T.C. Boyle Stories II: Volume II Page 11

  But now—now there was chaos, and it erupted all at once. There was a thump overhead, the caustic burn of a man’s voice, and then another scream, and another, and Melanie was out of bed, the walls pale and vague, the dark shadow that was Sean lurching up mechanically, and “What?” he was saying. “What is it?”

  Footsteps on the stairs. More screams. Melanie flicked on the light, and there was Sean, dressed only in his briefs, the long muscles of his legs, all that skin, and the gun in his hand, the pistol, the nasty gleaming black little thing he’d bought at a gun show six months ago and never bothered to tell her about. “Sean,” she said, “Sean, don’t!” but he was already out the door, racing down the hall in the sick yellow wash of the overhead light, already at the front door, the screams from above rising, rising. She was in her nightgown, barefooted, but she had no thought for anything but to get out that door and put an end to whatever this was.

  There was a streetlight out front, but the fog had cupped a hand over it and blotted the light from the windows and the stairway too. Melanie shot a glance up the stairs to where Jessica stood bracing herself against the railing, in nothing but panties and a brassiere torn off one shoulder, and then she saw the glint of Sean’s back across the lawn where the cars threw up a bank of shadow against the curb. He was shouting something, ragged, angry syllables that could have made no sense to anyone, even a Theorist, and she saw then that there was somebody else there with him, a dark, shifting figure rallying round a shuffle of feet on the pavement. She was closer now, running, Sean’s feet glowing in the night, the long white stalks of his legs and expanse of his back—he seemed to be wrestling with a shadow, but no, it was an animate thing, a man, a dark little man in bum’s clothes with a shovel clenched in both hands and Sean fighting him for it. Where was the gun? There was no gun. Both Sean’s hands were on the shovel and both the little man’s, and now Jessica was screaming again. “The gun,” Sean said. “In the grass. Get the gun.”

  In that moment the little man managed to wrench the shovel free, and in the next—it happened so quickly she wasn’t sure she actually saw it—he caught Sean under the chin with the haft, and then the blade, and Sean was on the ground. She never hesitated. Before the man could bring the blade down—and that was what he meant to do, no mistake about it, his arms already raised high for a savage stabbing thrust—she took hold of the haft with all the strength in her and pulled it tight to her chest.

  She could smell him. She could feel him. He hung on, the little man, the bum, the one who’d been on the doorstep that afternoon with his reeking breath and greasy clothes, and then he jerked so violently at the shovel she almost pitched headlong into him, into the spill of his flesh and the dankness of the grass. But she didn’t. She jerked back, and Jessica screamed, and Sean, reeling like a drunk, began to pick himself up off the lawn, and for the instant before the man let go of the shovel and flung himself into the shadows across the street she was staring him full in the face—yes, but she wasn’t seeing the man on the TV or the man on the porch or any one of the army of bums lined up along the street in their all-purpose shirts and sweat-stained caps, she was seeing Dr. Toni Brinsley-Schneider, Dr. Brinsley-Schneider the bioethicist, just her.

  —

  There were two policemen. From where she was sitting at the end of the couch, Melanie could see their cruiser reined in at the curb, the interior a black pit, the slowly revolving light on top chopping up the night over and over again. They were built like runners or squash players, both of them—crisp, efficient men in their thirties who looked away from her bare legs and feet and into her eyes. “So you heard screams, and this was about what time?”

  They’d already taken Jessica-something’s statement—Jessica Fortgang, and she had a name now: Ms. Fortgang, as the policemen referred to her—and Sean, hunched in the armchair with an angry red weal under his chin, had given his version of events too. The man in the night, the bum, the one who’d been the cause of all this, had escaped, at least for the time being, and they were denied the satisfaction of seeing him handcuffed in the back of the cruiser, bowed and contrite. Sean had been in a state when the police arrived, clenching his jaws as if he were biting down hard on something, gesturing with a closed fist and wide sweeps of his arm. “The railway killer, it was him, the railway killer,” he kept repeating, till the policeman with the mustache, the taller one, told him the railway killer had turned himself in at the Mexican border some fifteen hours earlier. “That was the Texas border,” he added, and then his partner, in a flat professional voice, said that they were treating this as an assault in any case, possibly an attempted rape. “Your neighbor, Ms. Fortgang? She apparently hired this individual to do some yard work this afternoon and then invited him in for iced tea and a sandwich when he was done. Then he comes back at night—and this is a cultural thing, you understand, a woman looks at one of these guys twice and he expects a whole lot more. He’s a transient, that’s all, nobody from around here. But we’ll get him.”

  Melanie answered their questions patiently, though her heart was still jumping in her chest, and she kept glancing at Sean, as if for guidance. But Sean was sullen, distant, withdrawn into some corner of himself—the gun was an embarrassment, the man had knocked him down, he’d been involved in an ordinary altercation with an ordinary bum, and the railway killer had already given himself up. She saw the lines in his face, saw the way his lower lip pushed his chin down into the soft flesh beneath it. Theory couldn’t help here. Theory deconstructs, theory has no purpose, no point, no overview or consolation—it was a kind of intellectual masturbation. If she hadn’t known it before, she knew it now.

  The police thanked them, tried on the briefest of smiles, and then Sean showed them to the door and Melanie got up from the couch with the vague idea of making herself a cup of herbal tea to help her unwind. Just as the door closed, she called Sean’s name aloud, and she almost said it, almost said, “Sean, there’s something I’ve been wanting to tell you,” but there was no use in that now.

  Sean turned away from the door, shoulders slumped, the corners of his mouth drawn down. After the skirmish on the lawn, he’d shrugged into a pair of jeans and the first shirt he could find—a Hawaiian print, festive with palm fronds and miniature pineapples—and she saw that he’d misbuttoned it. He looked hopeless. He looked lost in his own living room.

  She held that picture of him, and then she was thinking, unaccountably, of another captive of the Sioux, a young woman taken from her husband to be bride to a chief, the business settled in the smoke and confusion of a desperate fight, her daughter crying out over the cacophony of shouts and curses and the rolling thunder of a hundred rifles firing at once. Months later, fleeing with her captors after a loss in battle, she watched a brave from another party come up to them on his pony, in full regalia, trailing the shawl she’d knitted for her daughter and a tiny shrunken scalp with the hair—the blond shining hair—still attached.

  (1999)

  Achates McNeil

  My father is a writer. A pretty well-known one too. You’d recognize the name if I mentioned it, but I won’t mention it, I’m tired of mentioning it—every time I mention it I feel as if I’m suffocating, as if I’m in a burrow deep in the ground and all these fine grains of dirt are raining down on me. We studied him in school, in the tenth grade, a story of his in one of those all-purpose anthologies that dislocate your wrists and throw out your back just to lift them from the table, and then again this year, my freshman year, in college. I got into a Contemporary American Lit class second semester and they were doing two of his novels, along with a three-page list of novels and collections by his contemporaries, and I knew some of them too—or at least I’d seen them at the house. I kept my mouth shut though, especially after the professor, this blond poet in her thirties who once wrote a novel about a nymphomaniac pastry maker, made a joke the first day when she came to my name in the register.

  “Achates McNei
l,” she called out.

  “Here,” I said, feeling hot and cold all over, as if I’d gone from a sauna into a snowbank and back again. I knew what was coming; I’d been through it before.

  She paused, looking up from her list to gaze out the window on the frozen wastes of the campus in the frozen skullcap of New York State, and then came back to me and held my eyes a minute. “You wouldn’t happen by any chance to be a relation of anybody on our reading list, would you?”

  I sat cramped in the hard wooden seat, thinking about the faceless legions who’d sat there before me, people who’d squirmed over exams and unfeeling professorial remarks and then gone on to become plastic surgeons, gas station attendants, insurance salesmen, bums and corpses. “No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

  She gave me a mysterious little smile. “I was thinking of Teresa Golub or maybe Irving Thalamus?” It was a joke. One or two of the literary cretins in back gave it a nervous snort and chuckle, and I began to wonder, not for the first time, if I was really cut out for academic life. This got me thinking about the various careers available to me as a college dropout—rock and roller, chairman of the board, center for the New York Knicks—and I missed the next couple of names, coming back to the world as the name Victoria Roethke descended on the room and hung in the air like the aftershock of a detonation in the upper atmosphere.

  She was sitting two rows up from me, and all I could see was her hair, draped in a Medusan snarl of wild demi-dreadlocks over everything within a three-foot radius. Her hair was red—red as in pink rather than carrot-top—and it tended to be darker on the ends but running to the color of the stuff they line Easter baskets with up close to her scalp. She didn’t say here or present or yes or even nod her amazing head. She just cleared her throat and announced, “He was my grandfather.”

  I stopped her in the hallway after class and saw that she had all the usual equipment as well as a nose ring and two eyes the color of the cardboard stiffeners you get as a consolation prize when you have to buy a new shirt. “Are you really—?” I began, thinking we had a lot in common, thinking we could commiserate, drown our sorrows together, have sex, whatever, but before I could finish the question, she said, “No, not really.”

  “You mean you—?”

  “That’s right.”

  I gave her a look of naked admiration. And she was looking at me, sly and composed, looking right into my eyes. “But aren’t you afraid you’re going to be on Professor What’s-Her-Face’s shitlist when she finds out?” I said finally.

  Victoria was still looking right into me. She fiddled with her hair, touched her nose ring and gave it a quick squeeze with a nervous flutter of her fingers. Her fingernails, I saw, were painted black. “Who’s going to tell her?” she said.

  We were complicitous. Instantly. Half a beat later she asked me if I wanted to buy her a cup of ramen noodles in the Student Union, and I said yeah, I did, as if it was something I had any choice about.

  We ran through a crust of dead snow in a stiff wind and temperatures that hadn’t risen above minus ten in the past two weeks, and there were a lot of people running with us, a whole thundering herd—up here everybody ran everywhere; it was a question of survival.

  In the Union she shook out her hair, and five minutes after we’d found a table in the corner and poured the hot water into the Styrofoam containers of dehydrated mystery food I could still smell the cold she’d trapped there. Otherwise I smelled the multi-layered festering odors of the place, generic to college cafeterias worldwide: coffee, twice-worn underwear, cream of tomato soup. If they enclosed the place in plastic and sealed it like a tomb, it’d smell the same two thousand years from now. I’d never been in the kitchen, but I remembered the kitchen from elementary school, with its big aluminum pots and microwave ovens and all the rest, and pictured them back there now, the cafeteria ladies with their dyed hair and their miserable small-town loutish-husband lives, boiling up big cauldrons of cream of tomato soup. Victoria’s nose was white from the cold, but right where the nose ring plunged in, over the flange of her left nostril, there was a spot of flesh as pink as the ends of her hair.

  “What happens when you get a cold?” I said. “I mean, I’ve always wondered.”

  She was blowing into her noodles, and she looked up to shoot me a quick glance out of her cardboard eyes. Her mouth was small, her teeth the size of individual kernels of niblet corn. When she smiled, as she did now, she showed acres of gum. “It’s a pain in the ass.” Half a beat: that was her method. “I suffer it all for beauty.”

  And of course this is where I got all gallant and silver-tongued and told her how striking it was, she was, her hair and her eyes and—but she cut me off. “You really are his son, aren’t you?” she said.

  There was a sudden eruption of jock-like noises from the far end of the room—some athletes with shaved heads making sure everybody knew they were there—and it gave me a minute to compose myself, aside from blowing into my noodles and adjusting my black watchcap with the Yankees logo for the fourteenth time, that is. I shrugged. Looked into her eyes and away again. “I really don’t want to talk about it.”

  But she was on her feet suddenly and people were staring at her and there was a look on her face like she’d just won the lottery or the trip for two to the luxurious Spermata Inn on the beach at Waikiki. “I don’t believe it,” she said, and her voice was as deep as mine, strange really, but with a just detectable breathiness or hollowness to it that made it recognizably feminine.

  I was holding onto my Styrofoam container of hot noodles as if somebody was trying to snatch it away from me. A quick glance from side to side reassured me that the people around us had lost interest, absorbed once again in their plates of reheated stir fry, newspapers and cherry Cokes. I gave her a weak smile.

  “You mean, you’re like really Tim McNeil’s son, no bullshit?”

  “Yes,” I said, and though I liked the look of her, of her breasts clamped in the neat interwoven grid of a blue thermal undershirt and her little mouth and the menagerie of her hair, and I liked what she’d done in class too, my voice was cold. “And I have a whole other life too.”

  But she wasn’t listening. “Oh, my God!” she squealed, ignoring the sarcasm and all it was meant to imply. She did something with her hands, her face; her hair helicoptered round her head. “I can’t believe it. He’s my hero, he’s my god. I want to have his baby!”

  The noodles congealed in my mouth like wet confetti. I didn’t have the heart to point out that I was his baby, for better or worse.

  —

  It wasn’t that I hated him exactly—it was far more complicated than that, and I guess it got pretty Freudian too, considering the way he treated my mother and the fact that I was thirteen and having problems of my own when he went out the door like a big cliché and my mother collapsed into herself as if her bones had suddenly melted. I’d seen him maybe three or four times since and always with some woman or other and a fistful of money and a face that looked like he’d just got done licking up a pile of dogshit off the sidewalk. What did he want from me? What did he expect? At least he’d waited till my sister and brother were in college, at least they were out of the house when the cleaver fell, but what about me? I was the one who had to go into that classroom in the tenth grade and read that shitty story and have the teacher look at me like I had something to share, some intimate little anecdote I could relate about what it was like living with a genius—or having lived with a genius. And I was the one who had to see his face all over the newspapers and magazines when he published Blood Ties, his postmodernist take on the breakdown of the family, a comedy no less, and then read in the interviews about how his wife and children had held him back and stifled him—as if we were his jailers or something. As if I’d ever bothered him or dared to approach the sanctum of his upstairs office when his genius was percolating or asked him to go to a Little League game and sit in
the stands and yabber along with the rest of the parents. Not me. No, I was the dutiful son of the big celebrity, and the funny thing was, I wouldn’t have even known he was a celebrity if he hadn’t packed up and left.

  He was my father. A skinny man in his late forties with kinky hair and a goatee who dressed like he was twenty-five and had a dead black morbid outlook on life and twisted everything into the kind of joke that made you squirm. I was proud of him. I loved him. But then I saw what a monster of ego he was, as if anybody could give two shits for literature anymore, as if he was the center of the universe while the real universe went on in the streets, on the Internet, on TV and in the movie theaters. Who the hell was he to reject me?

  So: Victoria Roethke.

  I told her I’d never licked anybody’s nose ring before and she asked me if I wanted to go over to her apartment and listen to music and have sex, and though I felt like shit, like my father’s son, like the negative image of something I didn’t want to be, I went. Oh, yes: I went.

  —

  She lived in a cramped drafty ancient wreck of a nondescript house from the wood-burning era, about five blocks from campus. We ran all the way, of course—it was either that or freeze to the pavement—and the shared effort, the wheezing lungs and burning nostrils, got us over any awkwardness that might have ensued. We stood a minute in the superheated entryway that featured a row of tarnished brass coathooks, a dim hallway lined with doors coated in drab shiny paint and a smell of cat litter and old clothes. I followed her hair up a narrow stairway and into a one-room apartment not much bigger than a prison cell. It was dominated by a queen-size mattress laid out on the floor and a pair of speakers big enough to double as end tables, which they did. Bricks and boards for the bookcases that lined the walls and pinched them in like one of those shrinking rooms in a sci-fi flick, posters to cover up the faded nineteenth-century wallpaper, a greenish-looking aquarium with one pale bloated fish suspended like a mobile in the middle of it. The solitary window looked out on everything that was dead in the world. Bathroom down the hall.