by T. C. Boyle
He became aware of the rain, which was more persistent now. Lester’s face rose up suddenly in his consciousness, then melted away, as if he’d taken a match to a photograph. He let go of Meg, dropped his arms to his sides, took a step back. “Hi, Brian,” he called, lifting one hand in a crippled, fluttering wave though Brian couldn’t have heard him since the window was rolled up and the motor running. Still, he couldn’t help adding, “Great to see you!”
The house was one of twelve set on a slim strip of land between the river and the train tracks, a smallish 1940s bungalow that had been recast as a two-story contemporary, with fireplace, boat mooring and panoptic views of the river. It was nothing like the farmhouse, of course, but once you stepped inside it gave a good first impression: rustic furniture, framed photos of Hudson scenes on the walls, a brass telescope for stargazing or catching the eye-gleam of the tugboat captains who pushed barges up and down the river all day long. The second impression was maybe a hair less favorable (cramped kitchen, a smell of what, bilge?) but he was gratified—and relieved—to see that Caroline was going to be all right with it. “I love the view,” she said, striding across the parquet floor to pull the curtains open wide. “It’s”—she searched for the word, turning to him and holding out her hands. If he thought she was going to say “inspiring” or “sublime” or even “awesome,” he was disappointed. “It’s nice,” she said, and then clarified—“I mean, it works, right?”
They were just mixing their inaugural cocktail—vodka gimlet, Lester’s touchstone—when the first train entered the scene. On a theoretical level, Riley had understood that the proximity of the tracks might give rise to a certain degree of noise now and again, but this was something else altogether. There was a sudden shattering blast, as of a jet fighter obliterating the sound barrier, then the roar of the wheels, the insult of the horn and the chattered-teeth rattle of every glass, cup, dish and saucer in the cupboard. The whole thing, beginning to end, couldn’t have lasted more than ten seconds, but it managed to spike his blood pressure and induce him to slosh Rose’s lime juice all over the granite countertop the older couple had installed to fortify their barely adequate kitchen. “Jesus,” he said, “what was that?”
Caroline, deadpan: “The train.”
“How’re we supposed to sleep? I mean, what’s the schedule? Are there night trains—or no, there wouldn’t be, right?”
“Ask Meg and Brian.”
“You get used to it, is that what you’re saying?”
She shrugged. Implicit in that shrug and the tight smile that accompanied it was the reminder that they wouldn’t have been having this discussion if they were on the twelfth floor of the Algonquin or even the Royalton or Sofitel and that any train they might have run across would have been a conveyance, only that, a means of getting them from the city to this benighted place and back again.
“Jesus,” he repeated, looking round for the paper towels, and he was just sopping up the mess—sticky, redolent, probably ninety percent sugar—when there was a tap at the sliding door and Meg was there, framed in the glass panel as in a Renaissance painting, Our Lady of the River. She’d changed out of her jeans and into a skirt and she’d done something with her hair. He waved, enjoying the moment, till Brian’s head and shoulders entered the frame, and then, at hip level, the dog. She tapped again, grinning, and held up a handle of vodka.
They had a round of gimlets in memory of Lester, then another, after which they switched to wine, a Bordeaux from the case Riley had brought down from Buffalo to help ease Lester’s passage, or at least his own immersion in it. He’d written about death to the point of obsession, but he’d been spared the experience of it, if you except the death of his parents, which had happened so long ago he couldn’t even remember what they looked like, and he was finding the process of mourning in someone else’s living room increasingly disorienting. He tried to make small talk, but small talk wasn’t going to work, not with Lester hanging over them like some great-winged bird. The shadows deepened. The river went the color of steel. Everything he said seemed to begin with “You remember when?” And here were Meg’s eyes, inviting him right in, the most patient, salvatory eyes he’d ever seen. He was drunk, of course, that was it, and if Caroline and Brian were forced to hover on the fringes of the conversation, that was something they’d just have to get used to because they hadn’t been there with Lester right from the beginning and he had. And Meg had too.
“You’re slurring your words,” Caroline said at one point, and he looked up, wondering how it had gotten dark so quickly—and without his noticing.
“Maybe we should eat something?” he heard himself say, even as the lights of a barge drifted by on the dark shoulders of the river and the dog, agitated by something beyond the range of human senses, began to whine.
Brian pushed himself up from the easy chair in the corner, an empty wineglass in one hand. He was big-headed, white-haired, and, Riley noted with a certain degree of satisfaction, he’d begun to develop a pot belly. He looked old, tired, bored. “I’m ready for bed.”
“Pizza?” Meg made a question of it. “They’ll deliver.”
“Count me out,” Brian said, and gave a little laugh that was meant to be self-deprecating but to Riley’s ears sounded just this side of rude. He was a killjoy, Brian. A nonentity. And Meg was wasted on him. “But if you three want”—Brian waved at the air—“I mean, go ahead.”
“I don’t eat pizza,” Caroline put in, her voice light and incisive, no slurring for her though she’d had as much to drink as anybody. She let out a laugh. “It’s not Paleo.”
“You’re telling me they didn’t have pizza delivery in the Stone Age?” Riley had used the joke before, somewhere, sometime, and nobody responded to it now. He was sunk deep in the easy chair beside Brian’s, feeling as if he’d never summon the volition to move again. Somehow he found the dog’s head in his lap, and he began idly stroking its collapsed ear.
“We could go out,” Meg offered, but Caroline just shook her head and he sank deeper into the chair, wondering how he was even going to get up the stairs to bed, let alone negotiate the car and deal with lights, people, waiters, menus.
Just then there was a tap at the glass, which sent the dog into a frenzy, its head rocketing up out of Riley’s lap, paws scrabbling on the floor, the barking rising in pitch till it was nearly a scream, and Riley looked up to see a ghostly face illuminated there at the door, a woman’s face, nobody he knew, but it made his heart seize all the same.
As it turned out, she was Meg’s neighbor from the next house up and she had some bad news to impart, some very bad news, in fact. Meg slid the door back and the funk of the river rushed in to overwhelm him. “Turn on the TV!” the woman shouted, thumping into the room and going directly to the television—a wall-mounted thing Riley hadn’t to this point even noticed—and clicked it on. “I can’t believe it,” she sang out as images of wreckage, flames, emergency flares and stunned onlookers played across the screen in a way that had become the nightly reality and every bit as believable as anything else out there in the world. The feed at the foot of the screen read Florence, Italy, and gave the time there, 5:30 a.m. “They got Ted,” she said.
Meg gave her a look of disbelief. “What are you talking about? Who?”
“The terrorists. I just had a call from Nadine.” And here her voice broke. “It was, I don’t know, wrong place, wrong time.” She was fiftyish, this woman, bottom heavy, her hair cut short but for a spray of pink-dyed strands sprouting like feathers at the back of her neck. “She’s going to be okay, but Ted—he didn’t make it.”
Loudly, in a rising wail, Meg denied it.
“Who’s Ted?” he asked, puzzled, even as the tension began to sink its claws in his stomach, deep down, where he was most vulnerable.
“Ted Marchant,” Meg said without turning her head. “I can’t believe it,” she echoed, her eyes jumping from the screen to the woman who’d come to destroy their evening. Or night. It was ni
ght now. Definitely. “When?” she demanded. “Are you sure?”
“Who’s Ted Marchant?”
Brian loomed over him with his big white head, the empty glass arrested in mid-air. “The guy,” he said flatly, “whose chair you’re sitting in.”
So there were two deaths. First Lester, and now this. Ted Marchant. Whose name Riley must have written across the face of a check, though he had no recollection of it, who’d sat in this very chair and trained his telescope on the stars or maybe a girl going topless in a speedboat on the far side of the river, who, as it would turn out, had been unlucky enough to be sitting at a corner table in a Florentine café, sipping his espresso, at the very moment the black-clad gunmen had rumbled up on their stolen Ducatis and begun shooting. He’d never met Ted Marchant or his wife of forty-five years either—Nadine—but here he was in possession of the dead man’s home and all the dead man’s things, drinking out of the dead man’s wineglasses. It made him queasy to know it.
The television talked to them and they leaned forward in their chairs and watched the images play across the dead man’s screen, listened to the voices of the reporters, the same old thing, the tiredest thing, except that one of the seventeen dead had plodded across these floors and breathed this same dank river air that smelled of a whole array of deaths, from fish to worms to clams and the algae that bloomed on a bounty of phosphates and died back to nothing again. It was staggering. He almost wanted to protest—this wasn’t about Ted Marchant, whom he didn’t even know, it was about Lester—but instead, into the void, he said, “Maybe we should leave?”
Meg turned away from the screen, her features saturated with the garish light, and looked him full in the face. “No,” she said, fierce suddenly, as if the killers were in the room with them, “no way. You’re going to stay.”
He glanced at Caroline for support, but Caroline’s eyes never left the screen. “But won’t the wife—? She’ll be coming back now, she’ll have to, the widow, I mean—”
“Are you serious? Something like this—it could be weeks, months, who knows.” Meg’s voice caught in her throat. “Poor Nadine—can you imagine?”
“The weirdest thing”—and here the woman who’d brought the news gave him a long look—“is that you’re here . . . for a funeral, right?” A glance for Meg. “Or that’s what Meg said. And that makes this whole thing so, I don’t know, spooky, I guess you’d have to say—”
He didn’t deny it. In fact, he was spooked right down to the superstitious God-denying soles of his feet. It was like that time in Alaska when the surviving pilot of a two-man air service told him his partner had crashed while delivering a family of Inuit to the next village for the funeral of a family of Inuit killed in an air crash the previous day. Was that how the fates were aligned? Did death come in pairs, like twins? Lester had died of melanoma, a cruel, preposterous thing that had begun as a blister on the little toe of his right foot and spread to his brain and killed him so fast Riley hadn’t even known he was sick, let alone dying. It wasn’t cool to die, wasn’t hip, that was how Lester felt—he had an image to maintain—and so he’d done it alone. That was what hurt. He hadn’t called, e-mailed, written, hadn’t breathed a word. He’d just crawled off to some hospice in California and spared them the pain.
Later, after Caroline had gone up to bed and Brian took the dog back across the lawn to his own house and shut out the lights one by one till the fading image of it vanished into the night, there were just the three of them left there in the dead man’s living room. Everything was quiet, the lights muted, the TV screen gone blank now. He was the one who’d finally got up and shut it off, Meg whispering “Thank you” and the other woman (her name was Anna or Anne or maybe Joanne, he never quite caught it, not that it mattered—she was the Messenger of Death and that was all he needed to know) seconded her. “These media hyenas,” she said, waving her hand in dismissal. “Really, it’s just disgusting.” For a long while no one said anything, the only sounds the tap of bottle on glass and the consolatory splash of the wine, but then the house began to quail and rattle and here came the blast again, that violent rending of the air, and a train hurtled past with a last fading shriek.
“Oh, my god, I didn’t realize it was so late,” the woman said, rising from her chair and setting her glass down on the nearest horizontal surface—an inlaid end table, already blemished with a dozen fading circular scars, not that Ted Marchant was going to care. In the next moment she was embracing Meg, the two of them tearful, exuberant in their grief, and then the woman was gone and he was alone with Meg. She looked at him and shook her head. “It’s terrible, isn’t it?”
He didn’t know what to say. It was. Of course it was. Everything was terrible—and getting worse.
He watched her as she bent for her glass, stood up and drained it, one hand on her hip. She looked dazed, uncertain on her feet, and she set the glass down carefully beside the one her neighbor had left, then sank heavily into the couch. “Here,” she said, giving him a tired smile, “sit here beside me. Take a load off. It’s been a day.”
So he sat beside her and felt the warmth of her there in the house that had taken on a chill with the lateness of the hour, and then he put his arm around her and pulled her to him and they kissed and though he felt the tug of her like some elemental force of reconciliation and surcease, he didn’t give in to it. What he did do, with the smallest adjustment, was stretch out his legs and lay his head in her lap so that the warmth became a heat and his eyes fell shut, and the death, the two deaths, faded into oblivion.
The next morning, Caroline, declaring the situation “too weird for words,” took a train into the city to lunch with her roommate from college and engage in a little resuscitative shopping, and by the time he extracted himself from the bed he’d somehow managed to find his way to at some unfathomable hour of the night, he was just in time to see Meg pulling out of the driveway on her way to work. Brian’s car was gone too, as was his own—Caroline had taken it up to the Garrison station and left it there because he was too enfeebled by the night’s reversals to get up and drop her off. So he was alone there in the dead man’s house (the murdered man’s house) poking through the cupboards with the idea of coffee in mind—and maybe something to ease his stomach, like dry toast. Or . . . the zwieback he somehow found in his hand, the pastel rendering of a baby grinning up at him from the front of the cardboard box. But why would the old couple stock baby crackers? Grandchildren? Dental issues? He put a zwieback in his mouth, experimentally, then spat it back out in the palm of his hand. Milk. Maybe milk would settle his stomach. He poured out a clean white glass of it, set it on the counter, and stared at it a long moment before trying, with mixed success, to pour it back into the carton. In his distraction, it must have taken him five entire minutes before he remembered that Lester was dead. And that the funeral, at which he’d be expected to get himself together long enough to deliver a eulogy, was tomorrow.
He looked up at a sudden noise—a thump—and there was the dog, pressing its nose to the glass of the sliding door, a ruptured length of chain trailing away from its throat like essential jewelry. The day was bright, he noticed now, yesterday’s clouds and drizzle driven back over the hills and the sun dividing the lawn like a chessboard into patches of shadow and light, and the irritation he would normally have felt at the intrusion gave way to something lighter, more tenable, something almost like acceptance. He was glad Caroline had gone into the city and Meg to work, glad to be alone here so he could slow things down, take a walk, sit by the river, commune with Lester on his own terms, and never mind Ted Marchant—Ted Marchant was another issue altogether and he wasn’t going to go there.
The thump came again. The dog was pawing the glass as if it wanted something, as if it had a message to convey, some extrasensory glimpse into the process that had claimed Lester and Ted Marchant and would repurpose itself, in good time, to claim the survivors too. Or maybe it was just hungry, maybe that was it. Or, more likely, it wanted in
so it could go take a crap on the carpet—wasn’t that what dogs were famous for? But then it occurred to him that the dog shouldn’t be there at all, that it had, in fact, broken free of its chain, which meant that it was in danger, or potential danger—hadn’t Meg complained about how vigilant you had to be or it would bolt out the door and make straight for the train tracks? He got up from where he was sitting at the kitchen table, thinking to let the dog in—to trap it in the house—and then see if he could do something about reinforcing the chain.
But what was the thing’s name? Something with a T—Tuffy? Terry? Or no, Taffy, that was it, because of its coloration, as Meg had explained shortly after it had annihilated his pants. Anyway, he got up from the kitchen table, went to the door and slid it open, which, far from having the desired effect, caused the dog to back away from him so precipitately it fell from the porch in an awkward scramble of limbs. For the briefest moment it lay there on its back, its legs kicking in the air, and then it sprang up and bolted headlong away from him, straight in the direction of the tracks. “Taffy!” he called, feeling ridiculous, but nonetheless coming down off the porch and hustling across the lawn after him (or her; he wasn’t even sure what sex the thing was). “Taffy! No!”
It was at that moment the train appeared, the 9:50 or 10:10 or whatever it was, the air shrieking, the wheels thundering, a great onrushing force that eclipsed the animal as if it had never been there at all. Running now, his heart slamming at his ribs, Riley reached the tracks just as the last car—the caboose, a term that came to him out of a buried past, childhood, Lionel, mittens pressed to ears, Take Daddy’s hand now—raged on by and the tracks stood vacant, shining malevolently in the hard gleam of the sun. What he expected was death, another death, the dog’s remains dribbled like ragout up and down the line—and what was he going to tell Meg?—but that wasn’t what he found. The dog was there, intact, remnant chain and all, sitting on its rump on the far side of the tracks and staring at him stupidly across the void.