Riven Rock

by T. C. Boyle

  That was an inviting prospect, and he leaned back on the bar and let the booze settle into his veins, his eyes drifting languidly over the crowd, and no, he wasn’t going to look at Dolores, not yet, or Katherine either. His bones were melting, his legs were dead and he was feeling all right and better than all right, when suddenly a massive shimmering sphere of flesh welled up in his peripheral vision and a big adhesive hand took hold of his wrist and was jerking him in the direction of the band. It was Brush. Dr. Brush. He was wearing a grass skirt and one of those flower necklaces over a bare blubbery chest and he had Mrs. Brush trailing from one hand and O‘Kane from the other and there was no yielding to the onward rush of that tumultuous moving mountain of flesh. “Kamehameha!” Brush shouted, wriggling his hips. “Yakahula, hickydula!”

  O‘Kane felt his face go red. He was fighting like a fish at the end of a line and he saw Dolores’s face haunting the crowd and her sudden satiric smile and he was bumping into somebody—the dentist, wasn’t it?—and a drink spilled and then another. He finally broke the doctor’s grip and pulled up short in the middle of the whirling mob, everyone laughing, screaming with hilarity, and Brush hurtling onward in all his volatile-bosomed glory till he was right in front of the orchestra and every eye in the house was on him.

  Eldred strummed till his hand looked as if it was going to fall off, the orchestra caught fire and Dr. Brush shook and shimmied and drove all his floating appendages in every conceivable direction while his poor oscillating wife tried to keep up with him through the whole panoply of her jerks and twitches. And that was the moment of revelation for O‘Kane, his hopes as feeble suddenly as a dying man’s: Brush was no savior or miracle worker and there was no way in the world he would ever even scratch the surface of Mr. McCormick’s illness—for the main and simple reason that he was a congenital idiot himself.

  3.

  THE ART OF WOOING

  When Stanley McCormick strode across the croquet lawn at the Beverly Farms Resort Hotel in Beverly, Massachusetts, on that still, sun-struck afternoon in the summer of 1903 and Katherine Dexter glanced up and saw him for the first time in her adult life, he really wasn’t himself. He’d been driving all day, driving hard, driving as if a whole gibbering horde of demons was on his tail with their talons drawn and their black leathery wings beating him about the head and shrieking doom in his ears. Something had seized him at breakfast that morning, an agitation, a jolt of the nerves that was like a switch thrown inside him, his whole being and private interior self taking off in a sudden frenzy like a spooked horse or a runaway automobile. That was why he’d had to leave his chauffeur behind when they stopped for gasoline at a feed store in Medford and the man never knew it till he came out from behind the shed where he was relieving himself to see the car hurtling up the road (nothing personal and Stanley wished him well, he did, but when the switch was thrown there was nothing he could do about it), Stanley driving on himself in the Mercedes roadster that was exactly like the one John Jacob Astor had entered in the New York-to-Buffalo endurance run two years earlier, ramming along down roads that were no better than cartpaths in a tornado of dust, flying chickens and furiously yapping dogs. He didn’t stop at all till he got to Danvers, the throttle open wide all the way, the engine screaming, and he breathless with the adrenaline rush of beating along at speeds in excess of twenty miles an hour.

  At Danvers he got down, shaking so hard he was afraid his legs wouldn’t hold him upright, and already there was a crowd gathering, farmers in overalls and their red-faced wives, children on whirling legs, the man who sold insurance and the bank clerk just released to his lunch hour. Stanley tried to manage a smile, and he knew he must have been a sight, six foot four and looking like a man from Mars in his goggles and leather cap and the sweat-drenched greatcoat all furred with dust, feathers and moribund insects, but his facial muscles didn’t seem to want to cooperate. He lifted a feeble hand in greeting or warning or capitulation, he didn’t know what or which, and staggered into the restaurant next to the barber shop with the sign in the window that said HAIRCUT & SHAVE Two BITS.

  Inside it was cool and dark, walls paneled in pine, a scent of sweet pine sap at war with the cooking smells, boiled wienerwurst, fried onions, beef gravy, lard vaporizing in the pan. Stanley couldn’t see a thing at first, dazed from the drive and the sun and the flywheel spinning round unchecked somewhere in the middle of his chest, under his sternum, and it wasn’t his heart, it was something else, the switch thrown, the throttle on full, everything rushing, rushing. And what did he want? A sandwich, that was all. And something to drink. Soda water. A Coca-Cola. Root beer. But why was it so dark in here? It took him a moment, racing and whirling, though he was standing stock-still two feet inside the door, every face turned to him, to realize he was still wearing his goggles. And further, that his goggles were encrusted with a filthy opaque scrim of road dirt and insect parts, making night of day and sorrow of joy and creating fear where there was nothing to fear. He lifted the goggles and pushed them back up atop his head.

  And saw ... a waitress. Standing right there in front of him with her womanly shape and her fine and interesting closely gathered womanly features—and her eyes, her eyes with a question in them. “Will you be having luncheon today, sir?” she was saying, and everybody in the place, at the counter and seated at the dark-wood tables, was hanging on the answer.

  Stanley: “Yes. Yes, I’d like that. Luncheon, yes.”

  The Waitress: “Can I show you to a table?”

  Stanley: “Yes. Certainly. Of course. That’s just what I need. A table.” But he didn’t move.

  The Waitress: “Maybe you’d like to clean up first, in the lavatory?”

  Stanley: “Excuse me?”

  The Waitress (movement at the door now, the crowd drawn to the roadster beginning to disperse and filter into the restaurant for a glass of water and some soda crackers and a good long look at this dusty apparition in the long trailing coat): “I said, maybe you’d like to clean up? The lavatory’s in back there, down the hall, first door to your left.”

  And then Stanley was moving again, the flywheel spinning, down the hall, through the door and into the lavatory, sink and toilet and last year’s calendar on the wall. He stripped off the leather cap and goggles all in one motion, shrugged off the coat and found a hook for it on the back of the door. He stood over the toilet and relieved himself, throwing back his head to look up into the pigeon-haunted opacity of the skylight, chicken wire set in the glass for reinforcement. The noise of his urine against the porcelain was the most mundane sound in the world, a trickle and splash that took him back to the camp in the Adirondacks, he and Harold making water against the rocks like Iroquois raiders and Mama never knowing a thing about it. He saw the granite promontories, slabs of gray weathered rock layered like the skin of an onion, the fir trees stark against the iron water, and his fish, the gleaming iridescent thing he’d pulled from the secret depths and the guide saying it was the biggest lake trout he’d ever seen and Stanley should be proud—and he was proud.

  He was winding down. The switch clicked off. It was all right, just nerves, that was all. He ran the water in the sink and that was good too, the sound of it, the smell of that lavatory, and then he looked into the mirror and there was nothing there. No one. No person. No Stanley Robert McCormick, son of Cyrus Hall McCormick, inventor of the mechanical reaper. Just the wall behind him and the stall with the toilet. It was a trick, that was it, a trick mirror, the back wall painted there to scale and sealed behind a pane of translucent glass. He lifted his hand to the glass and touched it, and that was strange and frightening, because he could feel it, hard and real, but he couldn’t see his hand reflected there.

  The switch. It was off still, shut firmly and decisively off somewhere back there in the Adirondacks and the belly of that fish, that trout, but there was a finger on it now and the finger was itching to flick it on again, to start the cycle all over and the racing and the fear that was nameless and fo
rmless but no less terrifying for all that. He turned abruptly from the mirror and forced his head down till he could take in one thing at a time and build the world back to normalcy like a child with a set of wooden blocks, one block atop the other till a castle fortress rose from the center of the rug in the ballroom, towers, battlements and all. His shoes, he was staring at his shoes. They were not black. They were brown, but the brown was dust, road dust, and the road dust was there because he’d been motoring across country—and he’d been motoring for his nerves, to settle them, to relax and massage them like overused muscles. What had Dr. Favill advised? A break from the Harvester Company, a vacation. “Why not something bracing? ” he’d asked in all his rhetorical fervor. “A walking tour of the Hebrides? The Swiss Alps?” All right. And there were the cuffs of his trousers, sure, and the skirts of his jacket, his shirt front, and this, this was his tie, dangling loose.

  He was ready. Ready for anything. And he swung back precipitately on the mirror, steeled and ready, and it was the biggest mistake he’d ever made, the switch thrown right back on again and no stopping it now: he was there, he was there in the mirror, all right, his hands and his class ring and his suit and the shoulders it concealed, but instead of his head, Stanley Robert McCormick son of Cyrus Hall McCormick inventor of the mechanical reaper’s head, there was the head of a dog. His eyes were the dog’s eyes and the dog was him. That shrank him. That sent him down. A dog? Why a dog? He’d always liked dogs—he thought of Digger the beagle while looking at the dog in the mirror—but this was an ugly dog, a rutting stinking lusting un-Christian unredeemed whoremongering woman-ruining boxer dog, with a staved-in face and a tongue that hung down like a limp red phallus all smeared with the jism that was its drool....

  He was out again in the hallway, the lavatory door sighing closed behind him, a murmur of voices and the sounds and smells of cooking out there before him, and his feet carried him there, wanting something—a sandwich and a root beer—but did they serve dogs? There, out of the hallway now and standing rigid by the coatrack and every shining face and every furtive eye turned to him, and ...

  The Waitress (again): “Are you ready for your table now, sir? Sir?”

  Stanley: “I’m ... I don’t think I’m ... I can’t ... I-I don’t think I’m hungry anymore—”

  The Waitress (blanching, pinching, shrinking): “That’s fine, absolutely. It happens to me all the time, one minute I’m wanting a slice of pie just as if I could die for it—lemon meringue’s my favorite—and the next minute I feel like I just got done eating a cow and I couldn’t hold another bite.... Well. You take care now.”

  The switch was on and it got him back through the door and into the street and past the crowd of gapers and auto fanciers and barefoot kids out of school for the summer, and then he was on the road again, driving fast, hell-bent for leather, boxer dogs, winged things and womanly waitresses all left panting in his wake.

  What helped him that day, as paradoxical as it may seem, was a flat tire. Flats were as common as rain in those days, when roads were unpaved, tires scarce and garages, mechanics and gasoline stations nonexistent, and every motorist routinely carried a jack and tire iron, an air pump, tire patches and spare inner tubes, in addition to as much surplus fuel and oil as he could find room for. So too Stanley. Usually he would get out and stretch his legs while the chauffeur repaired the tire and remounted the wheel, but on this occasion the chauffeur was back in Medford and the road, as far as he could see in either direction, was empty. And clearly, the car just wasn’t going to go much farther with a punctured tire and blown inner tube.

  Stanley climbed down from the car. It was the last day of August, lazy, hot and still, not a breath of breeze, solid white clouds bunched like fists along the horizon. He could smell the grass, acres of it, an infinity of grass, grass and weeds and rank shoddy stands of sumac against a complex of trees so thick and variegated he might have been in the Amazon instead of Massachusetts. Tiger moths floated up out of the roadside weeds, grasshoppers impaled themselves on spears of light, cows looked on stupidly from the fields. Without thinking twice he sloughed off his coat and jacket, peeled back his goggles, and bent to the cool substantial handle of the car jack, and the switch had already shut off, so dead and null and detached from the place inside him where it had been wired it was as if it had never existed, as if he hadn’t raced and trembled and seen a dog staring back at him in the lavatory mirror at the restaurant where he’d tried to eat and couldn’t. All memory of it was gone, vanished, erased. He was a man at the side of a country road, stopped somewhere between a town and a village, changing a tire.

  He got his hands black, and the grit of the road worked itself into the knees of his trousers. There were grease smears on his shirt. Sweat dripped from the tip of his nose and puddled in the dust. And he burned, his face reddened till it looked as if he’d been slapped to consciousness, faded, and been slapped again. But he did it. He changed the tire, without help, thanks or advice from anybody, and as he mounted the running board and slipped back behind the wheel, he felt as if he could do anything, brave any danger, as tough and intrepid as Sitka Charley, the Malemute Kid, Jack London himself.

  The mood carried him to Beverly, got him down out of the car to ask about local accommodations and purchase fuel at the general store, and it swept him right across that vibrant glowing greensward of a croquet lawn and into the field of Katherine Dexter’s keen sciential vision. He bathed, changed, combed his hair and trimmed his mustache in the mirror, and there he was, reproduced just like anybody else, and he even went so far as to wink at his own image in the glass. And then he went down to dinner, and he’d never been so hungry in his life.

  The dining room was lively, full of vacationers bending to their soup and chops amid a subdued clatter of silverware and a crepitating hum of conversation that was soothing and reassuring at the same time, and after standing in the vestibule a moment, Stanley allowed the maître d’ to show him to a table. When the waiter appeared, Stanley thought he might have a glass of wine for the stimulus—he was feeling exhilarated from his feat of driving and the adventure of the tire, and he wanted to prolong the sensation. He gazed out idly over the crowd of diners, the animated faces, the busy elbows, the pleasure everyone seemed to be taking in the smallest things, and he didn’t notice Katherine, not at first, and he was thinking how pleasant it was to be sitting in that dining room way up north of Boston, roving free and with no one to account to, like a knight errant, if knights had automobiles. Then the wine arrived, chilled, in a bucket of ice, and the waiter presented him with the menu.

  He began with the ox joints consommé, followed by cucumber spears, olives and the boiled halibut with egg sauce and Parisienne potatoes. He chose the boiled leg of mutton with caper sauce for his meat course, with apple fritters, boiled onions, new green peas and the tomato salad au mayonnaise. For dessert, he began with the bread pudding in cognac sauce, then sampled the Roquefort and Edam cheeses with fruit and biscuit, and he was lingering over his café noir when he happened to glance up and catch the eye of a young woman seated all the way across the room from him in the midst of a gay-looking young group.

  Or he didn’t catch her eye, not exactly—she seemed to have caught his. She was staring at him, and she never flinched or turned away when he looked up and saw that she was staring. Normally he wouldn’t have made a thing of it—if anything, he would have shied away and pretended to study the configuration of his cuticles for the next half hour—but he’d never felt so good and the wine was sparkling in his veins and invading his eyes and inhabiting his smile, and there was something about her that was maddeningly familiar, almost as if he knew her.... And after all he’d been through that day, well, he couldn’t help himself. When one of the men in her party got up from the table and crossed the room to the lavatory, Stanley rose inconspicuously and made his way to the lavatory too. Avoiding the mirrors, he watched as the man emerged from one of the stalls and washed up at the sink, and then
he cleared his throat, introduced himself and asked if he might not have an introduction to the young lady in blue?

  The man was Morris Johnston. He was of average height and build, he dressed in an average way, and his hair and eye color were resolutely average as well—that is, he was neither stout nor thin, not showy but no stick-in-the-mud either, and his coloring was mouse brown. “Oh, you mean Katherine?” he said, not at all taken aback.

  “Yes,” Stanley managed, tugging at his collar, which suddenly felt like a garrote round his throat, “Katherine,” and he was trying out the name. “I think I know her. What’s her family name?”

  Morris flashed a smile. “Dexter,” he said. “Katherine Dexter. But you’re not from Boston, are you?”

  It all came back to him then, from the look of Monsieur LaBonte’s tortured mustaches to the smell of the wax on the polished floorboards of his studio and the feel of that twelve-year-old girl in his arms, all wing and bone and tentative shuffling feet, the girl who was Katherine Dexter, now grown and mature and sitting in the next room, dressed in blue. “No,” he said, remembering the moistness of her palms in that overheated room, the proximity of their bodies, the quality of her laugh on a certain winter day when the temperature plummeted and the snow dropped softly from the sky like the plucked feathers of some rare celestial creature, “I used to know her in Chicago.”