Without a Hero

by T. C. Boyle

  No, he wasn’t.

  “You’re serious, aren’t you?” he said after a moment. “You really believe in all this environmental hysteria.” He let the grin fade and gave us his stern off-at-the-knee look. “Peter, Adrian,” he said, drawing out the syllables in a profound and pedagogical way, “species conflict is the way of the world, has been from the beginning of time. Extinction is natural, expected: no species can hope to last forever. Even man. Conditions change.” He waved his hand and then laughed, making a joke of it. “If this weather doesn’t let up I think we’re in for a new ice age, and then where will your frogs be?”

  “That’s not the point,” I said.

  “What about the dinosaurs, Peter?” Charlene interjected. “And the woolly mammoth?”

  “Not to mention snake oil and bloodletting.” Jerry’s smile was back. He was in control. All was right with the world. “Things move on, things advance and change—why cry over something you can’t affect, a kind of fairy-tale Garden of Eden half these environmentalists never knew? Which is not to say I don’t agree with you—”

  “My god!” Adrian cried, springing from her seat as if she’d been hot-wired. “The goat!”

  Late that night, after everyone had gone home—even Adrian, though she’d gotten amorous at the door and would, I think, have spent the night but for my lack of enthusiasm—I eased into my armchair with the newspaper and tried to wipe my mind clean, a total abstersion, tabula rasa. I felt drained, desolate, a mass of meat, organ and bone slipping inexorably toward the grave along with my distant cousins the frogs and the toads. The rain continued. A chill fell over the room and I saw that the fire had burned down. There was a twinge in my back as I shifted my buttocks to adjust the heating pad, and then I began to read. I didn’t feel up to war in the Middle East, AIDS and the homeless or the obituaries, so I stuck to the movie reviews and personal-interest stories.

  It was getting late, my mind had gone gratifyingly numb and I was just about to switch off the light and throw myself into bed, when I turned to the science section. A headline caught my eye:

  HOPES RISE AS NEW SPECIES MOVE INTO SLUDGE OFF COAST

  And what was this? I read on and discovered that these rising hopes were the result of the sudden appearance of tubeworms, solemya clams and bacteria in a formerly dead stretch of water in the Hudson Canyon, used from time immemorial as a repository for the city’s sewage and refuse. Down there, deep in the ancient layers of sludge, beneath the lapping fishless waves, there was life, burgeoning and thriving in a new medium. What hope. What terrific uplifting news.

  Tubeworms. They had to be joking.

  After a while I folded up the newspaper, found my slippers and took this great and rising hope to bed with me.

  The week that followed was as grim and unrelenting as the week that had given rise to it. Work was deadening (I shifted numbers on a screen for a living and the numbers had never seemed more meaningless), my back went through half a dozen daily cycles of searing agony and utter absence of feeling, and the weather never broke, not even for an hour. The skies were close and bruised, and the cold rain fell. I went directly home after work and didn’t answer the phone at night, though I knew it was Adrian calling. All week I thought of frogs and death.

  And then, on Saturday, I woke to an outpouring of light and a sudden sharp apprehension of the world that was as palpable as a taste. I sat up. My feet found the floor. Naked and trembling, I crossed the room and stood at the window, the cord to the glowing blinds caught up in my hand, the stirrings of barometric change tugging at the long muscles of my lower back. Then I pulled the cord and the light spilled into the room, and in the next moment I was shoving the blinds aside and throwing open the window.

  The air was pregnant, rich, thick with the scent of renewal and the perspicacious hum of the bees. All that moping, all those fears, the named dread and the nameless void: it all evaporated in the face of that hosanna of a morning. I felt like Ebenezer Scrooge roused on Christmas Day, Lazarus reanimated, Alexander the Great heading into Thrace. I opened every window in the house; I ate a muffin, read the paper, matched the glorious J. S. Bach to the triumph of the morning. It was heady, but I couldn’t sustain it. Ultimately, inevitably, like a sickness, the frogs and toads crept back into my head, and by 10:00 A.M. I was just another mortal with a bad back sinking into oblivion.

  It was then, at the bottom of that trough, that I had an inspiration. The coffee was cold in the cup, the newsprint rumpled, Bach silenced by the tyranny of a mechanical arm, and suddenly a notion hit me and I was up and out of the kitchen chair as if I’d been launched. The force of it carried me to the bedroom closet, where I dug around for my hiking boots, a sweatshirt, my Yankees cap and a denim jacket, and then to the medicine cabinet, where I unearthed the tick repellant and an old aerosol can of Off! Then I dialed Adrian.

  “Adrian,” I gasped, “my heart, my love—”

  Her voice was thick with sleep. “Is this an obscene phone call?”

  “I’ve been gloomy lately, I know it—”

  “Not to mention not answering the phone.”

  “I admit it, I admit it. But have you seen the day out there?”

  She hadn’t. She was still in bed.

  “What I’m thinking is this: how can we take B. Reid’s word for it? How can we take anybody’s?”

  I didn’t know where to begin looking for the elusive toad, Bufo americanus, let alone the spring peeper or the leopard frog, but I was seized with a desire to know them, touch them, observe their gouty limbs and clumsy rituals, partake once more of the seething life of pond, puddle and ditch, and at least temporarily lay to rest the nagging memory of B. Reid and his diminutive corpses. It was irrational, I knew it, but I felt that if I could see them, just this once, and know they were occupying their humble niche in the hierarchy of being, everything would be all right.

  We parked along the highway and poked desultorily through the ditch alongside it, but there was nothing animate in sight. The old cane was sharp and brittle, and there was Styrofoam, glass and aluminum everywhere. Trucks stole the air from our lungs, teenagers jeered. Adrian suggested a promising-looking puddle on the far verge of the rutted commuter lot at the Garrison station, but we found nothing there except submerged gum wrappers and potato-chip bags ground into the muck by the numbing impress of steel-belted radials. “We can’t give up,” she said, and there was just the faintest catch of desperation in her voice. “What about the woods off the Appalachian Trail? You know, where it crosses the road down by K mart?”

  “All right,” I said, and the fever was on me, “we’ll give it a try.”

  Twenty minutes later we were in the woods, sun glazing bole and branch, tender new yellow-green leaves unfolding overhead, birds shooting up from the path as if jerked on a string. There was a smell here I’d forgotten, the dark wet odor of process, of things breaking down and springing up again, of spore and pollen and seed and mulch. Bugs hovered round my face. I was sweating. And yet I felt good, strong in back and leg, already liberated from the cloud that had hung over me all week, and as I followed Adrian up the long slow incline of the path, I thought I’d never seen such a miracle as the way the muscles of her thighs and buttocks flexed and relaxed in the grip of her jeans. This was nature.

  We’d gone a mile or so when she suddenly stopped dead in the middle of the path. “What’s the matter?” I said, but she waved her hand to shush me. I edged forward till I stood beside her, my pulse quickening, breath caught high in my throat. “What?” I whispered. “What is it?”

  “Listen.”

  At first I couldn’t hear it, my ears attuned to civilization, the chatter of the TV, high fidelity, the blast of the internal-combustion engine, but then the woods began to speak to me. The sound was indistinct at first, but after a while it began to separate into its individual voices, the smallest rustlings and crepitations, the high-pitched disputations of the birds, the trickle of running water—and something else, something at once
strange and familiar, a chirping fluid trill that rose strong and multivoiced in the near distance. Adrian turned to me and smiled.

  All at once we were in a hurry, breathless, charging through the frost-burned undergrowth and sharp stinging branches, off the path and down the throat of a dark and sodden ravine. I thought nothing. B. Reid, Jerry, herniated discs, compound fractures, the soft green glow of the computer monitor: nothing. We moved together, with a fluid balletic grace, the most natural thing in the world, hunched over, darting right, then left, ducking this obstruction, vaulting the next, shoving through the tangle as easily as we might have parted the bead curtains in a Chinese restaurant. And as we drew closer, that sound, that trill, that raucous joyous paean to life swelled round us till it seemed to vibrate in our every cell and fiber. “There!” Adrian cried suddenly. “Over there!”

  I saw it in that moment, a shallow little scoop of a pond caught in the web of the branches. The water gave nothing back, dead black under the buttery sun, and it was choked with the refuse of the trees. I saw movement there, and the ululating chorus rang out to the treetops, every new leaf shuddering on every branch. The smell came at me then, the working odor, rank and sweet and ripe. I took Adrian’s hand and we moved toward the water in a kind of trance.

  We were up to our ankles, our boots soaked through, when the pond fell silent—it happened in a single stroke, on the beat, as if a conductor had dropped his baton. And then we saw that there was no surface to that pond, that it was a field of flesh, a grand and vast congress of toads. They materialized before our eyes, stumpy limbs and foreshortened bodies clambering over one another, bobbing like apples in a barrel. There they were—toads, toads uncountable—humping in a frenzy of webbed feet and seething snouts, humping blindly, stacked up three and four high. Their eggs were everywhere, beaded and wet with the mucus of life, and all their thousands of eyes glittered with lust. We could hear them clawing at one another, grunting, and we didn’t know what to do. And then a single toad at the edge of the pond started in with his thin piping trill and in an instant we were forgotten and the whole pullulating mass of them took it up and it was excruciating, beautiful, wild to the core.

  Adrian looked at me and I couldn’t help myself: I moved into her arms. I was beyond reason or thought, and what did it matter? She pushed away from me then, for just a moment, and stepped back, water swirling, toads thrilling, to strip off her shirt and the black lace brassiere beneath it. Holding me with her eyes, she moved back another step and dropped them there, in the wet at the edge of the pond, and eased herself down as if into a nest. I’d never seen anything like it. I shrugged out of my denim jacket, tore off my shirt, sailed the Yankees cap into oblivion. And when I came for her, the toads leapt for their lives.

  FILTHY WITH THINGS

  HE DREAMS, amidst the clutter, of sparseness, purity, the wheeling dark star-haunted reaches beyond the grasp of this constrained little world, where distances are measured in light-years and even the galaxies fall away to nothing. But dreams get you nowhere, and Marsha’s latest purchase, the figured-mahogany highboy with carved likenesses of Jefferson, Washington and Adams in place of pulls, will not fit in the garage. The garage, designed to accommodate three big chromium-hung hunks of metal in the two-ton range, will not hold anything at all, not even a Japanese fan folded like a stiletto and sunk to the hilt in a horizontal crevice. There are no horizontal crevices—nor vertical, either. The mass of interlocked things, the great squared-up block of objects, of totems, of purchases made and accreted, of the precious and unattainable, is packed as tightly as the stones at Machu Picchu.

  For a long moment Julian stands there in the blistering heat of the driveway, contemplating the abstract sculpture of the garage while the boy from the Antique Warehouse rolls and unrolls the sleeves of his T-shirt and watches a pair of fourteen-year-old girls saunter up the sidewalk. The sun and heat are not salutary for the colonial hardwood of which the highboy is composed, and the problem of where to put it has begun to reach critical proportions. Julian thinks of the storage shed behind the pool, where the newspapers are stacked a hundred deep and Marsha keeps her collection of Brazilian scythes and harrows, but immediately rejects it—the last time he was back there he couldn’t even get the door open. Over the course of the next ten seconds or so he develops a fantasy of draining the pool and enclosing it as a sort of step-down warehouse, and it’s a rich fantasy, richly rewarding, but he ultimately dismisses it, too. If they were to drain the pool, where would Marsha keep her museum-quality collection of Early American whaling implements, buoys and ship’s furniture, not to mention the two hundred twelve antique oarlocks currently mounted on the pool fence?

  The boy’s eyes are vapid. He’s begun to whistle tunelessly and edge back toward the van. “So where’d you decide you want it?” he asks listlessly.

  On the moon, Julian wants to say. Saturn. On the bleak blasted ice plains of Pluto. He shrugs. “On the porch, I guess.”

  The porch. Yes. The only problem is, the screened-in porch is already stacked to the eaves with sideboards, armoires, butter churns and bentwood rockers. The best they can do, after a fifteen-minute struggle, is to wedge the thing two-thirds of the way in the door. “Well,” says Julian, and he can feel his heart fluttering round his rib cage like some fist-sized insect, “I guess that’ll have to do.” The laugh he appends is curt with embarrassment. “Won’t have to worry about rain till November, anyway.”

  The boy isn’t even breathing hard. He’s long-lipped and thin, strung together with wire, and he’s got one of those haircuts that make his head look as if it’s been put on backwards. For a long moment he leans over the hand truck, long fingers dangling, giving Julian a look that makes him feel like he’s from another planet. “Yeah, that’s right,” the boy finally murmurs, and he looks at his feet, then jerks himself up as if to drift back to the van, the freeway, the warehouse, before stopping cold again. He looks at Julian as if he’s forgotten something, and Julian digs into his pocket and gives the boy three dollars for his efforts.

  The sun is there, a living presence, as the boy backs the van out of the driveway, and Julian knows he’s going to have to do something about the mahogany highboy—drape a sheet over it or maybe a plastic drop cloth—but somehow he can’t really seem to muster the energy. It’s getting too much for him—all these things, the addition that was filled before it was finished, the prefab storage sheds on the back lawn, the crammed closets, the unlivable living room— and the butt end of the highboy hanging from the porch door seems a tangible expression of all his deepest fears. Seeing it there, the harsh light glancing off its polished flanks, its clawed feet dangling in the air, he wants to cry out against the injustice of it all, his miserable lot, wants to dig out his binoculars and the thin peeling ground cloth he’s had since he was a boy in Iowa and go up to the mountains and let the meteor showers wash him clean, but he can’t. That ancient handcrafted butt end represents guilt, Marsha’s displeasure, a good and valuable thing left to deteriorate. He’s begun to move toward it in a halfhearted shuffle, knowing from experience that he can squeeze it in there somehow, when a horn sounds breathlessly behind him. He turns, condemned like Sisyphus, and watches as Marsha wheels into the drive, the Range Rover packed to the windows and a great dark slab of furniture lashed to the roof like some primitive landing craft. “Julian!” she calls, “Julian! Wait till you see what I found!”

  “I’ve seen worse,” the woman says, and Julian can feel the short hairs on the back of his neck begin to stiffen—she’s seen worse, but she’s seen better, too. They’re standing in the living room—or rather on the narrow footpath between the canyons of furniture that obscure the walls, the fireplace, even the ceiling of what was once the living room—and Julian, afraid to look her in the eye, leans back against a curio cabinet crammed with painted porcelain dolls in native costume, nervously turning her card over in his hand. The card is certainly minimalistic—Susan Certaine, it reads in a thin black embossed scr
ipt, Professional Organizer, and it gives a telephone number, nothing else—and the woman herself is impressive, brisk, imposing, even; but he’s just not sure. Something needs to be done, something radical—and, of course, Marsha, who left to cruise the flea markets an hour ago, will have to agree to it, at least in substance—but for all his misery and sense of oppression, for all the times he’s joked about burning the place down or holding the world’s biggest yard sale, Julian needs to be reassured, needs to be convinced.

  “You’ve seen worse?” he prompts.

  “Sure I have. Of course I have. What do you take me for, an amateur?”

  Julian shrugs, turns up his palms, already on the defensive.

  “Listen, in my business, Mr. Laxner, you tend to run across the hard cases, the ones anyone else would give up on—the Liberaces, the Warhols, the Nancy Reagans. You remember Imelda Marcos? That was me. I’m the one they called in to straighten out that mess. Twenty-seven hundred pairs of shoes alone, Mr. Laxner. Think about that.”

  She pauses to let her eyes flicker over the room, the smallest coldest flame burning behind the twin slivers of her contact lenses. She’s a tall, pale, hovering presence, a woman stripped to the essentials, the hair torn back from her scalp and strangled in a bun, no cheeks, no lips, no makeup or jewelry, the dress black, the shoes black, the briefcase black as a dead black coal dug out of the bottom of the bag. “There’s trouble here,” she says finally, holding his eyes. “You’re dirty with things, Mr. Laxner, filthy, up to your ears in the muck.”

  He is, he admits it, but he can’t help wincing at the harshness of the indictment.