T. C. Boyle Stories

by T. C. Boyle

  In that moment, Ray Arthur Larry-Pete lost control of himself. “Forfeit, my ass!” he roared, slamming his forearm, cast and all, down on the nearest coffee table, which fell to splinters under the force of the blow. “Get up, guys,” he hissed in an intense aside to his fellow linemen, and Moss, DuBoy, Kitwany and McCornish rose beside him in a human wall. “We’re willing to play sixty minutes of football,” he boomed, and he had the attention of the room now, that was for sure. “Burt, Reggie, Steven, Brian and me, and we’ll play both ways, offense and defense, to fill in for guys with broken legs and concussions and whatnot—”

  A murmur went up. This was crazy, insane, practically sacrificial. State gave out scholarships—and under-the-table payoffs too—and they got the really topflight players, the true behemoths and crackerjacks, the ones who attracted pro scouts and big money. To go up against them in their present condition would be like replaying the Gulf War, with Caledonia cast in the role of the Iraqis.

  “What are you, a bunch of pussies?” Ray Arthur Larry-Pete cried. “Afraid to get your uniforms dirty? Afraid of a little contact? What do you want—to have to live with fifty-six-to-nothing for the rest of your life? Huh? I don’t hear you!”

  But they heard him. He pleaded, threatened, blustered, cajoled, took them aside one by one, jabbered into the phone half the night till his voice was hoarse and his ear felt like a piece of rubber grafted to the side of his head. In the end, they turned out for practice the following day—twenty-three of them, even Kitwany, who could barely move from the waist up and couldn’t get a jersey on over his cast—and Ray Arthur Larry-Pete Fontinot ascended the three flights to the Coach’s office and handed Coach Tundra the brand-new silver-plated whistle they’d chipped in to buy him. “Coach,” he said, as the startled man looked up at him from the crucible of his memories, “we’re ready to go out there and kick some butt.”

  The day of the game dawned cold and forbidding, with close skies, a biting wind and the threat of snow on the air. Ray Arthur Larry-Pete had lain awake half the night, his brain tumbling through all the permutations of victory and disaster like a slot machine gone amok. Would he shine? Would he rise to the occasion and fight off the devastating pass rush of State’s gargantuan front four? And what about the defense? He hadn’t played defense since junior high, and now, because they were short-handed and because he’d opened his big mouth, he’d have to go both ways. Would he have the stamina? Or would he stagger round the field on rubber legs, thrust aside by State’s steroid-swollen evolutionary freaks like the poor pathetic bumbling fat man he was destined to become? But no. Enough of that. If you thought like a loser—if you doubted for even a minute—then you were doomed, and you deserved 56-0 and worse.

  At quarter to seven he got out of bed and stood in the center of the room in his undershorts, cutting the air savagely with the battering ram of his cast, pumping himself up. He felt unconquerable suddenly, felt blessed, felt as if he could do anything. The bruises, the swollen eye, the hip pointer and rickety knees were nothing but fading memories now. By Tuesday he’d been able to lift both his arms to shoulder level without pain, and by Wednesday he was trotting round the field on a pair of legs that felt like bridge abutments. Thursday’s scrimmage left him wanting more, and he flew like a sprinter through yesterday’s light workout. He was as ready as he’d ever be.

  At seven-fifteen he strode through the weather to the dining hall to load up on carbohydrates, and by eight he was standing like a colossus in the foyer of Suzie’s sorority house. The whole campus had heard about his speech in the Bloethal lounge, and by Wednesday night Suzie had come back round again. They spent the night in his room—his private room, for the duration of Malm-stein’s stay at the Sisters of Mercy Hospital—and Suzie had traced his bruises with her lips and hugged the tractor tire of flesh he wore round his midsection to her own slim and naked self. Now she greeted him with wet hair and a face bereft of makeup. “Wish me luck, Suze,” he said, and she clung to him briefly before going off to transform herself for the game.

  Coach Tundra gathered his team in the locker room at twelve-thirty and spoke to them from his heart, employing the military conceits that always seemed to confuse the players as much as inspire them, and then they were thundering out onto the field like some crazed herd of hoofed and horned things with the scent of blood in their nostrils. The crowd roared. Caledonia’s colors, chartreuse and orange, flew in the breeze. The band played. Warming up, Ray Arthur Larry-Pete could see Suzie sitting in the stands with her sorority sisters, her hair the color of vanilla ice cream, her mouth fallen open in a cry of savagery and bloodlust. And there, just to the rear of her—no, it couldn’t be, it couldn’t—but is was: his mom. Sitting there beside the hulking mass of his father, wrapped up in her windbreaker like a leaf pressed in an album, her scalp glinting bald through the dyed pouf of her hair, there she was, holding a feeble fist aloft. His mom! She’d been too sick to attend any of his games this year, but this was his last one, his last game ever, and she’d fought down her pain and all the unimaginable stress and suffering of the oncology ward just to see him play. He felt the tears come to his eyes as he raised his fist in harmony: this game was for her.

  Unfortunately, within fifteen seconds of the kickoff, Caledonia was already in the hole, 7-0, and Ray Arthur Larry-Pete hadn’t even got out onto the field yet. State’s return man had fielded the kick at his own thirty after Malmstein’s replacement, Hassan Farouk, had shanked the ball off the tee, and then he’d dodged past the entire special teams unit and on into the end zone as if the Caledonia players were molded of wax. On the ensuing kickoff, Bobby Bibby, a jittery, butterfingered guy Ray Arthur Larry-Pete had never liked, fumbled the ball, and State picked it up and ran it in for the score. They were less than a minute into the game, and already it was 14-0.

  Ray Arthur Larry-Pete felt his heart sink, but he leapt up off the bench with a roar and butted heads so hard with Moss and DuBoy he almost knocked himself unconscious. “Come on, guys,” he bellowed, “it’s only fourteen points, it’s nothing, bear down!” And then Bibby held on to the ball and Ray Arthur Larry-Pete was out on the field, going down in his three-point stance across from a guy who looked like a walking mountain. The guy had a handlebar mustache, little black eyes like hornets pinned to his head and a long wicked annealed scar that plunged into his right eye socket and back out again. He looked to be about thirty, and he wore Number 95 stretched tight across the expanse of his chest. “You sorry sack of shit,” he growled over Diderot’s erratic snap-count. “I’m going to lay you flat out on your ass.”

  And that’s exactly what he did. McCornish snapped the ball, Ray Arthur Larry-Pete felt something like a tactical nuclear explosion in the region of his sternum, and Number 95 was all over Diderot while Ray Arthur Larry-Pete stared up into the sky. In the next moment the trainer was out there, along with the Coach—already starting in on his Ia Drang Valley speech—and Ray Arthur Larry-Pete felt the first few snowflakes drift down into the whites of his wide-open and staring eyes. “Get up and walk it off,” the trainer barked, and then half a dozen hands were pulling him to his feet, and Ray Arthur Larry-Pete Fontinot was back in his crouch, directly across from Number 95. And even then, though he hated to admit it to himself, though he was playing for Suzie and his mother and his own rapidly dissolving identity, he knew it was going to be a very long afternoon indeed.

  It was 35-0 at the half, and Coach Tundra already had his pant leg rolled up by the time the team hobbled into the locker room. Frozen, pulverized, every cord, ligament, muscle and fiber stretched to the breaking point, they listened numbly as the Coach went on about ordnance, landing zones and fields of fire, while the trainer and his assistant scurried round plying tape, bandages and the ever-present aerosol cans of Numzit. Kitwany’s replacement, a huge amorphous red-faced freshman, sat in the corner, quietly weeping, and Bobby Bibby, who’d fumbled twice more in the second quarter, tore off his uniform, pulled on his street clothes without showering
and walked on out the door. As for Ray Arthur Larry-Pete Fontinot, he lay supine on the cold hard tiles of the floor, every twinge, pull, ache and contusion from the previous week’s game reactivated, and a host of new ones cropping up to overload his nervous system. Along with Moss and DuBoy, he’d done double duty through the first thirty minutes—playing offense and defense both—and his legs were paralyzed. When the Coach blew his whistle and shouted, “On the attack, men!” Ray Arthur Larry-Pete had to be helped up off the floor.

  The third quarter was a delirium of blowing snow, shouts, curses and cries in the wilderness. Shadowy forms clashed and fell to the crunch of helmet and the clatter of shoulder pads. Ray Arthur Larry-Pete staggered around the field as if gutshot, so disoriented he was never quite certain which way his team was driving—or rather, being driven. But mercifully, the weather conditions slowed down the big blue barreling machine of State’s offense, and by the time the gun sounded, they’d only been able to score once more.

  And so the fourth quarter began, and while the stands emptied and even the most fanatical supporters sank glumly into their parkas, Caledonia limped out onto the field with their heads down and their jaws set in grim determination. They were no longer playing for pride, for the memories, for team spirit or their alma mater or to impress their girlfriends: they were playing for one thing only: to avoid at all cost the humiliation of 56-0. And they held on, grudging State every inch of the field, Ray Arthur Larry-Pete coming to life in sporadic flashes during which he was nearly lucid and more often than not moving in the right direction, Moss, DuBoy and McCornish picking themselves up off the ground at regular intervals and the Coach hollering obscure instructions from the sidelines. With just under a minute left to play, they’d managed (with the help of what would turn out to be the worst blizzard to hit the area in twenty years) to hold State to only one touchdown more, making it 49-0 with the ball in their possession and the clock running down.

  The snow blew in their teeth. State dug in. A feeble distant cheer went up from the invisible stands. And then, with Number 95 falling on him like an avalanche, Diderot fumbled, and State recovered. Two plays later, and with eight seconds left on the clock, they took the ball into the end zone to make it 55-0, and only the point-after attempt stood between Caledonia and the unforgivable, unutterable debasement of a second straight 56-0 drubbing. Ray Arthur Larry-Pete Fontinot extricated himself from the snowbank where Number 95 had left him and crept stiff-legged back to the line of scrimmage, where he would now assume the defensive role.

  There was one hope, and one hope only, in that blasted naked dead cinder of a world that Ray Arthur Larry-Pete Fontinot and his hapless teammates unwillingly inhabited, and that was for one man among them to reach deep down inside himself and distill all his essence—all his wits, all his heart and the full power of his honed young musculature—into a single last-ditch attempt to block that kick. Ray Arthur Larry-Pete Fontinot looked into the frightened faces of his teammates as they heaved for breath in the defensive huddle and knew he was that man. “I’m going to block the kick,” he said, and his voice sounded strange in his own ears. “I’m coming in from the right side and I’m going to block the kick.” Moss’s eyes were glazed. DuBoy was on the sidelines, vomiting in his helmet. No one said a word.

  State lined up. Ray Arthur Larry-Pete took a deep breath. The ball was snapped, the lines crashed with a grunt and moan, and Ray Arthur Larry-Pete Fontinot launched himself at the kicker like the space shuttle coming in for a landing, and suddenly—miracle of miracles!—he felt the hard cold pellet of the ball glancing off the bandaged nubs of his fingers. A shout went up, and as he fell, as he slammed rib-first into the frozen ground, he watched the ball squirt up in the air and fall back into the arms of the kicker as if it were attached to a string, and then, unbelieving, he watched the kicker tuck the ball and sprint unmolested across the goal line for the two-point conversion.

  If it weren’t for Moss, they might never have found him. Ray Arthur Larry-Pete Fontinot just lay there where he’d fallen, the snow drifting silently round him, and he lay there long after the teams had left the field and the stands stood empty under a canopy of snow. There, in the dirt, the steady drift of snow gleaming against the exposed skin of his calves and slowly obliterating the number on the back of his jersey, he had a vision of the future. He saw himself working at some tedious, spirit-crushing job for which his Phys. Ed. training could never have prepared him, saw himself sunk in fat like his father, a pale plain wife and two grublike children at his side, no eighty-yard runs or blocked points to look back on through a false scrim of nostalgia, no glory and no defeat.

  No defeat. It was a concept that seemed all at once to congeal in his tired brain, and as Moss called out his name and the snow beat down, he tried hard, with all his concentration, to hold it there.

  (1992)

  THE BIG GARAGE

  For K.

  B. stands at the side of the highway, helpless, hands behind his back, the droopy greatcoat like a relic of ancient wars. There is wind and rain—or is it sleet?—and the deadly somnolent rush of tires along the pavement. His own vehicle rests on the shoulder, stricken somewhere in its slippery metallic heart. He does not know where, exactly, or why—for B. is no mechanic. Far from it. In fact, he’s never built or repaired a thing in his life, never felt the restive urge to tinker with machinery, never as a jittery adolescent dismantled watches, telephone receivers, pneumatic crushers. He is woefully unequal to the situation at hand. But wait, hold on now—shouldn’t he raise the hood, as a distress signal? Isn’t that the way it’s done?

  Suddenly he’s in motion, glad to be doing something, confronting the catastrophe, meeting the challenge. He scuttles round to the front of the car, works his fingers under the lip of the hood and tugs, tugs to no effect, slips in the mud, stumbles, the knees of his trousers soaked through, and then rises to tug again, shades of Buster Keaton. After sixty or seventy seconds of this it occurs to him that the catch may be inside, under the dashboard, as it was in his late wife’s Volvo. There are wires—bundles of them—levers, buttons, handles, cranks and knobs in the cavern beneath the steering wheel. He had no idea. He takes a bundle of wire in his hand—each strand a different color—and thinks with a certain satisfaction of the planning and coordination that went into this machine, of the multiple factories, each dominating its own little Bavarian or American or Japanese town, of all the shifts and lunch breaks, the dies cast and what do you call them, lathes—yes, lathes—turned. All this—but more, much more. Iron ore dug from rock, hissing white hot vats of it, molten recipes, chromium, tall rubber trees, vinyl plants, crystals from the earth ground into glass. Staggering.

  “Hey pal—”

  B. jolted from his reverie by the harsh plosive, spasms of amber light expanding and contracting the interior of the car like the pulse of some predatory beast. Looking up into a lean face, slick hair, stoned eyes. “I was ah trying to ah get the ah latch here—”

  “You’ll have to ride back in the truck with me.”

  “Yeah, sure,” B. sitting up now, confused, gripping the handle and swinging the door out to a shriek of horns and a rush of air. He cracks something in his elbow heaving it shut.

  “Better get out this side.”

  B. slides across the seat and steps out into the mud. Behind him, the tow truck, huge, its broad bumper lowering over the hood of his neat little German-made car. He mounts the single step up into the cab and watches the impassive face of the towman as he backs round, attaches the grappling hook and hoists the rear of the car, spider and fly. A moment later the man drops into the driver’s seat, door slamming with a metallic thud, gears engaging. “That’ll be forty-five bucks,” he says.

  A white fracture of sleet caught up in the headlights, the wipers clapping, light flashing, the night a mist and a darkness beyond the windows. They’ve turned off the highway, jerking right and left over a succession of secondary roads, strayed so far from B.’s compass that he’s lon
g since given up any attempt at locating himself. Perhaps he’s dozed even. He turns to study the crease folded into the towman’s cheek. “Much farther?” he asks.

  The man jerks his chin and B. looks out at a blaze of light on the dark horizon, light dropped like a stone in a pool of oil. As they draw closer he’s able to distinguish a neon sign, towering letters stamped in the sky above a complex of offices, outbuildings and hangars that melt off into the shadows. Eleven or twelve sets of gas pumps, each nestled under a black steel parasol, and cars, dark and driverless, stretching across the whitening blacktop like the reverie of a used-car salesman. The sign, in neon grid, traces and retraces its colossal characters until there’s no end and no beginning: GARAGE. TEGELER’S. BIG. GARAGE. TEGELER’S BIG GARAGE.

  The truck pulls up in front of a deep, brightly lit office. Through the steamed-over windows B. can make out several young women, sitting legs-crossed in orange plastic chairs. From here they look like drum majorettes: white calf boots, opalescent skirts, lace frogs. And—can it be?—Dale Evans hats! What is going on here?

  The towman’s voice is harsh. “End of the road for you, pal.”

  “What about my car?”

  A cigarette hangs from his lower lip like a growth, smoke squints his eyes.

  “Nobody here to poke into it at this hour, what do you think? I’m taking it around to Diagnosis.”

  “And?”

  “Pfft.” The man fixes him with the sort of stare you’d give a leper at the Inaugural Ball. “And when they get to it, they get to it.”

  B. steps into the fluorescent blaze of the office, coattails aflap. There are nine girls seated along the wall, left calves swollen over right knees, hands occupied with nail files, hairbrushes, barrettes, magazines. They are dressed as drum majorettes. Nappy Dale Evans hats perch atop their layered cuts, short-and-sassies, blown curls. All nine look up and smile. Then a short redhead rises, and sweet as a mother superior welcoming a novice, asks if she can be of service.