After the Plague: And Other Stories

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  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 time, 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 wha
t’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, Eunice. 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.

  For the next hour, while the mosquitoes had a field day with her face and the back of her neck and her unprotected legs, Eunice kept trying. “Speak, girl!” she said. “Go get help. Get help! Speak!” At first, Walt did his part too, growling out one command after another, but all Booters did was whine through her slushy jowls and shift position to be near whichever one of them was exhorting her the most passionately. And when the automatic sprinklers came on with a hiss of air and the first sputtering release of subterranean pressure, the dog sprang up and trotted over to the porch, smart enough at least to come in out of the rain.

  He was dozing when the sprinklers came on. He’d long since given up on the dog—what did Eunice expect her to do, flag down an ambulance?—and he was dreaming about nothing more complicated than his bed, his bed and a glass of water, half a glass, anything to soothe his throat, when the deluge began. It was a mixed blessing. He’d never been so thirsty in his life, baked and bleached under the sun till he felt mummified, and he opened his mouth reflexively. Unfortunately, none of the sprinklers had been adjusted to pinpoint the gaping maw of a supine old man stretched out in the middle of the lawn, and while the odd drop did manage to strike his lips and even his tongue, it did nothing to relieve his thirst, and he was soon soaked through to the skin and shivering. And yet still the water kept coming like some sort of Oriental water torture until finally the pipes heaved a sigh and the flow cut off as abruptly as it had begun.

  He felt bad for Eunice, felt powerless and weak, felt dead, but he fought down the despair and tried to sit up again. Or his brain tried. The rest of him, aside from the sting of his sun-scorched face and the persistent ache of his knees and the shivers that shook him like a rag, seemed to belong to somebody else, some stranger he couldn’t communicate with. After a while, he gave it up and called out softly to his wife. There was no response. Then he was asleep, and the night came down to lie on him with all its crushing weight.

  Toward morning he woke and saw that Eunice had managed to crawl a few feet away; if he rolled his eyes all the way to the left, he could just make her out, a huddled lump in the shining grass. He held his breath, fearing the worst, but then he heard her breathing—or snoring, actually—a soft glottal insuck of air followed by an even softer puff of exhalation. The birds started in then, recommencing their daily argument, and he saw that the sky had begun to grow light, a phenomenon he hadn’t witnessed in ages, not since he was in college and stayed up through the night bullshitting about women and metaphysics and gulping beer from the can.

  He could shake it off then. Push himself up out of the damp grass, plow through ten flapjacks and half a dozen sausage links, and then go straight to class and after that to the gym to work out. He built himself up then, every day, with every repetition and every set, and there was the proof of it staring back at him in the weight-room mirror. But there was no building now, no collecting jazz albums and European novels, no worrying about brushing between meals or compound interest or life insurance or anything else. Now there was only this, the waiting, and whether you waited out here on the lawn like breakfast for the crows or in there in the recliner, it was all the same. Nothing mattered anymore but this. This was what it all came down to: the grass, the sky, the trumpet vine and the pepper tree, the wife with her bones shot full of air and her hip out of joint, the dog on the porch, the sun, the stars.

  Stan Sadowsky had tried to block the door on him the day he came to take Eunice away, but he held his ground because he’d made up his mind and when he made up his mind he was immovable. “She doesn’t want to be with you anymore, Stan,” he said. “She’s not going to be with you.”

  “Yeah?” Stan’s neck was corded with rage and his eyes leaped right out of his head. Walt didn’t hate him. He didn’t feel anything for him, one way or the other. But there behind him, in the soft light of the hall, was Eunice, her eyes scared and her jaw set, wearing a print dress that showed off everything she had. “Yeah?” Stan repeated, barking it like a dog. “And what the fuck do you know about it?”

  “I know this,” Walt said, and he hit him so hard he went right through the screen door and sprawled out flat on his back in the hallway. And when he got up, Walt hit him again.

  But now, now there was the sun to contend with, already burning through the trees. He smelled the rich wet chlorophyll of the grass and the morning air off the sea, immemorial smells, ancient as his life, and when he heard the soft annunciatory thump of the paper in the front drive, he called out suddenly, but his voice was so weak he could scarcely hear it himself. Eunice was silent. Still and silent. And that worried him, because he couldn’t hear her snoring anymore, and when he found his voice again, he whispered, “Eunice, honey, give me your hand. Can you give me your hand?”

  He could have sworn he saw her lift her shoulder and swivel toward him, her face alive and glowing with the early light, but he must have been fooling himself. Because when he summoned everything he had left in him and somehow managed to reach out his hand, there was nothing there.

  Peep Hall

  I like my privacy. My phone is unlisted, my mailbox locks with a key, and the gate across the driveway automatically shuts behind me when I pull in. I’ve got my own little half-acre plot in the heart of this sunny little university town, and it’s fenced all the way round. The house is a Craftsman-era bungalow, built in 1910, and the yard is lush with mature foliage, including the two grand old oaks that screen me from the
street out front, a tsunami of Bougainvillea that long ago swallowed up the chainlink on both sides of the place, half a dozen tree ferns in the fifteen-foot range, and a whole damp, sweet-earth-smelling forest of Pittosporum, acacia, and blue gum eucalyptus crowding out what’s left of the lawn.

  When I sit on the porch in the afternoon, all I see is twenty shades of green, and when someone bicycles by or the couple across the way get into one of their biweekly wrangles, I’m completely invisible, though I’m sitting right here with my feet propped up, taking it all in. I haven’t been to a concert or a sporting event for as long as I can remember, or even a play or the movies, because crowds irritate me, all that jostling and hooting, the bad breath, the evil looks, not to mention the microbes hanging over all those massed heads like bad money on a bad bet. And no, I’m not a crank. I’m not crazy. And I’m not old, or not particularly (I’ll be forty-one in November). But I do like my privacy, and I don’t think there’s any crime in that, especially when you work as hard as I do. Once I pull my car into the driveway, I just want to be left alone.

  Six nights a week, and two afternoons, I stir Mojitos and shake martinis at the El Encanto Hotel, where I wear a bowtie and a frozen smile. I don’t have any pets, I don’t like walking, my parents are dead, and my wife—my ex-wife—may as well be. When I’m not at the El Encanto, I read, garden, burn things in a pan, clean spasmodically, and listen to whatever the local arts station is playing on the radio. When I feel up to it, I work on my novel (working title, Grandma Rivers)—either that or my Master’s thesis, “Claustrophobia in Franz Kafka’s Fictive Universe,” now eleven years behind schedule.

  I was sitting on the porch late one afternoon—a Monday, my day off, the sun suspended just above the trees, birds slicing the air, every bud and flower entertaining its individual bee—when I heard a woman’s voice raised in exasperation from the porch next door. She was trying to reel herself in, fighting to keep her voice from getting away from her, but I couldn’t quite make out what she was saying. The woman’s voice rose and fell, and then I recognized the voice of my next-door neighbor saying something in reply, something curt and dismissive, punctuated by the end stop of the front door slamming shut.