by T. C. Boyle
“It was that maniac, wasn’t it?” Fran whispered, as if afraid she’d be overheard.
“Daddy,” Melissa cried, “where’s Lennie, and … and Duke?” The last word trailed off in a broken lamentation for the dead, and Bayard felt the anger like a hot nugget inside him.
“I don’t know,” he said, pressing Melissa to him and massaging her thin, quaking little shoulders. “I don’t know.” Through the doorway he could see Mar-cia sitting in the big armchair, sucking her thumb. Suddenly he became aware of the gun in his hand. He stared down at it for a long moment, and then, almost unconsciously, as if it were a cigarette lighter or a nail clipper, he slipped it into his pocket.
Now he stood outside Chuck’s Wagon, the night breathing down his neck, the telephone receiver pressed to his ear. Four rings, five, six. Suddenly the line engaged and Arkson, his voice shrunk round a kernel of suspicion, answered with a quick tentative “Yeah?”
“Sam? It’s me. Bayard.”
“Who?”
“Bayard Wemp.”
There was a pause. “Oh yeah,” Arkson said finally, “Bayard. What can I do for you? You need anything?”
“No, I just wanted to ask you—”
“Because I know you’re going to be short on hardware for harvesting, canning, and all that, and I’ve got a new line of meat smokers you might want to take a look at—”
“Sam!” Bayard’s voice had gone shrill, and he fought to control it. “I just wanted to ask you about the guy in the beret, you know, the one you had with you up here last month—Cullum?”
There was another pause. Bayard could picture his mentor in a flame-retardant bathrobe, getting ready to turn in on a bed that converted to a life raft in the event that a second flood came over the earth while he lay sleeping. “Uh-huh. Yeah. What about him?”
“Well, did he ever buy the place? I mean, is he up here now?”
“Listen, Bayard, why not let bygones be bygones, huh? Rayfield is no different than you are—except maybe he doesn’t like children, is all. He’s a one-hundred-percenter, Bayard, on for the long haul like you. I’m sure he’s forgot all about that little incident—and so should you.”
Bayard drew a long breath. “I’ve got to know, Sam.”
“It takes all kinds, Bayard.”
“I don’t need advice, Sam. Just information. Look, I can go down to the county assessor’s office in the morning and get what I want.”
Arkson sighed. “All right,” he said finally. “Yes. He moved in yesterday.”
When he turned away from the phone, Bayard felt his face go hot. Survival. It was a joke. He owned thirty-five acres of untrammeled Wild West backwoods wilderness land and his only neighbor was a psychopath who kicked children in the stomach and mutilated helpless animals. Well, he wasn’t going to allow it. Society might be heading for collapse, but there were still laws on the books. He’d call the sheriff, take him to court, have him locked up.
He was halfway to his car, just drawing even with the open door of the T&T, when he became aware of a familiar sound off to his left—he turned, recognizing the distinctive high whine of an Olfputt engine. There, sitting at the curb, was an Olfputt pickup, looking like half an MX missile with a raised bed grafted to the rear end. He stopped, puzzled. This was no Ford, no Chevy, no Dodge. The Olfputt was as rare in these parts as a palanquin—he’d never seen one himself till Arkson … Suddenly he began to understand.
The door swung open. Cullum’s face was dark—purple as a birthstain in the faint light. The engine ticked, raced, and then fell back as the car idled. The headlights seemed to clutch at the street. “Hey, hey,” Cullum said. “Mr. Rocky Marciano. Mr. Streetfight.”
Bayard became aware of movement in the shadows around him. The barflies, the cowboys, had gathered silently, watching him. Cullum stood twenty feet away, a rifle dangling at his side. Bayard knew that rifle, just as he’d known the Olfputt. Russian-made, he thought. AK-47. Smuggled out of Afghanistan. He felt Fran’s little pistol against his thigh, weighing him down like a pocketful of change. His teeth were good, his heartbeat strong. He had a five-year supply of food in his basement and a gun in his pocket. Cullum was waiting.
Bayard took a step forward. Cullum spat in the dirt and raised the rifle. Bayard could have gone for his gun, but he didn’t even know how to release the safety catch, let alone aim and fire the thing, and it came to him that even if he did know how to handle it, even if he’d fired it a thousand times at cans, bottles, rocks, and junkyard rats, he would never use it, not if all the hungry hordes of the earth were at his door.
But Cullum would. Oh yes, Cullum would. Cullum was on for the long haul.
(1983)
THE IOO FACES OF DEATH VOLUME IV
He knew he’d really screwed up. Screwed up in a major and unforgiving way. You could see the perception solidifying in his eyes—eyes that seemed to swell out of his head like hard-cooked eggs extruded through the sockets, and the camera held steady. He was on a stage, faultlessly lit, and a banner proclaimed him RENALDO THE GREAT ESCAPE ARTIST. He was running sweat. Oozing it. His pores were huge, saturated, craters trenching his face like running sores. Suspended six feet above his head, held aloft by block and tackle, was a fused meteorite of junkyard metal the size of a truck engine, its lower surface bristling with the gleaming jagged teeth of a hundred kitchen knives annealed in the forges of Guadalajara. Renaldo’s hands were cuffed to his ankles, and what looked like a tugboat anchor chain was wound round his body six or eight times and bolted to the concrete floor. His lovely assistant, a heavily made-up woman whose thighs ballooned from her lacy tutu like great coppery slabs of meat, looked as if her every tremor and waking nightmare had been distilled in the bitter secretions of that moment. This was definitely not part of the act.
“Watch this,” Jamie said. “Watch this.”
Janine tightened her grip on my hand. The room shrank in on us. The beer in my free hand had gone warm, and when I lifted it to my lips it tasted of yeast and aluminum. And what did I feel? I felt the way the lovely assistant looked, felt the cold charge of revulsion and exhilaration that had come over me when I’d seen my first porno movie at the age of fourteen, felt a hairy-knuckled hand slide up my throat and jerk at a little lever there.
When the video opened, over the credits, Renaldo was clenching a straw between his teeth—a straw, a single straw, yellow and stiff, the smallest part of a broom. He was leaning forward, working the straw in the tiny aperture that controlled the release mechanism of the handcuffs. But now, because he’d begun to appreciate that this wasn’t his day, and that the consequences of that fact were irrevocable, his lips began to tremble and he lost his grip on the straw. The lovely assistant gave the camera a wild strained look and then made as if to dash forward and restore that essential wisp of vegetation to the artist’s mouth, but it was too late. With a thick slushing sound, the sound of tires moving through wet snow, the timer released the mechanism that restrained the iron monolith, and Renaldo was no more.
Jamie said something like, “Dude really bought it,” and then, “Anybody ready for a beer?”
I sat through another ninety-nine permutations of the final moment, variously lit and passionately or indifferently performed, watched the ski-masked bank robber pop his hostage’s head like a grape with the aid of a .44 Magnum and then pop his own, saw the fire-eater immolate herself and the lumberjack make his final cut. Jamie, who’d seen the video half-a-dozen times, couldn’t stop laughing. Janine said nothing, but her grip on my hand was unyielding. For my part, I remember going numb after the third or fourth death, but I sat there all the same, though there were ninety-six to go.
But then, who was counting?
The following weekend, my Aunt Marion died. Or “passed on,” as my mother put it, a delicate euphemistic phrase that conjured up ethereal realms rather than the stark black-and-white image of damp soil and burrowing insects. My mother was in New York, I was in Los Angeles. And no, I wasn’t flying in for th
e funeral. She cried briefly, dryly, and then hung up.
I was twenty-five at the time, a graduate of an indifferent university, a young man who went to work and made money, sought the company of young women and was perhaps too attached to the friends of his youth, Jamie in particular. I listened to the silence a moment, then phoned Janine and asked her to dinner. She was busy. What about tomorrow, then? I said. She planned to be busy then, too.
I hadn’t laid eyes on my Aunt Marion in ten years. I remembered her as a sticklike woman in a wheelchair with an unsteady lip and a nose that overhung it like a cutbank, a nose that wasn’t qualitatively different from my mother’s and, in the fullness of generation, my own. Her death was the result of an accident—negligence, my mother insisted—and already, less than twenty-four hours after the fact, there was an attorney involved.
It seemed that Aunt Marion had been on an outing to the art museum with several other inmates of the nursing home where she’d been in residence since Nixon’s presidency, and the attendant, in placing her at the head of the ramp out back of the museum dining hall, had failed to properly set the brake on the back wheels of her chair. Aunt Marion suffered from some progressive nervous disorder that had rendered her limbs useless—she was able to control her motorized chair only through the use of a joystick which she gripped between her teeth, and even then only at the best of times. Left alone at the summit of the ramp while the attendant went off to fetch another patient, Aunt Marion felt her chair begin to slip inexorably forward. The chair picked up speed; and one of the two witnesses to the accident claimed that she’d bent her face to the controls to arrest it, while the other insisted she’d done nothing at all to save herself, but had simply glided on down the ramp and into eternity with a tight little smile frozen to her face. In any case, there was blame to be assigned, very specific and undeniable blame, and a cause-and-effect reaction to explain Aunt Marion’s removal from this sphere of being, and, in the end, it seemed to give my mother some measure of comfort.
Try as I might, though, I couldn’t picture the face of Aunt Marion’s death. My own blood was involved, my own nose. And yet it was all somehow remote, distant, and the death of Renaldo the Great stayed with me in a way Aunt Marion’s could never have begun to. I don’t know what I wound up doing that weekend, but in retrospect I picture the Coast Highway, an open convertible, Jamie, a series of bars with irradiated decks and patios, and women who were very much alive.
Janine passed into oblivion, as did Carmen, Eugenie and Katrinka, and Jamie went off to explore the wide bleeding world. He spent the next eight months dredging the dark corners of countries whose names changed in the interim, the sort of places where people died in the streets as regularly as flowers sprang through the soil and pigeons fouled the monuments to the generalissimo of the month. I worked. I turned over money. Somebody gave me a cat. It shat in a box under the sink and filled the house with a graveyard stink.
Jamie had been back two months before he called to invite me to a party in the vast necropolis of the San Fernando Valley. He’d found a job inculcating moral awareness in the minds of six- and seven-year-olds at the Thomas Jefferson Elementary School in Pacoima five days a week, reserving the weekends for puerile thrills. I didn’t realize how much I’d missed him until I saw him standing there on the landing outside my apartment. He looked the same—rangy, bug-eyed, a plucked chicken dressed in surfer’s clothes—but for his nose. It was inflamed, punished, a dollop of meat grafted to his face by some crazed body snatcher. “What’s with the nose?” I said, dispensing with the preliminaries.
He hesitated, working up to a slow grin under the porch light. “Got in a fight in this bar,” he said. “Some dude bit it off.”
They’d sewed the tip of his nose back in place—or almost in place; it would forever be canted ever so slightly to the left—but that wasn’t what excited him. He moved past me into the living room and fumbled around in his pocket for a minute, then handed me a series of snapshots, close-ups of his face shortly after the operation. I saw the starched white sheets, the nest of pillows, Jamie’s triumphant leer and an odd glistening black line drawn across the bridge of his nose where the bandage should have been. The photos caught it from above, beneath, head-on and in profile. Jamie was looking over my shoulder. He didn’t say a word, but his breathing was quick and shallow. “So what is it?” I said, swinging round on him. “What’s the deal?”
One word, succulent as a flavored ice: “Leeches.”
“Leeches?”
He held it a moment, center stage. “That’s right, dude, latest thing. They use them to bring back the tiny blood vessels, capillaries and whatnot, the ones they can’t tie up themselves. It’s the sucking action,” and he made a kissing noise. “Suck, suck, suck. I wore them around for three days, grossing the shit out of everybody in the hospital.” He was looking into my eyes. Then he shrugged and turned away. “They wouldn’t let. me take them home, though—that was the pisser.”
The party consisted of seven people—three women and four men, including us—sitting around a formal dining-room table eating carnitas and listening to inflammatory rap at a barely audible volume. The hosts were Hilary and Stefan, who had a house within hearing distance of the Ventura Freeway and taught with Jamie in Pacoima. Hilary’s sister, Judy, was there, the end product of psychosomatic dieting and the tanning salon, along with her friend Marsha and a man in his forties with sprayed-up hair and a goatee whose name I never did catch. We drank Carta Blanca and shots of Cuervo Gold and ate flan for dessert. The general conversation ran to Jamie’s nose, leeches, bowel movements and death. I don’t know how we got into it exactly, but after dinner we gravitated toward a pair of mallowy couches the color of a Haas avocado and began our own anthology of final moments. I came back from the bathroom by way of the kitchen with a fresh beer, and Judy, sunk into her tan like something out of a sarcophagus at Karnak, was narrating the story of the two UCLA students, lovers of nature and of each other, who went kayaking off Point Dume.
It was winter, and the water was cold. There’d been a series of storms bred in the Gulf of Alaska and the hills were bleeding mud. There was frost in the Valley, and Judy’s mother lost a bougainvillea she’d had for twenty years. That was the fatal ingredient, the cold. The big sharks—the great whites—generally stayed well north of the Southern California coast, up near the Bay Area, the Farallons and beyond, where the seals were. That was what they ate: seals.
In Judy’s version, the couple had tied their kayaks together and they were resting, sharing a sandwich, maybe getting romantic—kissing, fondling each other through their wet suits. The shark wasn’t supposed to be there. It wasn’t supposed to mistake the hulls of their kayaks for the silhouettes of two fat rich hot-blooded basking seals either, but it did. The girl drowned after going faint from blood loss and the chill of the water. They never found her lover.
“Jesus,” the older guy said, throwing up his hands. “It’s bad enough to have to go, but to wind up as sharkshit—”
Jamie, who’d been blowing softly into the aperture of his beer bottle, looked perturbed. “But how do you know?” he demanded, settling his eyes on Judy. “I mean, were you there? Did you see it, like maybe from another boat?”
She hadn’t seen it. She wasn’t there. She’d read about it in the paper.
“Uh-uh,” Jamie scolded, wagging his finger. “No fair. You have to have seen it, actually been there.”
The older guy leaned forward, lit a cigarette and told about an accident he’d witnessed on the freeway. He was coming back from the desert on a Monday night, the end of a three-day weekend, and there was a lot of traffic, but it was moving fast. Four guys in a pickup passed him—three in the cab, the fourth outside in the bed of the truck. A motorcycle stood beside him, lashed upright in the center of the bed. They passed on the right, and they were going at a pretty good clip. Just then, feeling a little bored and left out, the guy in the back of the truck mounted the motorcycle, as a joke. He got
up on the seat, leaned into the wind raking over the top of the cab and pretended he was heading into the final lap of the motocross. Unfortunately—and this was the morbid thrill of the exercise; there was always a pathetic adverb attached to the narrative, a “sadly” or “tragically” or “unfortunately” to quicken the audience’s blood—unfortunately, traffic was stalled ahead, the driver hit the brakes and the erstwhile motocross champion careened into the cab and went sailing out over the side like an acrobat. And like an acrobat, miraculously, he picked himself up unhurt. The older guy paused, flicked the ash from his cigarette. But unfortunately—and there it was again—the next car hit him in the hips at sixty and flung him under the wheels of a big rig one lane over. Eight more cars hit him before the traffic stopped, and by then there wasn’t much left but hair and grease.
Hilary told the story of the “Tiger Man,” who stood outside the tiger exhibit at the L.A. Zoo eight hours a day, seven days a week, for an entire year, and then was discovered one morning on the limb of a eucalyptus that hung thirty feet over the open enclosure, in the instant before he lost his balance. She was working the concession stand at the time, a summer job while she was in college, and she heard the people round the tiger pit screaming and the tigers roaring and snarling and thought at first they were fighting. By the time she got there the tiger man was in two pieces and his insides were spread out on the grass like blue strings of sausage. They had to shoot one of the tigers, and that was a shame, a real shame.
Jamie was next. He started in on the story of Renaldo the Great as if it were an eyewitness account. “I was like at this circus in Guadalajara,” he said, and my mind began to drift.
It was my turn next, and the only death I could relate, the only one I’d witnessed face to face and not in some voyeuristic video or the pages of Newsweek or Soldier of Fortune, a true death, the dulling of the eyes, the grip gone lax, the passing from animacy to quietus, I’d never spoken of, not to anyone. The face of it came back to me at odd moments, on waking, starting the car, sitting still in the impersonal dark of the theater before the trailers begin to roll. I didn’t want to tell it. I wasn’t going to. When Jamie was done, I was going to excuse myself, lock the bathroom door behind me, lean over the toilet and flush it and flush it again till they forgot all about me.