T. C. Boyle Stories

by T. C. Boyle

  When the tale is finished and Metek sits up to tell his story of the great winged whale that brought the gaunt men, the others turn back to their beads, knives, mugs. Kresuk stretches out and begins picking at his sealhaunch. He chews thoughtfully, only half-attending his friend’s narrative, his mind on the glory he’s won, glory that will pass down through generations. He sees himself a king, his sons princes. It is then that Sip-su raises himself and waddles over to his father, where he squats to deposit a turd, wet and shapeless, on Kresuk’s foot. The friends laugh. Ooniak stares down at her toe. And Kresuk explodes, slaps the fat-headed child across the igloo—Sip-su totters, spins off the kotluk, scalds himself, wails. The neighbors look down at their beads and laps, faces elongate, and fight to suppress chuffles and snorts while Kresuk pulls on his furs, orders Ooniak to dress the child. Wordless, he snatches up the screeching Sip-su and crawls out the door. The old men nod.

  Outside, in the wind so sharp it takes away the child’s squalling breath, Kresuk harnesses the dogs, straps the child to his back, and starts off toward Pekiutlik Lookout, tomb of his ancestors.

  Plaint

  Driven by the insufferable stench of the accumulated slops, he determines to make a slop-emptying expedition. Doggedly he hefts the slop bucket and doggedly he steps out into the glacial dark: the hairs in his nostrils fuse with his first steaming breath. When he exhales he can hear the vapor crystallize, whisper to the ground in tiny pellets. Already the reeking paste has become a bucket-shaped block, no more offensive than an ice cube. He stops, whale-oil lantern in hand, intent on checking the thermometer for his meteorological records. As he stoops to clear the glass an exceptionally virulent gust extinguishes his light, and brings to his ears the unmistakable plaint, weak and attentuated, of a child in distress.

  He drops the bucket, holds his breath, uncovers his ears (the lobes freeze through instantaneously). Yes, there it is again—borne down on the wind from above, up on Pauce Point!

  Captain’s Log, January 5

  The Esquimau child is doing well, fully recovered from the effects of his exposure. I only wish I could say as much for the men. Blackwark and Hoofer are alternately comatose and delirious; young Harlan Hawkins has contracted erysipelas in his left stump; Bone, who could hardly walk in any case, is suffering from a new attack of frostbite. Yesterday he reeled out to chop wood from our scrap heap to keep the fire going. After half an hour I began to wonder what had become of him, and went out searching. I found him asleep in the snow, his cheek frozen fast to the beam he’d been chopping—it was necessary to hack half his beard away in order to extricate the poor fellow. On one of my downward strokes I inadvertently swiped off his left ear. Little matter: I hardly expect the poor beggar to make it through the night.

  The child, though about five or six years of age, appears to be defective mentally, from all indications suffering from mongoloidism. He must be hand-fed, and insists on fouling himself. I can only pity the savage heart that left him to the cold.

  Captain’s Log, January 10

  Disaster. The dogs have broken loose and got at our cache of pemmican—practically all we had left, better than two hundred pounds, is gone. I’ve managed to round up five of them, bloated as they are. Four will pull my sledge (or be whipped raw) and the fifth will grace our table. I can’t see how we’ll survive—we’ve almost no provisions left, and the night has barely begun.

  Captain’s Log, January 11

  Bone and Hoofer dead, Blackwark on the brink. I must leave them in their bunks, as I’ve barely the strength to drag them outside, and I must conserve my resources for the days ahead. With an interior temperature of +35 degrees F., I do not expect an overly rapid decomposition. Temperature outside at noon today was −54 degrees F.

  Captain’s Log, January 21

  Mad with hunger. The last two days we’ve had nothing to eat but a broth made from bits of wood and the more tender portions of Mr. Bone’s boots. Blackwark expired early this morning—there were no hymns, as Harlan Hawkins is in a coma, and the Esquimau child, my only other companion, can do nothing but wail for food and defecate. Clearly, without edibles, there is no hope for us here. As a result, I’ve come to a decision—I’ve determined to strap Hawkins and the child to a sledge drawn by the four curs I’ve spared (what a temptation it’s been to roast them!) and make for the Esquimau settlement at Etah. When they see the condition we’re in, and when they see the child—one of their own—I trust they’ll help us.

  Hegira

  A Hero indeed! he triumphantly thinks as he brings the lash down across the muzzles of the four dogs. If only Momma and the girls could see me now! But it is dark as Styx-mist and cold as Proserpine’s breath—so cold the thoughts begin to freeze in his head. Beneath his feet the ice is a jagged saw’s edge, cutting into each agonizing step, overturning the sledge, abrading the hard pads of the dog’s paws as if they were wax. Sip-su and the comatose Hawkins are lashed to the sledge, greatly impeding its progress, and from time to time the dogs stop and begin devouring one another and it is all he can do to whip them back to order. But indomitable, he presses on, a navy fight tune frozen in his cerebrum. Ard! he bellows (he had meant to yell “On you Bastards!” but the wind had driven the words back at him, right down his throat and into his shocked lungs). Soon his fingers will become brittle, and the fluid in his eyes will turn to slush.

  At Etah

  Outside the wind tells of a gale as it sweeps smooth over the glassy surface of the igloo. Inside it is sweating hot, and the three seal-blubber lamps, burning simultaneously, circulate a thick greasy smoke which stings the eyes. In the center of the domed ceiling a black helix winds and dances as it is sucked up through the chimney-piece and out, to rush before the deadly gusts.

  Kresuk is sitting on the floor, dressed in furs, breathing heavily, his eyebrows white with frost. The carcass of a big bearded seal is wedged in the narrow entrance passage, its head and whiskers and cold dead eyes at Kresuk’s feet. The seal’s tail is outside, in the wind and dark, the bloated belly jammed like a cork in the neck of the entranceway. Kresuk turns, tugs at the animal’s head. He smiles. He’d been improvident in his early dealings with the gaunt men, trading away half his winter cache of meat for a few buttons and beads. And so he’d been forced out on the dark floes, hungry, hunting. There was no choice about it: Ooniak grumbling, the dogs howling, Metek muttering every time Kresuk stepped next door for dinner. But now he looks down at the seal. And thinks feast.

  Then the voices outside: Ooniak, Metek, Metek’s woman. Kresuk rises to his knees, works a hand under each flipper and leans back. He can feel the others pushing at the seal’s fat flank. There is a moment of inertia, effort in suspension, and then a lewd wet sucking release and Kresuk is on his anak, the seal in his lap, Ooniak and his friends scrambling in: laughing.

  Later, his belly full, Kresuk crawls over to Ooniak and lies beside her, the string of beads and watches clacking as he throws himself down. She is rounder than normal. He puts his ear to her stomach, and then barks out a laugh: something is moving, just beneath the skin. He sits up, grinning. Metek says something about sons sturdy as bears. The wind howls. And Kresuk looks down, suddenly startled. Beneath the smooth crystal, inching like an insect, the second hand has begun to trace its way around a watch face, and the watch has begun to tick.

  A Soporific

  A soporific, it lulls, soothes, spreads its uterine warmth—and you want to lie down on the floes, tired, ineffably tired, impervious now to the sting of it—bed down right there, on the floes. The child and Hawkins are still lashed down, but stiff as flagpoles: a patina of frost glosses their lips. The dogs have given up, ice-blood crusting between their toes: they lie doubled, nose to tail, whimpering, and still in their traces. Have you the strength to crack the whip? Hardly. It’s all you can do to grip the sledgehandles, woozy and reeling as you are. But warm, strangely warm, and tired. This is no gale, but gentle windsong, a lullaby in your tired ears. If only to lie down … for just a
moment …

  (1973)

  RAPTURE OF THE DEEP

  “We must go deeper,” Cousteau says. He is haggard, worn to bone, his splendid Gallic nose a wedge driven into his face. He uses his utensils to illustrate—his fork has become a crane, his spoon the diving machine, a pool of sauce the ocean. I feel the ship roll under my feet, an undulation as gentle as a breath. “Mais oui!” a chorus of voices sings out. “Deeper!”

  I’m working my way round the cramped table, pouring coffee into a desolation of plates, cutlery, crusts of bread and fish bones. “But why?” I hear myself asking. “Haven’t we gone deep enough? What crime have we committed that we don’t deserve to see a port, a tree, the inside of a good brasserie?”

  Twenty pairs of eyes settle on me. I can see that this last bit about the brasserie is having its effect. Cousteau glances up. “I will never rest,” he says, “until I see with my own two eyes what lies on the bottom. Who knows what miracles will be revealed, what kaleidoscopic vistas of the unknown and silent world?”

  I bite my tongue, though I could say plenty. Cousteau is getting old. We’re all getting old. We’ve plumbed every body of water on earth, from McMurdo Sound to the Arafura Sea and the Firth of Clyde, we’ve found every wreck and frolicked with every fish, and I just don’t see the point of it anymore. But Cousteau is the perennial Boy Scout, intoxicated with adventure, if not the cru bourgeois the Calypso carries in her three-ton stainless steel wine tank. For him, everything is “kaleidoscopic,” “dreamlike,” “phantasmagoric,” from the life of the coral reef to the dregs of vin rouge left in the bottom of his glass after dinner. The whole watery world is his to embrace, but for me it’s the galley and the galley only, for me it’s a dwindling supply of veal chops and limp vegetables and nothing but pois-son, poisson, poisson. Twenty ravenous gastronomes stare up at me from the table each night, and what do I have to offer them? Poisson.

  The first to break the silence is Saôut. He has bags under his eyes, and his chest, once sculpted and firm with his years of manhandling winches and hawsers, droops like an old woman’s. “Bernard has a point,” he says. “We’ve gone over two months now without liberty.”

  “Two months without women,” Didier growls.

  “Or meat,” Sancerre puts in.

  I try to keep from smirking as I lean over the sun-blasted nape of this man or that to pour my bitter black brew. But Cousteau is oblivious. He merely waves the lank flap of his hand and says, “Deeper.”

  We are anchored—have been anchored for two months now and counting—some 160 miles off the coast of West Africa, hovering over a deep sea canyon that for all intents and purposes has no bottom. Sense and sonar indicate that it is there, somewhere between thirteen and fourteen thousand feet, but because of poor maneuverability, undersea mudslides and senile dementia on the part of captain and crew, we have been unable to locate it. As if it matters. As if we haven’t already sounded out the sterile bottoms of a hundred canyons just like it and found absolutely nothing that would change anyone’s life one way or the other. The usual complement of scientists is aboard, of course, eager boyish men with pinched features, oversized eyeglasses, clipboards and calculators. They are geniuses. Learned professors. World-renowned authorities on the sponge or the sea cucumber. Tant pis. To me they are simply mouths to feed, mouths that tighten perceptibly at the mention of fish.

  I am up, as always, an hour before dawn, preparing breakfast. I still have flour—thank God for that or we’d have a full-scale mutiny on our hands—and am busy fashioning crěpes from thin air. I find myself absently filling them with artificial pastry creme and the obscenely flavorless pulp of defrosted strawberries, but what can I do? Even the batter is bastardized, the eggs produced from a tin in the form of a noxious yellow powder that looks like something you’d use in a chemistry experiment. What I wouldn’t give for a dozen fresh eggs. Half a dozen. Merde: even a single one. But of course there are no chickenhouses on the open sea.

  Busy with my whisk, I fail to notice Sancerre creeping into the galley. I hear him before I see him. “Who’s there?” I demand, the portholes black with the vestiges of yet another night at sea, the ship undulating beneath my feet in an incipient morning swell.

  Sheepish, the sleep still glued to his eyes, Sancerre emerges from the pool of shadow behind the deep freeze. “Me,” he says simply.

  “What are you doing here?”

  I watch as his long mulish face reconstitutes itself in the glare of the galley lights, a face yellowed by the shambling years and the hostility of the sun. He shuffles his big feet, drops his shoulders and spreads his hands wide. “I’m hungry,” he says.

  “Hungry, eh?”

  My first impulse is to toy with him, make him squirm a bit, offer to perhaps fry up a batch of the flying fish that lie stunned on the deck each morning. Fish isn’t what he wants. He wants sausage, cheese, croissants pregnant with butter, he wants cold chicken, thick slices of Bayonne ham, beefsteaks and pâté maison spread on crusty rounds of peasant bread. Yes, of course, but he too must suffer through this hell of fish.

  “A little something would do,” he says almost apologetically. “Just a bite to settle the stomach.”

  And in that moment, even before I reach for the smoked sausage I keep hidden behind the saucepans, I realize I have an ally.

  As soon as breakfast has been tucked away, down goes the bathyscaph, accompanied partway by the soucoupe plongeant—our diving saucer—and all hands are hungrily occupied till lunch. Cousteau himself is piloting the bathyscaph, though he’s too old to sit for hours in the moist cramped bubble of steel and glass down there in the ultimate hole of the earth, too old by far, just as I’m too old to prepare fillets of loup de mer in this straitjacket of a galley or ladle scalding chaudrée from the pot in an unsettled sea—and I have the scars to prove it. One of the scientists has gone down with him, an American with big American teeth and a braying American laugh that makes me want to kill every time I hear it. His very name—Dr. Mazzy Gort—sticks in my throat. I wish no one harm, but sometimes I fantasize. What if Cousteau and Dr. Mazzy Gort never come up again? What if the lifeline fails or a mudslide buries them two miles down in ooze a hundred feet thick and they join the fishes forever? It’s an evil thought. But it’s not my first, nor, I suspect, will it be my last.

  For lunch I serve a grouper Falco speared last night. I’ve taken some care with it, marinated the fine white flesh in olive oil and fennel—the last of my fennel—and a soupçon of pastis. I serve it with fresh bread, the remaining potatoes and defrosted green beans in an explosion of aromas, pretending, for all and sundry, that this is not fish at all, that this is not the open sea, that we are not prisoners of Cousteau’s madness. And what do I get for it?

  Saôut: “Oh, merde, not fish again.”

  Piccard: “What else?”

  Sancerre: “I want my mother.”

  Didier: “I want a whore. Two whores. One for this—and one for this.” (A manual demonstration, very nimble and expressive.)

  Afterward, in the interval between morning and afternoon dives, I find my feet directing me to the main deck and the cabin Cousteau used to share with his wife, back in the days when we were young and such things mattered. I am thinking. Talking to myself, actually. Making speeches. In one of the rear compartments of my brain, uninfected by the primordial reek of the sea and the visible evidence of the portholes, is the image of a modest auberge in Cluny or Trévoux, a tasteful little place that specializes in country dishes, viands mostly, heavy on cassoulets, game and sweetbreads, though perhaps, after a year or two on dry land, the chef might consider adding a pike quenelle or a truite aux amandes to the bill of fare. In the forefront of my consciousness an argument simmers for Cousteau.

  Jacques-Yves, mon vieux, be reasonable, I will tell him. We are out of butter, eggs, cream, vegetables and herbs, we have less than a gallon of olive oil, no meats to speak of, no shallots or onions or potatoes. Release us. Release me. I’m fed up. Thirty years
of clinging to the drainboard while the sea jerks my feet out from under me, thirty years of dicing leeks on a counter that won’t stand still, thirty years of racking my brain to come up with new ways and yet more new ways to prepare fish, and I’ve had it. I want to retire. I want to cook for tourists and the petite bourgeoisie. I want to cook meat, I want an herb garden and a chickenhouse. I want to feel the earth under my feet.

  This is my speech, the one gathering itself on my lips as I seek out Cousteau. Unfortunately, I never get to deliver it. Because by the time I get to Cousteau’s cabin and stick my head in the door, he is lost to me, lost to us all, as faraway as if he were on another ship off another coast. The portholes are smothered, the room bathed in shadow: Cousteau is absorbed in the ritual of the voice-over. He sits before the TV monitor, a weird greenish glow on his face, mesmerized by images of the sea. Nothing moves but his lips, his voice murmurous and rapt: “As we go deeper into the somnolent depths, a kaleidoscope of fishes whirling round us like painted stars in a night sky, we cannot help but wonder at the phantasmagoric marvels that await us below….”

  That evening, as the grouper appears in the guise of a saffronless bouillabaisse that is short on all ingredients except fish, Sancerre takes me aside. We are in the galley, the ship rolling in a moderate-to-heavy swell, the crew loud and raucous in the main cabin. His skin is the color of a baked yam, his eyes sunk deep in his head. “Bernard,” he says, lowering his voice to a whispery rasp, “I’ve been talking to some of the men….”