T. C. Boyle Stories

by T. C. Boyle

  Harris opened with a one-two combination of rice and kidney beans; the Kid countered with cocktail onions and capers. Then Harris hit him with baklava—400 two-inch squares of it. The Kid gobbled them like hors d’oeuvres, came back with chiles rellenos and asparagus vinaigrette. He KO’d Harris in the middle of the fourth round. After the bout he stood in a circle of jabbing microphones, flashing lights. “I got one thing to say,” he shouted. “And if you’re out there, Big Man, you better take heed:

  I’m going to float like a parfait,

  Sting like a tamale.

  Big Man, you ‘ll hit the floor,

  In four,”

  At the preliminary weigh-in for the title bout the Kid showed up on roller skates in a silver lamé jumpsuit. He looked like something off the launching pad at Cape Canaveral. Angelo, in his coal-bucket trousers and suspenders, could have been mistaken for an aging barber or a boccie player strayed in from the park.

  The-Kid had a gallon jar of hot cherry peppers under his arm. He wheeled up to the Champ, bolted six or seven in quick succession, and then held one out to him by the stem. “Care for an appetizer, Pops?” Angelo declined, his face dour and white, the big fleshy nostrils heaving like a stallion’s. Then the photographers posed the two, belly to belly. In the photograph, which appeared on the front page of the paper the following morning, Angelo D. looked like an advertisement for heartburn.

  There was an SRO crowd at the Garden for the title bout. Scalpers were getting two hundred and up for tickets. ABC Sports was there, Colonel Sanders was there, Arthur Treacher, Julia Child, James Beard, Ronald McDonald, Mamma Leone. It was the Trenching Event of the Century.

  Spider Decoud and the Kid’s manager had inspected the ring and found the arrangements to their satisfaction—each man had a table, stool, stack of plates and cutlery. Linen napkins, a pitcher of water. It would be a fourteen-round affair, each round going ten minutes with a sixty-second bell break. The contestants would name their dishes for alternate rounds, the Kid, as challenger, leading off.

  A hush fell over the crowd. And then the chant, rolling from back to front like breakers washing the beach: GULLET, GULLET, GULLET! There he was, the Kid, sweeping down the aisle like a born champion in his cinnamon-red robe with the silver letters across the abdomen. He stepped into the ring, clasped his hands, and shook them over his head. The crowd roared like rock faces slipping deep beneath the earth. Then he did a couple of deep knee bends and sat down on his stool. At that moment Angelo shuffled out from the opposite end of the arena, stern, grim, raging, the tight curls at the back of his neck standing out like the tail feathers of an albatross, his barren dome ghostly under the klieg lights, the celebrated paunch swelling beneath his opalescent robe like a fat wad of butter-ball turkeys. The crowd went mad. They shrieked, hooted and whistled, women kissed the hem of his gown, men reached out to pat his bulge. ANGELO! He stepped into the ring and took his seat as the big black mike descended from the ceiling.

  The announcer, in double lapels and bow tie, shouted over the roar, “Ladies and Gentlemen—” while Angelo glared at the Kid, blood in his eye. He was choked with a primordial competitive fury, mad as a kamikaze, deranged with hunger. Two days earlier Decoud had lured him into a deserted meat locker and bolted the door—and then for the entire forty-eight hours had projected pornographic food films on the wall. Fleshy wet lips closing on eclairs, zoom shots of masticating teeth, gulping throats, probing tongues, children innocently sucking at Tootsie Roll pops—it was obscene, titillating, maddening. And through it all a panting soundtrack composed of grunts and sighs and the smack of lips. Angelo D. climbed into the ring a desperate man. But even money nonetheless. The Kid gloated in his corner.

  “At this table, in the crimson trunks,” bellowed the announcer, “standing six foot two inches tall and weighing in at three hundred and seventy-seven pounds … is the challenger, Kid Gullet!” A cheer went up, deafening. The announcer pointed to Angelo. “And at this table, in the pearly trunks and standing five foot seven and a half inches tall and weighing in at three hundred and twenty-three pounds,” he bawled, his voice rumbling like a cordon of cement trucks, “is the Heavyweight Champion of the World … Angelo D.!” Another cheer, perhaps even louder. Then the referee took over. He had the contestants step to the center of the ring, the exposed flesh of their chests and bellies like a pair of avalanches, while he asked if each was acquainted with the rules. The Kid grinned like a shark. “All right then,” the ref said, “touch midriffs and come out eating.”

  The bell rang for Round One. The Kid opened with Szechwan hot and sour soup, three gallons. He lifted the tureen to his lips and slapped it down empty. The Champ followed suit, his face aflame, sweat breaking out on his forehead. He paused three times, and when finally he set the tureen down he snatched up the water pitcher and drained it at a gulp while the crowd booed and Decoud yelled from the corner: “Lay off the water or you’ll bloat up like a blowfish!”

  Angelo retaliated with clams on the half shell in Round Two: 512 in ten minutes. But the Kid kept pace with him—and as if that weren’t enough, he sprinkled his own portion with cayenne pepper and Tabasco. The crowd loved it. They gagged on their hot dogs, pelted the contestants with plastic cups and peanut shells, gnawed at the backs of their seats. Angelo looked up at the Kid’s powerful jaws, the lips stained with Tabasco, and began to feel queasy.

  The Kid staggered him with lamb curry in the next round. The crowd was on its feet, the Champ’s face was green, the fork motionless in his hand, the ref counting down. Decoud twisting the towel in his fists—when suddenly the bell sounded and the Champ collapsed on the table. Decoud leaped into the ring, chafed Angelo’s abdomen, sponged his face. “Hang in there, Champ,” he said, “and come back hard with the carbohydrates.”

  Angelo struck back with potato gnocchi in Round Four; the Kid countered with Kentucky burgoo. They traded blows through the next several rounds, the Champ scoring with Nesselrode pie, fettuccine Alfredo and poi, the Kid lashing back with jambalaya, shrimp creole and herring in horseradish sauce.

  After the bell ending Round Eleven, the bout had to be held up momentarily because of a disturbance in the audience. Two men, thin as tapers and with beards like Spanish moss, had leaped into the ring waving posters that read REMEMBER BIAFRA. The Kid started up from his table and pinned one of them to the mat, while security guards nabbed the other. The Champ sat immobile on his stool, eyes tearing from the horseradish sauce, his fist clenched round the handle of the water pitcher. When the ring was cleared the bell rang for Round Twelve.

  It was the Champ’s round all the way: sweet potato pie with butterscotch syrup and pralines. For the first time the Kid let up—toward the end of the round he dropped his fork and took a mandatory eight count. But he came back strong in the thirteenth with a savage combination of Texas wieners and sauce diable. The Champ staggered, went down once, twice, flung himself at the water pitcher while the Kid gorged like a machine, wiener after wiener, blithely lapping the hot sauce from his fingers and knuckles with an epicurean relish. Then Angelo’s head fell to the table, his huge whiskered jowl mired in a pool of bechamel and butter. The fans sprang to their feet, feinting left and right, snapping their jaws and yabbering for the kill. The Champ’s eyes fluttered open, the ref counted over him.

  It was then that it happened. His vision blurring, Angelo gazed out into the crowd and focused suddenly on the stooped and wizened figure of an old woman in a black bonnet. Decoud stood at her elbow. Angelo lifted his head. “Ma?” he said. “Eat, Angelo, eat!” she called, her voice a whisper in the apocalyptic thunder of the crowd. “Clean your plate!”

  “Nine!” howled the referee, and suddenly the Champ came to life, lashing into the sauce diable like a crocodile. He bolted wieners, sucked at his fingers, licked the plate. Some say his hands moved so fast that they defied the eye, a mere blur, slapstick in double time. Then the bell rang for the final round and Angelo announced his dish: “Gruel!” he roared. The Kid
protested. “What kind of dish is that?” he whined. “Gruel? Whoever heard of gruel in a championship bout?” But gruel it was. The Champ lifted the bowl to his lips, pasty ropes of congealed porridge trailing down his chest; the crowd cheered, the Kid toyed with his spoon—and then it was over.

  The referee stepped in, helped Angelo from the stool and held his flaccid arm aloft Angelo was plate-drunk, reeling. He looked out over the cheering mob, a welter of button heads like B in B mushrooms-or Swedish meatballs in a rich golden sauce. Then he gagged. “The winner,” the ref was shouting, “and still champion, Angelo D.!”

  (1977)

  BLOODFALL

  It started about three-thirty, a delicate tapping at the windows, the sound of rain. No one noticed: the stereo was turned up full and Walt was thumping his bass along with it, the TV was going, they were all stoned, passing wine and a glowing pipe, singing along with the records, playing Botticelli and Careers and Monopoly, crunching crackers. I noticed. In that brief scratching silence between songs, I heard it—looked up at the window and saw the first red droplets huddled there, more falling between them. Gesh and Scott and Isabelle were watching TV with the sound off, digging the music, lighting cigarettes, tapping fingers and feet, laughing. On the low table were cheese, oranges, wine, shiny paperbacks, a hash pipe. Incense smoked from a pendant urn. The three dogs sprawled on the carpet by the fireplace. Siamese cats curled on the mantel, the bench, the chair. The red droplets quivered, were struck by other, larger drops falling atop them, and began a meandering course down the windowpane. Alice laughed from the kitchen. She and Amy were peeling vegetables, baking pies, uncanning baby smoked oysters and sturgeon for hors d’oeuvres, sucking on olive pits. The windows were streaked with red. The music was too loud. No one noticed. It was another day.

  When I opened the door to investigate, the three dogs sprang up and ran to me, tails awag; they stopped at the door, sniffing. It was hissing down now, a regular storm: it streamed red from the gutter over the door, splashing my pant-leg. The front porch smelled like raw hamburger. My white pants were spotted with red. The dogs inched out now, stretching their necks: they lapped at the red puddle on the doorstep. Their heads and muzzles were soon slick with it. I slammed the door on them and walked back into the living room. Gesh and Scott were passing the pipe. On the TV screen were pictures of starving children: distended bellies, eyes as big as their bony heads, spiders’ arms and spiders’ legs: someone was laughing in the kitchen. “Hey!” I shouted. “Do you dig what’s happening outside?” Nobody heard me. The windows were smeared with red: it fell harder. Gesh looked up to pass the pipe. “What happened to you?” he said. “Cut yourself?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s raining blood.”

  Gesh was in the shower when the TV screen went blank. Earlier, when everybody had crowded around the open door, holding out their hands to it as it dripped down from the eaves, wowing and cursing and exclaiming, Gesh had pushed through and stepped out, down the stairs and out under the maple tree. His white pants, shirt and shoes turned pinkish, then a fresh wet red, the color of life. “It’s fantastic out here!” he yelled. We held back. In a minute or two he came back up the steps, his face a mosaic mortared in blood, the clotted hair stuck to his forehead. He looked like the aftermath of an accident, or a casualty of war. “How do I look?” he said, licking the wet red from his lips. “Like the Masque of the Red Death or something? Huh?” Scott was taking pictures with his Nikkormat. The smell when Gesh stepped in reminded me of a trip I took with my mom and dad when I was in the third grade. An educational trip. Every weekend we took an educational trip. We went to the slaughterhouse. Gesh smelled like that when he came in. Amy made him take a shower with baby shampoo and peppermint soap. She laid out a fresh white shirt and pants for him, and his white slippers. Scott ran downstairs to the darkroom to develop his pictures. Basically he does black and whites of slum kids in rakish hats giving him the finger; old slum women, the fingers stewed to the bone; old slum men, fingering port pints in their pockets. These he enlarges and frames, and hangs about the house. One of them hangs in the corner over Alice’s Reclino Love-Chair with the dyed rabbit-fur cover; another hangs in the dining room over my 125-gallon aquarium. The rabbit fur is dyed black.

  Walt took a break for a minute to change records and adjust the treble on his amp. In the ringing silence that ensued, we realized that the TV was emitting a thin high-pitched whistle. There was no picture. “What the fuck?” said Isabelle. She jumped up, flipped through the channels. All gray, all emitting the same whistle. Isabelle’s eyes were bleared. “Let’s try the radio!” she said. It too: the same insidious whine. “The phone!” she shouted. The phone hummed softly in her ear, my ear, Walt’s ear, Amy’s ear. It was the same sort of hum you get from an empty conch shell. “It’s dead,” I said. We stood there mute, staring at the receiver suspended from its cord, clickless and ringless. We theorized:

  Maybe it’s a National Emergency—

  Maybe it’s D-day—Maybe it’s the Nuclear Holocaust—

  Maybe it’s Judgment Day—

  Maybe it’s the Rockets they’re sending up—

  But we all suspected the soundness of these extrapolations. Probably it was just some new form of pollution, and a few wires down in the storm. Gesh appeared in fresh white, smelling like a candy cane. He walked deliberately to the pipe, thumbed in a chunk of hash, and sucked the flame of a match through it. Is-abelle, quickly sedated, picked out a couple of albums and Walt ducked under the embroidered shoulder strap of his bass—the blast of music sealed the room, stopped the ticking at the panes. Alice brought in the hors d’oeuvres, and a comforting smell of exotic dishes abubble in the kitchen. I sat, smoked, and ate.

  In the morning I slipped early from the warmth of the nest (Alice’s tender buttock, Gesh’s hairy satyr’s foot framed there beneath the sheets), wrapped my white robe over my white pajamas, stepped into my fluffy white slippers, and went downstairs, as I always do on Saturdays, to watch cartoons. My mind was a tabula rasa, wire-brushed with intoxicants; my dreams had been of cool colors, the green of the forest, the cerulean of the summer sky. In the living room, a pinkish light suffused the slats of the blinds. The window was like stained glass. In the early morning quiet, the red splashes drummed against it. I was stunned; and all alone there, at that early hour, frightened. Then I heard the scratching at the door: the dogs had been out all night. Without thinking, I opened the door and they rushed in, great living lumps of raw flesh, skinned carcasses come to life, slick with blood, their bellies bloated with it. “No, no, get down!” But they were already up on their hind legs, pawing affectionately at me, their fetid breath in my face. Their teeth were stained red, blood hung even in the sockets of their eyes. “Get down, goddamnit!” My robe, my pajamas, my fluffy white slippers were ruined: the blood crept through the white cotton like a stain in water. I kicked out at the dogs. They backed off and shook themselves—a fine bloodmist spotted the walls, the white rugs of the hallway, the potted plants. The dogs grunted, eased themselves down and licked their paws. Blood seeped from beneath them. I felt sick from the stink of it, and so upset with the mess that tears began to crowd my eyes—exasperated, hopeless tears. The hallway looked like a sacrificial altar, my arms like the gory High Priest’s. I would wash and go back to bed, face life later.

  In the bathroom I stepped carefully out of my clothes in an effort to avoid staining the bathmat. It was no use. Blood oozed from the fluffy red slippers. I wiped my hands and face on the lining of the robe, bundled everything together and stuffed it into the hamper. Seven electric toothbrushes, seven cups, and seven hotcombs hung on the rack over the sink. We kept the seven electric shavers, each in its own carrying case, stacked neatly in the cabinet. I stepped into the shower, the tap of blood against the bathroom window loud in my ears, and turned on hot, full force. Eyes pressed tight, face in the spray, I luxuriated in the warm pure rush of the water. I’d always taken a great deal of pleasure in showering and bathin
g, in being clean—it reminded me of my mom and the baths she used to give, sponging my crotch, kissing my wet little feet … but there was something wrong—that odor—good God, it was in the water supply! Horrified, I leaped from the shower. In the steamed-over mirror I was newborn, coated in blood and mucus, pulled hot from the womb. Diluted blood streamed down my body, puddled at my feet. I lifted the toilet seat and puked into the red bowl. Hung my head and puked: puked and cried, until Amy came down and found me there.

  Gesh sat back in the stuffed chair. He wore his white robe with the gold monogram, and his slippers. The bloodfall hammered on. “We’ve got to look at the precedents,” he said. There was a pie and a soufflé in the oven. We were in the living room, sipping apricot nectar, munching buns. Alice, in the entrance hall with detergent and scrub brush, was muttering like Lady Macbeth over the carpet stains. “What precedents?” I asked.

  “Like all of that shit that went down in Egypt about thirty-five hundred years ago.”

  Walt was tuning his bass: dzhzhzhzhtt. dzhzhzhzhtt. He picked a rumbling note or two and looked up. “You’re thinking of frogs, brother. Millions of frogs. Frogs under the bed, frogs in the flour, frogs in your shoes, clammy frogs’ flippers slapping at your ass when you take a shit.”

  “No, no—there was something about blood too, wasn’t there?”

  “Yeah,” said Walt. “Christ turned it into water. Or was it wine?”

  “You know what happened in Egypt?! You want to know?” My voice cracked. I was getting hysterical. A cat jumped into my lap. I tossed it over my shoulder. Everything in the room had a red cast, like when you put on those red cellophane glasses as a kid, to read 3D comic books.