After the Plague

by T. C. Boyle

  Ellen took a sip of her drink and felt the hot smoke of the liquor in the back of her throat. He was good-looking, handsome—more than handsome. At that moment, the engines thrumming, the flat, dull earth fanning out beneath the plane, he was shining and beautiful, as radiant as an archangel come flapping through the window to roost beside her. Not that it would matter to her. Roy was handsome too, but she was done with handsome, done with fifth graders, done with the whole failed experiment of living on her own in the big, smoggy, palm-shrouded city. Turn the page, new chapter. “Or maybe a barrel,” she heard herself say, “going over Niagara Falls.”

  “Yeah,” he said, laughing through his nose. “Only in the barrel you don’t get your own personal flotation device.”

  Ellen didn’t know what to say to that. She took another pull at her drink for lack of anything better to do. She was feeling it, no doubt about it, but what difference would it make if she were drunk or sober as she wandered the labyrinthine corridors of O’Hare, endlessly delayed by snow, mechanical failure, the hordes of everybody going everywhere? Three sheets to the wind, right—isn’t that what they said? And what, exactly, did that mean? Some old sailing expression, she supposed, something from the days of the clipper ships, when you vomited yourself from one place to another.

  Their meals had come. The broad-faced flight attendant was again leaning in confidentially, this time with the eternal question—“Chicken or pasta?”—on her lips. Ellen wasn’t hungry—food was the last thing she wanted—but on an impulse she turned to her neighbor. “I’m not really very hungry,” she said, her face too close to his, their elbows touching, his left knee rising up out of the floor like a stanchion, “but if I get a meal, would you want it—or some of it? As an extra, I mean?”

  He gave her a curious look, then said, “Sure, why not?” The flight attendant was waiting, the sealed-in smile beginning to crack at the corners with the first fidgeting of impatience. “Chicken for me,” the man said, “and pasta for the lady.” And then, to Ellen, as he shifted the tray from one hand to the other: “You sure, now? I know it’s not exactly three-star cuisine, but you’ve got to eat, and the whole reason they feed you is to make the time pass so you don’t realize how cramped and miserable you are.”

  The smell of the food—salt, sugar, and animal fat made palpable—rose to her nostrils, and she felt nauseated again. Was it the pills? The alcohol? Or was it Roy—Roy, and life itself? She thought about that, and the instant she did, there he was—Roy—clawing his way back into her mind. She could see him now, his shoulders squared in his black polyester suit with the little red flecks in it—the suit she’d helped him pick out, as if he had any taste or style he could call his own—his eyes swollen out of their sockets, his lips reduced to two thin, ungenerous flaps of skin grafted to his mouth. Shit-for-brains. That’s what he’d called her, right there in the teachers’ lounge with everybody watching—Lynn Bendall and Lauren McGimpsey and that little teacher’s aide, what was her name? He was shouting, and she was shouting back, no holds barred, not anymore. So what if I am sleeping with her? What’s it to you? You think you own me? Do you? Huh, shit-for-brains? Huh? Lauren’s face was dead, but Ellen saw Lynn exchange a smirk with the little teacher’s aide, and that smirk said it all, because Lynn, it seemed, knew more about who he was sleeping with than Ellen did herself.

  The man beside her—her neighbor—was eating now. He was hungry, and that was good. She felt saintly, watching him eat and listening to him chatter on about his work—he was some sort of writer or journalist, on his way to Philadelphia for the holidays. She’d renounced the pasta and given it to him, and he was grateful—he hadn’t eaten all day, and he was a growing boy, he said, with a smile, though he must have been in his early thirties. And unmarried, judging from his naked fingers. When the drinks cart came by, Ellen ordered another Scotch.

  They were talking about movies, maybe the only subject people had in common these days, when Ellen glanced up to see Lercher, his face twisted in a drunken scowl, looming over them as he made his unsteady way to the forward lavatories. She and her companion—his name was Michael, just Michael, that was all he offered—had struck a real chord when it came to the current cinema (no movies with explosions, no alien life-forms, no geriatric lovers, no sappy kids), and she’d begun to feel something working inside her. She was interested, genuinely interested in something, for maybe the first time in months. Michael. She held the name on her tongue like the thinnest wafer, repeating it silently, over and over. And then it came to her: he was the anti-Roy, that’s who he was, so polite and unassuming, a soul mate, somebody who could care, really care—she was sure of it.

  “You see that man?” she asked, lowering her voice. “The one with the hair? He was sitting right next to me on the last flight, the one where, well, I was telling you, I was looking out the window and the engine caught fire? And I’ve never been so scared in my life.”

  The wind shrieked along the length of the fuselage, the lights dimmed and went up again, Michael poured himself a second glass of wine and made sympathetic noises. “You actually saw this? Flames? Or was it like sparks or something?”

  She went cold with the memory of it. “Flames,” she said, pursing her lips and nodding her head. “I was so scared I started praying.” She glanced out the window, as if to reassure herself. “You’re not religious, are you?” she said, turning back to him.

  “No,” he said, and he raised his hand to cut the throat of the subject before it could take hold of him. “I’m an atheist. I mean, we had no set religion in our house, that’s just the way my parents were.”

  “Me too,” she said, remembering religious instruction, the icy dip of the holy water, her mother in a black veil, and the priest intoning the sleepy immemorial phrases of her girlhood, “but we went to church when I was little.”

  He didn’t ask what church, and a silence fell between them as the plane rocked gently and the big man oscillated back from the lavatory. Ellen closed her eyes again, for just a moment, the swaying of the cabin and the pills and the Scotch pulling her down toward some inky dark place that was like the mouth of an abandoned well, like a cave deep in the earth… .

  She was startled awake by a sudden explosion of voices behind her. “The fuck I will!” snarled a man’s voice, and even through the fog of her waking she recognized it.

  “But, sir, I’ve already told you, the plane is full. You can see for yourself.”

  “Then put me up front—and don’t try to tell me that’s full, because I was up there to use the rest room, and there’s all sorts of space up there. This is bullshit. I’m not going to sit here squeezed in like a rat. I paid full fare, and I’m not going to take this shit anymore, you hear me?”

  Heads had begun to turn. Ellen glanced at Michael, but he was absorbed with his computer, some message she couldn’t read, some language she didn’t know; for a moment she stared at the ranks of dark symbols floating across the dull firmament of the screen, then she craned her neck to see over the seat back. Lercher was standing in the aisle, his shoulders hunched, his head cocked forward against the low ceiling. Two flight attendants, the broad-faced woman and another, slighter woman with her hair in a neat French braid, stood facing him.

  “There’s nothing we can do, sir,” the slight woman said, an edge of hostility in her voice. “I’ve already told you, you don’t qualify for an upgrade. Now, I’m going to have to ask you to take your seat.”

  “This is bullshit,” he reiterated. “Two and a half fucking hours on the ground, and then we get sent back to LAX, and now I’m stuck in this cattle car, and you won’t even serve me a fucking drink? Huh? What do you call this?” He flailed his arms, appealing to the people seated around him; to a one, they looked away. “Well, I call it bullshit!” he roared.

  The women held their ground. “Sit down, sir. Now. Or we’ll have to call the captain.”

  The big man’s face changed. The crease between his eyes deepened; his lips drew back as
if he were about to spit down the front of the first woman’s crisp blue jacket. “All right,” he said ominously, “if that’s how you want to play it,” and he was already swinging around and staggering toward the rear of the plane, the flight attendants trailing along helplessly in his wake. Ellen shifted in her seat so she could follow their progress, her hips straining against the seat belt, her right hand inadvertently braced against Michael’s forearm. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she murmured, even as Lercher disappeared into the galley at the rear and she turned her face to Michael’s. He looked startled, his eyes so blue and electric they reminded her of the fish in the classroom aquarium—the neon tetras, with their bright lateral stripes. “Did you see that? I mean, did you hear him—the man, the one I was telling you about?”

  He hesitated a moment, just staring into her eyes. “No,” he said finally, “I didn’t notice. I was—I guess I was so absorbed in my work I didn’t know where I was.”

  Ellen’s face darkened. “He’s the worst kind of trash,” she said. “Just mean, that’s all, like the bullies on the playground.”

  And now there was the sound of a commotion from the rear of the plane, and Ellen turned to see Lercher emerge from the galley on the far side of the plane, the flight attendants cowering behind him. In each hand he wielded a gleaming stainless-steel coffeepot, and he was moving rapidly up the aisle, his eyes gone hard with hate. “Out of my way!” he screamed, elbowing a tottering old lady aside. “Anybody fucks with me gets scalded, you hear me?”

  People awoke with a snort. A hundred heads ducked down protectively, and on every face was an expression that said not now, not here, not me. No one said a word. And then, suddenly, a male flight attendant came hurtling down the aisle from the first-class section and attempted to tackle the big man, gripping him around the waist, and Ellen heard a woman cry out as hot coffee streamed down the front of her blouse. Lercher held his ground, bludgeoning the flight attendant to the floor with the butt of the wildly splashing pot he clutched in his right fist, and then the two female attendants were on him, tearing at his arms, and a male passenger, heavyset and balding, sprang savagely up out of his seat to enter the fray.

  For a moment, they achieved a sort of equilibrium, surging forward and falling back again, but Lercher was too much for them. He stunned the heavyset man with a furious, slashing blow, then flung off the flight attendants as if they were nothing. The scalded woman screamed again, and Ellen felt as if a knife were twisting inside her. She couldn’t breathe. Her arms went limp. Lercher was dancing in the aisle, shouting obscenities, moving backward now, toward the galley, and God only knew what other weapons he might find back there.

  Where was the captain? Where were the people in charge? The cabin was in an uproar, babies screaming, voices crying out, movement everywhere—and Lercher was in the galley, dismantling the plane, and no one could do anything about it. There was the crash of a cart being overturned, a volley of shouts, and suddenly he appeared at the far end of Ellen’s aisle, his face contorted until it was no human face at all. “Die!” he screamed. “Die, you motherfuckers!” The rear exit door was just opposite him, and he paused in his fury to kick at it with a big booted foot, and then he was hammering at the Plexiglas window with one of the coffeepots as if he could burst through it and sail on out into the troposphere like some sort of human missile.

  “You’re all going to die!” he screamed, pounding, pounding. “You’ll be sucked out into space, all of you!” Ellen thought she could hear the window cracking—wasn’t anybody going to do anything?—and then he dropped both coffeepots and made a rush up the aisle for the first-class section.

  Before she could react, Michael rose in a half-crouch, swung his laptop out across the saddlebag lady’s tray table, and caught Lercher in the crotch with the sharp, flying corner of it. She saw his face then, Lercher’s, twisted and swollen like a sore, and it came right at Michael, who could barely maneuver in his eighteen inches of allotted space. In a single motion, the big man snatched the laptop from Michael’s hand and brought it whistling down across his skull, and Ellen felt him go limp beside her. At that point, she didn’t know what she was doing. All she knew was that she’d had enough, enough of Roy and this big, drunken, testosterone-addled bully and the miserable, crimped life that awaited her at her mother’s, and she came up out of her seat as if she’d been launched—and in her hand, clamped there like a flaming sword, was a thin steel fork that she must have plucked from the cluttered dinner tray. She went for his face, for his head, his throat, enveloping him with her body, the drug singing in her heart and the Scotch flowing like ichor in her veins.

  They made an emergency stop in Denver, and they sat on the ground in a swirling light snow as the authorities boarded the plane to take charge of Lercher. He’d been overpowered finally and bound to his seat with cloth napkins from the first-class dining service, a last napkin crammed into his mouth as a gag. The captain had come on the loudspeaker with a mouthful of apologies, and then, to a feeble cheer from the cabin, pledged free headphones and drinks on the house for the rest of the flight. Ellen sat, dazed, over yet another Scotch, the seat beside her vacant. Even before the men in uniforms boarded the plane to handcuff and shackle Lercher, the paramedics had rushed down the aisle to evacuate poor Michael to the nearest hospital, and she would never forget the way his eyes had rolled back in his head as they laid him out on the stretcher. And Lercher, big and bruised, his head drunkenly bowed and the dried blood painted across his cheek where the fork had gone in and gone in again, as if she’d been carving a roast with a dull knife, Lercher led away like Billy Tindall or Lucas Lopez in the grip of the principal on a bad day at La Cumbre Elementary.

  She sipped her drink, her face gone numb, eyes focused on nothing, as the whole plane murmured in awe. People stole glances at her, the saddlebag woman offered up her personal copy of the January Cosmopolitan, the captain himself came back to pay homage. And the flight attendants—they were so relieved they were practically genuflecting to her. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. There would be forms to fill out, a delay in Chicago, an uneventful flight into New York, eight hours behind schedule. Her mother would be there, with a face full of pity and resignation, and she’d be too delicate to mention Roy, or teaching, or any of the bleak details of the move itself, the waste of a new microwave, and all that furniture tossed in a Dumpster. She would smile, and Ellen would try to smile back. “Is that it?” her mother would say, eyeing the bag slung over her shoulder. “You must have some baggage?” And then, as they were heading down the carpeted corridor, two women caught in the crush of humanity, with the snow spitting outside and the holidays coming on, her mother would take her by the arm, smile up at her, and just to say something, anything, would ask, “Did you have a nice flight?”

  The Black and White Sisters

  I used to cut their lawn for them, before they paved it over, that is. It was the older one, Moira, the one with the white hair and vanilla skirt, who gave me the bad news. “Vincent,” she said, “Caitlin and I have decided to do without the lawn—and the shrubs and flowers too.” (We were in her kitchen at the time, a place from which every hint of color had been erased, Caitlin was hovering in the doorway with her vulcanized hair and cream-pie face, and my name is Larry, not Vincent—just to give you some perspective.)

  I shuffled my feet and ducked my head. “So you won’t be needing a gardener anymore then?”

  Moira exchanged a look with her sister, who was my age exactly: forty-two. I know, because we were in school together, all three of us, from elementary through junior high, when their parents took them to live in New York. Not long after that the parents died and left them a truckload of money, and eventually they made their way back to California to take up residence in the family manse, which has something like twenty rooms and two full acres of lawns and flowerbeds, which I knew intimately. Moira wasn’t much to look at anymore—too pinned-back and severe—but Caitlin, if you caught her in the right light, could b
e very appealing. She had a sort of retro-ghoulish style about her, with her dead black clinging dress and Kabuki skin and all the rest of it. Black fingernails, of course. And toenails. I could just see the glossy even row of them peeping out from beneath the hem of her dress.

  “Well,” Moira demurred, coming back to me in her brisk grandmotherly way, though she wasn’t a grandmother, never even married, and couldn’t have been more than forty-four or -five, “I wouldn’t be too hasty. We’re going to want all the shrubs and trees removed—anything that shows inside the fence, that is.”

  I’d been around in my time (in and out of college, stint in the merchant marine, twice married and twice divorced, and I’d lived in Poughkeepsie, Atlanta, Juneau, Cleveland and Mazatlán before I came home to California and my mother), and nothing surprised me. Or not particularly. I studied Moira’s face, digging the toe of my workboot into the square of linoleum in front of me. “I don’t know,” I said finally, “it’s going to be a big job—the trees, anyway. I can handle the shrubs and flowers myself, but the treework’s going to have to go to a professional. I can make some calls, if you want.”

  Moira came right back at me, needling and sharp. “You know the rule: black jeans, white T-shirt, black caps. No exceptions.”

  I was wearing black jeans myself—and a white T-shirt and black cap, from which I’d removed the silver Raiders logo at her request. I was clear on the parameters here. But the money was good, very good, and I was used to dealing with the eccentric rich—that was pretty much all we had in this self-consciously quaint little town by the sea. And eccentric, as we all know, is just a code word for pure cold-water crazy. “Sure,” I said. “No problem.”