by T. C. Boyle
His mind wasn’t working well at this point—perhaps it was the shock of the storm or the effects of the whiskey and his nap in the folding chair. The keys. He fumbled twice through his pants and jacket before he finally found them, and then he flooded the engine and had to hold his foot to the floor while the starter whined and the rain smeared the windshield. Finally he got the thing going with a roar and jerked it into gear; it was then that he discovered the tree blocking the exit. And now what? The specter of Muriel rose before him, pale and trembling, and then he glanced up to see the postmaster and Bob planted on the steps and gawking at him as if he’d just dropped down from another planet. What the hell, he thought, and he gave them a jaunty wave, revved the engine and shot up over the curb and into the street.
But here the world was truly transformed. It was as if a big hand had swept the street, slapping down trees and telephone poles, obliterating windows, stripping shingles from the roofs. The road that led out to the highway was impassable, churning with shit-brown water and one of those little Japanese cars awash in it, overturned on its roof. Willis tried Meridian Street and then Seaboard, but both were blocked. An oak tree that must have been five hundred years old had taken the veranda out of the house where Joe Diggs had lived before he passed on, and there were live wires thrashing the shattered shaft of a telephone pole out front. Even through the tattoo of the rain on the roof Willis could hear the sirens, a continuous, drawn-out wail of grief.
He was worried now—this was as bad as Corpus Christi, worse—and his hands trembled on the wheel when he turned into his own street and found the entrance buried in rubble and vegetation. The house on the corner—the Needlemans’—was untouched, but across the street, on his side, the Stovers’ place had lost its roof. And the street itself, the placid tree-lined street that had attracted Muriel in the first place, was unrecognizable, a double row of maples laid down flat like a deck of cards. Willis backed out of the street, water running up to his hubcaps, and made a left on Susan and then another left on Massapequa, trying to make it around the block and come up on the house from the far side.
He was in luck. Neither street seemed to have suffered much damage, and he was able to make his way round a fallen telephone pole at the entrance to Massapequa by climbing up over the curb as he’d done at the post office. And then he was turning into Laurel, his own street, dodging refuse and swinging wide to avoid the clogged storm drain at the corner. People were out on their lawns now, assessing the damage—he saw Mrs. Tilden or Tillotson or whatever her name was trying to brace up a cypress that clung to her front porch like a wet mustache. It was almost comical, that little woman and that big limp tree, and he began to relax—everything was going to be okay, it was, there was hardly any damage on this end—and there was the fat guy—what was his name?—holding his head and dancing round the carcass of his crushed Cadillac. Yes, he said aloud, everything’s going to be all right, and he repeated it to himself, making a little prayer of it.
He was more afraid of Muriel now than of the storm—he could hear her already: how could he leave her in the middle of a hurricane? Where had he been? Was that liquor on his breath? The damage he could take care of—he was a builder, wasn’t he? It was just a matter of materials, that was all—bricks, lumber, drywall, shingles. And glass. The glaziers would be busy, that was for sure. As he eased past a lawn mower standing forlornly in the middle of the street and crept round the big sweeping curve that gave him his first view of the house, he was expecting the worst—shutters gone, a hole in the roof, the elm lying atop the garage like a crippled beast—but the reality made his heart seize.
There was nothing there. Nothing. Where the house had stood not two hours ago, the elm towering over it, the two-car garage in back with his tools and workbench and all the rest, there was now a vacant lot. The yard had been swept clean but for the torn and crenellated foundation, filled with rubble like some ancient ruin. Panic seized him, shock, and he hit the brake instinctively, sending the car into a fishtail that carried him across the street and slammed him into the curb with a jolt.
Trembling, he pried his fingers from the wheel. There was a throb of pain above his right eye where he’d hit the rearview mirror. His hands were shaking. But no, he thought, looking up again, it couldn’t be. He was on the wrong street, that was it—he’d got turned around and fetched up in front of somebody else’s place. It took him a moment, but then he swung the door open and stepped tentatively into the litter of the street, and there was the number on the curb to refute him, there the mailbox with his name stenciled across it in neat white letters, untouched, the red flag still standing tall. And that was the Novaks’ place next door, no doubt about it, a sick lime green with pink trim….
Then he thought of Muriel. Muriel. She was, she was … he couldn’t form the thought, and he staggered across the lawn like a drunk to stand gaping into that terrible hole in the ground. “Muriel,” he bleated, “Muriel!” and the rain drove down at him.
He stood there a long while, head bowed, feeling as old as the stones themselves, as old as the gashed earth and the dead gray sky. And then, the car still rumbling and stuttering behind him, he had the very first intimation of a thought that sparked and swelled till it glowed like a torch in his brain: Dewar’s and water. He saw himself as he was when Muriel first found him, wedded to the leatherette stool at the Dew Drop Inn, and his lips formed the words involuntarily: “Make mine a Dewar’s and water.” The house was gone, but he’d lost houses before—mainly to wives, which were a sort of natural disaster anyway; that he could live with—and he’d lost wives, too, but never like this.
It hit him then, a wave of grief that started in his hips and crested in his throat: Muriel. He saw her vividly, the lunchtime Muriel who rubbed his shoulders and fussed over him, making those little crackers with anchovy paste and avocado … he saw her turning down the sheets on the bed at night, saw her frowning over a crossword puzzle, the glasses perched on the end of her nose—little things, homey things. With a pang he remembered the way she’d kid him over the TV programs or a football game and how she’d dance round the kitchen with a bottle of wine and a beef brisket studded with cloves of garlic … and now it was over. He was seventy-five—seventy-six, come October—and he stared into that pit and felt the icy breath of eternity on his face.
His jacket was wet through and his arms hung limp at his sides by the time he turned away and limped back over the sodden lawn, a soldier returning from the wars. He dragged himself across the street to the car, and all he could think of was Ted Casselman, down at the Dew Drop—he would know what to do—and he actually had the door open, one foot poised on the rocker panel, when he glanced up for a final bewildered look, and a movement on the Novaks’ porch caught his eye. All at once the storm door swung back with a dull flash of light and there she was, Muriel, rescued from oblivion. She was in her housecoat still and it was bedraggled and wet, and her long white hair hung tangled round her shoulders so that she was like some old woman of the woods in a children’s tale. Anna Novak hovered behind her, a tragic look pressed into the immobile Slavic folds of her eyes. Muriel just stood there, gazing across the street to where he hovered at the door of the car, half a beat from release.
The wind came up then and rattled the branches of the trees that were still standing. Someone was calling a dog up the street: “Hermie, Hermie! Here, baby!” The rain slackened. “Willis!” Muriel suddenly cried, “Willis!” and the spell was broken. She was coming down the steps, grand and invincible, her arms spread wide.
What could he do? He dropped his foot to the pavement” ignoring the pain that shot through his hip, and opened his arms to receive her.
(1989)
HOPES RISE
I took my aching back to my brother-in-law, the doctor, and he examined me, ran some X-rays, and then sat me down in his office. Gazing out the window on the early manifestations of spring—inchoate buds crowning the trees, pussy willows at the edge of the marsh, the solit
ary robin probing the stiff yellow grass—I felt luxurious and philosophical. So what if my back felt as if it had been injected with a mixture of battery acid and Louisiana hot sauce? There was life out there, foliate and rich, a whole planet seething with possibility. It was spring, time to wake up and dance to the music of life.
My brother-in-law had finished fiddling with his unfashionable beard and pushing his reading glasses up and down the bridge of his nose. He cleared his throat. “Listen, Peter,” he said in his mellifluous healing tones, “we’ve known each other a long time, haven’t we?”
A hundred corny jokes flew to my lips, but I just smiled and nodded.
“We’re close, right?”
I reminded him that he was married to my sister and had fathered my niece and nephew.
“Well, all right,” he said. “Now that that’s been established, I think I can reveal to you the first suppressed axiom of the medical cabal.”
I leaned forward, a fierce pain gripping the base of my spine, like a dog shaking a rat in its teeth. Out on the lawn, the robin beat its shabby wings and was sucked away on the breeze.
My brother-in-law held the moment, and then, enunciating with elaborate care, he said, “Any injury you sustain up to the age of twenty-one, give or take a year, is better the next day; after twenty-one, any injury you sustain will haunt you to the grave.”
I gave a hoot of laughter that made the imaginary dog dig his claws in, and then, wincing with the pain, I said, “And what’s the second?”
He was grinning at me, showing off the white, even, orthodontically assisted marvel of his teeth. “Second what?”
“Axiom. Of the medical cabal.”
He waved his hand. It was nothing. “Oh, that,” he said, pushing at his glasses. “Well, that’s not suppressed really, not anymore. I mean, medical men of the past have told their wives, children, brother-in-laws—or is it brothers-in-law? Anyway, it’s ‘Get plenty of rest and drink plenty of fluids.’”
This time my laugh was truncated, cut off like the drop of a guillotine. “And my back?”
“Get plenty of rest,” he said, “and drink plenty of fluids.”
The pain was there, dulling a bit as the dog relaxed its grip, but there all the same. “Can we get serious a minute?”
But he wouldn’t allow it. He never got serious. If he got serious he’d have to admit that half the world was crippled, arthritic, suffering from dysplasia and osteoporosis; he’d have to admit that there were dwarves and freaks and glandular monsters, not to mention the legions of bandy-legged children starving in the streets even as we spoke. If he got serious he’d have to acknowledge his yawning impotence in the face of the rot and chaos that were engulfing the world. He got up from his desk and led me to the door with a brother-in-lawly touch at the elbow.
I stood at the open door, the waiting room gaping behind me. I was astonished: he wasn’t going to do anything. Not a thing. “But, but,” I stammered, “aren’t you going to give me some pills at least?”
He held his flawless grin—not so much as a quiver of his bearded lip—and I had to love him for it: his back didn’t hurt; his knees were fine. “Peter,” he said, his voice rich with playful admonition, “there’s no magic pill—you should know that.”
I didn’t know it. I wanted codeine, morphine, heroin; I wanted the pain to go away. “Physician,” I hooted, “heal thyself!” And I swung round on my heels, surfeited with repartee, and nearly ran down a tiny wizened woman suspended like a spider in a gleaming web of aluminum struts and wheels and ratchets.
“You still seeing Adrian?” he called as I dodged toward the outer door. My coat—a jab of pain; my scarf—a forearm shiver. Then the gloves, the door, the wind, the naked cheat of spring. “Because I was thinking,” the man of healing called, “I was thinking we could do some doubles at my place”—thunderous crash of door, voice pinched with distance and the interposition of a plane of impermeable oak—“Saturday, maybe?”
At home, easing into my chair with a heating pad, I pushed the playback button on my answering machine. Adrian’s voice leapt out at me, breathless, wound up, shot through with existential angst and the low-threshold hum of day-to-day worry. “The frogs are disappearing. All over the world. Frogs. Can you believe it?” There was a pause. “They say they’re like the canary in the coal mine—it’s the first warning, the first sign. The apocalypse is here, it’s now, we’re doomed. Call me.”
Adrian and I had been seeing each other steadily for eleven years. We shopped together, went to movies, concerts, museums, had dinner three or four nights a week and talked for hours on the phone. In the early years, consumed by passion, we often spent the night together, but now, as our relationship had matured, we’d come increasingly to respect each other’s space. There’d been talk of marriage, too, in the early years—talk for the most part generated by parents, relatives and friends tied to mortgages and diaper services—but we felt we didn’t want to rush into anything, especially in a world hurtling toward ecological, fiscal and microbial disaster. The concept was still on hold.
I dialed her number and got her machine. I waited through three choruses of “Onward, Christian Soldiers”—her joke of the week—before I could leave my message, which was, basically, “I called; call me.” I was trying to think of a witty tag line when she picked up the phone. “Peter?”
“No, it’s Liberace risen from the dead.”
“Did you hear about the frogs?”
“I heard about the frogs. Did you hear about my back?”
“What did Jerry say?”
“’Get plenty of rest and drink plenty of fluids.’”
She was laughing on the other end of the line, a gurgle and snort that sounded like the expiring gasps of an emphysemic horse, a laugh that was all her own. Two days earlier I’d been carrying a box of old college books down to the basement when I tore everything there is to tear in the human back and began to wonder how much longer I’d need to hold on to my pristine copy of Agrarian Corsica, 900 B.C. to the Present. “I guess it must not be so bad, then,” she said, and the snorting and chuffing rose a notch and then fell off abruptly.
“Not so bad for you,” I said. “Or for Jerry. I’m the one who can’t even bend down to tie his shoes.”
“I’ll get you a pair of loafers.”
“You spoil me. You really do. Can you find them in frog skin?”
There was a silence on the other end of the line. “It’s not funny,” she said. “Frogs, toads and salamanders are vital to the food chain—and no jokes about frogs’ legs, please—and no one knows what’s happening to them. They’re just disappearing. Poof.”
I considered that a moment, disappearing frogs, especially as they related to my throbbing and ruined back. I pictured them—squat, long of leg, with extruded eyes and slick mucus-covered skin. I remembered stalking them as a boy with my laxly strung bow and blunt arrows, recalled the sound of the spring peepers and their clumsy attempts at escape, their limbs bound up in ropy strings of eggs. Frogs. Suddenly I was nostalgic: what kind of world would it be without them?
“I hope you’re not busy this weekend,” Adrian said.
“Busy?” My tone was guarded; a pulse of warning stabbed at my spine through its thin tegument of muscle fiber and skin. “Why?”
“I’ve already reserved the tickets.”
The sound of my breathing rattled in my ear. I wasn’t about to ask. I took a stoic breath and held it, awaiting the denouement.
“We’re going to a conference at NYU—the Sixth Annual International Herpetology and Batrachiology Conference….”
I shouldn’t have asked, but I did. “The what?”
“Snakes and frogs,” she said.
On Saturday morning we took the train into Manhattan. I brought along a book to thumb through on the way down—a tattered ancient tome called The Frog Book, which I’d found wedged in a corner of one of the denuded shelves of the Frog and Toad section at the local library. I wondered at all th
at empty space on the shelves and what it portended for the genuses and species involved. Apparently Adrian wasn’t the only one concerned with their headlong rush to extinction—either that, or the sixth grade had been assigned a report on amphibians. I wasn’t convinced, but I checked the book out anyway.
My back had eased up a bit—there was a low tightness and an upper constriction, but nothing like the knifing pain I’d been subjected to a few days earlier. As a precautionary measure I’d brought along a Naugahyde pillow to cushion my abused vertebrae against the jolts and lurches of the commuter train. Adrian slouched beside me, long legs askew, head bent in concentration over Mansfield Park, which she was rereading, by her own calculation, for the twenty-third time. She taught a course in the novels of Jane Austen at Bard, and I never really understood how she could tolerate reading the same books over and over again, semester after semester, year after year. It was like a prison sentence.
“Is that really your twenty-third time?”
She looked up. Her eyes were bright with the nuances of an extinguished world. “Twenty-fourth.”
“I thought you said twenty-third?”
“Reread. The first time doesn’t count as a reread—that’s your original read. Like your birthday—you live a year before you’re one.”
Her logic was irrefutable. I gazed out on the vast gray reaches of the frogless Hudson and turned to my own book: The explosive notè of the Green Frog proceeds from the shallow water; the purring trill of “the Tree Toad” comes from some spot impossible to locate. But listen! The toad’s lullaby note comes from the far margin, sweeter than all the others if we except the two notes in the chickadee’s spring call. We could never have believed it to be the voice of a toad if we had not seen and heard on that first May Day. I read about the love life of toads until we plunged into the darkness at Ninety-seventh Street, and then gave my eyes a rest. In the early days, Adrian and I would have traded witticisms and cutting portraits of our fellow passengers all the way down, but now we didn’t need to talk, not really. We were beyond talk.