It was an irrational attitude—again, childish—and Felicia convinced me to pack up a few personal items (my high school yearbook, my reggae albums, a signed first edition of For Whom the Bell Tolls, a pair of deer antlers I’d found in the woods when I was eight) and move into a place on the ocean for a few days. We drove along the coast road at a slow, stately pace, looking over this house or that, until we finally settled on a grand modern place that was all angles and glass and broad sprawling decks. I got lucky and caught a few perch in the surf, and we barbecued them on the beach and watched the sun sink into the western bluffs.
The next few days were idyllic, and we thought about little beyond love and food and the way the water felt on our skin at one hour of the day or another, but still, the question of Sarai nagged at me. I was reminded of her every time I wanted a cold drink, for instance, or when the sun set and we had to make do with candles and kerosene lanterns—we’d have to go out and dig up another generator, we knew that, but they weren’t exactly in demand in a place like Santa Barbara (in the old days, that is) and we didn’t know where to look. And so yes, I couldn’t shake the image of Sarai and the look on her face and the things she’d said and done. And I missed my house, because I’m a creature of habit, like anybody else. Or more so. Definitely more so.
Anyway, the solution came to us a week later, and it came in human form—at least it appeared in human form, but it was a miracle and no doubt about it. Felicia and I were both on the beach—naked, of course, as naked and without shame or knowledge of it as Eve and Adam—when we saw a figure marching resolutely up the long curving finger of sand that stretched away into the haze of infinity. As the figure drew closer, we saw that it was a man, a man with a scraggly salt-and-pepper beard and hair the same color trailing away from a bald spot worn into his crown. He was dressed in hiking clothes, big-grid boots, a bright blue pack riding his back like a second set of shoulders. We stood there, naked, and greeted him.
“Hello,” he said, stopping a few feet from us and staring first at my face, then at Felicia’s breasts, and finally, with an effort, bending to check the laces of his boots. “Glad to see you two made it,” he said, speaking to the sand.
“Likewise,” I returned.
Over lunch on the deck—shrimp salad sandwiches on Felicia-baked bread—we traded stories. It seems he was hiking in the mountains when the pestilence descended—“The mountains?” I interrupted. “Whereabouts?”
“Oh,” he said, waving a dismissive hand, “up in the Sierras, just above this little town—you’ve probably never heard of it—Fish Fry Flats?”
I let him go on a while, explaining how he’d lost his girlfriend and wandered for days before he finally came out on a mountain road and appropriated a car to go on down to Los Angeles—“One big cemetery”—and how he’d come up the coast and had been wandering ever since. I don’t think I’ve ever felt such exhilaration, such a rush of excitement, such perfect and inimitable a sense of closure.
I couldn’t keep from interrupting him again. “I’m clairvoyant,” I said, raising my glass to the man sitting opposite me, to Felicia and her breasts, to the happy fishes in the teeming seas and the birds flocking without number in the unencumbered skies. “Your name’s Howard, right?”
Howard was stunned. He set down his sandwich and wiped a fleck of mayonnaise from his lips. “How did you guess?” he said, gaping up at me out of eyes that were innocent and pure, the newest eyes in the world.
I just smiled and shrugged, as if it were my secret. “After lunch,” I said, “I’ve got somebody I want you to meet.”
A Note on the Author
T.C. Boyle’s novels include World’s End, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, The Tortilla Curtain, Riven Rock, A Friend of the Earth, Drop City (which was a finalist for the National Book Awards), The Inner Circle and, most recently, When the Killing’s Done. His short story collections include Tooth and Claw and Wild Child, and his stories appear regularly in most major magazines, including the New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, Granta and the Paris Review. His work has been translated into twenty-five languages.
T.C. Boyle was recently inducted into the Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in California.
Also available by T. C. Boyle
Talk Talk
Dana sits in a courtroom with her legs shackled as a long list of charges is read out. But there has been a terrible mistake – she didn’t commit any of these crimes. She and her lover Bridger set out to clear her name and find the person who is living a blameless life of criminal excess at her expense.
The Inner Circle
In 1939 on the campus of Indiana University, a revolution has begun. The stir is caused by Alfred Kinsey, a zoologist who, behind closed doors, is a sexual enthusiast of the highest order and as a member of his ‘inner circle’ of researchers, freshman John Milk is called on to participate in experiments that become increasingly uninhibited...
Tooth and Claw
This collection of short stories finds Boyle at his mercurial best. Inventive, wickedly funny, sometimes disturbing, these are stories about drop-outs, deadbeats and kooks. With a unique deftness of touch and a keen eye for the telling detail, Boyle has mapped the strange underworld of America.
A Friend of the Earth
It’s 2025, and ex-eco-terrorist Ty Tierwater is eking out a bleak living in California, managing a pop-star’s private zoo, vital for the cloning of some of the last surviving species in the world. Now, when he’s just trying to survive in a world cursed by storm and drought, his wife Andrea returns to his life.
Drop City
Star has travelled to Drop City to be free from society’s constraints, but when the hippies decamp to the wilds of Alaska where they intend to live off the land, the group runs into trouble, unexpected friendships are made and dangerous enemies are born.
East is East
Hiro Tanaka impetuously jumps off a boat near the coast of Georgia, only to wash up on a barrier island populated by rednecks, descendants of black slaves and a colony of crazed artists. Tanaka is caught up in a hilarious and complicated spider’s web of misunderstandings. And his sole place of refuge on the island only sinks him deeper...
Riven Rock
Shortly after marrying Katherine, Stanley McCormick suffers a nervous breakdown, is diagnosed with a tormenting sex mania and is imprisoned in the forbidding mansion known as Riven Rock. Stanley is confined for the next twenty years, yet Katherine remains strong in her belief that one day he will return to her whole.
World’s End
Walter is a dreamer, and a lover of drugs, alcohol and speeding on his motorbike, until he crashes into a barrier and loses his right foot. Walter is a descendant of Dutch yeomen and since the day of the accident he has been haunted by their ghosts and becomes determined to find his father who deserted his family years ago, and to uncover the secrets of his ancestors.
Visit Bloomsbury.com for more about T.C. Boyle
By the Same Author
Novels
When the Killing’s Done
The Women
Talk Talk
Tooth & Claw
The Inner Circle
Drop City
A Friend of the Earth
Riven Rock
The Tortilla Curtain
The Road to Wellville
East Is East
World’s End
Budding Prospects
Water Music
Short Stories
Wild Child
Tooth and Claw
The Human Fly
T.C. Boyle Stories
Without a Hero
If the River Was Whiskey
Greasy Lake
Descent of Man
First published in Great Britain 2001
This electronic edition published in 2002 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following magazines, in which these stories first appeared: Esquire, “Peep Hall”; GQ, �
�Death of the Cool”; Granta, “Rust”; The New Yorker, “She Wasn’t Soft,”
“Killing Babies,” “Captured by the Indians” and “The Underground Gardens”; The Paris Review, “Going Down’; Playboy, “Termination Dust,” “The Black and White Sisters,” and “After the Plague.” “Killing Babies” also appeared in The Best American Stories 1997, edited by E. Annie Proulx (Houghton Mifflin); “The Underground Gardens,’ in Prize Stories 1999: The O. Henry Awards, edited by Larry Dark (Anchor Books); “The Love of My Life,” in Prize Stories 2001: The O. Henry Awards, edited by Larry Dark (Anchor Books); and “Mexico,” in somewhat different form, in T. C. Boyle Stories (Penguin).
Copyright © T. Coraghessan Boyle
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved
You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise
make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means
(including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying,
printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the
publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 36 Soho Square, London W1D 3QY
Bloomsbury Publishing, London, Berlin and New York
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 4088 2682 9
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After the Plague: And Other Stories Page 34