After the Plague: And Other Stories

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  “You’ll bill us?” Moira asked, smoothing down her skirt and crossing the room in a nervous flutter to pull open the refrigerator and peer inside.

  Ten percent, I could see it already—and the treework would be eleven or twelve thousand, easy, maybe more. It wasn’t gouging, not really, just my commission for catering to their whims—or needs. Black jeans and white T-shirts. Sure. I just nodded.

  “And no Mexicans. I know there’s practically nothing but on any work crew these days, and I have nothing against them, nothing at all, but you know how I feel, Vincent, I think. Don’t you?” She removed a clear glass pitcher of milk from the refrigerator and took a glass from the cupboard. “A black crew I’d have no objection to—or a white one, either. But it’s got to be one or the other, no mixing, and you know”—she paused, the glass in one hand, the pitcher in the other—“if it’s a black crew, I think I’d like to see them in white jeans and black T-shirts. Would there be a problem with that, if the question should arise?”

  “No,” I said, slowly shaking my head, as if I could barely sustain the weight of it, “no problem at all.”

  “Good,” she said, pouring out a clean white glass of milk and setting it down on the counter beside the pitcher as if she were arranging a still life. She clasped her hands over her breast, flashed a look at her sister, and then smiled as if I’d just carved up the world like a melon and handed it to her, piece by dripping piece. “We’ll begin A.S.A.P. then, hmm? The sooner the better?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “All right, then. Do you have anything to add, Caitlin?”

  Caitlin’s voice, soft as the beat of a cabbage moth’s wing: “No, nothing.”

  I started digging out the bushes myself—fuchsia, oleander, mock orange—but I had to go pretty far afield for the tree crew. There were three grand old oaks in the front yard, a mature Australian tea tree on the east side of the house, and half a dozen citrus trees in the back. It would take a crew of ten at least, with climbers, a cherry picker, shredder and cleanup, and as I say, it was going to be expensive. And wasteful. A real shame, really, to strip and pave a yard like that, but if that was what they wanted, I was in no position to argue. I stood to make eleven hundred or so on the trees and another five digging out the shrubs and tilling up the lawn.

  The problem, though, as Moira had foreseen, was in finding a non-Mexican crew in San Roque. It just didn’t exist. Nor were there many white guys on the dirty end of the tree business—they basically just bid the jobs and sent you the bill—and there were no blacks in town at all. Finally, I drove down to Los Angeles and talked to Walt Tremaine, of Walt’s Stump & Tree, and he agreed to come up and bid the job, writing in three hundred extra for the aesthetic considerations—i.e., the white jeans and black T-shirts.

  Walt Tremaine was a man of medium size with a firm paunch and a glistening bald sweat-speckled crown. He looked to be in his fifties, and he was wearing a pair of cutoff blue jeans and one of those tight-fitting shirts with the little alligator logo over the left nipple. The alligator was green, and the shirt was the color of a crookneck squash—a bright, glowing, almost aniline yellow. We were both contemplating the problem of the tea tree, a massive snaking thing that ran its arms out into a tangle of neglected Victorian Box, when the two women appeared round the corner of the house. Moira was in white—high-heeled boots, ankle-length dress and sweater, though it was a golden temperate day, like most days here—and Caitlin was in her customary black. Both of them had parasols, but Caitlin had taken the white one and Moira the black for some reason—maybe they were trying to impress Walt Tremaine with their improvisatory daring.

  I introduced them, and Moira, beaming, took Walt Tremaine’s hand and said, “So, you’re a black man.”

  He just stared at the picture of her white-gloved hand in the shadow of his for a minute and then corrected her. “African-American.”

  “Yes,” Moira said, still beaming, “exactly. And I very much like the color of your shirt, but you do understand I hope that it’s much too much of an excitation and will simply have to go. Yes?” And then she turned to me. “Vincent, have you explained to this gentleman what we require?”

  Walt Tremaine gave me a look. It was a look complicated by the fact that I’d introduced myself as Larry when he climbed out of his pickup truck, not to mention Moira’s comment about his shirt and the dead white of Moira’s dress and the nullifying black of her sister’s lipstick, but it went further than that too—it was the way Moira was talking, taking elaborate care with each syllable, as if she were an English governess with a board strapped to her back. He operated out of Van Nuys, and I figured he didn’t run across many women like Moira in an average day. But he was equal to the challenge, no problem there.

  “Sure,” he said, pressing a little smile onto his lips. “Your man here—whatever his name is—outlined the whole thing for me. I can do the job for you, but I have to say I’m an equal-opportunity employer, and I have eight Mexicans, two Guatemalans, a Serb and a Fiji Islander working for me, as well as my African-Americans. And I don’t particularly like it, but I can split off one crew of black men and bring them up here, if that’s what you want.” He paused. Toed the grass a minute, touched a finger to his lips. When he spoke, it was with a rising inflection, and his eyes rolled up like loose windowshades and then came back down again: “White jeans?”

  Caitlin gave a little laugh and gazed out across the lawn. Her sister shot her a fierce look and then clamped the grandmotherly smile back on her face. “Indulge us,” she said. “We’re just trying to—well, let’s say we’re trying to simplify our environment.”

  Later that afternoon, sweating buckets, I stopped to strip off my soaked-through T-shirt and hose some of the grit off me. I stood there a moment, my mind blank, the scent of everything that lives and grows rising to my nostrils, the steady stream of the hose now dribbling from my fingertips, now distending my cheeks, when the front gate cranked open and Caitlin’s black Mercedes rolled up the drive and came to a silent, German-engineered halt beside me. I’d been hacking away at an ancient plumbago bush for the past half hour, and I wasn’t happy. It seemed wrong to destroy all this living beauty, deeply wrong, a desecration of the yard and the neighborhood and a violation of the principles I try to live by—I hadn’t started up a gardening business to maim and uproot things, after all. I wanted to nurture new growth. I wanted healing. Rebirth. All of that. Because I’d seen some bad times, especially with my second wife, and all I can say is thank God we didn’t have any children.

  Anyway, there I was and there she was, Caitlin, stepping out of the car with a panting dog at her heels (no, it wasn’t a Scottie or a black Lab, but a Hungarian puli that was so unrelievedly black it cut a moving hole out of the scenery). She lifted two bulging plastic sacks from the seat beside her—groceries—and I remember wondering if the chromatic obsession extended to foods too. There would be eggplant in one of those bags, I was thinking, vanilla ice cream in another, devil’s food cake, Béchamel, week-old bananas, coffee, Crisco … but inspiration began to fail me when I realized she was standing two feet from me, watching the water roll off my shoulders and find its snaking way down my chest and into the waist of my regulation black jeans.

  “Hi, Larry,” she murmured, smiling at me with as sweet an expression as you could expect from a woman with black-rimmed eyes and lips the color of a dead streetwalker’s. “How’s it going?”

  I tried to wipe every trace of irritation from my face—as I say, I wasn’t too pleased with what she and her sister were doing here, but I tried to put things in perspective. I’d had crazier clients by a long shot. There was Mrs. Boutilier du Plessy, for one, who had me dig a pond twenty feet across for a single goldfish she’d been handed by a stranger at the mall, and Frank and Alma Fortressi, who paid me to line the floor of their master bedroom with Visquine and then dump thirty bags of planting mix on top of it so I could plant peonies right at the foot of the bed. I smiled back at Caitlin. “A
ll right, I guess.”

  She shaded her eyes from the sun and squinted at me. “Is that sweat? All over you, I mean?”

  “It was,” I said, holding her eyes. I was remembering her as a child, black hair in braids, like Pocahontas, dimpled knees, the plain constricting chute of a little girl’s dress, but a dress that was pink or moss-green or Lake Tahoe blue. “I just hosed off.”

  “Hard work, huh?” she said, looking off over my shoulder as if she were addressing someone behind me. And then: “Can I get you something to drink?”

  “It wouldn’t be milk, would it?” I said, and she laughed.

  “No, no milk, I promise. I can give you juice, soda, beer—would you like a beer?”

  The dog sniffed at my leg—or at least I hope he was sniffing, since he was so black and matted you couldn’t tell which end of him was which. “A beer sounds real nice,” I said, “but I don’t know how you and your sister are supposed to feel about it—I mean, beer’s not white.” I let it go a beat. “Or black.”

  She held her smile, not fazed in the least. “For one thing,” she said, “Moira always takes a nap after lunch, so she won’t be involved. And for another”—she was looking right into my eyes now, the smile turned up a notch—“we only serve Guinness in this house.”

  We sat in the kitchen—black-and-white tile, white cabinets, black appliances—and had three bottles each while the sun slid across the windowpanes and the plumbago withered over its hacked and naked roots. I don’t know what it was—the beer, the time of day, the fact that she was there and listening—but I really opened up to her. I told her about Janine, my second wife, and how she picked at me all the time—I was never good enough for her, no matter what I did—and I got off on a tangent about a transformative experience I’d had in Hawaii, when I first realized I wanted to work with the earth, with the whole redemptive process of digging and planting, laying out flowerbeds, running drip lines, setting trees in the ground. (I was on top of Haleakala Crater, in the garden paradise of the world, and there was nothing but volcanic debris all around me, a whole sour landscape of petrified symbols. It was dawn and I hadn’t slept and Janine and I stood there in the wind, bleary tourists gazing out on all that nullity, and suddenly I understood what I wanted in life. I wanted things to be green, that was all. It was as simple as that.)

  Caitlin was a good listener, and I liked the way she tipped the glass back in delicate increments as she drank, her eyes shining and her free hand spread flat on the tabletop, as if we were at sea and she needed to steady herself. She kept pushing the hair away from her face and then leaning forward to let it dangle loose again, and whenever I touched on anything painful or sensitive (and practically everything about Janine fell into that category), a sympathetic little crease appeared between her eyebrows and she clucked her tongue as if there were something stuck to the roof of her mouth. After the second beer, we turned to less personal topics: the weather, gardening, people we knew in common. When we cracked the third, we began reminiscing about the lame, halt and oddball teachers we’d had in junior high and some of the more memorable disasters from those days, like the time it rained day and night for the better part of a week and boulders the size of Volkswagens rolled up out of the streambeds and into the passing lane of the freeway.

  I was having a good time, and good times had been in precious short supply since my divorce. I felt luxurious and calm. The shrubs, I figured, could wait until tomorrow—and the trees and the grass and the sky too. It was nice, for a change, to let the afternoon stretch itself over the window like a thin skin and not have to worry about a thing. I was drunk. Drunk at three in the afternoon, and I didn’t care. We’d just shared a laugh over Mr. Clemens, the English teacher who wore the same suit and tie every day for two years and pronounced poem as “poim,” when I set my glass down and asked Caitlin what I’d been wanting to ask since I first left my card in her mailbox six months back. “Listen, Caitlin,” I said, riding the exhilaration of that last echoing laugh, “I hope you won’t take this the wrong way, but what is it with the black and white business—I mean, is it some sort of political statement? A style? A religious thing?”

  She leaned back in her chair and made an effort to hold on to her smile. The dog lay asleep in the corner, as shabby and formless as an old alpaca coat slipped from a hanger. He let out a long, heaving sigh, lifted his head briefly, and then dropped it again. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said, “it’s a long story—”

  That was when Moira appeared, right on cue. She was wearing a gauzy white pantsuit she might have picked up at a beekeepers’ convention, and she hesitated at the kitchen door when she saw me sitting there with her sister and a thick black beer, but only for an instant. “Why, Vincent,” she said, more the governess than ever, “what a nice surprise.”

  The next morning, at eight, Walt Tremaine showed up with seven black men in white jeans, black T-shirts and white caps and enough heavy machinery to take down every tree within half a mile before lunch. “And how are you this fine morning, Mr. Vincent Larry,” he said, “—or is it Larry Vincent?”

  I blew the steam off a cup of McDonalds’s coffee and worked my tongue round the remnants of an Egg McMuffin. “Just call me Larry,” I said. “It’s her,” I added, by way of explanation. “Moira, the older one. I mean, she’s … well, I don’t have to tell you—I’m sure you can draw your own conclusions.”

  Walt Tremaine planted his feet and wrapped his arms round his chest. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said, waxing philosophical as his crew scuttled past us with ropes, chainsaws, blowers and trimmers. “Sometimes I wish I could get a little simplicity in my life, if you know what I mean. Up in a tree half the day, sawdust in my hair, and when I come home to my wife she expects me to mow the lawn and break out the hedge clippers.” He looked down at his feet and then out across the lawn. “Hell, I’d like to pave my yard over too.”

  I was going to say I know what you mean, because that’s the sort of thing you say in a situation like that, but that would have implied agreement, and I didn’t agree, not at all. So I just shrugged noncommittally and watched Walt Tremaine’s eyes follow his climbers up the biggest, oldest and most venerable oak in the yard.

  Later, when the tree was in pieces and the guy I’d hired for the day and I had rototilled the lawn and raked the dying fragments into three top-heavy piles the size of haystacks, Moira, in her beekeeper’s regalia, appeared with a pitcher of milk and a tray of Oreo cookies. It was four in the afternoon, the yard was raw with dirt, and the air shrieked with the noise of Walt Tremaine’s shredder as his men fed it the remains of the oak’s crown. The other two oaks, smaller but no less grand, had been decapitated preparatory to taking them down, and the tea tree had been relieved of its limbs. All in all, it looked as if a bomb had hit the yard while miraculously sparing the house (white, of course, with whiter trim and a dead black roof). I watched Moira circulate among the bewildered sweating men of Walt Tremaine’s crew, pouring out milk, offering cookies.

  When she got around to me and Greg (black jeans, white T-shirt, black cap, white skin), she let her smile waver and flutter twice across her lips before settling in. We were taking a hard-earned break, stretched out in comfort on the last besieged patch of grass and trying to muster the energy to haul all that yellowing turf out to my pickup. We’d really humped it all afternoon, so caught up in the rhythm of destruction we never even stopped for a drink from the hose, but we couldn’t help but look guilty now—you always do when the client catches you on your rear end. I introduced her to Greg, who didn’t bother to get up.

  “I’m very pleased to meet you,” she said, and Greg just grunted in return, already tucking a cookie inside his cheek. I passed on the cookies myself, and the milk too—I was beginning to resent being reduced to a figure in some crazy composition. She smiled at me, though, a full-on interplanetary dreamer’s smile that really made me wonder if there was anyone home, at least for that instant, and then she turned back to Greg. “You’re, uh,
how can I put this?” she murmured, studying his deeply tanned face and arms. “You’re not Mexican, by any chance, are you?”

  Greg looked surprised and maybe a bit shocked too—she might as well have asked him if he was a Zulu. He gave me a quick glance, then shifted his gaze to Moira. “My last name’s Sorenson,” he said, struggling to keep his voice under control, and he took off his cap to show her the blond highlights in his hair. He replaced the cap indignantly and held out his arms. “I’m a surfer,” he said, “every chance I get. This is what’s known as a tan.”

  I watched the sun touch her hair as she straightened up with the tray and struggled with her smile. She must bleach her hair, I was thinking, because nobody under seventy has hair that white—and it was amazing hair, white right on through to the scalp, sheep-white, bone-white, paper-white—when she squared her shoulders and looked down at Greg as if he were some panting animal she’d discovered in a cage at the zoo. “Well, that’s nice,” she said finally. “Very nice. It’s a nice sport. Will you be working here long? For us, I mean?”

  “We’ll be done this time tomorrow, Moira,” I said, cutting in before Greg could say something I might wind up regretting. “We’ve just got to rake out the lawn—the dirt, that is—for the blacktop guy, and take out the rest of the Pittosporum under the tea tree. Walt Tremaine and his people are going to need two more days.”

  Moira wavered on the cusp of this news, the gauzy beekeeper’s outfit inflating with a sudden breath of wind. She held the tray of milk and cookies rigidly before her, and I noticed her hands for the first time, a young woman’s hands, sleek and unlined, the fingernails heavily enamelled in cake-frosting white. “Vincent,” she said after a moment, raising her voice to be heard over the dopplering whine of the shredder out on the street, “could I have a word with you in private?” She moved off then without waiting for an answer, and I was left to push myself up and tag after her, like the hired help I was.