T.C. Boyle Stories II: Volume II Page 10

  “He rides freight trains—or hops them, isn’t that the terminology?” she said, peering over the cover of the book. “He hops freight trains, Sean, and that means he could be anywhere in twenty-four hours—or forty-eight. How long does it take to drive from Kansas to Isla Vista? Two days? Three?” She wanted to tell him about the doctor, and what the doctor had said, and what it was going to mean for them, but she didn’t want to see the look on his face, didn’t want to have to fight him, not now, not yet. He’d go pale and tug involuntarily at the grown-over hole in his left earlobe where the big gold hoop used to reside before he got serious about his life, and then he’d tell her she couldn’t have her baby for the same reason she couldn’t have a dog or even a cat—at least until he’d done his dissertation, at least until then.

  “I don’t know, Mel,” he said, all the tiredness and resignation in the world crept into his voice, as if a simple discussion could martyr him, “what do you want me to say? He’s coming through the window tonight? Of the two hundred seventy million potential victims in the country, he’s singled us out, zeroed right in on us like a homing pigeon—?”

  “Statistics,” she said, and she was surprised at her own vehemence. “That’s like saying you have about the same chance of getting attacked by a shark as you do of getting hit by lightning, and yeah, sure, but anybody anywhere can get hit by lightning, but how many people live by the ocean, how many actually go in it, and of them, how many are crazy enough—or foolhardy, that’s the word I want here—how many are foolhardy enough to go out where the sharks are? Probably a hundred percent of them get eaten, and we live right by the tracks, don’t we?”

  As if in answer, there was the sudden sharp blast of the north-bound’s whistle as it neared the intersection two blocks away, and then the building thunder of the train itself, the fierce clatter of the churning wheels and everything in the room trembling with the rush of it. Sean rolled his eyes and disappeared into the bathroom. When the thunder subsided and he could be heard again, he poked his head round the doorframe. “It’s the Indians,” he said.

  “It has nothing to do with the Indians.” She wouldn’t give him this, though he was right, of course—or partially anyway. “It’s Brinsley-Schneider, who you seem to think is so great. Brinsley-Schneider and eugenics and euthanasia and all the rest of the deadly u’s.”

  He was smiling the smile of the literary theorist in a room full of them, the smile that made him look like a toad with an oversized insect clamped in its jaws. “The deadly u’s?” he repeated. And then, softening, he said, “All right, if it’ll make you feel any better I’ll check the doors and windows, okay?”

  Her eyes were on the book. Way off in the night she could hear the dying rattle of the last car at the end of the train. Her life was changing, and why couldn’t she feel good about it—why shouldn’t she?

  He was in the doorway still, his face settling into the lines and grooves he’d dug for it over the past two and a half years of high seriousness. He looked exactly like himself. “Okay?” he said.

  —

  She didn’t have to be in at work till twelve the next day—she was an assistant to the reference librarian at the university library, and her schedule was so flexible it was all but bent over double—and after Sean left for class she sat in front of the TV with the sound off and read the account of Lavina Eastlick, who was twenty-nine and the mother of five when the Sioux went on a rampage near Acton, Minnesota, in the long-forgotten year of 1862. There was a moment’s warning, no more than that. A frightened neighbor shouting in the yard, first light, and suddenly Lavina Eastlick—a housewife, a hopeful young woman her own age rudely jolted from sleep—was running barefooted through the wet grass, in her nightgown, herding her children before her. The Indians soon overtook them and cut down her husband, her children, her neighbors and her neighbors’ children, taking the women captive. She’d been shot twice and could barely stand, let alone walk. When she stumbled and fell, a Sioux brave beat her about the head and shoulders with the stock of his rifle and left her for dead. Later, when they’d gone, she was able to crawl off and hide herself in the brush through the long afternoon and interminable night that followed. The wounded children—hers and her neighbors’—lay sprawled in the grass behind her, crying out for water, but she couldn’t move to help them. On the second afternoon the Indians returned to dig at the children’s wounds with sharpened sticks till the terrible gargling cries choked off and the locusts in the trees filled the void with their mindless chant.

  And what would Dr. Toni Brinsley-Schneider have thought of that? She’d probably applaud the Indians for eliminating the useless and weak, who would only have grown up crippled around their shattered limbs in any case. That was what Melanie was thinking as she closed the book and glanced up at the casual violence scrolling across the TV screen, but once she was on her feet she realized she was hungry and headed off in the direction of the kitchen, thinking tuna fish on rye with roasted sunflower seeds and red bell pepper. She supposed she’d be putting on weight now, eating for two, and wouldn’t that be the way to announce the baby to Sean six months down the road, like the prom mom who hid it till the last fatal minute: And you thought I was just going to fat, didn’t you, honey?

  Outside, beyond the windows, the sun washed over the flowers in the garden, all trace of the night’s mist burned off. There were juncos and finches at the feeder she shared with the upstairs neighbor, a dog asleep at the curb across the street, pure white fortresses of cloud building over the mountains. It was still, peaceful, an ordinary day, no Indians in sight, no bioethicists, no railroad killers hopping off freight trains and selecting victims at random, and she chopped onions and diced celery with a steady hand while something inexpressibly sad came over the radio, a cello playing in minor key, all alone, until it was joined by a single violin that sounded as if a dead man were playing it, playing his own dirge—and maybe he was dead, maybe the recording was fifty years old, she was thinking, and she had a sudden image of a man with a long nose and a Gypsy face, serenading the prisoners at Auschwitz.

  Stop it, she told herself, just stop it. She should be filled with light, shouldn’t she? She should be knitting, baking, watching the children at the playground with the greedy intensity of a connoisseur.

  The sunflower seeds were in the pan, the one with the loose handle and the black non-stick surface, heat turned up high, when the doorbell rang. The violin died at that moment—literally—and the unctuous, breathless voice of the announcer she hated (the one who always sounded as if he were straining over a bowel movement) filled the apartment as she crossed the front room and stepped into the hall. She was about to pull open the door—it would be the mailman at this hour, offering up a clutch of bills and junk mail and one of Sean’s articles on literary theory (or Theory, as he called it, “Just Theory, with a capital T, like Philosophy or Physics”), returned from an obscure journal with postage due—but something stopped her. “Who is it?” she called from behind the door, and she could smell the sunflower seeds roasting in the pan.

  There was no answer, so she moved to the window beside the door and parted the curtains. A man stood on the concrete doorstep, staring at the flat plane of the door as if he could see through it. He was small and thin, no more than five-five or -six, tanned to the color of the copper teakettle on the stove and dressed in the oily jeans and all-purpose long-sleeved shirt of the bums who lined Cabrillo Boulevard with their Styrofoam cups and pint bottles—or should she call them panhandlers or the homeless or the apartmentally challenged? Sean called them bums, and she guessed she’d fallen into the habit herself. They said crude things to you when you walked down the street, gesturing with fingers that were as black as the stubs of cigars. They were bums, that was all, and who needed them?

  But then the man turned to her, saw her there at the window and turned to her, and she had a shock: he was Hispanic, a Latino just like the man on TV, the killer,
with the same dead cinders for eyes. He put three fingers together and pushed them at his open mouth, and she saw then that he had no mustache—no, no mustache, but what did that mean? Anybody could shave, even a bum. “What do you want?” she called, feeling trapped in her own apartment, caught behind the wall of glass like a fish in an aquarium.

  He looked surprised by the question. What did he want? He wanted food, money, sex, booze, drugs, her car, her baby, her life, her apartment. “Hungry,” he said. And then, when she didn’t respond: “You got work?”

  She just shook her head—No, she didn’t have any work—and all the time she had to give this man, this stranger, this bum, had already been used up, because there was smoke in the kitchen and the seeds were burning in the pan.

  —

  It was past eight when she drove home from work, feeling exhausted, as if she were in her eighth month instead of the second. The day was softening into night, birds dive-bombing the palms along the boulevard, joggers and in-line skaters reduced to shadows on the periphery of her vision. All through the afternoon the mist had been rolled up like a carpet on the horizon, but it was moving closer now and she could smell it on the air—it was going to be another dense, compacted night. She parked and came up the walk and saw that the upstairs neighbor—Jessica, Jessica-something, who’d been there only a month and was so pathologically shy she cupped both hands to her face when she talked to you as if a real live moving mouth were somehow offensive—had been doing something in the flower garden. The earth was raw in several spots, as if it had been turned over, and there was a spade leaning against the side of the house. Not that it mattered to Melanie—she’d never had a green thumb and plants were just plants to her. If Jessica wanted to plant flowers, that was fine; if she wanted to dig them up, that was fine too.

  Sean was in the kitchen, banging things around and singing—bellowing—along with one of Wagner’s operas, the only music he ever listened to. And which one was it?—she’d heard them all a thousand times. There it was, yes, Siegfried going down for the count: Götterdämmerung. Sean was making his famous shrimp and avocado salad, and he was in the throes of something—Wagner, Theory, some sort of testosterone rush—and he barely glanced up at her as she trudged into the bedroom. Her mistake was in taking off her shoes, the flats she wore for the sake of her feet while propping up an automatic smile behind the reference desk, because once her shoes were off she felt out of balance and had to rest her head on the pillow, just for a minute.

  The gods of Valhalla had been laid to rest and the house was silent when she awoke to the soft click of the bedroom door. Sean was standing there framed in the doorway, the tacky yellow globe of the hallway light hanging over his shoulder like a captive moon. It was dark beyond the windows. “What,” he said, “are you sick or something?”

  Was she? Now was her chance, now was the time to tell him, to share the news, the joyous news, pop the cork on the bottle of champagne and let’s go out to a nice place, a really nice place, and save the famous shrimp and avocado salad for tomorrow. “No,” she said. “No. Just tired, that’s all.”

  At dinner—Sean and Lacan and a scatter of papers, the shrimp salad, lemonade from the can and an incongruous side dish of Ranch Style barbecue beans, also from the can—she did tell him about the man at the door that morning. “He said he wanted work,” she said, waving a forkful of shrimp and beans in an attempt to delineate the scene for the third time, “and I told him I didn’t have any work for him. That was it. The whole thing.”

  Sean had begun to develop a groove just over the bridge of his nose, a V-shaped gouge that might have been a scar or the mark of a hot branding iron. It vanished when he was asleep or sunk into the couch with a beer and the New York Times, but it was there now, deeper than ever. “You mean he was Mexican?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, “he was a Latino. I was scared. He really scared me.”

  There was a long silence, the clock her mother had given her ticking dramatically from atop the brick-and-board bookcase in the hall, someone’s sprinklers going on outside, the muted rumble of Jessica-something’s TV seeping down through the ceiling—Melanie half-expected to hear the blast of the train’s whistle, but it was too early yet. “It could be,” Sean said finally, “—I mean, why not? You’re right. The guy takes a train, he could be anywhere. And then there’s the aleatory factor—”

  She just stared at him.

  “Chance. Luck. Fate. You can’t buck fate.” And then a look came over his face: two parts high seriousness, one part vigilante. “But you can be ready for it when it comes—you can be prepared.” Suddenly he was on his feet. “You just wait here, just sit tight”—and his voice had an edge to it, as if she’d been arguing with him, as if she had to be restrained from running off into the night like one of the screaming teenagers in a cheap horror film—“I’ll be right back.”

  She wanted a glass of wine, but she knew she couldn’t drink anymore, not if she was going to keep the baby, and if she hadn’t known, the doctor had taken her down a smiling anfractuous road full of caveats and prohibitions, the sort of thing she—the doctor—must go through ten times a day, albeit tailoring her tone to the educational level of the patient. Outside, the sprinklers switched off with an expiring wheeze. She could hear Sean in the bedroom, rummaging around for something. Tonight, she would tell him tonight.

  Because the knowledge was too big for her to contain, and she wanted to call her mother and have a long, confidential chat, and call her sisters too—but before that, before there could be any possibility of that, she had to tell Sean, and Sean had to say the things she needed to hear. During her five o’clock break, she’d confided in one of the girls she worked with, Gretchen Mohr, but it did nothing to reassure her. Gretchen was only twenty-three, in no way serious about the guy she was dating, and Melanie could tell from the way she squeezed her eyes shut over the news that the idea of a baby was about as welcome to her as paraplegia or epilepsy. Oh, she tried to cover herself with a flurry of congratulations and a nonstop barrage of platitudes and one-liners, but the final thing she said, her last and deepest thought, gave her away. “I don’t know,” she sighed, staring down into the keyhole of her Diet Coke can as if she were reading tea leaves, “but I just don’t think I’d be comfortable bringing a baby into a world like this.”

  When Melanie looked up, Sean was standing over her. He was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of Freud on it, over a legend that read “Dr. Who?” His hair was slicked down, and the left side of his face, up to and encircling the ear, was inflamed with the skin condition he was forever fighting. But that was ordinary, that was the way he always looked. What was different were his eyes—proud, incandescent, lit up like fireworks—and his hands, or what was in his hands. Swaddled in coarse white cloth that was stained with what might have been olive oil lay an object she recognized from the movies, from TV and pawnshop display cases: a gun.

  “What is that?” she said, edging away from him. “What are you showing me?”

  “Come on, Mel, give me a break.”

  “It’s a gun, isn’t it?”

  “We’re on the ground floor here, and we’re going to lock the windows tonight, even if it’s hot, which I doubt because already the fog’s coming in, and we’re going to keep this by the bed, on the night table, that’s all.”

  She’d drawn up her legs and hugged them to her, as far away from him on the couch as she could manage to be. “I don’t believe you,” she said, and she could hear the thin whine of complaint in her own voice. “You know what my father would say if he saw you now? Where did you get it? Why didn’t you tell me?” she demanded, and she couldn’t help herself—her voice broke on the final syllable.

  He drew the thing back, took it from its cradle and raised it up in one hand till it grazed the ceiling. The muscles of his forearm flexed, the soiled rag dropped to the carpet. “Son of a bitch,” he said, “son of a fucking bi
tch. Tell me this,” he said, “would you rather be the killer or the killee?”

  —

  She was asleep and dreaming the image of a baby floating in amniotic fluid, the cord attached, eyes shut tight—a big baby, an enormous glowing baby floating free like the interstellar embryo of 2001—when a sudden sharp explosion of noise jolted her awake. It took her a moment, heart pounding, breath coming quick, to understand what it was—it was a scream, a woman’s scream, improvised and fierce. The room was dark. Sean was asleep beside her. The scream—a single rising note tailing off into what might have been a sob or gasp—seemed to have come from above, where Jessica-something lived alone with her potted plants and two bloated pampered push-faced cats that were never allowed out of the apartment for fear of the world and its multiplied dangers. Melanie sat up and caught her breath.

  Nothing. The alarm clock on the night table flashed 1:59 and then 2:00.

  Earlier, after a dessert of tapioca pudding with mandarin orange slices fresh from the can, she and Sean had watched a costume drama on the public station that gave her a new appreciation for the term mediocre (mediocre, as she observed to Sean, didn’t come easy—you had to work at it), and then she’d slipped into bed with her book while the station went into pledge-break mode and Sean sat there paralyzed on the couch. She hadn’t read two paragraphs before he tiptoed into the room, naked and in full amatory display. She left the light on, the better to admire him, but the book dropped to the floor, and then it didn’t matter. She felt new, re-created. His body was so familiar, but everything was different now—she’d never been so aroused, rising up again and again to hold him deep inside her in the place where the baby was. Afterward, immediately afterward, almost as if he’d been drugged, he fell asleep with his head on her breast, and it was left to her to reach up awkwardly and kill the lamp. They hadn’t discussed a thing.