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

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  The funny thing was that nothing hurt, or not particularly or any more than usual, what with the arthritis in both knees and the unreconstructed hernia that felt as if some animal was living under his skin and clawing to get out—no, he hadn’t broken anything, he was pretty sure of that. But there was something wrong with him. Desperately wrong. Or why else would he be lying here on his back listening to the grass grow while the clouds became ghosts in winding sheets and fled away to nothing and the sun burned the skin right off his face?

  Maybe he was dying, maybe that was it. The thought didn’t alarm him, not especially, not yet, but it was there, a hard little bolus of possibility lodged in his brain. He moved the fingers of his right hand, one by one, just to see if the signals still carried that far, and then he tried the other side, the left, and realized after a long moment that there was nothing there, nothing he could feel anyway. Something whispered in his ear—a single word, stroke—and that was when he began to be afraid. He heard a car go by on the street out front of the house, the soughing of the tires, the clank of the undercarriage, the smooth fuel-injected suck of the engine. “Help!” he cried. “Somebody help!”

  And then he was looking up into the lace of the pepper tree and remembering a moment on a bus forty-five years ago, some anonymous stop in Kansas or Nebraska, and he on his way to California for the first time and every good thing awaiting him. An old man got on, dazed and scrawny and with a long whittled pole of a neck and a tattered straw hat set way back on his head, and he just stood there in the middle of the aisle as if he didn’t know where he was. Walt was twenty-nine, he’d been in the service and college too, and he wasn’t acquainted with any old people or any dead people either—not since the war anyway. He lifted weights two hours every morning, rain or shine, hot or cold, sick or well, and the iron suffused him with its power like some magic potion.

  He looked up at the old man and the old man looked right through him. That was when the driver, oblivious, put the bus in gear and the old man collapsed in his shiny worn suit like a puppet with the strings cut. No one seemed to know what to do, the mother with her mewling baby, the teenager with the oversized shoes, the two doughy old hens with the rolled-in-butter smiles fixed on their faces, but Walt came up out of his seat automatically and pulled the old man to his feet, and it was as if the old guy wasn’t even there, nothing more than a suit stuffed with wadding—he could have propped up ten old men, a hundred, because he was a product of iron and the iron flowed through his veins and swelled his muscles till there was nothing he couldn’t do.

  —

  Eunice refreshed her drink twice during Riddle Street, and then she sat through the next program with her eyes closed, not asleep—she couldn’t sleep anymore, sleep was a dream, a fantasy, the dimmest recollection out of an untroubled past—but in a state suspended somewhere between consciousness and its opposite. The sound of a voice, a strange voice, speaking right to her, brought her out of it—It was amazing, just as if she knew me and my whole life and she told me I was going to come into some money soon, and I did, and the very next day I met the man of my dreams—and the first thing she focused on was her husband’s empty chair. Now where had he got himself off to? Maybe he’d gone to lie down, maybe that was it. Or maybe he was in the kitchen, his big arms that always seemed to be bleeding pinioning the wings of the newspaper, a pencil in his big blunt fingers, his drink like liquid gold in the light through the window and the crossword all scratched over with his black, glistening scrawl. Those were skin cancers on his arms, she knew that, tiny dots of fresh wet blood stippling the places where his muscles used to be, but he wouldn’t do anything about it. He didn’t care. It was like his hernia. “I’m going to be dead soon anyway,” he said, and that got her down, it did, that he should talk like that. “How can you talk like that?” she’d say, and he’d throw it right back at her. “Why not? What have I got to live for?” And she’d blink at him, trying desperately to focus, because if she couldn’t focus she couldn’t give him a look, all pouty and frowning, like Marlene Dietrich in Destry Rides Again. “For me, baby,” she’d say. “For me.”

  The idea of the kitchen sent her there, a little shaky on her feet after sitting so long, and her ankles weren’t helping, not at all—it felt as if somebody’d snuck in and wrapped truck tires around them while she sat watching her programs. The kitchen was glowing, the back windows glazed with sun, and all the clutter of their last few half-eaten meals invested with a purity and beauty that took her breath away and made her feel like crying, the caramel of the maple syrup bottle and the blue of the Windex and red of the ketchup as vibrant and natural there as flowers in a field. It was a pretty kitchen, the prettiest kitchen in the world. Or it had been once. They’d remodeled in ’66—or was it ’69? Double aluminum sink, self-cleaning oven, cabinets in solid oak and no cheap lamination, thank you very much. She’d loved that kitchen. It was a kitchen that made her feel loved in return, a place she could retreat to after all the personal nastiness and gossip at the library and wait for her man to come home from coaching football or basketball or whatever it was, depending on the season.

  The thought came to her then—or not a thought, actually, but a feeling because feelings were what moved her now, not thoughts—that she ought to maybe fix a can of tomato soup for lunch, and wouldn’t it be nice, for a change, to fix some for Walt too? Though she knew what his reaction would be. “I can’t eat that,” he’d say, “not with my stomach. What do you think, I’m still thirty-eight?”

  Well, yes, she did, as a matter of fact. And when he was thirty-eight and he took her away from Stan Sadowsky and blackened both of his eyes for him when he tried to get rough about it, he’d eat anything she put down on the table in front of him, shrimp cocktail in horseradish sauce right out of the jar, pickled cherry peppers, her special Tex-Mex tamales with melted cheese and Tabasco. He loved her then too. Loved her like she’d never been loved before. His fingers—his fingers were magic, the fingers of a masseur, a man who knew what a deep rub was, who knew muscle and ligament and the finer points of erectile tissue and who could manipulate her till she was limp as a rag doll and tingling all over.

  Sure, sure he could. But where in Lord’s name was he?

  —

  The sun had moved. No doubt about it. He’d been asleep, unconscious, delirious, dehydrated, sun-poisoned—pick an adjective—and now he was awake again and staring up at that yellow blot in the sky that went to deep blue and then black if you stared at it too long. He needed water. He needed bourbon. Aspirin. Ibuprofen. Two of those little white codeine tablets the doctor gave him for the pain in his knees. More than anything, though, he needed to get up off this damn lawn before the grass grew through the back of his head. Furious suddenly, raging, he gave it everything he had and managed to lift his right shoulder and the dead weight of his head from the ground—and hold it there, hold it there for a full five seconds, as if he were bench-pressing his own body—before he sank back down again. It wasn’t going to work, he could see that now, nothing was going to work, ever again, and he felt himself filling up with despair, a slow dark trickle of it leaking into the black pool that was already inside him.

  With the despair came Jimmy. That was the way it always was. When he felt blue, when he felt that life was a disease and not worth the effort of drawing the next contaminated breath, Jimmy was there. Seven years, six months, and fourteen days old, sticks for legs, his head too big for his body and his hair like something you’d scour pans with. Jimmy. His son. The boy who grew up teething on a catcher’s mitt and was already the fastest kid in the second grade. Walt had been at school the day he was killed, spotting for the gymnastics club as they went through their paces on the parallel bars. Somebody said there was smoke up the street—the paint store was on fire, the whole block going up, maybe even the bank—and the vaulted cathedral of the gym went silent. Then they smelled the smoke, musty and sharp at the same ti
me, and then they heard the sirens. By the time Walt got out to the street, his gymnasts leading the way in a blur of flying heels, the fire engine was skewed across the sidewalk in the oddest way, three blocks at least from the fire, and he remembered thinking they must have been drunk or blind, one or the other. When he got there, to where the fire company was, smoke crowding the sky in the distance and the taste of it, acid and bitter, on his tongue, he asked the first person he saw—Ed Bakey, the assistant principal—what was the matter. “One of the kids,” Ed said, and he was shaking so badly he could hardly get the words out, “one of the kids got hit by the truck.”

  He drifted off again, mercifully, and when he came to this time the sun was playing peekaboo with the crown of the pepper tree, and the field of shade, healing redemptive shade, spread almost to his feet. What time was it anyway? Three, at least. Maybe four. And where the hell was Eunice? Inside, that’s where she was, where time was meaningless, a series of half-hour slices carved out of the program guide, day melding into night, breakfast into dinner, the bright electrons dancing eternally across the screen. He dug his elbows into the lawn then, both of them, and yes, he could feel his left side all of a sudden and that was something, and he flexed every muscle in his body, pecs, delts, biceps, the long striated cords of his back and the lump of nothing that was his left leg, but he couldn’t sit up, couldn’t so much as put an inch between him and the flattened grass. That frustrated him. Made him angry. And he cried out again, the driest, faintest bleat of rage and bewilderment from the desert throat of a man who’d never asked anybody for anything.

  —

  She called him for lunch, went to the foot of the stairs and called out his name twice, but it was next to impossible to wake him once he went off, soundest sleeper in the world—you’d need a marching band just to get him to blink his eyes—so she heated the tomato soup, cleared a place at the table, and ate by herself. The soup was good, really hit the spot, but they put too much salt in it, they all did, didn’t matter which brand you bought. It made her thirsty, all that salt, and she got up to make herself a fresh vodka and soda—there was no sense in traipsing round the house looking for the other glass, which, as she knew from experience, could be anywhere. She couldn’t count the hours she’d spent shuffling through the bathroom, kitchen and living room on her feet that felt as if they’d been crimped in a vise, looking for one melted-down watery drink or another. So she took a fresh glass, and she poured, and she drank. Walt was up in the bedroom, that’s where he was, napping, and no other possibility crossed her mind, because there was none.

  There was the usual ebb and flow of afternoon programming, the stupid fat people lined up on a stage bickering about their stupid fat lives and too stupid to know the whole country was laughing at them, the game shows and teenage dance shows and the Mexican shows stocked with people as fat and stupid as the Americans, only bickering in Spanish instead of English. Then it was evening. Then it was dusk. She was watching a Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland picture on the classic movie channel when a dog began barking on the screen, and she was fooled, just for a second, into thinking it was Booters. That was when she noticed that Booters was gone. And Walt: whatever could he be doing all this time?

  She went up the stairs, though each step seemed to rise up insidiously to snatch at her just as she lifted her foot, and saw that the bedroom was empty and that neither dog nor man was in the upstairs bathroom enjoying the monotonous drip-drip-drip of the faucet that never seemed to want to shut itself off. Twice more she went round the house, utterly bewildered, and she even looked in the pantry and the broom closet and the cabinet under the sink. It was nearly dark, the ice cubes of her latest vodka and soda tinkling like chimes in her hand, when she thought to look out back.

  “Walt?” she called, thrusting her head out the door. “Booters?”

  The frail bleating echo of her own voice came back to her, and then, slipping in underneath it, the faintest whisper of a sound, no louder than the hum of a mosquito’s wings or the muffled cry of a bird strangled in the dark. “Help!” she heard, or thought she heard, a sound so weak and constrained it barely registered.

  “Walt?” she tried again.

  And then: “Eunice, goddamnit, over here!”

  She was so startled she dropped her drink, the glass exploding on the flagstones at her feet and anointing her ankles with vodka. The light was fading, and she didn’t see very well anymore, not without her glasses anyway, and she was puzzled, truly puzzled, to hear her husband’s voice coming out of nowhere. “Walt?” she murmured, moving across the darkened lawn as through a minefield, and when she tripped, and fell, it wasn’t over a sprinkler head or gopher’s mound or a sudden rise in the lawn, it was over the long, attenuated shadow of her husband’s still and recumbent form.

  —

  Eunice cried out when she went down, a sharp rising exhalation of surprise, followed by an aquiescent grunt and the almost inevitable elision of some essential bone or joint giving way. He’d heard that sound before, too many times to count, on the football field, the baseball diamond, the basketball court, and he knew right away it was trouble. Or more trouble, if that was possible. “Eunice,” he croaked, and his face was cooked right down to the bone, “are you hurt?”

  She was right there, right there beside him, one of her legs thrust awkwardly over his, her face all but planted in the turf. She was trying to move, to turn over, to right herself—all that he could feel, though he couldn’t for the life of him swivel his head to see—but she wasn’t having much success. When finally, after a protracted effort, she managed to drag her living leg across his dead one, she took what seemed like an hour to gulp at the air before her lips, tongue and mouth could form a response. “Walt,” she gasped, or moaned actually, that’s what it was, moaning, “my . . . I think . . . oh, oh, it hurts . . .”

  He heard a car race up the street, the swift progress of life, places to go, people to meet. Somewhere a voice called out and a door slammed.

  “My hip, I think it’s my hip—”

  It was all he could do to keep from cursing, but he didn’t have the strength to curse, and there was no use in it, not now. He gritted his teeth. “Listen, I can’t move,” he said. “And I’ve been laying here all day waiting for somebody to notice, but do you think anybody’d even poke their damn head out the door to see if their husband was dead yet and fried up in the sun like a damn pork rind?”

  She didn’t answer. The shadows thickened round them. The lawn went from gray to black, the color drained out of the treetops and the sky grew bigger by the minute, as if invisible forces were inflating it with the stuff of the universe. He was looking up at the emerging stars—he had no choice, short of closing his eyes. It had been a long time since he’d looked at the stars, indifferent to any space that didn’t have a roof over it, and he was strangely moved to see that they were all still there. Or most of them anyway, but who was counting? He could hear Eunice sobbing in the dark just to the left of him, and for a long while she didn’t say anything, just sniffed and snuffled, gagging on every third or fourth breath. Finally her voice came at him out of the void: “You always blame me for everything.”

  Well, there was truth in that, he supposed, but no sense in getting into it now. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me, Eunice,” he said, trying to keep his voice level, though his heart was hammering and he foresaw every disaster. “I can’t get up. I can’t even move. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  There was no response. A mosquito lighted on his lower eyelid, soft as a snowflake, and he didn’t have the power to brush it away. “Listen,” he said, speaking to the sky and all the spilled paint of the stars, “how bad are you? Can you—do you think you can crawl?”

  “It hurts,” she gasped, “Walt, it hurts,” and then she was sobbing again, a broken dry nagging rasp that cut into him like the teeth of a saw.

  He softened his voice. “It’s okay, Eu
nice. Everything’s going to be okay, you’ll see.”

  It was then, just as the words passed his lips, that the familiar music of Booters’ jingling tags rang out ecstatically from the far corner of the yard, followed by a joyful woof and the delirious patter of approaching paws. “Booters!” they cried out simultaneously. “Good girl, Booters. Come here, come here, girl!”

  —

  Eunice was expecting a miracle, nothing less—she was an optimist, always was, always would be—and the minute she heard the dog she thought of all the times Lassie had come to the rescue, Rin Tin Tin, Old Yeller, Buck, Toto and she didn’t know who else. She was lying face-down on the lawn, and her cheek had begun to itch where it was pressed into the grass and the grass made its snaking intaglio in the flesh, but she didn’t dare move because of the pain in her hip and lower back that made her feel as if she were being torn in two. She was scared, of course she was, for herself and for Walt, but when Booters stood over her and began to lick the side of her face, she felt a surge of hope. “That’s a girl,” she said. “Now speak, Booters, speak!”

  Booters didn’t speak. She settled her too-big paws down in the grass beside Eunice’s head and whined in a soft, puppyish way. She wasn’t much more than a puppy, after all, a big lumpish stupid dog of indeterminate breed that couldn’t seem to resist soiling the carpet in the hallway no matter how many times she was punished for it. The last dog they’d had, Booters the First, the original Booters, now that was a dog. She was a border collie, her eyes bright with alertness and suspicion, and so smart you could have taught her the multiplication tables if you had a mind to. It was a sad day when they had to have her put down, fifteen years old and so stiff it was like she was walking on stilts, and Walt felt it as much as she did herself, but all he said was “You measure your life in dogs, and if you’re lucky you’ll get five or six of them,” and then he threw the dirt in the hole.