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

  For a long while no one said anything—everything had already been said, over and over, one long flood of hurt and recrimination—and the antiseptic silence of the hospital held them in its grip while the rain beat at the windows and the machines at the foot of the bed counted off numbers. From down the hall came a snatch of TV dialogue, and for a minute China opened her eyes and thought she was back in the dorm. “Honey,” her mother said, raising a purgatorial face to her, “are you all right? Can I get you anything?”

  “I need to—I think I need to pee.”

  “Why?” her father demanded, and it was the perfect non sequitur. He was up out of the chair, standing over her, his eyes like cracked porcelain. “Why didn’t you tell us, or at least tell your mother—or Dr. Fredman? Dr. Fredman, at least. He’s been—he’s like a family member, you know that, and he could have, or he would have . . . What were you thinking, for Christ’s sake?”

  Thinking? She wasn’t thinking anything, not then and not now. All she wanted—and she didn’t care what they did to her, beat her, torture her, drag her weeping through the streets in a dirty white dress with “Baby Killer” stitched over her breast in scarlet letters—was to see Jeremy. Just that. Because what really mattered was what he was thinking.

  —

  The food at the Sarah Barnes Cooper Women’s Correctional Institute was exactly what they served at the dining hall in college, heavy on the sugars, starches, and bad cholesterol, and that would have struck her as ironic if she’d been there under other circumstances—doing community outreach, say, or researching a paper for her sociology class. But given the fact that she’d been locked up for more than a month now, the object of the other girls’ threats, scorn, and just plain nastiness, given the fact that her life was ruined beyond any hope of redemption, and every newspaper in the country had her shrunken white face plastered across its front page under a headline that screamed MOTEL MOM, she didn’t have much use for irony. She was scared twenty-four hours a day. Scared of the present, scared of the future, scared of the reporters waiting for the judge to set bail so that they could swarm all over her the minute she stepped out the door. She couldn’t concentrate on the books and magazines her mother brought her or even on the TV in the rec room. She sat in her room—it was a room, just like a dorm room, except that they locked you in at night—and stared at the walls, eating peanuts, M&M’s, sunflower seeds by the handful, chewing for the pure animal gratification of it. She was putting on more weight, and what did it matter?

  Jeremy was different. He’d lost everything—his walk, his smile, the muscles of his upper arms and shoulders. Even his hair lay flat now, as if he couldn’t bother with a tube of gel and a comb. When she saw him at the arraignment, saw him for the first time since she’d climbed out of the car and limped into the dorm with the blood wet on her legs, he looked like a refugee, like a ghost. The room they were in—the courtroom—seemed to have grown up around them, walls, windows, benches, lights and radiators already in place, along with the judge, the American flag and the ready-made spectators. It was hot. People coughed into their fists and shuffled their feet, every sound magnified. The judge presided, his arms like bones twirled in a bag, his eyes searching and opaque as he peered over the top of his reading glasses.

  China’s lawyer didn’t like Jeremy’s lawyer, that much was evident, and the state prosecutor didn’t like anybody. She watched him—Jeremy, only him—as the reporters held their collective breath and the judge read off the charges and her mother bowed her head and sobbed into the bucket of her hands. And Jeremy was watching her too, his eyes locked on hers as if he defied them all, as if nothing mattered in the world but her, and when the judge said “First-degree murder” and “Murder by abuse or neglect,” he never flinched.

  She sent him a note that day—“I love you, will always love you no matter what, More than Moon”—and in the hallway, afterward, while their lawyers fended off the reporters and the bailiffs tugged impatiently at them, they had a minute, just a minute, to themselves. “What did you tell them?” he whispered. His voice was a rasp, almost a growl; she looked at him, inches away, and hardly recognized him.

  “I told them it was dead.”

  “My lawyer—Mrs. Teagues?—she says they’re saying it was alive when we, when we put it in the bag.” His face was composed, but his eyes were darting like insects trapped inside his head.

  “It was dead.”

  “It looked dead,” he said, and already he was pulling away from her and some callous shit with a camera kept annihilating them with flash after flash of light, “and we certainly didn’t—I mean, we didn’t slap it or anything to get it breathing. . . .”

  And then the last thing he said to her, just as they were pulled apart, and it was nothing she wanted to hear, nothing that had any love in it, or even the hint of love: “You told me to get rid of it.”

  —

  There was no elaborate name for the place where they were keeping him. It was known as Drum Hill Prison, period. No reform-minded notions here, no verbal gestures toward rehabilitation or behavior modification, no benefactors, mayors or role models to lend the place their family names, but then who in his right mind would want a prison named after him anyway? At least they kept him separated from the other prisoners, the gangbangers and dope dealers and sexual predators and the like. He was no longer a freshman at Brown, not officially, but he had his books and his course notes, and he tried to keep up as best he could. Still, when the screams echoed through the cellblock at night and the walls dripped with the accumulated breath of eight and a half thousand terminally angry sociopaths, he had to admit it wasn’t the sort of college experience he’d bargained for.

  And what had he done to deserve it? He still couldn’t understand. That thing in the Dumpster—and he refused to call it human, let alone a baby—was nobody’s business but his and China’s. That’s what he’d told his attorney, Mrs. Teagues, and his mother and her boyfriend, Howard, and he’d told them over and over again: “I didn’t do anything wrong.” Even if it was alive, and it was, he knew in his heart that it was, even before the state prosecutor presented evidence of blunt-force trauma and death by asphyxiation and exposure, it didn’t matter, or shouldn’t have mattered. There was no baby. There was nothing but a mistake, a mistake clothed in blood and mucus. When he really thought about it, thought it through on its merits and dissected all his mother’s pathetic arguments about where he’d be today if she’d felt as he did when she was pregnant herself, he hardened like a rock, like sand turning to stone under all the pressure the planet can bring to bear. Another unwanted child in an overpopulated world? They should have given him a medal.

  It was the end of January before bail was set—three hundred and fifty thousand dollars his mother didn’t have—and he was released to house arrest. He wore a plastic anklet that set off an alarm if he went out the door, and so did she, so did China, imprisoned like some fairy-tale princess at her parents’ house. At first, she called him every day, but mostly what she did was cry—“I want to see it,” she sobbed. “I want to see our daughter’s grave.” That froze him inside. He tried to picture her—her now, China, the love of his life—and he couldn’t. What did she look like? What was her face like, her nose, her hair, her eyes and breasts and the slit between her legs? He drew a blank. There was no way to summon her the way she used to be or even the way she was in court, because all he could remember was the thing that had come out of her, four limbs and the equipment of a female, shoulders rigid and eyes shut tight, as if she were a mummy in a tomb . . . and the breath, the shuddering long gasping rattle of a breath he could feel ringing inside her even as the black plastic bag closed over her face and the lid of the Dumpster opened like a mouth.

  He was in the den, watching basketball, a drink in his hand (7Up mixed with Jack Daniel’s in a ceramic mug, so no one would know he was getting shit-faced at two o’clock on a Sunday afternoon), when the ph
one rang. It was Sarah Teagues. “Listen, Jeremy,” she said in her crisp, equitable tones, “I thought you ought to know—the Berkowitzes are filing a motion to have the case against China dropped.”

  His mother’s voice on the portable, too loud, a blast of amplified breath and static: “On what grounds?”

  “She never saw the baby, that’s what they’re saying. She thought she had a miscarriage.”

  “Yeah, right,” his mother said.

  Sarah Teagues was right there, her voice as clear and present as his mother’s. “Jeremy’s the one that threw it in the Dumpster, and they’re saying he acted alone. She took a polygraph test day before yesterday.”

  He could feel his heart pounding the way it used to when he plodded up that last agonizing ridge behind the school with the cross-country team, his legs sapped, no more breath left in his body. He didn’t say a word. Didn’t even breathe.

  “She’s going to testify against him.”

  —

  Outside was the world, puddles of ice clinging to the lawn under a weak afternoon sun, all the trees stripped bare, the grass dead, the azalea under the window reduced to an armload of dead brown twigs. She wouldn’t have wanted to go out today anyway. This was the time of year she hated most, the long interval between the holidays and spring break, when nothing grew and nothing changed—it didn’t even seem to snow much anymore. What was out there for her anyway? They wouldn’t let her see Jeremy, wouldn’t even let her talk to him on the phone or write him anymore, and she wouldn’t be able to show her face at the mall or even the movie theater without somebody shouting out her name as if she was a freak, as if she was another Monica Lewinsky or Heidi Fleiss. She wasn’t China Berkowitz, honor student, not anymore—she was the punchline to a joke, a footnote to history.

  She wouldn’t mind going for a drive, though—that was something she missed, just following the curves out to the reservoir to watch the way the ice cupped the shore, or up to the turnout on Route 9 to look out over the river where it oozed through the mountains in a shimmering coil of light. Or to take a walk in the woods, just that. She was in her room, on her bed, posters of bands she’d outgrown staring down from the walls, her high school books on two shelves in the corner, the closet door flung open on all the clothes she’d once wanted so desperately she could have died for each individual pair of boots or the cashmere sweaters that felt so good against her skin. At the bottom of her left leg, down there at the foot of the bed, was the anklet she wore now, the plastic anklet with the transmitter inside, no different, she supposed, than the collars they put on wolves to track them across all those miles of barren tundra or the bears sleeping in their dens. Except that hers had an alarm on it.

  For a long while she just lay there gazing out the window, watching the rinsed-out sun slip down into the sky that had no more color in it than a TV tuned to an unsubscribed channel, and then she found herself picturing things the way they were an eon ago, when everything was green. She saw the azalea bush in bloom, the leaves knifing out of the trees, butterflies—or were they cabbage moths?—hovering over the flowers. Deep green. That was the color of the world. And she was remembering a night, summer before last, just after she and Jeremy started going together, the crickets thrumming, the air thick with humidity, and him singing along with the car radio, his voice so sweet and pure it was as if he’d written the song himself, just for her. And when they got to where they were going, at the end of that dark lane overhung with trees, to a place where it was private and hushed and the night fell in on itself as if it couldn’t support the weight of the stars, he was as nervous as she was. She moved into his arms, and they kissed, his lips groping for hers in the dark, his fingers trembling over the thin yielding silk of her blouse. He was Jeremy. He was the love of her life. And she closed her eyes and clung to him as if that were all that mattered.

  (1999)

  Rust

  That was the sky up above, hot, with a fried egg of a sun stuck in the middle of it, and this was the ground down here, hard, with a layer of parched grass and a smell of dirt and leaf mold, and no matter how much he shouted there didn’t seem to be much else in between. What he could use was a glass of water. He’d been here, what—an hour, maybe?—and the sun hadn’t moved. Or not that he could see, anyway. His lips were dry, and he could feel all that ultraviolet radiation cooking the skin off his face, a piece of meat on the grill, turkey skin, crisp and oozing, peeling away in strips. But he wasn’t hungry—he was never hungry anymore. It was just an image, that was all. He could use a chair, though, and somebody to help him up and put him in it. And some shade. Some iced tea, maybe, beads of moisture sliding down the outside of the glass.

  “Eunice!” he called out in a voice that withered in his throat. “Eunice, goddamnit, Eunice!” And then, because he was old and he was angry and he didn’t give a damn anymore, he cried out for help. “Help!” he croaked. “Help!”

  But nobody was listening. The sky hung there like a tattered curtain, shreds of cloud draped over the high green crown of the pepper tree he’d planted forty years ago, the day his son was born, and he could hear the superamplified rumble of the TV from behind the shut and locked windows and the roar of the air conditioner, and where was the damn dog anyway? That was it. He remembered now. The dog. He’d come out to look for the dog—she’d been gone too long, too long about her business, and Eunice had turned her parched old lampshade of a head away from the TV screen and said, “Where’s the dog?” He didn’t know where the dog was, though he knew where his first bourbon and water of the day was—right there on the TV tray in front of him—and it was 11:00 a.m. and plenty late enough for it. “How the hell would I know,” he’d said, “you were the one let her out,” and she’d come right back at him with something smart, like “Well you’d better just get yourself out there in the yard and see, hadn’t you?”

  He hadn’t actually been out in the yard in a long while—years, it seemed—and when he went out the back door and down the steps he found himself gaping at the bushes all in flower, the trumpet vine smothering the back of the house, and he remembered a time when he cared about all that, about nature and flowers, steer manure and potting soil. Now the yard was as alien to him as the Gobi Desert. He didn’t give a damn for flowers or trees or the stucco peeling off the side of the house and all the trim destroyed with the blast of the sun or anything else. “Booters!” he’d called, angry suddenly, angry at he didn’t know what. “Booters! Here, girl!”

  And that was when he fell.

  Maybe the lawn dipped out from under him, maybe he stepped in a gopher hole or tripped over a sprinkler head—that must have been it—but the long and short of it was that he was here, on the grass, stretched out like a corpse under the pepper tree, and he couldn’t for the life of him seem to get up.

  —

  I’ve never wanted anybody more in my life, from the minute I came home from Rutgers and laid eyes on you, and I don’t care if you are my father’s wife, I don’t care about anything anymore. . . . Eunice sipped at her drink—vodka and soda, bland as all get-out, but juice gave her the runs—and nodded in complete surrender as the former underwear model-turned-actress fell into the arms of the clip-jawed actor with the ridge of glistening hair that stood up from his crown like a meat loaf just turned out of the pan. The screen faded for the briefest nanosecond before opening on a cheery ad for rectal suppositories, and she found herself drifting into a reverie about the first time Walt had ever taken her in his arms.

  They were young then. Or younger. A whole lot younger. She was forty-three and childless, working the checkout desk at the library while her husband ran a slowly failing quick-printing business, and Walt, five years her junior and with the puffed-up chest and inflated arms of the inveterate body builder, taught phys ed at the local high school. She liked to stop in at the Miramar Hotel after work, just to see who was there and unwind a bit after a day of typing out three-by-fives
for the card catalogue and collecting fifteen- and twenty-cent fines from born-nasty rich men’s wives with beauty parlor hair and too much time on their hands. One day she came in out of the flaming nimbus of the fog and there was Walt, sitting at the bar like some monument to manhood, his tie askew and the sleeves of his white dress shirt rolled up to reveal the squared-off blocks of his forearms. She sat at one of the tables, ordered a drink—it was vodka and grapefruit in those days, tall—and lit a cigarette. When she looked up, he was standing over her. “Don’t you know smoking’s bad for your health?”

  She took her time, crossed her legs under the table and squirmed her bottom around till she was comfortable. She’d seen Ava Gardner in the movies. And Lauren Bacall too. “Tell me that,” she said, slow and languid, drawing it out with the smoke, “when I’m an old lady.”

  Well, he laughed and sat down and they got to talking and before long he was meeting her there every afternoon at five while her husband moaned and fretted over last-minute rush jobs and his wife drank herself into oblivion in her own kitchen. And when that moment came—their first embrace—she reached out for his arms as if she were drowning.

  But now the screen flickered and The Furious Hours gave way to Riddle Street and she eased back in her chair, the vodka and soda at her lips like recirculated blood flowing back into her, and watched as the heroine—one of the towering sluts of daytime television—carved up another man.