by T. C. Boyle
All right, she would be rational about it, she would. It had a lifetime guarantee, didn’t it? But what a joke, she thought bitterly, and again she had to restrain herself from flinging the thing into the wall—a glass of wine, that’s what she needed. Yes. To calm her. And then she’d wrap the thing up in the box and send it right back to the bastards—they’d see how fast their own shit came sailing back to them, they’d see whether they could put anything over on her … she’d have Willis down at the post office the minute he came in the door. And she’d be damned if she’d pay postage on it either. Return to Sender, that’s how she’d mark it. Damaged in Transit, Take Your Garbage and—
But then she glanced up at the clock. It was quarter to twelve already and he’d be home any minute now. Suddenly all the rage she’d generated over the Frinstell Corporation was gone, extinguished as quickly as it had arisen, and she felt a wild rush of affection for her man, her husband, for Willis—the poor guy, out there in all kinds of weather, working like a man half his age, providing for her and protecting her … and she’d been hard on him at breakfast, she had. What he needed was a nice lunch, she decided, a nice hot lunch. She set the Home Weather Center back in the box as gently as if she were lowering a baby into its crib, and then she wrapped the package up again, retaped the seams, and went to the cupboard. She poured herself a glass of wine from the jug and then fastened on a can of split-pea-and-ham soup—she’d heat that for Willis, and she’d make him a nice egg salad on toast….
Toast. But they were out of bread, weren’t they? There was nothing but that sawdust-and-nut crap he’d tried to pawn off on her for breakfast. She thought about that for a moment and a black cloud seemed to rise up before her. And then, before she knew it, the fury of the morning swept over her again, the tragedy of the TV and the cheat of the Home Weather Center doubling it and redoubling it, and by the time she heard Willis’s key turn in the lock, she was smoldering like Vesuvius.
If she was testy in the morning, if she lashed into him for no reason and jumped down his throat at the slightest provocation, by lunchtime she was inevitably transformed, so that an all-embracing cloud of maternal sweetness wrapped him up as he stepped through the door, and then ushered him out again, half an hour later, with a series of tender lingering hugs, squeezes and back pats. That was the usual scenario, but today was different. Willis sensed it even before he shambled down the hallway to discover her in the kitchen fussing over a can of soup and a box of saltines. He saw that she was still in her nightdress and housecoat, a bad sign, and he recognized the stunned, hurt, put-upon look in her eyes. He just stood there at the kitchen door and waited.
“Willis, oh, Willis,” she sighed—or no, moaned, bleated, wailed as if all the trials of Job had been visited on her in the five hours since he’d seen her last. He knew the tone and knew it was trouble—anything could have set her off, from a stopped-up drain to the war in Bosnia or teary memories of her first husband, the saint. “Honey,” she cried, crossing the room to catch him up in an embrace so fierce it nearly ruptured his kidneys, “you’ve got to help me out—just a little favor, a tiny little one.” Her voice hardened almost imperceptibly as she clung to him and swayed back and forth in a kind of dance of grief: “Everything is just so, so rotten.“
He was seventy-five years old and he’d been working since the day he climbed out of the cradle. Most men his age were dead. He was tired. His hips felt as if an army of mad acupuncturists had been driving hot needles into them. All he wanted was to sit down.
“Honey, here,” she said, cooing now, nothing but concern,’and she led him awkwardly to the table, still half-clinging to him. “Sit down and eat; poor man, you’re probably starved. And exhausted, too. Is it raining out there?”
It was a question that didn’t require an answer, a variant on her luncheon monologue, a diversion to distract him from the true subject at hand, the crisis, whatever it was—the shattered TV screen, was that it?—the crisis which required his immediate attention and expertise. And no, it wasn’t raining, not yet, but it was blowing like holy hell out there and his morning had been an unmitigated disaster, a total waste of time. The framers hadn’t showed—or the damn plumber, either—and he’d spent the whole moming in the skeleton of the house, which was already behind schedule, watching the wind whip the waves to a froth and batter the seawall as if it were made of cardboard instead of concrete. He’d called the sons of bitches five or six times from the pay phone out front of the bank, but they weren’t answering. Pups, that’s what they were, afraid of a little weather. He glanced up and the soup appeared on the table before him, along with a platter of sardines, six neat squares of cheddar, saltines, and a glass of apple juice. Muriel hovered over him.
He took a sip of the juice, fingered his spoon and set it down again. Why forestall the inevitable? “What’s the trouble, sweetie?” he asked.
“I know you’re not going to like this, but you’re going to have to go to the post office for me.”
“The post office?” He didn’t want to go to the post office—he wanted to get back to the torn earth and wooden vertebrae of the rising house, to the mounds of rubble and refuse and the hot sudden smell of roofing tar. He thought of the doctor and his wife who’d hired him, a young couple in their forties, building their dream house by the sea. He’d promised them fifty-five hundred square feet with balconies, sundeck and wraparound view in six months’ time—and here two months had gone by already and the damn frame wasn’t even up yet. And Muriel wanted him to go to the post office.
“It’s the Home Weather Center,” she said. “It’s got to go back. And I mean today, immediately, right now.” Her voice threatened to ignite. “I won’t have it here in the house another minute … if those bastards think they can—”
She was working herself up, her ire directed for the moment at the Home Weather Center, whatever that was, and the unnamed bastards, whoever they were, but he knew that if he didn’t watch himself, if he didn’t look sharp, the full weight of her outrage would shift to him with the sudden killing swiftness of an avalanche. He heard himself saying, “I’ll take care of it, sweetie, don’t you worry.”
But when he glanced up to gauge her reaction, he found he was talking to himself: she’d left the room. Now what? There were sounds from the dining room—a fierce rending of tape and an impatient rustle of tissue paper, followed by the sharp tattoo of her approaching footsteps—and before he could lift the spoon to his lips she was back with a cardboard box the size of an ottoman. She swept across the room and dropped it on the table with a percussive thump that jarred the soup bowl and sent the juice swirling round the rim of the glass. Outside, the wind howled at the windows.
“Just look at this, will you?” she was saying, her elbows leaping as she tore the package open and extracted a long slim wooden plaque with three gleaming gauges affixed to it. He had a moment of enlightenment: the weather center. “Did you ever see such junk in your life?”
It looked all right to him. He wanted soup, he wanted sleep, he wanted the doctor’s house to rise up out of the dunes and bravely confront the sea, perfect in every detail. “What’s wrong with it, sweetie?”
“What’s wrong with it?” Her voice jumped an octave. “Are you blind? Look at this”—a blunt chewed fingernail stabbed at the middle gauge—“that’s what’s wrong. Junk. Nothing but junk.”
He frowned over the thing while his soup got cold and then he fished his glasses out of his shirt pocket and studied it. The barometer needle was pinned all the way down at twenty-eight inches—he’d never seen anything like it. He lifted the plaque from the table and shook it. He inverted it. He tapped the glass. Nothing.
Muriel was seething. She went off into a tirade about con men, cheats, the Japanese and what they’d done to her brother, not to mention the American economy, and all he could do to calm her was agree with everything she said and croon “sweetie” over and over again till his soup turned gelid and he pushed himself up from the table, tuc
ked the package under his arm, and headed out the door for the post office.
The wind was up, whipping the treetops like rags, and the smell of the ocean was stronger now, rank and enveloping, as if the bottom of the sea had turned over and littered the shore with its dead. A trash can skittered down the street and a shopping bag shot across the lawn to cling briefly to his ankles. As he settled into the car, the package beside him, the wind jerked the door out of his hand and he began to realize that there would be no more work today. At this rate he’d be lucky if what they’d put up so far was still there in the morning. No wonder the framers hadn’t showed: this was a real blow.
He dodged trash-can lids and branches that glided magically across the road, the car pulling him along to the post office as faithfully as an old horse. The streets were deserted. He encountered exactly three other cars, all with their lights on and all going like hell. By the time he got to the traffic light outside the post office and sat there for an eternity watching the stoplight heave on its wires, it was so dark it might have been dusk. Maybe it was a hurricane after all, he thought, maybe that was it. He would have turned on the radio, but the damn thing had never worked to begin with, and then, two months ago, some jerk had smashed out the window on the driver’s side and made off with it.
Sitting there watching the stoplight leap and sway over the deserted pavement, he felt a sudden sense of foreboding, a quick hot jolt of fear that made him gun the engine impatiently and inch forward into the intersection. He was thinking he’d better get home and see to the windows, see to Muriel—he’d been caught in a hurricane in Corpus Christi once and they’d been without lights or water for six days. He remembered an old woman sitting in the middle of a flooded street with a bloody strip of somebody’s parlor curtains knotted round her head. That was an image. And he and his buddies with two cases of tequila they’d fished out of the wreckage of a liquor store. He’d better get home. He’d better.
But then the light changed and he figured he was here already and might as well take care of business—there’d be hell to pay at home if he didn’t, hurricane or no—and he pulled into the lot, parked the car and reached for the package. Five minutes, that’s all it would take. Then he’d be home.
As he came up the walk—and it was blowing now, Jesus, dirt or sand or something in his eyes—he saw the postmaster and a bearded guy with a ponytail scurrying around with a sheet of plywood big enough to seal off a shopping mall. The postmaster had a hammer in his hand and he was shouting something to the other one, but then a gust took hold of the plywood and sent them both sprawling into the bushes. Willis hunched himself over and snatched at the Mets cap, but it was too late: it shot from his head and sailed up over the trees like a clay pigeon. Hurrying now, he fought his way through the heavy double doors and into the post office.
There was no one at the counter, no one waiting in line, no one in the building at all as far as he could see. The lights were all up full and the polished floor ran on down the corridor as usual, but the place was eerily silent. Outside, the sky raged at the plate-glass windows, a wild spatter of rain driving before it now. Willis hit the handbell, just to be sure no one was back there in the sorting room or on the toilet or something, and then he turned to go. Muriel would have to understand, that was all: they were closed down. There was a hurricane coming. He’d done all he could.
He’d just pulled back the inner door when the big plate-glass window in the lobby gave way with a pop like a champagne cork, followed by the splash of shattering glass. Leave the damn package, his brain told him, drop it and get on home and lock yourself up in the basement with Muriel and the cat and a case of pork and beans, but his legs failed him. He just stood there as a window shattered somewhere in the back and the lights faltered and then blew. “Hey, you, old man!” a voice was shouting, and there was the postmaster, right beside him, his face drawn and white, hair disheveled. The bearded man was with him and their eyes were jumping with excitement. In the next moment they had Willis by the arms, wind screaming in his ears; a flurry of white envelopes lifted suddenly into the air, and he was moving, moving fast, down a hallway and into the darkness and the quiet.
He could smell the postmaster and the other one, could smell the wet and the fear on them. Their breath came in quick greedy pants. Outside, way in the distance, he could hear the muted keening of the wind.
“Anybody got a match?” It was the postmaster’s voice, a voice he knew from the roped-off line and the window and the gleaming tiled expanse of the lobby.
“Here,” came another voice and a match flared to reveal the pockmarked face of the bearded man and a cement-block storage room of some kind, mail-bags, cardboard boxes, heaps of paper.
The postmaster fumbled through a cabinet behind him and came up with a flashlight, one of those big boxy jobs with a lighthouse beam at one end and a little red emergency light at the other. He played it round the room, then set the flashlight down on a carton and cut the beam. The room glowed with an eerie reddish light. “Holy shit,” he said, “did you see the way that window blew? You didn’t get cut, did you, Bob?”
Bob answered in the negative.
“Man, we were lucky.” The postmaster was a big bearish man in his fifties who’d worn a beard for years but now had the pasty stubbly look of a man newly acquainted with a razor. He paused. The wind screamed in the distance. “God, I wonder if Becky’s okay—she was supposed to take Jimmy to the dentist, to the orthodontist, I mean—”
Bob said nothing, but then both of them turned to Willis, as if they’d just realized he was there.
“You okay?” the postmaster asked him.
“I’m all right,” Willis said. He was, wasn’t he? But what about the car? What about Muriel? “But listen, I’ve got to get home—”
The postmaster let out a little bark of a laugh. “Home? Don’t you get it? That’s Hurricane Leroy out there—you’ll be lucky if you got a home left to go to—and whatever possessed you to come out in this mess? I mean, don’t you listen to the TV? Christ,” he said, as if that summed it all up.
There was a silence, and then, with a sigh, Bob eased himself back into a cradle of folded cardboard boxes. “Well,” he said, and the faint red light glinted off the face of the pint bottle he extracted from his shirt, “we might as well enjoy ourselves—looks like we’re going to be here a while.”
Willis must have dozed. They’d passed the bottle and he’d got a good deep burning taste of whiskey—a taste Muriel denied him; she was worse than the Schick Center when it came to that, though she sipped wine all day herself—and then Bob had begun to drone on in a stopped-up, back-of-the-throat sort of voice, complaining about his marriage, his bad back, his sister on welfare and the way the cat sprayed the bedposts and the legs of the kitchen table, and Willis had found it increasingly difficult to focus on the glowing red beacon of the light. He was slouched over in a folding chair the postmaster had dragged in from one of the offices, and when awareness gripped him, Bob was enumerating the tragic flaws of the auto-insurance industry, his face ghastly in the hellish light. For a moment Willis didn’t know where he was, but then he heard the wind in the distance and it all came back to him.
“With only two accidents, Bob? I can’t believe it,” the postmaster said.
“Hell,” Bob countered, “I’ll show you the damn bill.”
Willis tried to get up but his hips wouldn’t allow it. “Muriel,” he said.
The two faces turned to him then, the bearded one and the one that should have been bearded, and they looked strange and menacing in that unnatural light. “You all right, old-timer?” the postmaster asked.
Willis felt like Rip Van Winkle, like Methuselah; he felt tired and hopeless, felt as if everything he’d known and done in his life had been wasted. “I’ve got to”—he caught himself; he’d been about to say I’ve got to go home, but they’d probably try to stop him and he didn’t want any arguments. “I’ve got to take a leak,” he said.
The postmaster studied him a moment. “It’s still blowing out there,” he said, “but the radio says the worst of it’s past.” Willis heard the faint whisper of the radio then—one of those little transistors the kids all wear; it was tucked into the postmaster’s breast pocket. “Give it another hour,” the postmaster said, “and we’ll make sure you get home all right. And your car’s okay, if that’s what’s worrying you. Nothing worse than maybe a branch on the roof.”
Willis said nothing.
“Down the hall and to your left,” the postmaster said.
It took him a moment to fight the inertia of his hips, and then he was emerging from the shadows of the storage room and into the somber gray twilight of the hallway. Nuggets of glass crunched and skittered underfoot and everything was wet. It was raining hard outside and there was that rank smell in the air still, but the wind seemed to have tapered off. He found the toilet and he kept on going.
The lobby was a mess of wet clinging paper and leaves, but the doors swung open without a hitch, and in the next moment Willis was out on the front steps and the rain was driving down with a vengeance on his bare bald head. He reached automatically for the Mets cap, but then he remembered it was gone, and he hunched his shoulders and started off across the parking lot. He moved cautiously, wary of the slick green welter of leaves and windblown debris underfoot, and he was wet through by the time he reached the car. A single crippled branch was draped over the windshield, but there was no damage; he swept it to the ground and ducked into the driver’s seat.