T. C. Boyle Stories

by T. C. Boyle

  There were two inches of glare ice on the road. Hal thumped his mother’s stuttering Oldsmobile from tree to tree, went into a 180-degree spin, and schussed down Jill’s driveway, narrowly avoiding the denuded azalea bush, three Flexible Flyers, and a staved-in Renault on blocks. He licked his fingertips and smoothed down his sideburns on the doorstep, knocked perfunctorily, and entered, grinning, in all his exotic, fair-haired, California glory. Unfortunately, the effect was wasted—no one but Jill was there. Hunched in the corner of a gutted sofa, she smiled wanly from behind a mound of soggy Fritos and half a gallon of California dip. “Hi,” she said in a voice of dole, “they’re coming, they’re coming.” Then she winked her bad eye at him and limped across the room to stick her tongue in his mouth.

  She was clinging to him, licking at his mustache and telling him about her bout with breast cancer, when the doorbell rang and Rob and Irene came hurtling into the room shrieking “My God, look at you!” They were late, they screamed, because the baby-sitter never showed for their daughter, Soukamathandravaki, whose frightened little face peered in out of the night behind them.

  An instant later, Harvey swung furiously up the walk on his silver crutches, Tootle and Pesky staggered in together with reddened noses and dilated pupils, and Steve, Stevie, and Steven emerged from the back of the house on their minibikes to pop wheelies in the middle of the room. The party was on.

  “So,” Harvey snarled, fencing Hal into the corner with the gleaming shafts of his crutches, “they tell me you’re doing pretty good out there, huh, bub?”

  Pesky and Tootle were standing beside him, grinning till Hal thought their lips would dry out and stick to their teeth, and Pesky had his arm around Tootle’s shoulder. “Me?” Hal said, with a modest shrug. “Well, since you ask, my agent did say that—”

  Harvey cut him off, turning to Pesky with a wild leer and shouting, “So how’s the kid, what’s his name—Damian?”

  Dead silence fell over the room.

  Rob and Irene froze, clutching Dixie cups of purple passion to their chests, and Jill, who’d been opening their eyes to the in-fighting, petty abuses, and catastrophic outrages of the food-stamp office where she worked, caught her tongue. Even Steve, Stevie, and Steven snapped to attention. They’d been playfully binding little Soukamathandravaki to one of the dining-room chairs with electrical tape, but at the mention of Damian, they looked round them in unison and vanished.

  “You son of a bitch,” Pesky said, his fingers dug so deep in Tootle’s shoulder his knuckles went white. “You crippled fascist Marine Corps burnout.”

  Harvey jerked his big head to one side and spat on the floor.

  “What’d they give him, life plus a hundred and fifty years? Or’d they send him to Matteawan?”

  “Hey,” Irene shouted, a desperate keening edge to her voice, “hey, do you guys remember all those wild pranks we used to pull back in high school?” She tore across the room, waving her Dixie cup. “Like, like when we smeared that black stuff on our faces and burned the Jewish star on Dr. Rosenbaum’s front lawn?”

  Everyone ignored her.

  “Harv,” Hal said, reaching out to take his arm, but Harvey jerked violently away—“Get your stinking hands off me!” he roared—before he lost his balance and fell with a sad clatter of aluminum into the California dip.

  “Serves you right, you bitter son of a bitch,” Pesky growled, standing over him as if they’d just gone fifteen rounds. “The crippled war hero. Why don’t you show us your scars, huh?”

  “Pesky,” Hal hissed, “leave it, will you?”

  Rob and Irene were trying to help Harvey to his feet, but he fought them off, sobbing with rage. There was California dip on the collar of his campaign jacket. Hairless and pale, with his quivering jowls and splayed legs, he looked like a monstrous baby dropped there on the rug.

  “Or the time Pesky ran up in front of Mrs. Gold’s class in the third grade and did squat thrusts till he passed out, remember that?” Irene was saying, when the room was rent by a violent, predatory shriek, as if someone had torn a hawk in half. It was Tootle. She twisted out from under Pesky’s arm and slammed her little white fist into his kidney. “You,” she sputtered, “who are you to talk, lording it over Harvey as if he was some kind of criminal or something. At least he fought for his country. What’d you do, huh?” Her eyes were swollen. There was a froth of saliva caught in the corner of her mouth.

  Pesky swung around. He was wearing his trademark Levi’s—jeans, jacket, sweatshirt, socks, and big-buckled belt. If only they made shoes, he used to say. “Yeah, yeah, tell us about it,” he sneered, “you little whore. Peddling your ass just like—”

  “Canada, that’s what you did about it. Like a typical wimp.”

  “Hey, hold on,” Hal said, lurching out of the corner in his parachute pants, “I don’t believe this. We all tried to get out of it—it was a rotten war, an illegal war, Nixon’s and Johnson’s war—what’s the matter with you? Don’t you remember?”

  “The marches,” Irene said.

  “The posters,” Rob joined in.

  “A cheap whore, that’s all. Cover girl, my ass.”

  “Shut up!” Tootle shrieked, turning on Hal. “You’re just as bad as Pesky. Worse. You’re a hypocrite. At least he knows he’s a piece of shit.” She threw back a cup of purple passion and leveled her green-eyed glare on him. “And you think you’re so high and mighty, out there in Hollywood—well, la-de-da, that’s what I say.”

  “He’s an artist,” Harvey said from the floor. “He co-wrote the immortal script for the ‘Life with Beanie’ show.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Fuck you too.”

  And then suddenly, as if it signaled a visitation from another realm, there was the deep-throated cough of a precision engine in the driveway, a sputter and its dying fall. As one, the seven friends turned to the door. There was a thump. A knock—dat dat-dat-dat da. And then: “Allo, allo, anybody is home?”

  It was Enzo. Tall, noble, with the nose of an emperor and a weave of silver in his hair so rich it might have been hammered from the mother lode itself. He was dressed in a coruscating jumpsuit with Pennzoil and Pirelli patches across the shoulder and chest, and he held his crash helmet in his hand. “Baby,” he said, crossing the room in two strides and taking Tootle in his arms, “ciao.”

  No one moved. No one said a thing.

  “Beech of a road,” Enzo said. “Ice, you know.” Outside, through the open door, the sleek low profile of his Lazaretto 2200 Pinin Farina coupe was visible, the windshield plated with ice, sleet driving down like straight pines. “Tooka me seventeen and a half minutes from La Guardia—a beech, huh? But baby, at least I’m here.”

  He looked round him, as if seeing the others for the first time, and then, without a word, crossed the room to the stereo, ran a quick finger along the spines of the albums, and flipped a black platter from its jacket as casually as if he were flipping pizzas in Napoli. He dropped the stylus, and as the room filled with music, he began to move his hips and mime the words: “Oooh-oooh, I heard it through the grapevine …”

  Marvin Gaye. Delectable, smooth, icy cool, ancient.

  Pesky reached down to help Harvey from the floor. Jill took Hal’s arm. Rob and Irene began to snap their fingers and Enzo swung Tootle out into the middle of the floor.

  They danced till they dropped.

  (1987)

  A BIRD IN HAND

  No, jutty, frieze,

  Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird

  Hath made his pendent bed and procreant cradle.

  —Macbeth, I. vi.

  1980

  They come like apocalypse, like all ten plagues rolled in one, beating across the sky with an insidious drone, their voices harsh and metallic, cursing the land. Ten million strong, a flock that blots out the huge pale sinking sun, they descend into the trees with a protracted explosion of wings, black underfeathers swirling down like a corrupt snow. At dawn they vacate the little
grove of oak and red cedar in a streaming rush, heading west to disperse and feed in the freshly seeded fields; at dusk they gather like storm clouds to swarm back to their roost. Ten million birds, concentrated in a stand of trees no bigger around than a city block—each limb, each branch, each twig and bole and strip of bark bowed under the weight of their serried bodies—ten million tiny cardiovascular systems generating a sirocco of heat, ten million digestive tracts processing seeds, nuts, berries, animal feed, and streaking the tree trunks with chalky excrement. Where before there had been leafspill, lichened rocks, sunlit paths beneath the trees, now there are foot-deep carpets of bird shit.

  “We’ve got a problem, Mai.” Egon Scharf stands at the window, turning a worn paperback over in his hand. Outside, less than a hundred feet off, ten million starlings squat in the trees, cursing one another in a cacophony of shrieks, whistles, and harsh check-checks. “Says here,” holding up the book, “the damn birds carry disease.”

  A muted undercurrent of sound buzzes through the house like static, a wheezing, whistling, many-throated hiss. Mai looks up from her crocheting: “What? I can’t hear you.”

  “Disease!” he shouts, flinging the book down. “Stink, fungus, rot. I say we got to do something.”

  “Tut,” is all she says. Her husband has always been an alarmist, from the day Jack Kennedy was shot and he installed bulletproof windows in the Rambler, to the time he found a single tent-caterpillar nest in the cherry tree and set fire to half the orchard. “A flock of birds, Egon, that’s all—just a flock of birds.”

  For a moment he is struck dumb with rage and incomprehension, a lock of stained white hair caught against the bridge of his nose. “Just a flock—? Do you know what you’re saying? There’s millions of them out there, crapping all over everything. The drains are stopped up, it’s like somebody whitewashed the car—I nearly broke my neck slipping in wet bird shit right on my own front porch, for Christ’s sake—and you say it’s nothing to worry about? Just a flock of birds?“

  She’s concentrating on a tricky picot stitch. For the first time, in the silence, she becomes aware of the steady undercurrent of sound. It’s not just vocal, it’s more than that—a rustling, a whisper whispered to a roar. She imagines a dragon, breathing fire, just outside the house.

  “Mai, are you listening to me? Those birds can cause disease.” He’s got the book in his hand again—The Pictorial Encyclopedia of Birds—thumbing through it like a professor. “Here, here it is: histoplasmosis, it says. Wind-borne. It grows in bird crap.”

  She looks inexpressibly wise, smug even. “Oh, that? That’s nothing, no more serious than a cold,” she says, coughing into her fist. “Don’t you remember Permilla Greer had it two years back?”

  “Can spread through the reticulo-something-or-other system,” he reads, and then looks up: “with a high percentage of mortality.”

  Three days later a man in a blue Ford pickup with tires the size of tank treads pulls into the driveway. The bed of the truck is a confusion of wires and amplifiers and huge open-faced loudspeakers. Intrigued, Mai knots the belt of her housecoat and steps out onto the porch.

  “Well, yes, sure,” Egon is saying, “you can back it over that pile of fence posts there and right up under the trees, if you want.”

  A young man in mirror sunglasses is standing beside the open door of the pickup. He nods twice at Egon, then hoists himself into the truck bed and begins flinging equipment around. “Okay,” he says, “okay,” as if addressing a large and impatient audience, “the way it works is like this: I’ve got these tapes of starling distress calls, and when they come back tonight to roost I crank up the volume and let ‘em have it.”

  “Distress calls?”

  The man is wearing a T-shirt under his jacket. When he pauses to put his hands on his hips, Mai can make out the initials emblazoned across his chest—KDOG—red letters radiating jagged orange lightning bolts. “Yeah, you know, like we mike a cage full of starlings and then put a cat or a hawk or something in there with them. But that’s not when we start the tape. We wait till the cat rips one up, then we set the reels rolling.”

  Egon looks dubious. Mai can see him pinching his lower lip the way he does when somebody tells him the Russians are behind high fertilizer prices or that a pack of coyotes chewed the udders off twenty dairy cows in New Jersey.

  “Don’t worry,” the man says, a thick coil of electrical cord in his hand, “this’ll shake ‘em up.”

  For the next two weeks, at dusk, the chatter of the roosting birds is entirely obliterated by a hideous tinny death shriek, crackling with static and blared at apocalyptic volume. When the Bird Man, as Mai has come to think of him, first switches on the amplifier each night, thirty or forty starlings shoot up out of the nearest tree and circle the yard twice before settling back down again. These, she supposes, are the highstrung, flighty types. As for the rest—the great weltering black mass hunkered down in the trees like all the generations of God’s creation stretching back from here to the beginning of time—they go about their business as if wrapped in the silence of the Ages. That is, they preen their wings, cackle, squawl, screech, warp the branches, and crap all over everything, as unruffled and oblivious as they were before the Bird Man ever set foot in the yard.

  On this particular evening the racket seems louder than ever, the very win-dowpanes humming with it. Mai has not been feeling well—she’s got a cough that makes her want to give up smoking, and her forehead seems hot to the touch—and she was lying down when the Bird Man started his serenade. Now she gets up and shuffles over to the window. Below, parked in the shadow of the nearest oak, the Bird Man sits in his truck, wearing a set of headphones and the sunglasses he never removes. The hammering shriek of the bird call sets Mai’s teeth on edge, assaults her ears, and stabs at her temples, and she realizes in that instant that it is distressing her far more than it distresses the birds. She suddenly wants to bolt down the stairs, out the door and into the pickup, she wants to pull the plug, rake the sunglasses from the Bird Man’s face, and tell him to get the hell out of her yard and never come back again. Instead, she decides to have a word with Egon.

  Downstairs the noise is even louder, intolerable, as if it had been designed to test the limits of human endurance. She rounds the corner into the den, furious, and is surprised to see Ed Bartro, from the McCracken Board of Supervisors, perched on the edge of the armchair. “Hello, Mai,” he shouts over the clamor, “I’m just telling your husband here we got to do something about these birds.”

  Egon sits across from him, looking hunted. He’s got two cigarettes going at once, and he’s balancing a double gimlet on his knee. Mai can tell from the blunted look of his eyes that it isn’t his first.

  “It worked in Paducah,” Ed is saying, “and over at Fort Campbell too. Tergitol. It’s a detergent, like what you use on your dishes, Mai,” he says, turning to her, “and when they spray it on the birds it washes the oil out of their feathers. Then you get them wet—if it rains, so much the better; if not, we’ll have the fire department come out and soak down the grove—and they freeze to death in the night. It’s not cheap, not by a long shot,” he says, “but the country’s just going to have to foot the bill.”

  “You sure it’ll work?” Egon shouts, rattling the ice in his glass for emphasis.

  “Nothing’s for certain, Egon,” Ed says, “but I’m ninety-nine and nine-tenths sure of it.”

  The following night, about seven o’clock, a pair of helicopters clatter over the house and begin circling the grove. Mai is hand-mashing potatoes and frying pork chops. The noise startles her, and she turns down the flame, wipes her hands on her apron, and steps out onto the porch to have a look. Angry suddenly, thinking, Why must everything be so loud?, she cups her hands over her ears and watches the searchlights gleam through the dark claws of the treetops. Gradually, she becomes aware of a new odor on the damp night air, a whiff of soap and alcohol undermining the sour ammoniac stench of the birds. It’s like a d
ream, she thinks, like a war. The helicopters scream, the spray descends in a deadly fog, the pork chops burn.

  An hour later the firemen arrive. Three companies. From Lone Oak, West Paducah and Woodlawn. The sequence is almost surreal: lights and shouts, black boots squashing the shoots in the garden, heavy-grid tires tearing up the lawn, the rattle of the pumps, coffee for thirty. By the time they leave, Mai is in bed, feeling as if she’s been beaten with a shoe. She coughs up a ball of phlegm, spits it into a tissue and contemplates it, wondering if she should call the doctor in the morning.

  When Egon comes in it is past midnight, and she’s been dozing with the light on. “Mai,” he says, “Mai, are you asleep?” Groggy, she props herself up on her elbows and squints at him. He is drunk, trundling heavily about the room as he strips off his clothes, “Well, I think this is going to do it, Mai,” he says, the words thick on his tongue. “They knocked off six million in one shot with this stuff over at Russellville, so Ed tells me, and they only used half as much.”

  She can’t make out the rest of what he says—he’s muttering, slamming at a balky bureau drawer, running water in the bathroom. When she wakes again the house is dark, and she can feel him beside her, heavy and inert. Outside, in the trees, the doomed birds whisper among themselves, and the sound is like thunder in her ears.

  In the morning, as the sun fires the naked fingers of the highest branches, the flock lifts up out of the trees with a crash of wings and a riot of shrieks and cackles. Mai feels too weak to get out of bed, feels as if her bones have gone soft on her, but Egon is up and out the door at first light. She is reawakened half an hour later by the slam of the front door and the pounding of footsteps below. There is the sound of Egon’s voice, cursing softly, and then the click-click-click of the telephone dial. “Hello, Ed?” The house is still, his voice as clear as if he were standing beside her. A cough catches in her throat and she reaches for the bottle of cough syrup she’d fished out of the medicine cabinet after the firemen had left.