T. C. Boyle Stories

by T. C. Boyle

  I could see her face in the yellow light that seeped through the windows of the lodge and lay like a fungus on the surface of the snow. She gave me a rare smile, and then her face changed as she touched a finger to the corner of my mouth. “What happen you?” she said, and her finger glistened with blood.

  I licked my lip. “Nothing. Bit my lip, I guess.” The snow caught like confetti in the feathery puff of her hair and her eyes tugged at me from the darkness. “Hey,” I said, surprised by inspiration, “you want to maybe come up to my place for a drink?”

  Next day, at dusk, I was out in the woods with my axe. The temperature was about ten degrees above zero, I had a pint of Presidente to keep me warm, and I was looking for a nice round-bottomed silver fir about five feet tall. I listened to the snow groan under my boots, watched my breath hang in the air; I looked around me and saw ten thousand little green trees beneath the canopy of the giants, none of them right. By the time I found what I was looking for, the snow had drunk up the light and the trees had become shadows.

  As I bent to clear the snow from the base of the tree I’d selected, something made me glance over my shoulder. Failing light, logs under the snow, branches, hummocks. At first I couldn’t make him out, but I knew he was there. Sixth sense. But then, before the shaggy silhouette separated itself from the gloom, a more prosaic sense took over: I could smell him. Shit, piss, sweat, and hair, dead meat, bad breath, the primal stink. There he was, a shadow among shadows, big around as a fallen tree, the bear, watching me.

  Nothing happened. I didn’t grin him down, fling the axe at him, or climb a tree, and he didn’t lumber off in a panic, throw himself on me with a bloody roar, or climb a tree either. Frozen like an ice sculpture, not even daring to come out of my crouch for fear of shattering the moment, I watched the bear. Communed with him. He was a renegade, a solitary, airlifted in a groggy stupor from Yosemite, where he’d become too familiar with people. Now he was familiar with me. I wondered if he’d studied my tracks as I’d studied his, wondered what he was doing out in the harsh snowbound woods instead of curled cozily in his den. Ten minutes passed. Fifteen. The woods went dark. I stood up. He was gone.

  Christmas was a pretty sad affair. Talk of post-holiday depression, I had it before, during, and after. I was broke, Jill and I were on the outs, I’d begun to loathe the sight of three-hundred-foot trees and snow-capped mountains, and I liked the rest of humanity about as much as Gulliver liked the Yahoos. I did stop by Jill’s place around six to share a miserable, tight-lipped meal with her and Adrian and exchange presents. I gave Adrian a two-foot-high neon-orange plastic dragon from Taiwan that spewed up puddles of reddish stuff that looked like vomit, and I gave Jill a cheap knit hat with a pink pom-pom on top. She gave me a pair of gloves. I didn’t stay for coffee.

  New Year’s was different.

  I gave a party, for one thing. For another, I’d passed from simple misanthropy to nihilism, death of the spirit, and beyond. It was 2:00 A.M., everybody in the lodge was wearing party hats, I’d kissed half the women in the place—including a reluctant Jill, pliant Regina, and sour-breathed poetess—and I felt empty and full, giddy, expansive, hopeful, despondent, drunk. “Party at my place,” I shouted as Marshall announced last call and turned up the lights. “Everybody’s invited.”

  Thirty bon vivants tramped through the snowy streets, blowing party horns and flicking paper ticklers at one another, fired up snowmobiles, Jeeps, and pickups, carried open bottles out of the bar, and hooted at the stars. They filled my little place like fish in a net, squirming against one another, grinning and shouting, making out in the loft, vomiting in the toilet, sniggering around the fireplace. Boo was there, water under the bridge. Jill too. Marshall, Regina, Scooter, Mae-Mae, Josh and Scott, the poetess, San Diego, and anybody else who happened to be standing under the moosehead in a glossy duncecap when I made my announcement. Somebody put on a reggae album that sent seismic shudders through the floor, and people began to dance. I was out in the kitchen fumbling with the ice-cube tray when Regina banged through the door with a bar glass in her hand. She gave me a crooked smile and held it out to me. “What’re you drinking?” she asked.

  “Pink Boys,” I said. “Vodka, crushed ice, and pink lemonade, slushed in the blender.”

  “Pink Boys,” Regina said, or tried to say. She was wearing her knit hat and matching sweater, the hat pulled down to her eyebrows, the sweater unbuttoned halfway to her navel. I took the glass from her and she moved into me, caught hold of my biceps, and stuck her tongue in my mouth. A minute later I had her pinned up against the stove, exploring her exemplary dentition with the tip of my own tongue and dipping my hand into that fabulous sweater as if into the mother lode itself.

  I had no problems with any of this. I gave no thought to motives, mores, fidelity, or tomorrow: I was a creature of nature, responding to natural needs. Besides which, Jill was locked in an embrace with Marshall in the front room, the old satyr and king of the mountain reestablishing a prior claim, Boo was hunched over the fire with Mae-Mae, giving her the full flash of his eyes and murmuring about bear scat in a voice so deep it would have made Johnny Cash turn pale, and Josh and the poetess were joyfully deflating Edna St. Vincent Mil-lay while swaying their bodies awkwardly to Bob Marley’s voodoo backbeat. New Year’s Eve. It was like something out of La Ronde.

  By three-thirty, I’d been rejected by Regina, who’d obviously been using me as a decoy, Marshall and Jill had disappeared and rematerialized twice, Regina had tried unsuccessfully to lure Boo away from Mae-Mae (who was now secreted with him in the bedroom), San Diego had fallen and smashed my coffee table to splinters, one half-gallon of vodka was gone and we were well into the second, and Josh and the poetess had exchanged addresses. Auld lang syne, I thought, surveying the wreckage and moodily crunching taco chips while a drunken San Diego raved in my ear about dune buggies, outboard engines, and tuna rigs. Marshall and Jill were holding hands. Regina sat across the room, looking dangerous. She’d had four or five Pink Boys, on top of what she’d consumed at the lodge, but who was counting? Suddenly she stood—or, rather, jumped to her feet like a marine assaulting a beachhead—and began to gather her things.

  What happened next still isn’t clear. Somehow her hat had disappeared—that was the start of it. At first she just bustled round the place, overturning piles of scarves and down jackets, poking under the furniture, scooting people from the couch and easy chair, but then she turned frantic. The hat was a keepsake, an heirloom. Brought over from Flekkefjord by her great-grandmother, who’d knitted it as a memento of Olaf the Third’s coronation, or something like that. Anyway, it was irreplaceable. More precious than the Magna Carta, the Shroud of Turin, and the Hope Diamond combined. She grew shrill.

  Someone cut the stereo. People began to shuffle their feet. One clown—a total stranger—made a show of looking behind the framed photograph of Dry Gulch, Wyoming, that hangs beside the fireplace. “It’ll turn up,” I said.

  Regina had scattered a heap of newspapers over the floor and was frantically riffling through the box of kindling in the corner. She turned on me with a savage look. “The hell it will,” she snarled. “Somebody stole it.”

  “Stole it?” I echoed.

  “That’s right,” she said, the words coming fast now. She was looking at Jill. “Some bitch. Some fat-assed jealous bitch that just can’t stand the idea of somebody showing her up. Some, some—”

  She didn’t get a chance to finish. Jill was up off the couch like something coming out of the gate at Pamplona and suddenly the two of them were locked in combat, pulling hair and raking at one another like Harpies. Regina was cursing and screeching at the same time; Jill went for the vitals. I didn’t know what to do. San Diego made the mistake of trying to separate them, and got his cheek raked for the effort. Finally, when they careened into the pole lamp and sent it crashing to the floor with a climactic shriek of broken glass, Marshall took hold of Regina from behind and wrestled her out the door, while I did
my best to restrain Jill.

  The door slammed. Jill shrugged loose, heaving for breath, and turned her back on me. There were twenty pale astonished faces strung round the room like Japanese lanterns. A few of the men looked sheepish, as if they’d stolen a glimpse of something they shouldn’t have. No one said a word. Just then Boo emerged from the bedroom, Mae-Mae in tow. “What’s all the commotion?” he said.

  I glanced around the room. All of a sudden I felt indescribably weary. “Party’s over,” I said.

  I woke at noon with a hangover. I drank from the tap, threw some water in my face, and shambled down to the lodge for breakfast. Marshall was there, behind the grill, looking as if he was made of mashed potatoes. He barely noticed as I shuffled in and took a window seat among a throng of chipper, alert, and well-fed tourists.

  I was leafing through the Chronicle and puffing away at my third cup of coffee when I saw Regina’s car sail past the window, negotiate the turn at the end of the lot, and swing onto the road that led down the mountain. I couldn’t be sure—it was a gloomy day, the sky like smoke—but as near as I could tell she was hatless. No more queen of the mountain for her, I thought. No more champagne cocktails and the tight thrilling clasp of spandex across the bottom—from here on out it was stinking mouths and receding gums. I turned back to the newspaper.

  When I looked up again, Boo, Josh, and Scott were stepping out of a Jeep Cherokee, a knot of gawkers and Sunday skiers gathered round them. Draped over the hood of the thing, still red at the edges with raw meat and blood, was a bearskin, head intact. The fur was reddish, almost cinnamon-colored, and one ear was folded down. I watched as Boo ambled up to the door, stepped aside for a pair of sixteen-year-old ski bunnies with layered hair, and then pushed his way into the lodge.

  He took off his shades and stood there a moment in the doorway, carefully wiping them on his parka before slipping them into his breast pocket. Then he started toward the cash register, already easing back to reach for his wallet. “Hey,” he said when he saw me, and he stopped to lean over the table for a moment. “We got him,” he said, scraping bottom with his baritone and indicating the truck beyond the window with a jerk of his head. There was a discoloration across the breast of his white parka, a brownish spatter. I swiveled my head to glance out the window, then turned back to him, feeling as if I’d had the wind punched out of me. “Yeah,” I said.

  There was a silence. He looked at me, I looked at him. “Well,” he said after a moment, “you take care,” and then he strode up to the cash register to pay his bill and check out.

  Jill came in about one. She was wearing shades too, and when she slipped behind the bar and removed them, I saw the black-and-blue crescent under her right eye. As for Marshall, she didn’t even give him a glance. Later, after I’d been through the paper twice and figured it was time for a Bloody Mary or two and some Bowl games, I took a seat at the bar. “Hi, Michael,” she said, “what’ll you have?,” and her tone was so soft, so contrite, so sweet and friendly and conciliatory, that I could actually feel the great big heaving plates of the world shifting back into alignment beneath my feet.

  Oh, yes, the hat. A week later, when the soot and dust and woodchips around the cabin got too much for me, I dragged out the vacuum cleaner for my semiannual sweep around the place. I scooted over the rug, raked the drapes, and got the cobwebs in the corners. When I turned over the cushions on the couch, the wand still probing, I found the hat. There was a label inside. JCPenney, it read, $7.95. For a long moment I just stood there, turning the thing over in my hand. Then I tossed it in the fire.

  (1984)

  WHALES WEEP

  They say the sea is cold, but the sea contains the hottest blood of all….

  —D. H. Lawrence, “Whales Weep Not”

  I don’t know what it was exactly—the impulse toward preservation in the face of flux, some natal fascination with girth—who can say? But suddenly, in the winter of my thirty-first year, I was seized with an overmastering desire to seek out the company of whales. That’s right: whales. Flukes and blowholes. Leviathan. Moby Dick.

  People talked about the Japanese, the Russians. Factory ships, they said. Dwindling numbers and a depleted breeding stock, whales on the wane. I wanted desperately to see them before they sang their swan song, before they became a mere matter of record, cards in an index, skeletal remains strung out on coat hangers and suspended from the high concave ceilings of the Smithsonian like blueprints of the past. More: I wanted to know them, smell them, touch them. I wanted to mount their slippery backs in the high seas, swim amongst them, come to understand their expansive gestures, sweeping rituals, their great whalish ecstasies and stupendous sorrows.

  This cetaceamania was not something that came on gradually, a predilection that developed over a period of months into interest, awareness, and finally absorption—not at all. No: it took me by storm. Of course I’d been at least marginally aware of the plight of whales and dolphins for years, blitzed as I was by pleas from the Sierra Club, the National Wildlife Federation, and the Save the Whales people. I gave up tuna fish. Wrote a letter to my congressman. Still, I’d never actually seen a whale and can’t say that I was any more concerned about cetaceans than I was about the mountain gorilla, inflation, or the chemicals in processed foods. Then I met Harry Macey.

  It was at a party, somewhere in the East Fifties. One of those seasonal affairs: Dom Pérignon, cut crystal, three black girls whining over a prerecorded disco track. Furs were in. Jog togs. The hustle. Health. I was with Stephanie King, a fashion model. She was six feet tall, irises like well water, the de rigueur mole at the corner of her mouth. Like most of the haute couture models around town, she’d developed a persona midway between Girl Scout and vampire. I did not find it at all unpalatable.

  Stephanie introduced me to a man in beard, blazer, and bifocals. He was rebuking an elderly woman for the silver-fox boa dangling from her neck. “Disgusting,” he snarled, working himself into a froth. “Savage and vestigial. What do you think we’ve developed synthetics for?” His hair was like the hair of Kennedys, boyish, massed over his brow, every strand shouting for attention; his eyes were cold and messianic. He rattled off a list of endangered species, from snail darter to three-toed sloth, his voice sucking mournfully at each syllable as if he were a rabbi uttering the secret names of God. Then he started on whales. I cleared my throat and held out my hand. “Call me Roger,” I said. He didn’t even crack a smile. Just widened his sphere of influence to include Stephanie and me. “The blue whale,” he was saying, flicking the ash from his cigarette into the ashtray he held supine in his palm, “is a prime example. One hundred feet long, better than a quarter of a million pounds. By far and away the largest creature ever to inhabit the earth. His tongue alone weighs three tons, and his penis, nine and a half feet long, would dwarf a Kodiak bear. And how do we reward this exemplar of evolutionary impetus?” He paused and looked at me like a quiz-show host. Stephanie, who had handed her lynx maxicoat to the hostess when we arrived, bowed twice, muttered something unintelligible, and wandered off with a man in dreadlocks. The old woman was asleep. I shrugged my shoulders.

  “We hunt him to the brink of extinction, that’s how. We boil him down and convert him into margarine, pet food, shoe polish, lipstick.”

  This was Harry Macey. He was a marine biologist connected with NYU and, as I thought at the time, something of an ass. But he did have a point. Never mind his bad breath and egomania; his message struck a chord. As he talked on, lecturing now, his voice modulating between anger, conviction, and a sort of evangelical fervor, I began to develop a powerful visceral sympathy with him. Whales, I thought, sipping at my champagne. Magnificent, irreplaceable creatures, symbols of the wild and all that, brains the size of ottomans, courting, making love, chirping to one another in the fathomless dark—just as they’d been doing for sixty million years. And all this was threatened by the greed of the Japanese and the cynicism of the Russians. Here was something you could throw yourse
lf into, an issue that required no soul-searching, good guys and bad as clearly delineated as rabbits and hyenas.

  Macey’s voice lit the deeps, illuminated the ages, fired my enthusiasm. He talked of the subtle intelligence of these peaceful, lumbering mammals, of their courage and loyalty to one another in the face of adversity, of their courtship and foreplay and the monumental suboceanic sex act itself. I drained my glass, shut my eyes, and watched an underwater pas de deux: great shifting bulks pressed to one another like trains in collision, awesome, staggering, drums and bass pounding through the speakers until all I could feel through every cell of my body was that fearful, seismic humping in the depths.

  Two weeks later I found myself bobbing about in a rubber raft somewhere off the coast of British Columbia. It was raining. The water temperature was thirty-four degrees. A man unlucky enough to find himself immersed in such water would be dead of exposure inside of five minutes. Or so I was told.

  I was given this morsel of information by either Nick, Gary, or Ernie, my companions in the raft. All three were in their mid-twenties, wild-eyed and bearded, dressed in Norwegian sweaters, rain slickers, and knit skullcaps. They were aficionados of rock and roll, drugs, airplanes, and speedboats. They were also dangerous lunatics dedicated to thrusting themselves between the warheads of six-foot, quadri-barbed, explosive harpoons and the colossal rushing backs of panic-stricken whales.

  At the moment, however, there were no whales to be seen. Living whales, at any rate. The carcasses of three sei whales trailed behind the rictus of a Russian factory ship, awaiting processing. A low cloud cover, purple-gray, raveled out from horizon to horizon like entrails on a butcher’s block, while the Russian ship loomed above us, its endless rust-streaked bows high as the Jersey palisades, the stony Slavic faces of the Russian seamen ranged along the rail like a string of peas. There were swells eight feet high. All around us the sea was pink with the blood of whales and sliced by the great black dorsal fins of what I at first took to be sharks. A moment later I watched a big grinning killer whale rush up out of the depths and tear a chunk of meat the size of a Holstein from one of the carcasses.