T. C. Boyle Stories

by T. C. Boyle

  “Your drinking!” shrieks a voice from the back of the throng, his wife’s voice, and there she is, Fredda, barefoot and in a snotgreen robe and hood, wafting her way through the crowd and pointing her long accusatory finger at his poor miserable shrinking self. “Every drop,” she booms, and the vast array of vats and kegs and tumblers swivels to reveal the signs hung from their sweating slats—GIN, BOURBON, BEER, WHISKEY, SCHNAPPS, PERNOD—and the crowd lets out a long exhalation of shock and lament.

  The keg of gin. Tall it is and huge, its contents vaguely sloshing. You could throw cars into it, buses, tractor trailers. But no, never, he couldn’t have drunk that much gin, no man could. And beside it the beer, frothy and bubbling, a cauldron the size of a rest home. “No!” he cries in protest. “I don’t even like the taste of the stuff.”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” chants a voice beside him. The statue is back, Fredda gone. It speaks in a voice he recognizes, though the wheezy, rheumy deathbed rasp of it has been wiped clean. “Ma?” he says, turning to the thing.

  Three feet tall, slick as a seal, the robes flowing like the sea, the effigy looks up at him out of his mother’s face in miniature. “I warned you,” the voice leaps out at him, high and querulous, “out behind the 7-Eleven with Ricky Reitbauer and that criminal Tommy Capistrano, cheap wine and all the rest.”

  “But Mom, Pernod?” He peers into the little pot of it, a pot so small you couldn’t boil a good Safeway chicken in it. There it is. Pernod. Milky and unclean. It turns his stomach even to look at it.

  “Your liver, son,” the statue murmurs with a resignation that brings tears to his eyes, “just look at it.”

  He feels a prick in his side and there it is, his liver—a poor piece of cheesy meat, stippled and striped and purple—dangling from the plaster fingers. “God,” he moans. “God Almighty.”

  “Rotten as your soul,” the statue says.

  McGahee, still on his knees, begins to blubber. Meaningless slips of apology issue from his lips—“I didn’t mean … it wasn’t … how could I know?”—when all of a sudden the statue shouts “Drugs!” with a voice of iron.

  Immediately the scene changes. The vats are gone, replaced with bales of marijuana, jars of pills in every color imaginable, big, overbrimming tureens of white powder, a drugstore display of airplane glue. In the background, grinning Laotians, Peruvian peasants with hundreds of scrawny children propped like puppets on their shoulders.

  “But, but—” McGahee stutters, rising to his feet to protest, but the statue doesn’t give him a chance, won’t, can’t, and the stentorian voice—his wife’s, his mother’s, no one’s and everyone’s, he even detects a trace of his high-school principal’s in there—the stentorian voice booms: “Sins of the Flesh!”

  He blinks his eyes and the Turks and their bales are gone. The backdrop now is foggy and obscure, dim as the mists of memory. The statue is silent. Gradually the poor sinner becomes aware of a salacious murmur, an undercurrent of moaning and panting, and the lubricious thwack and whap of the act itself. “Davey,” a girl’s voice calls, tender, pubescent, “I’m scared.” And then his own voice, bland and reassuring: “I won’t stick it in, Cindy, I won’t, I swear … or maybe, maybe just … just an inch …”

  The mist lifts and there they are, in teddies and negligees, in garter belts and sweat socks, naked and wet and kneading their breasts like dough. “Davey,” they moan, “oh, Davey, fuck me, fuck me, fuck me,” and he knows them all, from Cindy Lou Harris and Betsy Butler in the twelfth grade to Fredda in her youth and the sad and ugly faces of his one-night stands and chance encounters, right on up to the bug-eyed woman with the doleful breasts he’d diddled in the rest room on the way out from Kennedy. And worse. Behind them, milling around in a mob that stretches to the horizon, are all the women and girls he’d ever lusted after, even for a second, the twitching behinds and airy bosoms he’d stopped to admire on the street, the legs he’d wanted to stroke and lips to press to his own. McCarey’s wife, Beatrice, is there and Fred Dolby’s thirteen-year-old daughter, the woman with the freckled bosom who used to sunbathe in the tiger-skin bikini next door when they lived in Irvington, the girl from the typing pool, and the outrageous little shaven-headed vixen from Domino’s Pizza. And as if that weren’t enough, there’s the crowd from books and films too. Linda Lovelace, Sophia Loren, Emma Bovary, the Sabine women and Lot’s wife, even Virginia Woolf with her puckered foxy face and the eyes that seem to beg for a good slap on the bottom. It’s too much—all of them murmuring his name like a crazed chorus of Molly Blooms, and yes, she’s there too—and the mob behind him hissing, hissing.

  He glances at the statue. The plaster lip curls in disgust, the adamantine hand rises and falls, and the women vanish. “Gluttony!” howls the Virgin and all at once he’s surrounded by forlornly mooing herds of cattle, sad-eyed pigs and sheep, funereal geese and clucking ducks, a spill of scuttling crabs and claw-waving lobsters, even the odd dog or two he’d inadvertently wolfed down in Tijuana burritos and Cantonese stir-fry. And the scales—scales the size of the Washington Monument—sunk under pyramids of ketchup, peanut butter, tortilla chips, truckloads of potatoes, onions, avocados, peppermint candies and after-dinner mints, half-eaten burgers and fork-scattered peas, the whole slithering wasteful cornucopia of his secret and public devouring. “Moooooo,” accuse the cows. “Stinker!” “Pig!” “Glutton!” cry voices from the crowd.

  Prostrate now, the cattle hanging over him, letting loose with their streams of urine and clots of dung, McGahee shoves his fists into his eyes and cries out for mercy. But there is no mercy. The statue, wicked and glittering, its tiny twisted features clenching and unclenching like the balls of its fists, announces one after another the unremitting parade of his sins: “Insults to Humanity, False Idols, Sloth, Unclean Thoughts, The Kicking of Dogs and Cheating at Cards!”

  His head reels. He won’t look. The voices cry out in hurt and laceration and he feels the very ground give way beneath him. The rest, mercifully, is a blank.

  When he comes to, muttering in protest—“False idols, I mean like an autographed picture of Mickey Mantle, for christsake?”—he finds himself in a cramped mud-and-wattle hut that reeks of goat dung and incense. By the flickering glow of a bank of votary candles, he can make out the bowed and patchy head of Nuala Nolan. Outside it is dark and the rain drives down with a hiss. For a long moment, McGahee lies there, studying the fleshless form of the girl, her bones sharp and sepulchral in the quavering light. He feels used up, burned out, feels as if he’s been cored like an apple. His head screams. His throat is dry. His bladder is bursting.

  He pushes himself up and the bony demi-saint levels her tranced gaze on him, “Hush,” she says, and the memory of all that’s happened washes over him like a typhoon.

  “How long have I—?”

  “Two days.” Her voice is a reverent whisper, the murmur of the acolyte, the apostle. “They say the Pope himself is on the way.”

  “The Pope?” McGahee feels a long shiver run through him.

  Nods the balding death’s-head. The voice is dry as husks, wheezy, but a girl’s voice all the same, and an enthusiast’s. “They say it’s the greatest vision vouchsafed to man since the time of Christ. Two hundred and fifteen people witnessed it, every glorious moment, from the cask of gin to the furtive masturbation to the ace up the sleeve.” She’s leaning over him now, inching forward on all fours, her breath like chopped meat gone bad in the refrigerator; he can see, through the tattered shirt, where her breasts used to be. “Look,” she whispers, gesturing toward the hunched low entranceway.

  He looks and the sudden light dazzles him. Blinking in wonder, he creeps to the crude doorway and peers out. Immediately a murmur goes up from the crowd—hundreds upon hundreds of them gathered in the rain on their knees—and an explosion of flash cameras blinds him. Beyond the crowd he can make out a police cordon, vans and video cameras, CBS, BBC, KDOG, and NPR, a face above a trenchcoat that could once belong to Dan Rather himself. �
��Holy of holies!” cries a voice from the front of the mob—he knows that voice—and the crowd takes it up in a chant that breaks off into the Lord’s Prayer. Stupefied, he wriggles out of the hut and stands, bathed in light. It’s McCarey there before him, reaching out with a hundred others to embrace his ankles, kiss his feet, tear with trembling devoted fingers at his Levi’s and Taiwanese tweed—Michael McCarey, adulterer, gambler, drunk and atheist, cheater of the IRS and bane of the Major Deegan—hunkered down in the rain like a holy supplicant. And there, not thirty feet away, is the statue, lit like Betelgeuse and as inanimate and snot-green as a stone of the sea.

  Rain pelts McGahee’s bare head and the chill seizes him like a claw jerking hard and sudden at the ruined ancient priest-ridden superstitious root of him. The flashbulbs pop in his face, a murmur of Latin assaults his ears, Sister Mary Magdalen’s unyielding face rises before him out of the dim mists of eighth-grade math … and then the sudden imperious call of nature blinds him to all wonder and he’s staggering round back of the hut to relieve himself of his two days’ accumulation of salts and uric acid and dregs of whiskey. Stumbling, fumbling for his zipper, the twin pains in his groin like arrows driven through him, he jerks out his poor pud and lets fly.

  “Piss!” roars a voice behind him, and he swivels his head in fright, helpless before the stream that issues from him like a torrent. The crowd falls prostrate in the mud, cameras whir, voices cry out. It is the statue, of course, livid, jerking its limbs and racking its body like the image of the Führer in his maddest denunciation. “Piss on sacred ground, will you,” rage the plaster lips in the voice of his own father, that mild and pacifistic man, “you unholy insect, you whited sepulcher, you speck of dust in the eye of your Lord and maker!”

  What can he do? He clutches himself, flooding the ground, dissolving the hut, befouling the bony scrag of the anchorite herself.

  “Unregenerate!” shrieks the Virgin. “Unrepentant! Sinner to the core!” And then it comes.

  The skies part, the rain turns to popcorn, marshmallows, English muffins, the light of seven suns scorches down on that humble crowd gathered on the sward, and all the visions of that first terrible day crash over them in hellish simulcast. The great vats of beer and gin and whiskey fall to pieces and the sea of booze floats them, the cattle bellowing and kicking, sheep bleating and dogs barking, despoiled girls and hardened women clutching for the shoulders of the panicked communicants as for sticks of wood awash in the sea, Sophia Loren herself and Virginia Woolf, Fredda, Cindy Lou Harris and McCarey’s wife swept by in a blur, the TV vans overturned, the trenchcoat torn from Dan Rather’s back, and the gardai sent sprawling—“Thank God he didn’t eat rattlesnake,” someone cries—and then it’s over. Night returns. Rain falls. The booze sinks softly into the earth, food lies rotting in clumps. A drumbeat of hoofs thunders off into the dark while fish wriggle and escargots creep, and Fredda, McCarey, the shaven-headed pizza vixen, and all the gap-toothed countrymen and farm wives and palsied children pick themselves up from the ground amid the curses of the men cheated at cards, the lament of the fallen women, and the mad frenzied chorus of prayer that speaks over it all in the tongue of terror and astonishment.

  But oh, sad wonder, McGahee is gone.

  Today the site remains as it was that night, fenced off from the merely curious, combed over inch by inch by priests and parapsychologists, blessed by the Pope, a shrine as reverenced as Lourdes and the Holy See itself. The cattle were sold off at auction after intensive study proved them ordinary enough, though brands were traced to Montana, Texas, and the Swiss Alps, and the food—burgers and snowcones, rib roasts, Fig Newtons, extra dill pickles, and all the rest—was left where it fell, to feed the birds and fertilize the soil. The odd rib or T-bone, picked clean and bleached by the elements, still lies there on the ground in mute testimony to those three days of tumult. Fredda McGahee Meyerowitz, Herb Buck-nell and others cheated at cards, the girl from the pizza parlor and the rest were sent home via Aer Lingus, compliments of the Irish government. What became of Virginia Woolf, dead forty years prior to these events, is not known, nor the fate of Emma Bovary either, though one need only refer to Flaubert for the besf clue to this mystery. And of course, there are the tourism figures—up a whopping 672 percent since the miracle.

  McCarey has joined an order of Franciscan monks, and Nuala Nolan, piqued no doubt by her supporting role in the unfolding of the miracle, has taken a job in a pastry shop, where she eats by day and prays for forgiveness by night. As for Davey McGahee himself, the prime mover and motivator of all these enduring mysteries, here the lenses of history and of myth and miracology grow obscure. Some say he descended into a black hole of the earth, others that he evaporated, while still others insist that he ascended to heaven in a blaze of light, Saint of the Common Sinner.

  For who hasn’t lusted after woman or man or drunk his booze and laid to rest whole herds to feed his greedy gullet? Who hasn’t watched them starve by the roadside in the hollows and waste places of the world and who among us hasn’t scoffed at the credulous and ignored the miracle we see outside the window every day of our lives? Ask not for whom the bell tolls—unless perhaps you take the flight to Cork City, and the bus or rented Nissan out to Ballinspittle by the Sea, and gaze on the halfsize snotgreen statue of the Virgin, mute and unmoving all these many years.

  (1987)

  TOP OF THE FOOD CHAIN

  The thing was, we had a little problem with the insect vector there, and believe me, your tamer stuff, your Malathion and pyrethrum and the rest of the so-called environmentally safe products didn’t begin to make a dent in it, not a dent, I mean it was utterly useless—we might as well have been spraying with Chanel No. 5 for all the good it did. And you’ve got to realize these people were literally covered with insects day and night—and the fact that they hardly wore any clothes just compounded the problem. Picture if you can, gentlemen, a naked little two-year-old boy so black with flies and mosquitoes it looks like he’s wearing long Johns, or the young mother so racked with the malarial shakes she can’t even lift a diet Coke to her lips—it was pathetic, just pathetic, like something out of the Dark Ages…. Well, anyway, the decision was made to go with DDT. In the short term. Just to get the situation under control, you understand.

  Yes, that’s right, Senator, DDT: Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane.

  Yes, I’m well aware of that fact, sir. But just because we banned it domestically, under pressure from the birdwatching contingent and the hopheads down at the EPA, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the rest of the world—especially the developing world—is about to jump on the bandwagon. And that’s the key word here, Senator: developing. You’ve got to realize this is Borneo we’re talking about here, not Port Townsend or Enumclaw. These people don’t know from square one about sanitation, disease control, pest eradication—or even personal hygiene, if you want to come right down to it. It rains a hundred and twenty inches a year, minimum. They dig up roots in the jungle. They’ve still got head-hunters along the Rajang River, for god’s sake.

  And please don’t forget they asked us to come in there, practically begged us—and not only the World Health Organization, but the Sultan of Brunei and the government in Sarawak too. We did what we could to accommodate them and reach our objective in the shortest period of time and by the most direct and effective means. We went to the air. Obviously. And no one could have foreseen the consequences, no one, not even if we’d gone out and generated a hundred environmental-impact statements—it was just one of those things, a freak occurrence, and there’s no defense against that. No that I know of, anyway….

  Caterpillars? Yes, Senator, that’s correct. That was the first sign: caterpillars.

  But let me backtrack a minute here. You see, out in the bush they have these roofs made of thatched palm leaves—you’ll see them in the towns too, even in Bintulu or Brunei—and they’re really pretty effective, you’d be surprised. A hundred and twenty inches of rain, they’ve got to f
igure a way to keep it out of the hut, and for centuries, this was it. Palm leaves. Well, it was about a month after we sprayed for the final time and I’m sitting at my desk in the trailer thinking about the drainage project at Kuching, enjoying the fact that for the first time in maybe a year I’m not smearing mosquitoes all over the back of my neck, when there’s a knock at the door. It’s this elderly gentleman, tattooed from head to toe, dressed only in a pair of running shorts—they love those shorts, by the way, the shiny material and the tight machine-stitching, the whole country, men and women and children, they can’t get enough of them…. Anyway, he’s the headman of the local village and he’s very excited, something about the roofs—atap, they call them. That’s all he can say, atap, atap, over and over again.

  It’s raining, of course. It’s always raining. So I shrug into my rain slicker, start up the 4×4 and go have a look. Sure enough, all the atap roofs are collapsing, not only in his village, but throughout the target area. The people are all huddled there in their running shorts, looking pretty miserable, and one after another the roofs keep falling in, it’s bewildering, and gradually I realize the headman’s diatribe has begun to feature a new term I was unfamiliar with at the time—the word for caterpillar, as it turns out, in the Iban dialect. But who was to make the connection between three passes with the crop duster and all these staved-in roofs?

  Our people finally sorted it out a couple weeks later. The chemical, which, by the way, cut down the number of mosquitoes exponentially, had the unfortunate side effect of killing off this little wasp—I’ve got the scientific name for it somewhere in my report here, if you’re interested—that preyed on a type of caterpillar that in turn ate palm leaves. Well, with the wasps gone, the caterpillars hatched out with nothing to keep them in check and chewed the roofs to pieces, and that was unfortunate, we admit it, and we had a real cost overrun on replacing those roofs with tin … but the people were happier, I think, in the long run, because let’s face it, no matter how tightly you weave those palm leaves, they’re just not going to keep the water out like tin. Of course, nothing’s perfect, and we had a lot of complaints about the rain drumming on the panels, people unable to sleep and what-have-you….