T.C. Boyle Stories II: Volume II Read online

  ALSO BY T. CORAGHESSAN BOYLE

  NOVELS

  San Miguel . When the Killing’s Done . The Women . Talk Talk . The Inner Circle . Drop City . A Friend of the Earth . Riven Rock . The Tortilla Curtain . The Road to Wellville . East Is East . World’s End . Budding Prospects . Water Music

  SHORT STORIES

  Wild Child . Tooth and Claw . The Human Fly . After the Plague . T.C. Boyle Stories . Without a Hero . If the River Was Whiskey . Greasy Lake . Descent of Man

  VIKING

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  First published by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2013

  Copyright © 2013 by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  After the Plague copyright © 2001 by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Tooth and Claw copyright © 2005 by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Wild Child copyright © 2010 by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  The Acknowledgments constitute an extension of this copyright page.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Boyle, T. Coraghessan.

  [Short stories. Selections]

  T.C. Boyle Stories II : the collected stories of T. Coraghessan Boyle. Volume II / T.C. Boyle.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-101-63810-1

  I. Title.

  PS3552.O932A6 2013

  813'.54—dc23

  2013017210

  These selections are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For Spencer, who comes bearing his own stories

  I do not know which to prefer,

  The beauty of inflections

  Or the beauty of innuendoes,

  The blackbird whistling

  Or just after.

  —Wallace Stevens,

  “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”

  Contents

  Also by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Preface

  I. After the Plague

  Termination Dust

  She Wasn’t Soft

  Killing Babies

  Captured by the Indians

  Achates McNeil

  The Love of My Life

  Rust

  Peep Hall

  Going Down

  Friendly Skies

  The Black and White Sisters

  Death of the Cool

  My Widow

  The Underground Gardens

  After the Plague

  II. Tooth and Claw

  When I Woke Up This Morning, Everything I Had Was Gone

  Swept Away

  Dogology

  The Kind Assassin

  The Swift Passage of the Animals

  Jubilation

  Rastrow’s Island

  Chicxulub

  Here Comes

  All the Wrecks I’ve Crawled Out Of

  Blinded by the Light

  Tooth and Claw

  Almost Shooting an Elephant

  The Doubtfulness of Water: Madam Knight’s Journey to New York, 1702

  Up Against the Wall

  III. Wild Child

  Balto

  La Conchita

  Question 62

  Sin Dolor

  Bulletproof

  Hands On

  The Lie

  The Unlucky Mother of Aquiles Maldonado

  Admiral

  Ash Monday

  Thirteen Hundred Rats

  Anacapa

  Three Quarters of the Way to Hell

  Wild Child

  IV. A Death in Kitchawank

  My Pain Is Worse Than Your Pain

  The Silence

  A Death in Kitchawank

  What Separates Us from the Animals

  Good Home

  In the Zone

  Los Gigantes

  The Way You Look Tonight

  The Night of the Satellite

  Slate Mountain

  Sic Transit

  Burning Bright

  The Marlbane Manchester Musser Award

  Birnam Wood

  Acknowledgments

  Preface

  When putting together the first volume of the Collected Stories for publication in 1998, I chose a rather whimsical arrangement, in three sections, of the sixty-eight pieces that made the final cut. The sections were titled “Love,” “Death,” “And Everything in Between,” and the stories collected therein represented a period of some twenty-five years’ work, from the early 1970s to the mid-1990s. The present volume collects the stories written since then, though some pieces that appeared in the earlier volume—“Mexico,” “Juliana Cloth” and “Little Fur People”—should rightly have been included in 2001’s After the Plague and so in this collection, but were published in the first volume at the suggestion of my editor so as to make T.C. Boyle Stories something more than simply a reassemblage. (In keeping with this precedent, Part IV of this book, A Death in Kitchawank, presents an entirely new collection of stories written since the publication of Wild Child in 2009.)

  This time around I’ve chosen a more straightforward arrangement—that is, roughly chronological—because I suppose I’ve become ever so slightly less whimsical as I move on down the long dark road that inescapably ends in an even darker place. Still, readers will find here many of the satires, tall tales and excursions into the absurd the first volume provided, though perhaps as a lower percentage of the whole. There are a number of decidedly non-whimsical stories here too, pieces like “When I Woke Up This Morning, Everything I Had Was Gone,” “Tooth and Claw,” “Rastrow’s Island” and “La Conchita,” or the odd story drawing on autobiographical elements like “Up Against the Wall” or “Birnam Wood” (as with “If the River Was Whiskey,” “The Fog Man” and “Greasy Lake” in the first volume), as well as historical meditations, memory pieces and comedic stories in various valences, from laugh-aloud to the sort of strained laughter that catches in your throat. All well and good. All part of the questing impulse that has pushed me forward into territory I could never have dreamed of when I first set out to write—that is, to understand that there are no limits and everything that exists or existed or might exist in some other time or reality is fair game for exploration.

  To me, a story is an exercise of the imagination—or, as Flannery O’Connor has it, an act of discovery. I don’t know what a story will be until it begins to unfold, the whole coming to me in the act of composition as a kind of waking dream, and it might begin with the exploration of a subject or a theme or a recollect
ion or something as random as my discovery that the wild creatures in Tierra del Fuego were going blind as a result of the hole in the ozone layer that opens up there annually (“Blinded by the Light”) or that the Shetland Islands are the windiest place on earth (“Swept Away”). The professorial dictum has always been to write what you know, but I say write what you don’t know and find something out. And it works. Or can work. After all, a story is a seduction of the reader, and such a seduction can so immerse him or her that everything becomes plausible. And so with “Swept Away.” I’d never been to the Shetland Islands, though I’d been near enough—on a fishing boat off Oban, where I nearly froze to death—but the story came to me as if I’d been born and raised there in some other life. After it appeared in The New Yorker, I heard from the editors of The Shetlander, the magazine of the islands, who wanted to know when and where I’d lived amongst them.

  All of the stories collected here were written after my move to Santa Barbara from Los Angeles in 1993, and readers will note that the stories that are not locked into a specific locale—the Fresno of “The Underground Gardens,” where Baldasare Forestiere constructed his fantastic maze of subterranean rooms, for instance, or “The Unlucky Mother of Aquiles Maldonado,” which takes place in Caracas, or “Dogology” in India—have moved north as well. And west, if you take into account the many stories set in the New York of my younger days, most of which appear in the previous volume. To that degree, I suppose I am writing what I know, at least in terms of exploring the history, ecology, emotional temperature and socioeconomics of whatever environment I find myself in, and this includes the many stories that I’ve set in the Sequoia National Monument (formerly “Forest”), a place to which I’ve been escaping since I first moved to the West Coast. “My Pain Is Worse Than Your Pain,” for instance, grows directly out of an incident I’d heard rumor of up there in a microcosmic community I like to call “Big Timber” by way of eliding the real and actual. I don’t know the people involved in that incident and I don’t want to know them. All I want, from that story or any other, is to hear a single resonant bar of truth or mystery or what-if-ness, so I can hum it back and play a riff on it.

  Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, the Sierra Nevada, the desert, the chaparral, the sunstruck chop of the Pacific, jagged agaves and wind-ravaged palms—until I was in my twenties I’d never been west of the Hudson, and when I did go west it was first to Iowa City and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and then, finally, to Los Angeles. To say that northern Westchester County, where I was born and raised (in Peekskill, thirty miles up the river from Manhattan) is provincial might seem surprising, but it was when I was a boy, at least in my parents’ milieu. I was raised in a working-class household in which we didn’t have books or the tradition of them and didn’t know much of the outside world, not even the City, with all its cultural glories, which seemed infinitely remote to us. We had TV, and TV dominated our household, the gray screen coming to life when we arrived home from school/work and flicking off when we went to bed. Though the local schools provided a sound egalitarian education, I was pre-literary in those days, a hyperactive kid playing ball and roaming the woods and mainly staying out of trouble. My mother read to me when I was young—it was she who taught me to read, in fact, as I was too impatient and immature to sit still in class—but my earliest memory of the thrill of fiction comes from my eighth-grade English class at Lakeland Junior High, where Mr. (Donald) Grant would read stories aloud to us on Fridays if we were good, and we were very good indeed. Mr. Grant was an amateur actor and he really put the thunder into chestnuts like “To Build a Fire” and “The Most Dangerous Game.” We’d leave his class trembling.

  Darwin and earth science came tumbling into my consciousness around then, and I told my mother that I could no longer believe in the Roman Catholic doctrine that had propelled us to church on Sundays for as long as I could remember. To her credit, patient woman, she set me free from all that, and I suppose I’ve been looking for something to replace it ever since. What have I found? Art and nature, the twin deities that sustained Wordsworth and Whitman and all the others whose experience became too complicated for received faith to contain it. At seventeen I found myself at SUNY Potsdam, the New York State university system’s music school, where I had gone as an ardent disciple of John Coltrane and lightning-fast technician of saxophone and clarinet. Unfortunately, I had no feel for the sort of music we were expected to play and I flunked my audition. But still, there I was in college, and I fell directly into the cold embrace of the existentialists on the one hand and the redeeming grace of Flannery O’Connor, John Updike, Saul Bellow and the playwrights of the absurd on the other. If I had to choose a defining moment it was when I first read O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” for an English class: here was the sort of story that subverted expectations, that began in one mode—situation comedy, familiar from TV—and ended wickedly and deliciously in another. And I’d thought there were rules.

  I lived then in a rooming house on a canopied avenue of trees, enduring Potsdam’s arctic temperatures, the gales that battered the storm windows and the rain that froze over everything in a glistening sheet so that the world became crystalline and treacherous. Once the temperature hit twenty below, no car would start, even when plied with ether sprayed generously into the steel maw of the carburetor. It wasn’t a problem, or not at first, not until I began to discover romance and the vital significance of the back seat. We lived—variously six, seven or eight of us, males exclusively—in three upstairs rooms of a frame house owned by a widow who had been Potsdam’s homecoming queen in 1911 and referred to us as “my boys.” The rooms were dense with ancient furniture that gave off an odor of times long gone, but they were adequate to the purpose, and it was here that I began my first rudimentary essays into this form—the form of the short story—that would come to dominate my life. That said, I have to admit that I was not a good student or a dutiful one. Still, I read vastly, read what was current rather than what was prescribed, and came away with a spotty education (a double major in history and English, with a junior-year swoop into Krishna Vaid’s creative writing class), but with a real fever for art. What do I remember of that time? A fear of the nausea that Sartre dropped in my lap and a gnawing unformed desire that had me haunting the high steel rafters of the partly constructed library building, alone, in the spectral hours after the bars had closed, trying to taste the future on a sub-zero wind.

  I remember Wite-Out, the very acme of technological perfection, made all the more irresistible because of the rumor that Bob Dylan’s mother had invented it. I remember Dylan and the instruction rock and roll gave me, years before I coalesced my musical impulses and fronted a band myself, howling out my rage and bewilderment till my body went rigid and my throat clenched. I remember the feel of the Olivetti portable on which I composed everything I’d ever written—stories, essays, letters, notes—until computers made it redundant. And I can still summon up the satisfaction of typing a clean finished copy of something that seemed to have value, great value, value for me and the world too, on fresh crinkled sheets of Corrasable Bond.

  Hippie times came along, and that’s where memory solidifies. I’ve always been single-minded (to a fault, many would say), and I do tend to plunge in with everything I’ve got. I was a hippie’s hippie, so blissed-out and outrageously accoutered that people would stop me on the street and ask if I could sell them acid. Which I couldn’t. And wouldn’t. That would be too . . . grasping. Music pounded in my brain, the music that was the culture of the time. I lived in various houses with various people, but I settled into a relationship with a graceful and encouraging woman who had her finger on the pulse of the day, my wife through all these years and moves and books and children, and I read hungrily, madly, looking for something I couldn’t define. My fumbling attempts at stories in those times were in the mode then called “experimental,” a playful thrust at parrying the traditional narrative and fracturing it into its discrete
elements. It was then that I discovered Robert Coover and his clean, lyrical, ultra-smart and wickedly funny stories, and I saw what I had been blindly striving toward made perfection. Next came Barthelme, Borges, Cortázar, Pynchon, Barth, Calvino, García Márquez, writers of a period in which no one ever said never and there was no form that couldn’t be squeezed and milked and molded.

  I published my first story—in the “experimental” mode—in the North American Review in 1972, under the aegis of Robley Wilson Jr., to whom I will forever be grateful. On the strength of that, I applied to Iowa and was accepted and my life as a writer really began to begin. Now I’d been bitten. Now I was an adult. Now I knew what I wanted from my life and I pursued it with devotion and purpose. My professors at the Workshop—Vance Bourjaily, John Irving and John Cheever—gave me exactly what I most needed, a boost of confidence, and my professors in the English Department, where I completed my Ph.D. in nineteenth-century British literature, gave me the foundation I hadn’t been able to build during my years as a disaffected undergrad. My rationale? I felt if I wanted to be a writer, it might actually be helpful to know something.

  And yes, I was well aware that formal study, at least to writers of the generation before mine, was anathema. Cheever, who was unfailingly kind and generous to me, was positively acidic on the subject of my academic pursuits, which he felt had no real place in an artistic repertoire, but I persisted, because, for better or worse, no one and nothing can turn me once I’ve got a notion in my head. And so, on graduating, I went to Los Angeles and founded the creative writing program at USC, where I continued to teach until becoming writer in residence in the fall of 2012. The university turned out to be a blessing. It grounded me, got me out of the house and out of myself, and gave me the precious opportunity of assessing, encouraging and discussing the art of fiction on a regular basis with people, mostly young and still in the formative stages, who were as excited about it as I.

  It was Cheever too who gently chastised me for using that bludgeoning term “experimental,” as did Tom Whittaker, who then edited The Iowa Review, where I worked first as assistant fiction editor (to Robert Coover) and then, during my last year, as fiction editor in my own right. Cheever insisted that all good fiction was experimental—and, of course, it is—adducing his own “The Death of Justina” as an example. I took his point. And during the 1980s and into the 1990s I came under the influence of his stories and those of Raymond Carver, who became a friend during the years I was at Iowa. If in the beginning I was more interested in language, design and idea than in character (and this is reflected, I think, in volume one), as I grew as a novelist and came to admire what Carver and Cheever and so many others were accomplishing in a less “experimental” and more traditional vein, I became more at ease with building stories around character as well.