by T. C. Boyle
Before anybody can respond, April Wind draws in an audible breath – a stabbing, shrieking, stifled–in–the–cradle sort of breath – and asks, ‘Is it true, Mac?’
Mac turns his head to me, the shades flinging off the light of the chandelier in a poisonous silver flash, then comes back to April Wind, and I can’t help thinking of the tight little smile of satisfaction on her face the first morning I saw her slipping out of Mac’s room or the time he held her in his lap like a ventriloquist’s dummy all through a showing of Soylent Green in the screening room. Good, I think, let her get her comeuppance. Who is she anyway, and how did she weasel her way in here?
Mac’s response is so soft, so sweet and lispingly breathy, my old man’s ears can barely pick it up. ‘If you mean what I think you mean, baby, then, yes, it’s true, we’re out of here – Al and Al and me – this afternoon. Business, that is. Up north. You all can stay on, and everything’s going to be built back again, so don’t you worry, Ty – you know I wouldn’t sacrifice those precious sweet creatures down there for anything in the world.’
April Wind wants to say a whole lot more, I can see that, she wants to call on the spirits of the trees and the other animist gods, wants to talk crystals and auras, wants to marshal all the forces of woo–woo to bind Mac to her, to us, but she just gives him a plaintive look and stockpiles her words for later, when she can get him alone. I’m not a betting man, but I give her less than a ten–percent chance of finding a seat on that helicopter when it rises up out of the muck with our resident god aboard. Goodbye, Mac, I’m thinking, and let’s get on with it.
Events to this point are still pretty clear in my mind, the champagne, the promise of eggs fried in butter, Mac, April Wind, Andrea, the two Als – all that’s been preserved in the hard–drive of my old man’s memory. But the rest of it, I’m afraid, suffers from gaps and deletions. It’s the shock factor, I suppose, selective memory, repressed material, events so naked and grisly you can’t admit them. For better or worse, here’s what I can bring up:
Fatima, all in black, shoving through the swinging doors to the upper kitchen, which is really just a warming room, connected by dumbwaiter to the main kitchen on the first floor and the incinerator in the basement, and Zulfikar right behind her in his white toque and spattered apron. Both of them carrying big silver chafing dishes and a familiar ambrosial aroma that takes me back to my mother, my grandmother, the kitchens of old, but I can’t taste those eggs now, so I don’t think we got that far. I see the big silver dishes in the center of the table, Fatima’s pitted black eyes peering out of the gap in her yashmak, and then I’m seeing Dandelion, incongruous as that may seem, scraping his way up the dumbwaiter from the basement with a kind of grit and leonine initiative I’d have had to admire under other circumstances. And that’s a picture, four hundred— and—some—odd pounds of determined cat, the yellow fire of his eyes, the mane swinging from the back of his head like an ill–fitting wig, the spidering limbs and grasping claws. He defies gravity. He is silent, absolutely, no sound but for the rasp of those hooked claws digging for purchase. Dandelion. Climbing.
The door swings open again, right on Fatima’s heels, as if there’s another server back there, more to the feast than just eggs – curries and lamb tikka, defrosted halibut in a cardamom sauce, unexpected delicacies and further delights – but no human agency has pushed open that door. I don’t know who becomes aware of it first. I remember looking up, heads turning, the motion of the door, and then seeing Dandelion there. And smelling him. A lion in the doorway might have been a trick of the fight, slip off your glasses and polish them on your sleeve, get a new prescription ASAP, but there was no arguing with that smell. That smell was immemorial. That smell was the smell of death.
In the wild, when there was a wild, lions would kill their prey through suffocation. They would bring down a zebra or a wildebeest or even a cape buffalo, and then clamp their jaws on the throat or, more typically, over the mouth and nose, until the animal lay still. And when they took humans, they would most often attack at night, biting through the walls of a tent or hut and seizing the victim by the skull, crushing it instantly. If the victim awoke or the lion missed its stroke, things would get nasty. Then the claws would come into play, and the victim would be dragged off screaming into the night. Of course, in a chance encounter in the bush, all bets were off. The lion would do what lions do.
Is there a snarl? Or a woof? I don’t know, but I have a hand on Andrea’s arm and I’m dragging her awkwardly down into the vacancy beneath the table, chairs scraping, somebody shouting, God Himself invoked by one of the Als, the one who’s about to be sliced open like a watermelon and flung across the room even as Dandelion, spitting and roaring, homes in on Mac. Why Mac? I’m thinking, as I scramble for the door with Andrea in tow and April shrieks and the surviving Al tries to draw a ridiculous little pistol from the leather holster under his arm, but thinking isn’t something you do a lot of under circumstances like these. The roaring alone is enough to seize your heart – and I’ve never seen Dandelion like this, so wrought up and nasty, whirling, biting, slashing – and then there’s the sight of the blood. And worse, the sight of Mac – our benefactor, Dandelion’s benefactor, the provider of meat, money, health care, companionship, a true and caring friend of the animals – lying there so still in the cradle of his overturned chair. His hat is gone, the shades are crushed, the eel whips drawing the blood out of his scalp like the bright–red tips of a painter’s brushes. Andrea is screaming something in my ear and the door to the hallway is closing on the scene, closing firmly, Ratchiss’ big gun all the way down on the first floor and no hope for anybody or anything left in all this world.
Part Three
Wildlife in America
Lompoc/Los Angeles,
September–October 1991
It had to be one of the stranger transformations – from a penis sheath and limitless horizons to prison–issue cotton and a twelve–foot chain–link fence with concertina wire strung across the top. Tierwater let his legs dangle from the upper bunk in the room (not cell, room) he shared with Bill Driscoll, stock swindler, scam artist and interstate bilker of the elderly, and turned it over in his mind. Most offenders, white–collar or blue-, were either taken in the act or surprised in their own beds at 4:00 a.m., but how many went from a state of nature to civilization and incarceration in one fell swoop? Tierwater pictured some Wild West desperado hunkered over a jackrabbit stew one day and tossed into the Yuma Territorial Prison the next. Or the Bushmen themselves, run down on horseback and converted to slaves by their Boer masters. Or, even more poignantly, an animal captured in the wild, one of Uncle Sol’s orangutans torn from the trees and fitfully gnashing at the alien mesh of the wire cage, the elephant trapped in the kraal and chained to a stake, the eagle with its wings clipped.
But if he felt like an animal, it wasn’t a wild or even a feral one – no, he felt like a domesticated beast, a child’s pony with its nose in the feedbag, the bloated dog curled up on a rug in front of the fireplace. For thirty days last year he’d subsisted on roots, insects and fish no longer than his index finger, and when they locked him up in here, he ate like three men, fried chicken and mashed potatoes, Boston cream pie, sloppy joes, pizza, spaghetti, french fries and onion rings, three scoops of ice cream with chocolate syrup and a can of root beer to wash it down. He was in possession of a belly for the first time in his fife, and he’d even developed something resembling buttocks to fill out his prison–issue trousers. There was that, and the fact that this place – Club Fed, they called it – wasn’t much more rigorous than Boy Scout camp. But Boy Scouts got to go home, and, however you sliced it, Tierwater was still in jail – locked up, incarcerated, separated from his wife and daughter and his checkbook and his cause – and he hadn’t done a thing to deserve it.
They’d wanted to pin the fire on him – and the destruction of all that costly equipment belonging to Coast Lumber – but he got angry, got incensed, and denied ev
erything with the self–righteous rage of the falsely accused, and, of course, they had no proof. Not a shred. Though they let Quinn in on the interrogation, and Quinn, rasping and nodding and scratching, was certain he was guilty, and did everything he could to prod the state and federal investigators into extending the list of charges. They didn’t. Tierwater pled guilty to interstate flight and kidnapping, as per the plea bargain worked out by Fred and his team of wild–eyed paper–shufflers, the other charges against him dropped in both federal and state courts. He was sentenced to three hundred and sixty days at the Federal Prison Camp in Lompoc, the state sentence to be served concurrently with the federal.
At first he’d been glad to come in out of the cold, happy just to find himself in a bed at night or following his nose to the dining hall three times a day. He was dead to everything else, as if he were recuperating from a serious illness. He didn’t even see the other inmates, didn’t see their shuffling feet or their faces frozen in fear, lust, rage and hate. All he saw was the plate, the food, the Twix bar and the Milky Way at the prison commissary. That didn’t last long. Four or five days maybe. A week. Then he began to notice the guards as if they’d materialized out of a dream, he saw the fence, the barred windows, the sly and all–knowing faces ranged round him like masks on a wall. He was a criminal. He was in jail. And though the other inmates learned to stay out of his way, though there were classes to attend in everything from Zen to auto mechanics to poetry writing and there were three blacktop tennis courts and a workout room at his disposal, the fact of his incarceration began to gnaw at him till he could barely sleep at night. This was what the system had done to him. The machine. Progress.
Each day was eternal, but not in the way of those shimmering, unconscious days in the wilderness when all his senses were on fire and every least rustle of the leaves screamed food in his brain, but in the way of stupefaction, of boredom so black and viscous it was like sludge poured through a funnel into a very small container. He read, he slept, he watched TV with the other emasculated idiots. Out of desperation, and because Fred said it could reduce his sentence (it didn’t), he took a class called ‘Salutary Self–Expression and the Paradox of the Me’ from an embittered unpublished poet who taught part–time at the local community college and confessed that he was ‘attracted to the criminal mind.’ He worked in the prison printshop, turning out government forms. He played cards, checkers, chess, Parcheesi, chewed gum, put model airplanes together from kits Andrea brought him. Three times a week he played savage stinging sets of tennis with a young bankrobber by the name of Amaury Benitez, who’d been arrested on his doorstep twenty minutes after passing a note to the teller scrawled on the back of one of his own deposit slips. At night, when Bill Driscoll’s breathing derailed itself and fell away into the twisting tunnels of deep sleep, he thought of Andrea, naked in the wild, and masturbated in a slow dream, making it last as long as he could.
Well, he was at the end of all that now, due for release in twenty–six days. Twenty–six days. And then he could go back to his normal life, meeting with his parole officer every Monday and slipping out in the wee hours to do his bit to bring the whole system crashing down, and don’t think he hadn’t had plenty of time to draw up an exhaustive list of key players – the very props and supports of the machine – with Sheriff Bob Hicks, Judge Duermer and Siskiyou Lumber right at the top. Ah, yes: freedom. And what was the day like out there beyond the barred windows and the chain–link fence? Sunny and cool, with an ocean breeze that smelled of sea wrack and clams – geoducks – dug wet from the sand and minced for chowder.
As Tierwater eased himself down from the bed so as not to wake Bill Driscoll, who seemed intent on sleeping out his sentence, he felt good, renewed, ready for anything. This was Saturday, visiting day, and he was expecting Andrea and Sierra in the early afternoon. He’d kiss his wife – once at the beginning of the visit, and once at the end, as sanctioned by the regulations – and he’d pat his daughter’s hand and listen to her go on about school, boys and the mall and how she was so totally glad to be out of that hick town and the whole Sarah Dorkwater thing. He wanted to open up to her, to tell her how much he missed her and how he was going to make everything up to her as soon as he got out, but he couldn’t; she always seemed so muted in the visitors’ hall, intimidated by the place – and, he began to suspect, by her father too. He stared across the table at her, and didn’t know what to say.
He saw her once a month, and each time she was a new person, nothing like the scrawny red–faced infant he’d thrown over his shoulder like a rug, or the little girl slashing away at the out–of–tune violin while the sun crashed through the trees, or even the loose–limbed teenager playing Monopoly on the steps of Ratchiss’ cabin. She was growing up without him. She was fifteen now, nearly as tall as Andrea, and with the flowering figure of a woman, and he had so much to tell her. Or he thought he did. But when she was actually there, sitting across the table from him, and Bill Driscoll was complaining in a thunderous voice about the food to the bob–nosed little exercise freak who was his wife and Amaury Benitez’s mother was sobbing into a handkerchief the size of a beach towel, he couldn’t seem to summon any advice, fatherly or otherwise.
But now, now he hitched up his pants and ambled down the hall and out the door into the courtyard, stunned all over again by the reach of the sky and the feel of the sun on his face, and he didn’t have a worry. Twenty–six days. It was nothing. He’d move into the house Andrea had rented for them in Tarzana and mow the lawn and take the trash out, and he’d drive Sierra to school in the morning and be there for her in the afternoon, and he’d take her shopping, for ice cream, to the movies, and it would be like it used to be, before Teo and Sheriff Bob Hicks came onto the scene. Yes. And then there was Andrea. He’d love her in the flesh – all night, every night – and not in the pathetic theater of his mind.
A couple of the inmates were sunning themselves against the south wall of the dormitory – Anthony Imbroglio, a small–time gangster from Long Beach, and his muscle, a perpetually smirking fat–headed goon by the name of Johnny Taradash – and Tierwater gave them a noncommittal nod, not friendly exactly, but not disrespectful either. That was the thing here, respect. Even though the place was for nonviolent and first–time offenders – nothing like the maximum- or even medium–security prisons, where your fellow inmates were armed robbers, killers and gang members and you were locked in cells on a cellblock just like in an old George Raft movie – you could still get hurt here. For all the overweight accountants, pigeon–chested scam artists and inside traders with flat feet and staved–in eyes, there were drug offenders too, muscle–bound high–school dropouts, ethnic groups with gang affiliations – black, Latino, Native American – and all of them were angry, and they all pumped iron instead of worrying about their investment portfolios.
At the end of Tierwater’s first week, Johnny Taradash had come to him and suggested he might want to have Andrea deposit a hundred dollars a month in Anthony Imbroglio’s account at First Interstate in Los Angeles. For his own protection, that is. Tierwater was weak still, skinny as a refugee, but his temper – that uncontainable flood of rage that came up in him like Blitzkrieg at the most inopportune times – was as muscular as ever. He told Johnny Taradash to fuck off, and Johnny Taradash let out a weary sigh and began tearing up the room in a slow methodical way, ripping the covers off books, crumpling magazines, that sort of thing, and he left Tierwater gasping for breath on the concrete floor. The next day Tierwater smuggled a wrench and screwdriver out of the printshop and spent the better part of the afternoon removing a dull–gray scuffed metal leg from the desk in his room. He lingered in the doorway that evening, while Bill Driscoll turned to the wall and moaned in his sleep and the shadows solidified in the trees beyond the window, till he caught sight of Johnny Taradash’s big head floating down the hall from the TV room, just behind the sleek, neatly barbered form of his boss. He waited. Held his breath. Then stepped out and hit Johnny
Taradash flat across the plane of his face, swinging for the fences with everything he had. After that, there was respect.
He’d almost reached the visitors’ hall when Radovan Divac, the Serbian chess fiend, came at him out of nowhere, demanding a game. Divac was a gangling, morose–looking character with a nose like a loaf of French bread and a pair of negligible eyes who’d tried to rob a federal credit union with a water pistol. ‘Come on, Ty,’ he pleaded, ‘I give you queen and, and – knight’s bishop. Fi’ dollar, you beat me.’
‘Sorry, Rado,’ he said, brushing past him, ‘I’ve got visitors.’
The Serb held up a fist choked with black pieces. ‘And the rook – I give you both rook. Fi’ dollar, come on!’
Tierwater gave his name to the guard at the door of the visitors’ facility and went on into the long low rectangular room with its wrung–out fight, its smell of flooding glands and the dust that hung eternally in the air. A segmented table divided the room: on one side were women in dresses, makeup and heels, accompanied by the occasional squirming infant or fiercely scrubbed toddler; on the other were the prisoners. Tierwater took one of the only two seats available – on the far end, next to a guard named Timson who must have weighed three hundred pounds. They were like umpires, the guards – bloated, titanic men with dead faces who called all the strikes balls and the balls strikes, enemies of the game and the players alike. Tierwater had learned not to expect much from them. He was listening to one of the new inmates tell his wife or girlfriend how thoroughly he was going to fuck her when he got out in six months – Right on down to the spaces in between your toes, baby – when Andrea and Sierra came through the door.
Andrea was wearing heels and a tight green dress with spaghetti straps that showed off her arms and shoulders. Sierra, in baggy jeans, high–tops and a sweatshirt that featured the name of her high school stamped across the front of it, stood against the wall just inside the door while one of the guards – another flesh–monster born of doughnuts and Kentucky Fried – frisked Andrea for contraband. Up and down her front with the portable metal–detector, both sides, now turn around, the wand re–creating each dip and bulge, the hair falling across her face in a shimmering, fine white–blond sheet, every prisoner watching with that starved prison light in his eyes, even the ones with their pregnant sixteen–year–old girlfriends propped up across from them like tombstones. Then Andrea was crossing the room, everything in motion, and Tierwater stood to place his hands flat on the table and lean into her for the kiss.