by T. C. Boyle
There was the time he crashed into a girder on I-95, his ridiculous Cadillac suddenly in front of her Cutlass. I swerved, she says, and I don’t know how, there was traffic all around us, but I got over to the edge of the highway and pulled over. I saw his car totally wrecked. I couldn’t move. The police came and your father, he’s sitting there covered in blood, the steering wheel was split in half from his chest, you know your father, he’s big but back then he was huge, and both his eyes black and blue, and his leg, the right one, we found out later, broken. But he was awake, and he kept looking at me. The cops are trying to get him to say something, what day is it, who’s the president, how many fingers, you know, and he’s sitting there in all this blood, looking right at me. The whole highway was blocked off and I was standing right in the middle of it. Can you imagine? Right in the middle of I-95 in broad daylight, all these ambulance and police lights, just standing right there. Do you know what he did? When they cut off the door and get him onto a stretcher, he’s looking at me again, and right before they put him in the ambulance, he grins. She pauses. I had just left him that morning. We were going to his mother’s so I could get you and your sister. I told him it was over. Do you understand what I’m saying? She finishes her cigarette. Your father, she says, the way she has always said it.
A rocks glass of Scotch. A plastic cup of vodka.
The difference between your mother and me, he says, is my demons are real. Satan’s angels. They visit me, son. Last night, he says, then stops. These angels, he says. They once walked the earth. God had already expelled Lucifer from His Kingdom, and Lucifer, listen, son, bitter, angry, proud, had begun his reign on earth. He sent these angels to breed with Woman. The offspring were the Nephilim. They were giants, demigods. They stole land, beat their neighbors, raped their own daughters. Listen. In the beginning of the Old Testament, right there in Genesis, he says, the tale of these human demons is there for anyone who wants to see. Look around, he says. They never left.
After he falls to the ground, you tower over him, and that is when he gets back up and takes off his clown nose. Flattens it like a silver dollar and slips it into a pocket of his oversized trousers. Takes off his dented stovepipe hat, his enormous bow tie, wipes each cheek stippled with gray grease paint, and says something through his lips smeared white. Before he leaves, he says: When you were a baby I gave you a bath but I didn’t know how hot the water was. I couldn’t tell your mother, explain; she just kept screaming. She was in her nurse’s aide uniform, she just got home. In the ambulance I prayed to Jehovah, first time in years, I was praying and your skin, it looked so red and you, I can’t remember if you were still screaming. I had never bathed you before. I was your father. I was off booze. Driving a cab and making good money—this is what, 1977, 1978? Jimmy Carter. Your mother took me back. Maybe it was. A mistake. I can still hear your voice, screaming to me, when we were up in the sky. The circus when you were two or three. You wanted to get down, but the ride was broke, we were stuck up there for what. Over an hour. I could see the ocean, and, across the Sound, Long Island. I could see the whole circus below us, in miniature, just like at the Barnum Museum. Do you remember? All the little tightrope walkers and clowns and weightlifters, all the wild animals, the cotton candy. The music.
Then, limping toward the door, his voice slurred with whiskey, victorious in its cruelty, the last thing he ever said to me: We could see all the way to Bermuda.
Over twenty years later, walking early one morning into the private country club where I tended bar: the lock on the bar’s refrigerator busted, two empty bottles of Burgundy in the trash, the maître d’s tie slung over the bar’s mirror. As if all he had wanted was to finally catch himself in the act.
You dream of waking in the night, or half-waking, or less, but there is something there. You cannot see anything except your desk, your homework from the night before lit up a little by the streetlight outside. Your pencil. Your baseball cap. Then, more faintly, the television to the left, resting on a small bookshelf. A poster of Larry Bird above it, his green Converse almost black. Out the window the streetlight is hidden, but its light sifts through at an angle, and on the right side of your room, right in front of your bed, is a darkness. And it moves, like a muscle, like a heartbeat, before you wake up.
Another story: this one true. A married couple wanders the streets of the city for years. Everyone has grown used to their presence. They never ask for money. They sleep together, spooning, in a house made of cardboard and blankets. Their faces are ruddy and without expression, and when not asleep they are always in motion, always searching through garbage for survival.
The first time you see them you do not know any of this. You are with your father, holding his hand, and you are walking just to walk, a stroll through downtown on a Sunday afternoon. He is humming a song, maybe about rain but it is sunny, and he hums so loudly you can feel it in the palm of your hand. He begins to swing your hand with his, slightly, as if in a wind. Then you see them, ahead. The man is digging through a mesh trashcan on a corner, his arm buried to the shoulder, and he is looking at you. The woman stands beside him, looking inside one of many shopping bags hung from her shoulders. The man does not take his eyes off you and you cannot look away. Your father stops. He looks at you. He kneels. Son, he says, it is rude to stare. Some people have very hard lives, and it is hard to understand for many of us why they live this way. But they are human beings, and Jehovah made them the same way he made you, me, your mother, your sister. I want you to say you are sorry. I am right here. Go say you are sorry to that man and woman, and I will be right here waiting for you.
But you can’t. You begin to cry. Your father says it is OK. To just wait here.
You watch him as he walks, in his long, slow strides, in a suit and tie, toward the man and woman. He is wearing a new hat, and you remember that was the reason you came downtown, so your father could buy a new hat. He stops just a couple steps from the man and woman and they look at him. The man’s arm remains in the trash but is now still. After a few seconds, the man looks at your father’s hand, which is held out to him. The man looks at the woman briefly, then he takes something from your father, looks at it, then puts it into his pocket. He goes back to rifling through the trash and the woman begins to yell at your father. She begins to scream, her face turning even redder, you cannot hear or understand what she is saying but you know she hates your father, hates you, hates many, many people. You want to help your father, the man who has only recently come back into your life, clean-shaven and speaking of God, you want to run toward him and defend him, protect him, but now he is holding out his hand to the man again, he has taken off his hat and is holding it out toward the man. The woman is now silent. The man takes the hat, a brand-new fedora with a feather, and puts it on his head. And looks at you, as if for the first time.
KEVIN CANTY
Happy Endings
FROM New Ohio Review
ALL HIS LIFE McHenry had lived with someone watching him: a mother, a father, a wife, a daughter, his customers. He dug wells for a living and his customers were cattle ranchers and wheat farmers, which meant they were always about to go broke, except when they were rich. They didn’t make a show of watching him but they did. Assholes and elbows: a thing he learned in high school, doing pick-and-shovel work on an extra gang for the Milwaukee Railroad. It didn’t matter how much you got done or how many mistakes you made or how smart you were. The only thing was to look like you were working when Sorenson, the straw boss, came by. I just want to see assholes and elbows.
So he learned to look like he was working when he worked. He learned to act like a father when his daughter was around, to look like a husband when Marnie needed a husband. He did what people expected him to or maybe a little more. He always tried for more. McHenry had a brisk practical manner, plastic glasses, and a crewcut that turned gray early, an all-purpose character that didn’t change. He got along with people. It was a way through.
He wasn’t e
xpecting to find himself with nobody watching, but here he was, age fifty-nine. Marnie had gone five years before, a pancreatic cancer that burned so swiftly through her that McHenry never felt it until she was buried. Still sometimes it felt to him that the death had never happened, an unreal, ugly dream. Then Carolyn, their daughter, had ended up in Guangzhou, China. This too felt unlikely. She had gone off to Missoula and ended up as a dual major in Chinese and business and now she was importing Chinese balers and hay rakes and making crazy money. They Skyped each other every few weeks but it was nothing like having her around, just a picture on a computer screen. McHenry talked about how busy he was and how things were going fine and so on. He was still her father, even if she was on the other side of the world. Plus the time was impossible for him to figure out. He would call her on Sunday afternoon and it would be Monday morning where she was.
McHenry approved on principle. If you were going to get the hell out of Harlow, you might as well just keep going. And he liked the fact that she was good with money. He felt like he had given her that.
Still it was just him and Missy, the little papillon dog that Marnie had gotten just before they found out. It seemed like a dirty trick. Claws skittering on the wood floors.
And then these two kids down out of Billings talked one of their dads into bankrolling a brand-new computer-controlled Japanese drilling rig. McHenry did the math. They were losing money every time they took a job from him. They had to be. But he couldn’t underbid them, despite the fact that his rig was paid for. McHenry knew better than to expect his customers to turn down a low bid. These were men who would drive ninety miles to the Sam’s Club to save a nickel on toilet paper.
McHenry could have waited them out. But one afternoon, when he got off the phone with Gib Gustafson, a wheat farmer McHenry had known since kindergarten, a millionaire, telling him that they weren’t going to be able to do business—after he got that call, McHenry just got angry. If Marnie had been there, if Carolyn. But they weren’t. By five that afternoon he was out of the business, rig sold, trucks sold, FOR RENT sign on the shop.
Was this a mistake? Maybe. He had all the money he was going to need, from savings along the way and from Marnie’s life insurance. The house was paid for and so was the shop. Even if nobody rented it, and nobody was able to stay in business in Harlow anymore, it was still worth five or six times what he had paid for it, the year after the railroad left town. He had a couple of rentals, and no crew, by then, that was depending on him.
But the quiet.
The phone just didn’t ring.
And if he didn’t get laid pretty soon he was going to go out of his mind. He hated to think like this. He was not a crude man, not naturally. But this was the simple fact of the matter. McHenry was not an old man, not yet, and whatever had switched off when Marnie got sick had gotten switched back on again somehow. He remembered one of his crew—an extra guy, a friend of somebody’s, not one of the regulars—talking about his day off, going to a massage place in Billings. He shut up about it when he saw McHenry was listening. But it stuck in his mind. You could just pay for it. And nobody was watching.
McHenry lived with these thoughts for two or three months and then decided he needed to go to Billings to see what the truth of the matter was. It took him another few weeks to gather his nerve. It was April before he made it.
Spring has a good reputation, he thought, driving south through spitting snow, but it maybe shouldn’t. Not Montana spring, anyway. Just a hard season. Easter Sunday with Marnie in her flowery dresses and the freezing rain just pounding down.
He found the Bangkok Sunshine out by the Interstate, alone and kind of forlorn-looking in a giant gravel parking lot behind the truck wash. His pickup was the only car in the lot. A pink building with the word MASSAGE in red neon, a white door. Momentum carried him inside where a young, not-quite-pretty Asian girl in a swimsuit top and a piece of flowery cloth for a skirt sat reading a magazine in a language McHenry didn’t recognize.
“Thirty or sixty minutes?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” said McHenry. “Sixty, I guess.”
“That’s a hundred,” she said, and McHenry was shocked. He didn’t know what he was expecting but this was somehow a substantial amount of money. But it seemed too late to back out now, and it was just this once. He could afford it.
“I don’t see you much,” said the girl.
“This is my first time.”
“Are you a cop?”
“No.”
“Okay. Room two. And people usually tip.”
It was a room with a bed and a poster of a beach. The door he had come in and another door and a third he guessed was a closet. No windows. Linoleum floors, everything easy to clean, like a veterinarian’s exam room. McHenry sat on the bed and waited. It was taller and narrower than a regular bed and he could feel plastic under the sheet. It was a room without any music, he thought, too many people passing through and nobody staying long. The sadness came back to him. PHUKET, said the poster. He didn’t know where that was. It looked beautiful, in a faceless way. Palm trees and blue skies.
Then the far door opened and another Asian girl walked in, smiling—a little shorter and rounder than the girl at the desk but dressed the same, her breasts spilling out of the swimsuit top. Her hair was long and bound at the back with a red ribbon. She was barefoot.
“You have to take your clothes off!” she said, laughing. “Otherwise it doesn’t work.”
McHenry had allowed himself to forget this part. He had not had his clothes off in front of anybody for a long while, anybody but doctors and Marnie. An urge to flee arose, was suppressed by an act of will. She opened the closet. He took his shoes off, then his pants. Then he hesitated.
“Come on,” she said. But lightly, playfully. She was alive if the room was not. He went the rest of the way naked and then lay facedown on the bed. Cold plastic under a thin sheet. She covered his ass with a towel and bent to look him sideways in the face.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Bill,” he lied.
“I’m Tracy,” she said. “Relax.”
McHenry tried to make himself relax. But the body doesn’t lie, and he tensed at the touch of her hand on his shoulder.
“OK, OK,” she said. “It’s going to be OK.” She turned the lights down quite low, and music seeped in from the corners. He smelled something complicated like herbs or hay but pleasant and then she touched him again with warm oil on her hands and he lay still this time. It was like getting a haircut, the way he knew where her body was around him, the accidental brush of her breasts on his skin as she bent over him. Small as she was, she had a firm hand and surprising strength and after a few minutes he understood that she knew what she was doing. Her breasts were everywhere but he wasn’t even thinking about that now or maybe thinking about that from a different direction, because it was just very nice. He didn’t know till now how many troubles he was carrying in his body. They just kind of stopped being there after a while. He felt light and free.
She massaged his feet, which was something that had never happened to McHenry before and although he liked it, he felt the pressure on unexpected places, as if his liver and his testicles and even his eyes were all connected somehow to places in his feet and he had not known this. Then she worked her way up his legs. It was pleasant but he felt vulnerable. Her hand just grazed his scrotum. Something woke up then and stayed awake as she worked on his back, his neck.
McHenry hoped he was in the right place.
He let go for a while. Time passed, he wasn’t sure how much. It wasn’t important. All touch, all her hands and music of a kind he generally hated and dim lights and the scent of the oil. Then when he had basically turned into a puddle of goo she rolled him over on his back. The towel came off. Tracy put it back on after half a minute but she must have noticed.
She did his feet again from another angle and then his face and then his chest. All this was absolutely new to McHen
ry and surprising. Also, her breasts, just touching, spilling out of her top, and the feel of her small strong hands and the scent of her perfume mixed with the scented oil. This should have been relaxing but McHenry got more and more agitated in his need. Did he need to ask? How would he go about asking? What were the words, what was the code? She must see. She must know.
In the end, he didn’t need to know anything. Tracy worked his calves and then his thighs and then leaned down toward him, her breasts dangling, and whispered in his ear: “Happy ending?”
“Please,” said McHenry.
“Twenty extra.”
“Please,” he said.
She laughed, but pleasantly, dropped the towel to the floor, and got him off with her strong little hands. It didn’t take much. McHenry kept his eyes closed, all touch and scent. If he kept his eyes closed, this moment would never end. It was magic.
“OK,” said Tracy. “See you next time. Shower’s right outside that door.”
McHenry opened his eyes. He was naked in a room with a stranger. The lights were still dim but the magic was gone. Tracy smiled at him and was pleasant. He unfolded his pants, found his wallet, gave her a twenty and then another. He would have stood there handing her twenties all night if she had wanted him to. He had made a fool of himself. He understood that much.
He made it two weeks before he was back. The girl at the front desk didn’t like him any better this time. She said that Tracy was busy but she could get one of the other girls to take care of him. Either that or he could wait.
McHenry waited. Nobody else came through, just him and the bored girl, reading a magazine in what he assumed was Thai or Vietnamese. Remember what you’re doing, he told himself. That girl is with somebody else in the next room. It’s what she does. It’s her job.