T. C. Boyle Stories

by T. C. Boyle

  “Who are you to talk?—you’re shit-faced yourself.” She shrank away from him, that sick smile on her lips, her shoulders hunched. He wanted to smash things, kick in the damn stove, make her hurt.

  “At least I have a job,” she said.

  “I’ll get another one, don’t you worry.”

  “And what about Tiller? We’ve been here two weeks and you haven’t done one damn thing with him, nothing, zero. You haven’t even been down to the lake. Two hundred feet and you haven’t even been down there once.” She came up out of the corner now, feinting like a boxer, vicious, her sharp little fists balled up to drum on him. She spoke in a snarl. “What kind of father are you?”

  He brushed past her, slammed open the cabinet, and grabbed the first bottle he found. It was whiskey, cheap whiskey, Four Roses, the shit she drank. He poured out half a water glass full and drank it down to spite her. “I hate the beach, boats, water, trees. I hate you.”

  She had her purse and she was halfway out the screen door. She hung there a second, looking as if she’d bitten into something rotten. “The feeling’s mutual,” she said, and the door banged shut behind her.

  There were too many complications, too many things to get between him and the moment, and he tried not to think about them. He tried not to think about his father—or his mother either—in the same way that he tried not to think about the pictures of the bald-headed stick people in Africa or meat in its plastic wrapper and how it got there. But when he did think about his father he thought about the river-was-whiskey day.

  It was a Tuesday or Wednesday, middle of the week, and when he came home from school the curtains were drawn and his father’s car was in the driveway. At the door, he could hear him, the chunk-chunk of the chords and the rasping nasal whine that seemed as if it belonged to someone else. His father was sitting in the dark, hair in his face, bent low over the guitar. There was an open bottle of liquor on the coffee table and a clutter of beer bottles. The room stank of smoke.

  It was strange, because his father hardly ever played his guitar anymore—he mainly just talked about it. In the past tense. And it was strange too—and bad—because his father wasn’t at work. Tiller dropped his bookbag on the telephone stand. “Hi, Dad,” he said.

  His father didn’t answer. Just bent over the guitar and played the same song, over and over, as if it were the only song he knew. Tiller sat on the sofa and listened. There was a verse—one verse—and his father repeated it three or four times before he broke off and slurred the words into a sort of chant or hum, and then he went back to the words again. After the fourth repetition, Tiller heard it:

  If the river was whiskey,

  And I was a divin’ duck,

  I’d swim to the bottom,

  Drink myself back up.

  For half an hour his father played that song, played it till anything else would have sounded strange. He reached for the bottle when he finally stopped, and that was when he noticed Tiller. He looked surprised. Looked as if he’d just woke up. “Hey, ladykiller Tiller,” he said, and took a drink from the mouth of the bottle.

  Tiller blushed. There’d been a Sadie Hawkins dance at school and Janet Rumery had picked him for her partner. Ever since, his father had called him ladykiller, and though he wasn’t exactly sure what it meant, it made him blush anyway, just from the tone of it. Secretly, it pleased him. “I really liked the song, Dad,” he said.

  “Yeah?” His father lifted his eyebrows and made a face. “Well, come home to Mama, doggie-o. Here,” he said, and he held out an open beer. “You ever have one of these, ladykiller Tiller?” He was grinning. The sleeve of his shirt was torn and his elbow was raw and there was a hard little clot of blood over his shirt pocket. “With your sixth-grade buddies out behind the handball court, maybe? No?”

  Tiller shook his head.

  “You want one? Go ahead, take a hit.”

  Tiller took the bottle and sipped tentatively. The taste wasn’t much. He looked up at his father. “What does it mean?” he said. “The song, I mean—the one you were singing. About the whiskey and all.”

  His father gave him a long slow grin and took a drink from the big bottle of clear liquor. “I don’t know,” he said finally, grinning wider to show his tobacco-stained teeth. “I guess he just liked whiskey, that’s all.” He picked up a cigarette, made as if to light it, and then put it down again. “Hey,” he said, “you want to sing it with me?”

  All right, she’d hounded him and she’d threatened him and she was going to leave him, he could see that clear as day. But he was going to show her. And the kid too. He wasn’t drinking. Not today. Not a drop.

  He stood on the dock with his hands in his pockets while Tiller scrambled around with the fishing poles and oars and the rest of it. Birds were screeching in the trees and there was a smell of diesel fuel on the air. The sun cut into his head like a knife. He was sick already.

  “I’m giving you the big pole, Dad, and you can row if you want.”

  He eased himself into the boat and it fell away beneath him like the mouth of a bottomless pit.

  “I made us egg salad, Dad, your favorite. And I brought some birch beer.”

  He was rowing. The lake was churning underneath him, the wind was up and reeking of things washed up on the shore, and the damn oars kept slipping out of the oarlocks, and he was rowing. At the last minute he’d wanted to go back for a quick drink, but he didn’t, and now he was rowing.

  “We’re going to catch a pike,” Tiller said, hunched like a spider in the stern. There was spray off the water. He was rowing. He felt sick. Sick and depressed.

  “We’re going to catch a pike, I can feel it. I know we are,” Tiller said, “I know it. I just know it.”

  It was too much for him all at once—the sun, the breeze that was so sweet he could taste it, the novelty of his father rowing, pale arms and a dead cigarette clenched between his teeth, the boat rocking, and the birds whispering—and he closed his eyes a minute, just to keep from going dizzy with the joy of it. They were in deep water already. Tiller was trolling with a plastic worm and spinner, just in case, but he didn’t have much faith in catching anything out here. He was taking his father to the cove with the submerged logs and beds of weed—that’s where they’d connect, that’s where they’d catch pike.

  “Jesus,” his father said when Tiller spelled him at the oars. Hands shaking, he crouched in the stern and tried to light a cigarette. His face was gray and the hair beat crazily around his face. He went through half a book of matches and then threw the cigarette in the water. “Where are you taking us, anyway,” he said, “—the Indian Ocean?”

  “The pike place,” Tiller told him. “You’ll like it, you’ll see.”

  The sun was dropping behind the hills when they got there, and the water went from blue to gray. There was no wind in the cove. Tiller let the boat glide out across the still surface while his father finally got a cigarette lit, and then he dropped anchor. He was excited. Swallows dove at the surface, bullfrogs burped from the reeds. It was the perfect time to fish, the hour when the big lunker pike would cruise among the sunken logs, hunting.

  “All right,” his father said, “I’m going to catch the biggest damn fish in the lake,” and he jerked back his arm and let fly with the heaviest sinker in the tackle box dangling from the end of the rod. The line hissed through the guys and there was a thunderous splash that probably terrified every pike within half a mile. Tiller looked over his shoulder as he reeled in his silver spoon. His father winked at him, but he looked grim.

  It was getting dark, his father was out of cigarettes, and Tiller had cast the spoon so many times his arm was sore, when suddenly the big rod began to buck. “Dad! Dad!” Tiller shouted, and his father lurched up as if he’d been stabbed. He’d been dozing, the rod propped against the gunwale, and Tiller had been studying the long suffering-lines in his father’s face, the grooves in his forehead, and the puffy discolored flesh beneath his eyes. With his beard and long hai
r and with the crumpled suffering look on his face, he was the picture of the crucified Christ Tiller had contemplated a hundred times at church. But now the rod was bucking and his father had hold of it and he was playing a fish, a big fish, the tip of the rod dipping all the way down to the surface.

  “It’s a pike, Dad, it’s a pike!”

  His father strained at the pole. His only response was a grunt, but Tiller saw something in his eyes he hardly recognized anymore, a connection, a charge, as if the fish were sending a current up the line, through the pole, and into his hands and body and brain. For a full three minutes he played the fish, his slack biceps gone rigid, the cigarette clamped in his mouth, while Tiller hovered over him with the landing net. There was a surge, a splash, and the thing was in the net, and Tiller had it over the side and into the boat. “It’s a pike,” his father said, “goddamnit, look at the thing, look at the size of it.”

  It wasn’t a pike. Tiller had watched Joe Matochik catch one off the dock one night. Joe’s pike had been dangerous, full of teeth, a long, lean, tapering strip of muscle and pounding life. This was no pike. It was a carp. A fat, pouty, stinking, ugly mud carp. Trash fish. They shot them with arrows and threw them up on the shore to rot. Tiller looked at his father and felt like crying.

  “It’s a pike,” his father said, and already the thing in his eyes was gone, already it was over, “it’s a pike. Isn’t it?”

  It was late—past two, anyway—and he was drunk. Or no, he was beyond drunk. He’d been drinking since morning, one tall vodka and soda after another, and he didn’t feel a thing. He sat on the porch in the dark and he couldn’t see the lake, couldn’t hear it, couldn’t even smell it. Caroline and Tiller were asleep. The house was dead silent.

  Caroline was leaving him, which meant that Tiller was leaving him. He knew it. He could see it in her eyes and he heard it in her voice. She was soft once, his soft-eyed lover, and now she was hard, unyielding, now she was his worst enemy. They’d had the couple from the roadhouse in for drinks and burgers earlier that night and he’d leaned over the table to tell the guy something—Ed, his name was—joking really, nothing serious, just making conversation. “Vodka and soda,” he said, “that’s my drink. I used to drink vodka and grapefruit juice, but it tore the lining out of my stomach.” And then Caroline, who wasn’t even listening, stepped in and said, “Yeah, and that”—pointing to the glass—“tore the lining out of your brain.” He looked up at her. She wasn’t smiling.

  All right. That was how it was. What did he care? He hadn’t wanted to come up here anyway—it was her father’s idea. Take the cabin for a month, the old man had said, pushing, pushing in that way he had, and get yourself turned around. Well, he wasn’t turning around, and they could all go to hell.

  After a while the chill got to him and he pushed himself up from the chair and went to bed. Caroline said something in her sleep and pulled away from him as he lifted the covers and slid in. He was awake for a minute or two, feeling depressed, so depressed he wished somebody would come in and shoot him, and then he was asleep.

  In his dream, he was out in the boat with Tiller. The wind was blowing, his hands were shaking, he couldn’t light a cigarette. Tiller was watching him. He pulled at the oars and nothing happened. Then all of a sudden they were going down, the boat sucked out from under them, the water icy and black, beating in on them as if it were alive. Tiller called out to him. He saw his son’s face, saw him going down, and there was nothing he could do.

  (1987)

  JULIANA CLOTH

  She was just sixteen, and still under her mother’s wing, when William Wamala first came to town with his bright bolts of cloth. He was a trader from the North, and he’d come across the vast gray plane of the lake so early in the morning he was like a ghost rising from the mist. Picture him there, out on the lake, the cylinders of rich cotton batik hanging limp over the prow of the invisible boat as if suspended in ether, no movement discernible but for the distant dip and rise of his arms, and all the birds crying out, startled, while the naked statue of his torso levitated above the still and glassy surface. The fishermen were the first to see him coming. They were the eyes of the village, just as the dogs were its nose, and as they cast their nets for dagaa they raised their palms in silent greeting.

  Miriam—she was the only child of Ann Namirimu and the late Joseph Namirimu, who had been struck by lightning and scorched out of this existence when she was an infant strapped to her mother’s back—was at first unaware that the trader had arrived in town with a new season’s patterns. She was asleep at such an hour, crushed under the weight of her sixteen years and the disco dance she’d attended the night before with her Aunt Abusaga and Uncle Milton Metembe. Uncle Milton’s special friend, Gladys Makuma, had been there, and he danced with her all night while Aunt Abusaga danced with Miriam and a mural of boys and men painted themselves to the walls, alive only in their eyes. People were smoking and drinking beer and whiskey. The music thumped with a percussive bass, and the beat held steady except in those intervals when the electricity faltered and people fell laughing into each other’s arms. It was like Heaven, a picture-book Heaven, and Miriam, asleep, lived only to go back there and dance till her feet got so heavy she couldn’t lift them.

  Coffee woke her. And griddle cakes. And the crowing of fugitive cocks. Her mother, richly draped in last year’s kanga and exuding a smell of warm sheets and butter, was fixing breakfast preparatory to her departure to the government office where she worked as a secretary. Miriam got up, and her dog got up with her. She ate with her mother in silence, sitting at the polished wooden table as if she were chained to it.

  When her mother had left for work, Miriam dug a pack of cigarettes from an innocent-looking fold of her bedclothes and stuck one experimentally in the corner of her mouth. They were Top Club cigarettes (“For Men Whose Decisions Are Final”) and they’d been slipped into her hand at the disco dance, right there in the middle of the floor, while she was rolling her hips and cranking her shoulders in synch with the beat. And who had slipped them to her, unlooked for and unasked for, as a kind of tribute? A boy she’d known all her life, James Kariango, who was eighteen years old and as tall and wide-shouldered as any man. She felt a hand touch hers as everyone moved in a blur of limbs through sweat that was like a wall, the fumes of whiskey rose from the makeshift bar, and the shadowy blue clouds of smoke hung like curtains around imaginary windows, and there he was, dancing with a woman she’d never seen before and eclipsing his left eye in a sly wink.

  She had never smoked a cigarette. Her mother wouldn’t allow it. Cigarettes were for common people, and Ann Namirimu was no common person—educated in the capital and sister to one of the president’s top advisers—and neither was her daughter. Her daughter was a lady, one of only eight girls in the village to go on to high school, and she would conduct herself like a lady at all times or suffer the rolling thunder and sudden strikes of her mother’s wrath, and, while Aunt Abusaga and Uncle Milton Metembe might have thought a disco dance appropriate for a young lady, Ann Namirimu certainly did not, and it was against her better judgment that Miriam had been allowed to go at all. Still, once Miriam had stuck the cigarette in her mouth and studied herself in the mirror from various angles, she couldn’t help putting a match to the tip of it and letting the sweet stinging smoke invade her mouth and swell out her cheeks until she exhaled like a veteran. She never took the smoke into her lungs, and she didn’t really like the taste of it, but she smoked the cigarette down to a nub, watching herself in the mirror all the while, and then she went out into the yard and carefully buried the remnant where her mother wouldn’t find it.

  She fed her dog, swept the mats, and dressed for school in a dream oriented around the pulse of disco music and the movement of liberated bodies. Then she went off to school, barefoot, carrying her shoes in one hand and her satchel of books and papers in the other, thinking she might just have a peek at the market on her way.

  It was early still, t
he sun long in the trees and all the striped and spotted dogs of the town stretching and yawning in the street, but it might as well have been noon in the marketplace. Everyone was there. Farmwives with their yams and tomatoes arranged in baskets and laid out on straw mats, a man selling smoked colobus monkey and pangas honed to a killing edge, the fishermen with their fresh-caught tilapia and tiger fish, the game and cattle butchers and the convocation of flies that had gathered to taste the wet sweetness of the carcasses dangling from metal hooks. And the crafts merchants, too—the women selling bright orange and yellow plastic bowls, pottery, mats and rugs and cloth. Cloth especially. And that was where Miriam found him, William Wamala, the smiling, handsome, persuasive young man and budding entrepreneur from the North, and his fine print cotton cloth, his Juliana cloth.

  For that was what they christened it that morning, the crowd gathered around his stall that was nothing more than a rickety table set up at the far end of the marketplace where no one bothered about anything: Juliana cloth. William Wamala stood behind the table with his measuring tape and shears and the bolts of cloth in a blue so deep you fell into it, with slashes of pale papaya and bright arterial red for contrast. “How much for the Juliana cloth?” one woman asked, and they all knew the name was right as soon as she’d pronounced it. Because this print, unlike any they’d seen before, didn’t feature flowers or birds or palm fronds or the geometric patterns that had become so popular in the last few years but a name—a name in English, a big, bold name spelled out in the aforementioned colors that ran in crazy zigzags all over the deep-blue field. “Juliana,” it read. “Juliana, Juliana, Juliana.”