunch. Better to go hungry than have a four-hundred-pound black bear pinning you down and licking your face, don’t you think?”

  That got a chuckle out of them, at least a couple of them anyway. He gave the group a quick once-over, looking for weakness or instability, thinking of the woman who’d had some sort of nervous breakdown on the Freeman Creek trail last spring, repeating a single word—“dirigible”—over and over in an array of voices till she was screaming it at the treetops. Or the bone-thin guy dressed in motorcycle regalia who’d gone into convulsions and had to have a stick thrust between his teeth while the ravens buzzed overhead and an untimely snow sifted down to whiten his face and sculpt miniature pyramids on both ends of the stick before help could arrive. That had been a nightmare. And if it hadn’t been for one of the group, a dental hygienist who knew her way around emergencies, the guy probably would have died there on the trail. But that was an anomaly, the chance you take, whether you’re out on a mountaintop in the Sierras or pushing a cart at Walmart.

  There wouldn’t be any problems today, he could see that at a glance. A cluster of mild-looking faces hung round him like pale fruit, old faces—older faces—that had seen their senses of humor erode along with everything else. They looked obedient, respectful, eager. And all of them, the seventy-five-year-old and the stocky women included, looked fit enough for what had been advertised as a moderate-to-strenuous hike of six hours’ duration and a two-thousand-foot elevation gain, lunch at the summit, back before dark. No problem. No problem at all.

  He collected the liability waivers, checked his watch to give the two no-shows the requisite fifteen minutes to pull into the lot, then announced, “We’re all set then. Just follow me and I’ll try to point out anything interesting we might encounter along the way.” And he’d actually started out, the group falling into line behind him, before he swung round and added, pointing to Mal, “The rear leader today is Mal Warner, in the plaid shirt there?”

  Until he pronounced it aloud, he hadn’t realized he was going to select Mal, but after being stuck in the car with him for the better part of an hour, listening to him jaw on about everything from his stock-market losses to the line of hiking gear he was trying to get off the ground with the help of a major investor and his devotion to Pilates, weight training and the modified butterfly stroke he’d devised to take pressure off his hips, Brice couldn’t help thinking it might be best all the way round if he put some distance between himself and Mal. Mal would have been the logical choice in any case, since Brice didn’t know the first thing about any of the others and Syl could get herself lost walking to the grocery store. They’d have plenty of time to catch up on things later on—at least that’s what he told himself. He even foresaw a conciliatory dinner, at which he would insist on picking up the check.

  “Please be sure to stay ahead of him,” he went on, in official mode. “And if you have trouble, whether it’s a stone in your shoe or a blister or you need to catch your breath, just give a holler. We want everybody to have a super experience today, okay?” Heads nodded. People shuffled in place. “So let’s just go and enjoy the heck out of it, are you with me?”

  —

  The first sour note was struck before they’d gone half a mile. Someone—hunters, was his best guess—had scattered trash all over the trail, fire-blackened cans, plastic bags, a slurry of corn cobs, ground meat and chili beans in a sauce like congealed blood, the de rigueur half-crumpled beer cans and empty liquor bottles. Today it was bourbon and vodka, generic brands, the mainstay of the middle-aged sportsman. If they were younger, it would have been Jägermeister, and what the appeal of that sugary medicinal crap was, he could never figure. Of course, in his day it was sloe gin, which you gulped down without pausing for breath, telling yourself you loved it, till it came up in the back of your throat. No matter—he made a point of carrying a biodegradable trash bag with him anywhere he went, even along the back roads down below, and now he bent patiently to the trash and began stuffing it into the mouth of the bag.

  “People have no respect,” somebody said.

  “You can say that again,” the woman who’d been
worried about the bears put in, and in the next moment she was kneeling beside him, scooping up trash with hands like risen dough and nails done in two colors, magenta and pink. “They’re like animals.” And then, lowering her voice to address him so he had to turn his face to hers and see that she was wearing mascara and blusher—on a hike—she said, “I’m Beverly, by the way. Beverly Slezak? I thought you might have known my husband Hal, from down in Visalia? He was a great one for hiking—before the cancer got to him. Lung,” she added, her shoulder brushing against his as she leaned forward to dump a handful of cans into the bag.

  “No,” he said, scuttling forward with the bag as some of the others brought him offerings, “I don’t think I know him. Or knew him, that is.”

  Mal’s voice, from somewhere behind him: “People are animals. Apes. The third chimpanzee, along with the bonobo and the common chimp.”

  “Right,” Syl put in. “And that’s why we’re out here in the woods, cleaning up trash. It’s what apes do.”

  Somebody laughed. And then the old guy (old: he was ten years older than Brice, if that) opined in a flat voice that it was probably Mexicans because the whole world’s just a dump to them and one of the other men—tall, with swept-back features and a long white braid trailing down his back—objected. “Hey, I resent that. I’m Mexican and you don’t see me throwing shit all over the place—”