by T. C. Boyle
He approaches the crest of the final dune blocking his way to the beach, the sea breeze stiff in his nostrils and cool against his face. Feet splayed, his legs attack the slope—the band of ocean visible over the lip of the dune grows wider, opening like an eye, with each plodding step upward. Finally, with a great wet heave of breath, he reaches the summit. Ah! The wind in his hair, the sea, the lone gull coasting overhead, solitude! But no, there below him is … a female! Nude and asleep! He starts back, vanishes. And then, on his belly in the sand, takes a lingering look. Her breasts, flattened with gravity, nipples pointing heavenward, her black-haired pubes! Beneath him, another part of the body, just a small appendage, adds itself to the general tumescence.
One hour. They had one hour to leer to their hearts’ content—she wasn’t even watching—her gaze was fixed on the bell tower out the window and across the campus. They were crowding in, faces blank, scholars. Scholars operating under the premise that she was just a specimen, headless and mindless, a physique, a painted beetle fixed beneath a microscope.
She knew better.
Tomorrow they wouldn’t dare approach her, yet they’d stare even harder, straining to see up her skirt and down her blouse, grinning like jackals. They’d leer and joke as if she were some kind of freak. And she would be distant, haughty. They’d had their hour, and that was that. The closest any of them would ever come to her. In bed in the dark they would fitfully strain to summon her image, but like all mental pictures it would come in flashes, a film out of frame. She knew all this, and as she posed that day the faintest trace of a smile rounded her lips: inscrutably.
All his life he’d been forced to contend with sniggers, grinning faces, pointed fingers. People looked on him as a bad joke—a caricature of themselves, some sort of cosmic admonition to keep their noses clean. They laughed to cover their horror, laughed, imagining their own eyes pinched behind those sagging cheeks and chins. And often as not they resorted to violent pranks. He had for instance been obliged to discontinue regular attendance at the high school when he found he couldn’t walk the halls without having his head slapped from behind by some invisible hand or having the books pushed from his arms to spray beneath hundreds of trampling feet. On one occasion eight or nine lean toughs had lined the wall outside his chemistry class, and when he emerged had enthusiastically decorated his physiognomy with lemon chiffon, coconut custard and Boston cream. After that, his parents decided that perhaps home tutoring would be more viable.
Since the time of these experiences he had very rarely entertained the company of others, had very rarely in fact left his parents’ home. In the winter it was the apartment, in the summer the beach house. His social phobia was so overwhelming that he refused to show himself in public under any circumstance, not even in so trivial a role as picking up half a pound of pastrami at the delicatessen around the corner or taking the wash to the laundromat. He was a hermit, a monk, a solipsist. In the summer he would walk for miles through the dunes so he could swim alone without fear of exposing himself to ridicule, the preponderance of his flesh displayed in a swimsuit.
The upshot of all this is that he had, at the time of this story, reached the age of twenty-one years without ever having been laid. He had never been on a date, had never brushed a cheek against his own, had never squeezed a sweating palm or tit.
He stands, decides to have a closer look. But what if she should wake? The thought attenuates his resolve and he freezes there at the dune’s crest, staring, obsessed. Just like in the nudist magazines. Masturbatory fantasies recur, charge through his head like rams—this is just the situation he had always pictured alone in his room, pulling furiously at his pud.
Soon he becomes increasingly conscious of the heat and removes his T-shirt, dropping it carelessly beside him, his attention fixed on the browned peaks below. He starts stealthily down the slope: a sly beast stalking its prey. But in a moment he’s sliding down out of control, a truckload of sand following him. The seat of his trunks fills with it. At the base of the dune he recovers himself, jumps up, afraid to breathe, his rear abraded and an uncomfortable projection straining against the zipper of his trunks. The trunks begin to annoy him: he removes them.
A course of action is not entirely clear to him, but he moves closer anyhow, now as naked as she. The breasts swell gently with her sleep, the legs stir, the tongue peeps out to moisten her lips. And then suddenly the feathery warmth of the sun becomes a hot oppressive burden and she wakes to a huge childish face in her own and an insistent poking between her thighs. She shrieks, pushes wildly at that fat face. But she’s pinned beneath a truck, she’s been involved in an accident, that’s it, a mountain has fallen and she’s trapped beneath it. (Sure he’s embarrassed but how can he stop now, the blood swelling up in him as it is?)
Cheeks clawed and gashed, eardrums aching, sweating like a frosted goblet, he drives relentlessly on. He inserts a massive fist in her mouth to quiet the wailing, and inadvertently, as he stiffens toward his moment of truth, he shoves increasingly harder, her head smoothing a depression in the sand—a basin for the blood that seeps from her mashed lips, loosened teeth. She gasps, croaks for air. Below, the white triangle is smothered beneath a sea of convulsively heaving flesh, and furtively, deep within, it too begins to bleed.
“Hey!” yell the fishermen. (They’d been poking around up the shore, drinking beer from a cooler, hunting in a half-assed way for stripers or porgies or blues.) “Hey!” And then they begin running toward what looks like a giant sea turtle digging frantically to bury its eggs.
His head rears up in surprise. With a grunt he disengages himself from her body and his fist from her mouth. An enamel cap, embedded between the second and third knuckles of his left hand, comes with it. He stands there for a blind moment, naked, dripping blood, caught in the act of committing an atrocity. He feels shame, mortification, guilt, remorse, self-denigration—and a rabid animal impulse to escape at any cost. He lumbers in a panic toward the sea, his only possible refuge. The fishermen reach the girl just as he is parting the waves, a colossal preterrestrial creature more at home in the sea than on land. “Hey!” the fishermen shout. But he is gone, paddling furiously, smashing the waves like an icebreaker. Deeper and deeper, farther and farther from his pursuers and his own fat life.
The fishermen are standing in the surf, their shoes and pants wet. They bellow a few drunken imprecations but he is already too distant to care. He drifts off on the waves, a great lump of sperm seeking to impregnate the sea. The fishermen turn back to the whimpering girl. One gently cups his hand under her chin while the other removes his trousers and sets to her.
Far out to sea, far beyond the churning fat boy and the rapacious fishermen, that strange pale creature floats, peacefully drowsing. His beard and long hair fan out in the water, become masses of seaweed. A chance wave, peaking higher than the others, rolls over him and he swallows a quantity of water. The next buries him. He has had no warning, no chance to cry for help, no hope that help would be available. Quite simply then, he drowns. A random event, one that I imagine, considering the world as a whole, is quite common.
The fat boy creeps home naked through the dark dunes, miles from where he had first encountered the girl. His feet and lower legs are lacerated from the stiff dune grass which bites into each blind step. In all, he feels a vague sense of shame, but also a certain exhilaration. After all, he’s finally made the first palpable step in overcoming his social inadequacy.
The fishermen are at home, watching color TV. They feel a deep and abiding sense of accomplishment, of fulfillment—though they returned home this afternoon with an empty porgy basket.
The girl sleeps a heavy drugged sleep, enfolded in the astringently white hospital sheets. Her tan contrasts nicely with them. The breath passes gently through her parted lips, lips battered and brown with dried blood. A gray-haired man (her father?) sits beside her, patting her sleeping hand.
The thin man, the pale one, is jerked spasmodically by the u
nderwater currents, tangled in a bed of weed. The crabs have long since discovered him and are rattling their ancient horny shells about his flesh, delighted with the unexpected treat. The tide is washing in, and the drowned man with it. Eventually, I suspect, what is left of him will come to rest on the beach, a few yards away from a curious red-brown stain in the bleached sand. The half-cleaned skeletons and carapaces of other strange creatures lie there too, waiting for the morning’s
RARA AVIS
It looked like a woman or a girl perched there on the roof of the furniture store, wings folded like a shawl, long legs naked and exposed beneath a skirt of jagged feathers the color of sepia. The sun was pale, poised at equinox. There was the slightest breeze. We stood there, thirty or forty of us, gaping up at the big motionless bird as if we expected it to talk, as if it weren’t a bird at all but a plastic replica with a speaker concealed in its mouth. Sidor’s Furniture, it would squawk, loveseats and three-piece sectionals.
I was twelve. I’d been banging a handball against the side of the store when a man in a Studebaker suddenly swerved into the parking lot, slammed on his brakes, and slid out of the driver’s seat as if mesmerized. His head was tilted back, and he was shading his eyes, squinting to focus on something at the level of the roof. This was odd. Sidor’s roof—a flat glaring expanse of crushed stone and tar relieved only by the neon characters that irradiated the proprietor’s name—was no architectural wonder. What could be so captivating? I pocketed the handball and ambled round to the front of the store. Then I looked up.
There it was: stark and anomalous, a relic of a time before shopping centers, tract houses, gas stations and landfills, a thing of swamps and tidal flats, of ooze, fetid water, and rich black festering muck. In the context of the minutely ordered universe of suburbia, it was startling, as unexpected as a downed meteor or the carcass of a woolly mammoth. I shouted out, whooped with surprise and sudden joy.
Already people were gathering. Mrs. Novak, all three hundred pounds of her, was lumbering across the lot from her house on the corner, a look of bewilderment creasing her heavy jowls. Robbie Matechik wheeled up on his bike, a pair of girls emerged from the rear of the store with jump ropes, an old man in baggy trousers struggled with a bag of groceries. Two more cars pulled in, and a third stopped out on the highway. Hopper, Moe, Jennings, Davidson, Sebesta: the news echoed through the neighborhood as if relayed by tribal drums, and people dropped rakes, edgers, pruning shears, and came running. Michael Donadio, sixteen years old and a heartthrob at the local high school, was pumping gas at the station up the block. He left the nozzle in the customer’s tank, jumped the fence, and started across the blacktop, weaving under his pompadour. The customer followed him.
At its height, there must have been fifty people gathered there in front of Sidor’s, shading their eyes and gazing up expectantly, as if the bird were the opening act of a musical comedy or an ingenious new type of vending machine. The mood was jocular, festive even. Sidor appeared at the door of his shop with two stockboys, gazed up at the bird for a minute, and then clapped his hands twice, as if he were shooing pigeons. The bird remained motionless, cast in wax. Sidor, a fleshless old man with a monk’s tonsure and liver-spotted hands, shrugged his shoulders and mugged for the crowd. We all laughed. Then he ducked into the store and emerged with an end table, a lamp, a footstool, motioned to the stockboys, and had them haul out a sofa and an armchair. Finally he scrawled BIRD WATCHER’S SPECIAL on a strip of cardboard and taped it to the window. People laughed and shook their heads. “Hey, Sidor,” Albert Moe’s father shouted, “where’d you get that thing—the Bronx Zoo?”
I couldn’t keep still. I danced round the fringe of the crowd, tugging at sleeves and skirts, shouting out that I’d seen the bird first—which wasn’t strictly true, but I felt proprietary about this strange and wonderful creature, the cynosure of an otherwise pedestrian Saturday afternoon. Had I seen it in the air? people asked. Had it moved? I was tempted to lie, to tell them I’d spotted it over the school, the firehouse, the used-car lot, a hovering shadow, wings spread wider than the hood of a Cadillac, but I couldn’t. “No,” I said, quiet suddenly. I glanced up and saw my father in the back of the crowd, standing close to Mrs. Schlecta and whispering something in her ear. Her lips were wet. I didn’t know where my mother was. At the far end of the lot a girl in a college sweater was leaning against the fender of a convertible while her boyfriend pressed himself against her as if he wanted to dance.
Six weeks earlier, at night, the community had come together as it came together now, but there had been no sense of magic or festivity about the occasion. The Novaks, Donadios, Schlectas, and the rest—they gathered to watch an abandoned house go up in flames. I didn’t dance round the crowd that night. I stood beside my father, leaned against him, the acrid, unforgiving stink of the smoke almost drowned in the elemental odor of his sweat, the odor of armpit and crotch and secret hair, the sematic animal scent of him that had always repelled me—until that moment. Janine McCarty’s mother was shrieking. Ragged and torn, her voice clawed at the starless night, the leaping flames. On the front lawn, just as they backed the ambulance in and the crowd parted, I Caught a glimpse of Janine, lying there in the grass. Every face was shouting. The glare of the fire tore disordered lines across people’s eyes and dug furrows in their cheeks.
There was a noise to that fire, a killing noise, steady and implacable. The flames were like the waves at Coney Island—ghost waves, insubstantial, yellow and red rather than green, but waves all the same. They rolled across the foundation, spat from the windows, beat at the roof. Wayne Sanders was white-faced. He was a tough guy, two years older than I but held back in school because of mental sloth and recalcitrance. Police and firemen and wild-eyed neighborhood men nosed round him, excited, like hounds. Even then, in the grip of confusion and clashing voices, safe at my father’s side, I knew what they wanted to know. It was the same thing my father demanded of me whenever he caught me—in fact or by report—emerging from the deserted, vandalized, and crumbling house: What were you doing in there?
He couldn’t know.
Spires, parapets, derelict staircases, closets that opened on closets, the place was magnetic, vestige of an age before the neat rows of ranches and Cape Cods that lined both sides of the block. Plaster pulled back from the ceilings to reveal slats like ribs, glass pebbled the floors, the walls were paisleyed with aerosol obscenities. There were bats in the basement, rats and mice in the hallways. The house breathed death and freedom. I went there whenever I could. I heaved my interdicted knife end-over-end at the lintels and peeling cupboards, I lit cigarettes and hung them from my lower lip, I studied scraps of pornographic magazines with a fever beating through my body. Two days before the fire I was there with Wayne Sanders and Janine. They were holding hands. He had a switchblade, stiff and cold as an icicle. He gave me Ex-Lax and told me it was chocolate. Janine giggled. He shuffled a deck of battered playing cards and showed me one at a time the murky photos imprinted on them. My throat went dry with guilt.
After the fire I went to church. In the confessional the priest asked me if I practiced self-pollution. The words were formal, unfamiliar, but I knew what he meant. So, I thought, kneeling there in the dark, crushed with shame, there’s a name for it. I looked at the shadowy grille, looked toward the source of the soothing voice of absolution, the voice of forgiveness and hope, and I lied. “No,” I whispered.
And then there was the bird.
It never moved, not once, through all the commotion at its feet, through all the noise and confusion, all the speculation regarding its needs, condition, origin, species: it never moved. It was a statue, eyes unblinking, only the wind-rustled feathers giving it away for flesh and blood, for living bird. “It’s a crane,” somebody said. “No, no, it’s a herring—a blue herring.” Someone else thought it was an eagle. My father later confided that he believed it was a stork.
“Is it sick, do you think?” Mrs. Novak said.
“Maybe it’s broke its wing.”
“It’s a female,” someone insisted. “She’s getting ready to lay her eggs.”
I looked around and was surprised to see that the crowd had thinned considerably. The girl in the college sweater was gone, Michael Donadio was back across the street pumping gas, the man in the Studebaker had driven off. I scanned the crowd for my father: he’d gone home, I guessed. Mrs. Schlecta had disappeared too, and I could see the great bulk of Mrs. Novak receding into her house on the corner like a sea lion vanishing into a swell. After a while Sidor took his lamp and end table back into the store.
One of the older guys had a rake. He heaved it straight up like a javelin, as high as the roof of the store, and then watched it slam down on the pavement. The bird never flinched. People lit cigarettes, shuffled their feet. They began to drift off, one by one. When I looked around again there were only eight of us left, six kids and two men I didn’t recognize. The women and girls, more easily bored or perhaps less interested to begin with, had gone home to gas ranges and hopscotch squares: I could see a few of the girls in the distance, on the swings in front of the school, tiny, their skirts rippling like flags.
I waited. I wanted the bird to flap its wings, blink an eye, shift a foot; I wanted it desperately, wanted it more than anything I had ever wanted. Perched there at the lip of the roof, its feet clutching the drainpipe as if welded to it, the bird was a coil of possibility, a muscle relaxed against the moment of tension. Yes, it was magnificent, even in repose. And, yes, I could stare at it, examine its every line, from its knobbed knees to the cropped feathers at the back of its head, I could absorb it, become it, look out from its unblinking yellow eyes on the street grown quiet and the sun sinking behind the gas station. Yes, but that wasn’t enough. I had to see it in flight, had to see the great impossible wings beating in the air, had to see it transposed into its native element.