T.C. Boyle Stories

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  “… nothing at all,” her husband says below. “I think I counted eighty-six or -seven birds … uh-huh, uh-huh … yeah, well, you going to try again?”

  She doesn’t have to listen to the rest—she already knows what the county supervisor is saying on the other end of the line, the smooth, reasonable politician’s voice pouring honey into the receiver, talking of cost overruns, uncooperative weather, the little unpleasantries in life we just have to learn to live with. Egon will be discouraged, she knows that. Over the past few weeks he’s become increasingly touchy, the presence of the birds an ongoing ache, an open wound, an obsession. “It’s not bad enough that the drought withered the soybeans last summer or that the damned government is cutting out price supports for feed corn,” he’d shouted one night after paying the Bird Man his daily fee. “Now I can’t even enjoy the one stand of trees on my property. Christ,” he roared, “I can’t even sit down to dinner without the taste of bird piss in my mouth.” Then he’d turned to her, his face flushed, hands shaking with rage, and she’d quietly reminded him what the doctor had said about his blood pressure. He poured himself a drink and looked at her with drooping eyes. “Have I done something to deserve this, Mai?” he said.

  Poor Egon, she thinks. He lets things upset him so. Of course the birds are a nuisance, she’ll admit that now, but what about the man with the distress calls and the helicopters and firemen and all the rest? She tilts back the bottle of cough syrup, thinking she ought to call him in and tell him to take it easy, forget about it. In a month or so, when the leaves start to come in, the flock will break up and head north: why kill yourself over nothing? That’s what she wants to tell him, but when she calls his name her voice cracks and the cough comes up on her again, racking, relentless, worse than before. She lets the spasm pass, then calls his name again. There is no answer.

  It is then that she hears the sputter of the chainsaw somewhere beyond the window. She listens to the keening whine of the blade as it engages wood—a sound curiously like the starling distress call—and then the dry heaving crash of the first tree.

  1890

  An utter stillness permeates the Tuxedo Club, a hush bred of money and privilege, a soothing patrician quiet insisted upon by the arrases and thick damask curtains, bound up in the weave of the rugs, built into the very walls. Eugene Schiefflin, dilettante, portraitist, man of leisure, and amateur ornithologist, sits before the marble fireplace, leafing through the Oologist Monthly and sipping meditatively at a glass of sherry. The red-eyed vireo, he reads, nests twice a year, both sexes participating in the incubation of the eggs. The eggs, two to four in number, are white with brown maculations at the larger extremity, and measure 5/16 by 2/3 of an inch…. When his glass is empty, he raises a single languid finger and the waiter appears with a replacement, removes the superfluous glass, and vanishes, the whole operation as instantaneous and effortless as an act of the will.

  Despite appearances to the contrary—the casually crossed legs, the proprietary air, the look of dignity and composure stamped into the seams of his face—Eugene is agitated. His eyes give him away. They leap from the page at the slightest movement in the doorway, and then surreptitiously drop to his waistcoat pocket to examine the face of the gold watch he produces each minute or so. He is impatient, concerned. His brother Maunsell is half an hour late already—has he forgotten their appointment? That would be just like him, damn it. Irritated, Eugene lights a cigar and begins drumming his fingertips on the arm of the chair while the windows go gray with dusk.

  At sixty-three, with his great drooping mustache and sharp, accipiter’s nose, Eugene Schiefflin is a salient and highly regarded figure in New York society. Always correct, a master of manners and a promoter of culture and refinement, a fixture of both the Society List and the Club Register, he is in great demand as commencement speaker and dinner guest. His grandfather, a cagey, backbiting immigrant, had made a fortune in the wholesale drug business, and his father, a lawyer, had encouraged that fortune to burgeon and flower like some clinging vine, the scent of money as sweet as jasmine. Eugene himself went into business when he was just out of college, but he soon lost interest. A few years later he married an heiress from Brooklyn and retired to hold forth at the Corinthian Yacht Club, listen to string quartets, and devote himself to his consuming passions—painting, Shakespeare, and the study of birds.

  It wasn’t until he was nearly fifty, however, that he had his awakening, his epiphany, the moment that brought the disparate threads of his life together and infused them with import and purpose. He and Maunsell were sitting before the fire one evening in his apartment at Madison and Sixty-fifth, reading aloud from Romeo and Juliet. Maunsell, because his voice was pitched higher, was reading Juliet, and Eugene, Romeo. “Wilt thou be gone?” Maunsell read, “it is not yet near day: / It was the nightingale, and not the lark, / That pierc’d the fearful hollow of thine ear.” The iambs tripped in his head, and suddenly Eugene felt as if he’d been suffused with light, electrocuted, felt as if Shakespeare’s muse had touched him with lambent inspiration. He jumped up, kicking over his brandy and spilling the book to the floor. “Maunsell,” he shouted, “Maunsell, that’s it!”

  His brother looked up at him, alarmed and puzzled. He made an interrogatory noise.

  “The nightingale,” Eugene said, “and, and … woodlarks, siskins, linnets, chaffinches—and whatever else he mentions!”

  “What? Who?”

  “Shakespeare, of course. The greatest poet—the greatest man—of all time. Don’t you see? This will be our enduring contribution to culture; this is how we’ll do our little bit to enrich the lives of all the generations of Americans to come—”

  Maunsell’s mouth had dropped open. He looked like a classics scholar who’s just been asked to identify the members of the Chicago White Stockings. “What in Christ’s name are you talking about?”

  “We’re going to form the American Acclimatization Society, Maunsell, here and now—and we’re going to import and release every species of bird—every last one—mentioned in the works of the Bard of Avon.

  That was thirteen years ago.

  Now, sitting in the main room of the Tuxedo Club and waiting for his brother, Eugene has begun to show his impatience. He jerks round in his seat, pats at his hair, fiddles with his spats. He is imbibing his fourth sherry and examining a table enumerating the stomach contents of three hundred and fifty-nine bay-breasted warblers when he looks up to see Maunsell in the vestibule, shrugging out of his overcoat and handing his hat and cane over to the limp little fellow in the cloakroom.

  “Well?” Eugene says, rising to greet him. “Any news?”

  Maunsell’s face is flushed with the sting of the March wind. “Yes,” he says, “yes,” the timbre of his voice instantly soaked up in the drapes and rugs and converted to a whisper. “She’s on schedule as far as they know, and all incoming ships have reported clear weather and moderate seas.”

  Any irritation Eugene may have shown earlier has vanished from his face. He is grinning broadly, the dead white corners of his mustache lifted in exultation, gold teeth glittering. “That’s the best news I’ve heard all week,” he says. “Tomorrow morning, then?”

  Maunsell nods. “Tomorrow morning.”

  At eight the following morning, the two brothers, in top hats and fur-lined overcoats, are perched, anxiously on the edge of the broad leather seat of Maunsell’s carriage, peering out at the tapering length of the Fourteenth Street pier and the Cunard steamer edging into the slips. Half an hour later they are on deck, talking animatedly with a man so short, pale, and whiskerless he could be mistaken for a schoolboy. It is overcast, windy, raw, the temperature lurking just below the freezing mark. “They seem to have held up pretty well, sir,” the little fellow is shouting into the wind. “Considering the Cunard people made me keep them in the hold.”

  “What? In the hold?” Both brothers look as if they’ve been slapped, indignation and disbelief bugging their eyes, mad wisps of sil
ver hair foaming over their ears, hands clutching savagely at the brims of their hats.

  “’Loive cargo goes in the ‘old,’” the little fellow says, his voice pinched in mockery, “’and Oy’m vewy sowwy, Oy am, but them’s the regelations.’” He breaks into a grin. “Oh, it was awful down there—cold, and with all those horses stamping and whinnying and the dogs barking it’s a wonder any of the birds made it at all.”

  “It’s a damned outrage,” Eugene sputters, and Maunsell clucks his tongue. “How many did you say made it, Doodson?”

  “Well, as you’ll see for yourself in a minute, sir, the news is both good and bad. Most of the thrushes and skylarks came through all right, but there was a heavy mortality among the nightingales—and I’ve got just three pairs still alive. But the starlings, I’ll tell you, they’re a hardy bird. Didn’t lose a one, not a single one.”

  Eugene looks relieved. In what has become a reflex gesture over the past few days, he consults his pocket watch and then looks up at Doodson. “Yes, they’re a glorious creature, aren’t they?”

  Maunsell directs the driver to Central Park East—Fifth and Sixty-fifth—and then settles back in the seat beside his brother. Two cabs fall in behind them, the first containing Doodson and a portion of the transatlantic aviary, the second packed to the roof with bird cages. There is the steady adhesive clap of hoofs, the rattling of the springs. Eugene glances over his shoulder to reassure himself that the cabs—and birds—are still there, and then turns to his brother, beaming, his fingers tapping at the stiff crown of the hat in his lap, an aureole of hair radiating from his head. “When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding; / Sweet lovers love the spring,” he recites with a laugh, unscrewing the cap of his flask and nudging Maunsell. “I think we’ve really got it this time,” he says, laughing again, the sound of his voice softening the cold clatter of the coach. “I can feel it in my bones.”

  Outwardly, his mood is confident—celebratory, even—but in fact his high hopes are tempered by the Acclimatization Society’s history of failure over the course of the thirteen years since its inception. Eugene has released thrushes, skylarks, and nightingales time and again. He has released siskins, woodlarks, and common cuckoos. All have failed. Inexplicably, the seed populations disappeared without a trace, as if they’d been sucked up in a vacuum or blown back to Europe. But Eugene Schiefflin is not a man to give up easily—oh no. This time he’s got a new ace in the hole, Sturnus vulgaris, the starling. Certainly not the Bard’s favorite bird—in all the countless lines of all the sonnets, histories, comedies, and tragedies it is mentioned only once—but legitimate to the enterprise nonetheless. And hardy. Doodson’s report has got to be looked upon as auspicious: not a single bird lost in the crossing. It’s almost too good to be true.

  He is musing with some satisfaction on the unexpected beauty of the bird—the stunning metallic sheen of the plumage and the pale butter pat of the beak revealed to him through the mesh of the cage—when the carriage pulls up along the curb opposite the park. Before the percussive echo of the horses’ hoofs has faded, Eugene is out of the carriage and shouting directions to Doodson, the two cabbies, and Maunsell’s driver. In one hand he clutches a pry bar; in the other, a bottle of Moët et Chandon. “All right,” he calls, rigorous as a field marshal. “I want the cages laid side by side underneath those elms over there.” And then he strikes out across the grass, Maunsell bringing up the rear with three long-stemmed glasses.

  It is still cold, a crust of ice stretched over the puddles in the street, the cabbies’ breath clouding their faces as they bend to negotiate the wooden cages. “Here,” Eugene barks, striding across the field and waving his arm impatiently, “hurry it along, will you?” Well-tipped, but muttering nonetheless, the cabbies struggle with one cage while Doodson—his nose red with cold and excitement-helps Maunsell’s chauffeur with another. Within minutes all eight cages are arranged in parallel rows beneath the elms, laid out like coffins, and Eugene has begun his customary rambling speech outlining his and the society’s purposes, eulogizing Shakespeare and reciting quotations relevant to the caged species. As he stoops to pry the lid from the first cage of thrushes, he shouts out an injunction from Hamlet: “Unpeg the baskets on the house’s top,” he calls, liberating the birds with a magisterial sweep of his arm, “Let the birds fly.”

  The cabbies, paid and dismissed, linger at a respectful distance to watch the mad ceremony. Deliberate, methodical, the old fellow in the top hat and silk muffler leans down to remove the tops of the cages and release the birds. There is a rustle of wings, a cry or two, and then the appearance of the first few birds, emerging at random and flapping aimlessly into the branches of the nearest tree. The pattern is repeated with each box in succession, until the old man draws up to the single remaining cage, the cage of starlings. The other old fellow, the rickety one with the drawn face and staring eyes, steps forward with the glasses, and then there’s the sound of a cork popping. “A toast,” the first one shouts, and they’re raising their glasses, all three of them, the two old duffers and the young cub with the red nose. “May these humble creatures, brought here with goodwill and high expectation, breed and prosper and grace the land with beauty and song.”

  “Hear, hear!” call the others, and the chauffeur as well, though he hasn’t been offered any wine.

  Behind the mesh of their cage, the big dull birds crouch in anticipation, stuffed like blackbirds in a pie, their voices wheezing with a sound of metal on metal. The cabbies shake their heads. A cold wind tosses the dead black limbs of the trees. Then the old gentleman bends to the cage at his feet, his hair shining in the pale sunlight, and there is a sudden startling explosion as the birds stream from the opening as if propelled, feathers rasping, wings tearing at the air, a single many-voiced shriek of triumph issuing from their throats. En masse, almost in precision formation, they wheel past the spectators like a flock of pigeons, and then, banking against the sun, they wing off over the trees, looking for a place to roost.

  (1981)

  THE ARCTIC EXPLORER

  I. DAY

  Departure

  Posing in full dress uniform at the bow of the little brig Endeavor, rigid as the mast looming behind him, he raises a stiff arm in acknowledgment of the small send-off parties spotting the Kings’ shore of the Narrows. With his perfect posture, immaculate uniform and manicured mustache, he looks very much the Hero, a reincarnated admixture of Henry Hudson, John Paul Jones and El Cid.

  His solemn eyes scan the bandless, bannerless shore. A paltry crowd, he reflects, for an occasion so momentous. After all, he is sailing cheekily off into the frigid unknown, beyond the reaches of men’s maps, to probe regions whose very existence is but rumor. Yet such, he supposes, is the lot of Heroes: all but ignored by the self-satisfied Present, revered by Posterity. Glebe cows. If it were up to them Kentucky would be a wilderness still.

  Beyond the Narrows, the open Atlantic, rolling pleasantly underfoot to a gentle June breeze. Captain John Pennington Frank (M.D., U.S.N.) breathes deeply, closes his eyes, and removes his cap to let the Seabreeze tickle through his hair. As he does so, the last spangles of confetti are sucked up in the wind and shot away to starboard (this the confetti that his mother and two unmarried sisters had solemnly flung at him just half an hour earlier when the brig had been launched at the Brooklyn Naval Yard). Like Ishmael too long a-land, he feels the salt breeze raking up all the old sailor’s pluck: Ah! The Open Sea! Adventure! Man against the Elements! It is then that the brig pitches forward and an icy slap intrudes itself upon the Captain’s meditations. His eyelids snap-to like the surprise of a stroke and he lurches forward against the rail: the cap sails out from his hand in a graceful arc, to be sucked down by the frothing waves below. When he recovers himself he glances furtively about before digging out the handkerchief, thankful that none of the crew had been watching. The ceremonies over, and the voyage begun, the Captain retires to his cabin, where the crisp and neatly lined pages of the logbook await hi
m.

  Of course he knows nothing as yet of the Arctic Night.

  Captain’s Log, June 2

  Set sail from NY Harbor at 1100 hours Eastern Time. Momma, Evangeline and Euphonia saw us off with a not inconsiderable crowd. As we passed the Narrows, quite ten thousand I should think turned out to cheer us. It was heartening thus to witness the deep reverence and goodwill the people of this great nation show for our venture.

  My party consists of fifteen: eight officers (myself included); five crewmen; Phillip Blackwark, cook; and Harlan Hawkins, cabin boy. Our stores include a large supply of navy ration salt beef and pork, hard biscuit, flour, some barrels of exsiccated potato, two thousand pounds of pemmican, a quantity of dried fruits, and twelve barrels of pickled cabbage. (Surreptitiously, I laid in a supply of party hats and whistles, to cheer the men during our winter confinement.) It is my expectation to reach the northern coast of Newfoundland by the twentieth. There we will supplement our stores with a few sides of fresh beef, God and Governor Pickpie willing.

  Glut at Anoatuk

  Kresuk’s bare chest is bespattered with blood, his face a smear, the oily black hair at his cheeks congealed with blood and birdfat. His incisors dig at the purple vein along the breastbone, his lips suck at the tatters of pink flesh still clinging to the pink ribs. As he gnaws, the denuded breast and its few dangling particles flap flat against his greasy knuckles. The remains of nine eider-ducks lie beside his bare thigh, a wet neck and ribcage beneath it. His right nostril is crammed white with fat and bits of raw meat.