After the Plague

by T. C. Boyle

  It was snowing pretty steadily, six inches on the ground at least, and it muffled my footsteps as I worked my way around the cabin to the back window. The night was absolute, the sky so close it was breathing for me, in and out, in and out, and the snow held everything in the grip of silence. A candle was burning in the back window—I could tell it was a candle from the way the light wavered even before I got there—and I heard the music then, violins all playing in unison, the sort of thing I wouldn’t have expected from a lowlife like Bud, and voices, a low, intimate murmur of voices. That almost stopped me right there, that whispery blur of Jordy’s voice and the deeper resonance of Bud’s, and for a moment everything hung in the balance. A part of me wanted to back away from that window, creep back to the canoe, and forget all about it. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I’d seen her first—I’d squeezed her hand and given her the corsage and admired the hand-lettered nametag—and it wasn’t right. The murmur of those voices rose up in my head like a scream, and there was nothing more to think about.

  My shoulder hit the back door just above the latch and blew the thing off the hinges like it was a toy, and there I was, breathing hard and white to the eyebrows. I saw them in the bed together and heard this little birdlike cry from Jordy and a curse from Bud, and then the dog came hurtling in from the front room as if he’d been launched from a cannon. (And I should say here that I like dogs and that I’ve never lifted a finger to hurt any dog I’ve ever owned, but I had to put this one down. I didn’t have any choice.) I caught him as he left the floor and slammed him into the wall behind me till he collapsed in a heap. Jordy was screaming now, actually screaming, and you would have thought that I was the bad guy, but I tried to calm her, her arms bare and the comforter pulled up over her breasts and Bud’s plastic feet set there like slippers on the floor, telling her a mile a minute that I’d protect her, it was all right, and I’d see that Bud was prosecuted to the fullest extent, the fullest extent, but then Bud was fumbling under the mattress for something like the snake he was, and I took hold of his puny slip of a wrist with the blue-black .38 Special in it and just squeezed till his other hand came up and I caught that one and squeezed it too.

  Jordy made a bolt for the other room and I could see she was naked, and I knew right then he must have raped her because there was no way she’d ever consent to anything with a slime like that, not Jordy, not my Jordy, and the thought of what Bud had done to her made me angry. The gun was on the floor now and I kicked it under the bed and let go of Bud’s wrists and shut up his stream of curses and vile foul language with a quick stab to the bridge of his nose, and it was almost like a reflex. He went limp under the force of that blow and I was upset, I admit it, I was furious over what he’d done to that girl, and it just seemed like the most natural thing in the world to reach out and put a little pressure on his throat till the raw-looking stumps of his legs lay still on the blanket.

  That was when I became aware of the music again, the violins swelling up and out of a black plastic boombox on the shelf till they filled the room and the wind blew through the doorway and the splintered door groaned on its broken latch. Jordy, I was thinking, Jordy needs me, needs me to get her out of this, and I went into the front room to tell her about the snow and how it was coming down out of season and what that meant. She was crouched in the corner across from the stove and her face was wet and she was shivering. Her sweater was clutched up around her neck, and she’d got one leg of her jeans on, but the other leg was bare, sculpted bare and white all the way from her little painted toenails to the curve of her thigh and beyond. It was a hard moment. And I tried to explain to her, I did. “Look outside,” I said. “Look out there into the night. You see that?”

  She lifted her chin then and looked, out beyond the doorway to the back room, beyond Bud on his bed and the dog on the floor and into the gaping hole where the door had been. And there it was, coming down like the end of everything, snow, and there was only one name for it now. I tried to tell her that. Because we weren’t going anywhere.

  She Wasn’t Soft

  She wasn’t tender, she wasn’t soft, she wasn’t sweetly yielding or coquettish, and she was nobody’s little woman and never would be. That had been her mother’s role, and look at the sad sack of neuroses and alcoholic dysfunction she’d become. And her father. He’d been the pasha of the living room, the sultan of the kitchen, and the emperor of the bedroom, and what had it got him? A stab in the chest, a tender liver, and two feet that might as well have been stumps. Paula Turk wasn’t born for that sort of life, with its domestic melodrama and greedy sucking babies—no, she was destined for something richer and more complex, something that would define and elevate her, something great. She wanted to compete and she wanted to win—always, shining before her like some numinous icon was the glittering image of triumph. And whenever she flagged, whenever a sniffle or the flu ate at her reserves and she hit the wall in the numbing waters of the Pacific or the devilish winds at the top of San Marcos Pass, she pushed herself through it, drove herself with an internal whip that accepted no excuses and made no allowances for the limitations of the flesh. She was twenty-eight years old, and she was going to conquer the world.

  On the other hand, Jason Barre, the thirty-three-year-old surf-and-dive shop proprietor she’d been seeing pretty steadily over the past nine months, didn’t really seem to have the fire of competition in him. Both his parents were doctors (and that, as much as anything, had swayed Paula in his favor when they first met), and they’d set him up in his own business, a business that had continuously lost money since its grand opening three years ago. When the waves were breaking, Jason would be at the beach, and when the surf was flat he’d be stationed behind the counter on his tall swivel stool, selling wax remover to bleached-out adolescents who said things like “gnarly” and “killer” in their penetrating adenoidal tones. Jason liked to surf, and he liked to breathe the cigarette haze in sports bars, a permanent sleepy-eyed, widemouthed California grin on his face, flip-flops on his feet, and his waist encircled by a pair of faded baggy shorts barely held in place by the gentle sag of his belly and the twin anchors of his hipbones.

  That was all right with Paula. She told him he should quit smoking, cut down on his drinking, but she didn’t harp on it. In truth, she really didn’t care all that much—one world-beater in a relationship was enough. When she was in training, which was all the time now, she couldn’t help feeling a kind of moral superiority to anyone who wasn’t—and Jason most emphatically wasn’t. He was no threat, and he didn’t want to be—his mind just didn’t work that way. He was cute, that was all, and just as she got a little frisson of pleasure from the swell of his paunch beneath the oversized T-shirt and his sleepy eyes and his laid-back ways, he admired her for her drive and the lean, hard triumph of her beauty and her strength. She never took drugs or alcohol—or hardly ever—but he convinced her to try just a puff or two of marijuana before they made love, and it seemed to relax her, open up her pores till she could feel her nerve ends poking through them, and their love-making was like nothing she’d ever experienced, except maybe breaking the tape at the end of the twenty-six-mile marathon.

  It was a Friday night in August, half past seven, the sun hanging in the window like a piñata, and she’d just stepped out of the shower after a two-hour tuneup for Sunday’s triathlon, when the phone rang. Jason’s voice came over the wire, low and soft. “Hey, babe,” he said, breathing into the phone like a sex maniac (he always called her babe, and she loved it, precisely because she wasn’t a babe and never would be—it was their little way of mocking the troglodytes molded into the barstools beside him). “Listen, I was just wondering if you might want to join me down at Clubber’s for a while. Yeah, I know, you need your sleep and the big day’s the day after tomorrow and Zinny Bauer’s probably already asleep, but how about it. Come on. It’s my birthday.”

  “Your birthday? I thought your birthday was in December?”

  There was the ghost of a pa
use during which she could detect the usual wash of background noise, drunken voices crying out as if from the netherworld, the competing announcers of the six different games unfolding simultaneously on the twelve big-screen TVs, the insistent pulse of the jukebox thumping faintly beneath it all. “No,” he said, “my birthday’s today, August twenty-sixth—it is. I don’t know where you got the idea it was in December … but come on, babe, don’t you have to load up on carbohydrates?”

  She did. She admitted it. “I was going to make pancakes and penne,” she said, “with a little cheese sauce and maybe a loaf of that brown-and-serve bread… .”

  “I’ll take you to the Pasta Bowl, all you can eat—and I swear I’ll have you back by eleven.” He lowered his voice. “And no sex, I know—I wouldn’t want to drain you or anything.”

  She wasn’t soft because she ran forty-five miles a week, biked two hundred and fifty, and slashed through fifteen thousand yards of the crawl in the Baños del Mar pool. She was in the best shape of her life, and Sunday’s event was nothing, less than half the total distance of the big one—the Hawaii Ironman—in October. She wasn’t soft because she’d finished second in the women’s division last year in Hawaii and forty-fourth over all, beating out a thousand three hundred and fifty other contestants, twelve hundred of whom, give or take a few, were men. Like Jason. Only fitter. A whole lot fitter.

  She swung by Clubber’s to pick him up—he wasn’t driving, not since his last D.U.I., anyway—and though parking was no problem, she had to endure the stench of cigarettes and the faint sour odor of yesterday’s vomit while he finished his cocktail and wrapped up his ongoing analysis of the Dodgers’ chances with an abstract point about a blister on somebody or other’s middle finger. The guy they called Little Drake, white-haired at thirty-six and with a face that reminded her of one of those naked drooping dogs, leaned out of his Hawaiian shirt and into the radius of Jason’s gesticulating hands as if he’d never heard such wisdom in his life. And Paula? She stood there at the bar in her shorts and Lycra halter top, sucking an Evian through a straw while the sports fans furtively admired her pecs and lats and the hard hammered musculature of her legs, for all the world a babe. She didn’t mind. In fact, it made her feel luminous and alive, not to mention vastly superior to all those pale lumps of flesh sprouting out of the corners like toadstools and the sagging abrasive girlfriends who hung on their arms and tried to feign interest in whatever sport happened to be on the tube.

  But somebody was talking to her, Little Drake, it was Little Drake, leaning across Jason and addressing her as if she were one of them. “So Paula,” he was saying. “Paula?”

  She swivelled her head toward him, hungry now, impatient. She didn’t want to hang around the bar and schmooze about Tommy Lasorda and O.J. and Proposition 187 and how Phil Aguirre had broken both legs and his collarbone in the surf at Rincon; she wanted to go to the Pasta Bowl and carbo-load. “Yes?” she said, trying to be civil, for Jason’s sake.

  “You going to put them to shame on Sunday, or what?”

  Jason was snubbing out his cigarette in the ashtray, collecting his money from the bar. They were on their way out the door—in ten minutes she’d be forking up fettucine or angel hair with black olives and sun-dried tomatoes while Jason regaled her with a satiric portrait of his day and all the crazies who’d passed through his shop. The little man with the white hair didn’t require a dissertation, and besides, he couldn’t begin to appreciate the difference between what she was doing and the ritualistic farce of the tobacco-spitting, crotch-grabbing “athletes” all tricked out in their pretty unblemished uniforms up on the screen over his head, so she just smiled, like a babe, and said, “Yeah.”

  Truly, the race was nothing, just a warm-up, and it would have been less than nothing but for the puzzling fact that Zinny Bauer was competing. Zinny was a professional, from Hamburg, and she was the one who’d cranked past Paula like some sort of machine in the final stretch of the Ironman last year. What Paula couldn’t fathom was why Zinny was bothering with this small-time event when there were so many other plums out there. On the way out of Clubber’s, she mentioned it to Jason. “Not that I’m worried,” she said, “just mystified.”

  It was a fine, soft, glowing night, the air rich with the smell of the surf, the sun squeezing the last light out of the sky as it sank toward Hawaii. Jason was wearing his faded-to-pink 49ers jersey and a pair of shorts so big they made his legs look like sticks. He gave her one of his hooded looks, then got distracted and tapped at his watch twice before lifting it to his ear and frowning. “Damn thing stopped,” he said. It wasn’t until they were sliding into the car that he came back to the subject of Zinny Bauer. “It’s simple, babe,” he said, shrugging his shoulders and letting his face go slack. “She’s here to psych you out.”

  He liked to watch her eat. She wasn’t shy about it—not like the other girls he’d dated, the ones on a perpetual diet who made you feel like a two-headed hog every time you sat down to a meal, whether it was a Big Mac or the Mexican Plate at La Fondita. No “salad with dressing on the side” for Paula, no butterless bread or child’s portions. She attacked her food like a lumberjack, and you’d better keep your hands and fingers clear. Tonight she started with potato gnocchi in a white sauce puddled with butter, and she ate half a loaf of crusty Italian bread with it, sopping up the leftover sauce till the plate gleamed. Next it was the fettucine with Alfredo sauce, and on her third trip to the pasta bar she heaped her plate with mostaccioli marinara and chunks of hot sausage—and more bread, always more bread.

  He ordered a beer, lit a cigarette without thinking, and shovelled up some spaghetti carbonara, thick on the fork and sloppy with sauce. The next thing he knew, he was staring up into the hot green gaze of the waitperson, a pencil-necked little fag he could have snapped in two like a breadstick if this weren’t California and everything so copacetic and laid back. It was times like this when he wished he lived in Cleveland, even though he’d never been there, but he knew what was coming and he figured people in Cleveland wouldn’t put up with this sort of crap.

  “You’ll have to put that out,” the little fag said.

  “Sure, man,” Jason said, gesturing broadly so that the smoke fanned out around him like the remains of a pissed-over fire. “Just as soon as I”—puff, puff—“take another drag and”—puff, puff—“find me an ashtray somewhere … you wouldn’t happen”—puff, puff—“to have an ashtray, would you?”

  Of course the little fag had been holding one out in front of him all along, as if it were a portable potty or something, but the cigarette was just a glowing stub now, the tiny fag end of a cigarette—fag end, how about that?—and Jason reached out, crushed the thing in the ashtray and said, “Hey, thanks, dude—even though it really wasn’t a cigarette but just the fag end of one.”

  And then Paula was there, her fourth plate of the evening mounded high with angel hair, three-bean salad, and wedges of fruit in five different colors. “So what was that all about? Your cigarette?”

  Jason ignored her, forking up spaghetti. He took a long swig of his beer and shrugged. “Yeah, whatever,” he said finally. “One more fascist doing his job.”

  “Don’t be like that,” she said, using the heel of her bread to round up stray morsels on her plate.

  “Like what?”

  “You know what I mean. I don’t have to lecture you.”

  “Yeah?” He let his eyes droop. “So what do you call this then?”

  She sighed and looked away, and that sigh really irritated him, rankled him, made him feel like flipping the table over and sailing a few plates through the window. He was drunk. Or three-quarters drunk anyway. Then her lips were moving again. “Everybody in the world doesn’t necessarily enjoy breathing through a tube of incinerated tobacco, you know,” she said. “People are into health.”

  “Who? You maybe. But the rest of them just want to be a pain in the ass. They just want to abrogate my rights in a public place”—abrogate, now
where did that come from?—“and then rub my nose in it.” The thought soured him even more, and when he caught the waitperson pussyfooting by out of the corner of his eye he snapped his fingers with as much pure malice as he could manage. “Hey, dude, another beer here, huh? I mean, when you get a chance.”

  It was then that Zinny Bauer made her appearance. She stalked through the door like something crossbred in an experimental laboratory, so rangy and hollow-eyed and fleshless she looked as if she’d been pasted onto her bones. There was a guy with her—her trainer or husband or whatever—and he was right out of an X-Men cartoon, all head and shoulders and great big beefy biceps. Jason recognized them from Houston—he’d flown down to watch Paula compete in the Houston Ironman, only to see her hit the wall in the run and finish sixth in the women’s while Zinny Bauer, the Amazing Bone Woman, took an easy first. And here they were, Zinny and Klaus—or Olaf or whoever—here in the Pasta Bowl, carbo-loading like anybody else. His beer came, cold and dependable, green in the bottle, pale amber in the glass, and he downed it in two gulps. “Hey, Paula,” he said, and he couldn’t keep the quick sharp stab of joy out of his voice—he was happy suddenly and he didn’t know why. “Hey, Paula, you see who’s here?”

  The thing that upset her was that he’d lied to her, the way her father used to lie to her mother, the same way—casually, almost as a reflex. It wasn’t his birthday at all. He’d just said that to get her out because he was drunk and he didn’t care if she had to compete the day after tomorrow and needed her rest and peace and quiet and absolutely no stimulation whatever. He was selfish, that was all, selfish and unthinking. And then there was the business with the cigarette—he knew as well as anybody in the state that there was an ordinance against smoking in public places as of January last, and still he had to push the limits like some cocky immature chip-on-the-shoulder surfer. Which is exactly what he was. But all that was forgivable—it was the Zinny Bauer business she just couldn’t understand.