T.C. Boyle Stories II: The Collected Stories of T. Coraghessan Boyle, Volume II

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  When he crept into the bedroom—the master bedroom, the place where he’d slept alone in the big antique bed for the past three weeks—there was a man there, his back to the door, his arms and shoulders busy with the work at hand. A phrase came into Edison’s head: rifling the drawers. And then another one, one he’d heard on TV a thousand times—used himself in too many episodes of Savage Street to count: Freeze. And that’s what he said now, in a kind of bark, and he couldn’t help appending an epithet to it, for maximum effect. “Freeze, motherfucker,” that’s what he said. “Freeze, motherfucker!”

  That was when Lyle, dressed in the same pale European-cut suit he’d been wearing the night before, turned around, his hands at his sides. “Hey, man,” he said, all the sunshine in the world distilled in his voice, no worries, no problems, and how do you spell California? “I just stopped by to see you, take you up on your invitation, you know? Cool house. I really dig your antiques—you the collector, or is it your wife?”

  Edison had a gun in his hand. A gun he’d fired just once, at the indoor firing range, twelve bucks an hour, no target big enough for him to nail—or maybe it wasn’t this gun at all. Maybe it was the one under the sink in the master bath or the one behind the drapes in the front hall. The gun was cold. It was heavy. He didn’t know what to do with it now that he was holding it there in his hand like some party favor.

  “Hey, come on, man, put that thing away, all right? You’re scaring me.” Lyle was wearing two-tone shoes and a hand-painted tie, very cool. He swept the hair back from his brow with a hand that betrayed him—a hand that was shaking. “I mean I knocked and all, but nobody answered, right? So I came in to wait for you, so we could maybe spin some sides—isn’t that what you say, ‘spin some sides’?”

  It came to him then that Lyle was exactly like the kid on the beach, the kid grown up, all mockery and hate, all attitude. “You’re the guy,” Edison said. “You’re the guy, aren’t you?”

  And there it was, the curled lip, the dead blue vacancy of the eyes. “What guy? I don’t know what you’re talking about, man—I mean, I come over, at your invitation, to, to—”

  “The jewelry thief. ‘The discerning burglar.’ You’re him, aren’t you?” The knowledge went right through him, hot knowledge, knowledge like the burning needle his mother would use to probe his flesh when he came in screaming with a splinter embedded in his finger. “Let me see your pockets. Pull out your pockets.”

  “Spin some sides,” Lyle said, but the phrase was bitter now, nasal and venomous. “Isn’t that what you hepcats say, you hipsters and thin white dukes? Too cool, right?” And he pulled a necklace out of his pocket, one of the things Kim, in her haste, had left behind. He held it out for a moment, a gentle silken dangle of thin hammered gold with a cluster of jewels, and let it drop to the carpet. “Let me tell you something, Edison—your show sucked. Even back then it was a joke—me and my buds’d get stoned and laugh at it, you know that? And your band—your pathetic band—was even worse.”

  Outside, beyond Lyle, beyond the blinds and the curtains, the sun was spread over everything like the richest cream, and the window that framed it all was like nothing so much as an outsized TV screen. Edison felt something in him die, droop down and die like some wilted plant, and he wondered if it was the codeine or what it was. It came almost as a surprise to him to glance down and see that he was still holding on to the gun.

  Lyle leaned back against the dresser and fumbled in his pocket for a cigarette, stuck it between his lips, and lit it with a quick flick of his lighter. “So what are you going to do, shoot me?” he said. “Because it’s my word against yours. I mean, where’s your witness? Where’s the stolen property? You invited me over, right? ‘Anytime, man,’ isn’t that what you said? And here I am, an honored guest, and maybe we had an argument and you got a little crazy—old guys are like that, aren’t they? Don’t they go a little crazy every once in a while?” He exhaled a blue veil of smoke. “Or shit, I mean I was just up here checking out my listings, I thought this was going to be an open house, and I wander in, innocent, totally innocent, and suddenly there’s this guy with a gun . . . and who is it? It’s you.”

  “That’s right,” Edison said, “it’s me. Edison Banks. And who the fuck are you? What did you ever write? How many albums did you record? Huh?”

  Lyle put the cigarette to his lips, and Edison watched the coal go red with the rush of oxygen. He had nothing to say, but his look—it was the look of the kid on the beach all over again. Exactly. Exactly that. But this time there would be no footrace, because Edison had already caught up.

  (1999)

  My Widow

  Cat Person

  My widow likes cats. No one knows exactly how many cats inhabit the big solid old redwood house I left her, but after several generations of inbreeding and depositing fecal matter in select corners and in an ever-growing mound on the mantelpiece, their numbers must reach into the thirties, perhaps even the forties. There are cats draped like bunting over every horizontal surface in the house, and when they mew in concert for their cat chow and their tins of mashed fish heads, the noise is enough to wake the dead, if you’ll pardon the expression. She sleeps with these cats, my widow does, or at least as many of them as the antique bed, with its questionable sheets and cat-greased quilt, can accommodate, and all night and into the burgeoning sun-dappled hours of the early morning, there is a ceaseless movement of limb and tongue and the lazy twitching of feline tails. In addition to the cats, my widow once had a pair of vocal and energetic little dogs, of a breed whose name I could never remember, but both have long since run off or been crushed to marrow out on the busy street that winds up from the village and past the rear gate of the house. She had a ferret too, for a while, though ferrets are illegal in the state of California. It didn’t last long. After throttling and partially dismembering a litter of week-old kittens, the animal secreted itself in the crawl space under the house, where it took sick and died. Even now, its mummified corpse subsides gradually into the immemorial dust beneath the floorboards of the kitchen, just under the place where the refrigerator rests, going quietly about its work.

  One afternoon, a day or two after the first rain of the winter has converted the dry creek bed out back into a sluice of braided, sepia-colored ripples and long, trailing ropes of eucalyptus bark, my window is startled by a persistent thumping from the far end of the house. She is, as always, in the kitchen, peering into a steaming pot of chicken-vegetable soup, the only thing she ingests these days, aside from the odd slab of indifferently grilled flank steak and coffee so acidic it’s taken the glaze off the ceramic cup our son made her when he was in the sixth grade. The doorbell, which in my day chimed a carillon from Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” is long since defunct, and so my widow takes a while to register the notion that someone is knocking at the front door. The front door, is, after all, a good sixty paces from the kitchen, out the kitchen door and down the long L-shaped hall that leads to the entryway and the grand room beyond it, now a refuge for cats. Still, that is unmistakably the sound of knocking, and you can see the alertness come into her eyes—it could be the postman, she’s thinking, who just the other day (or was it the other week?) brought her a letter from our son, who lives and works in Calcutta, dispensing cornmeal mush and clean bandages to the mendicants there. “I’m coming!” my widow calls in her creaking, octave-challenged voice, and she sets down the stirring spoon amidst the debris of what once was the kitchen counter, wipes her hands on her flannel nightgown, and moves slowly but resolutely down the hall to answer the door.

  Standing on the brick doorstep, plainly visible through the ancient flowing glass of the front door, is a young woman in shorts, leggings and some sort of athletic jersey, with stringy black hair, terrible posture, and what appears to be a fur muff tucked under one arm. As my widow gets closer and the indefinite becomes concrete, she sees that the young woman’s eyes are heavily made up, and that
the muff has become a kitten of indeterminate breed—black, with a white chest and two white socks. Curious, and pursing her lips in the way she used to when she was a young woman herself, my widow swings open the door and stands there blinking and mute, awaiting an explanation.

  “Oh, hi,” the young woman says, squeezing the words through an automatic smile, “sorry to disturb you, but I was wondering . . .” Unaccountably, the young woman trails off, and my widow, whose hearing was compromised by the Velvet Underground and Nico during a period of exuberance in the last century, watches her lips for movement. The young woman studies my widow’s face a moment, then decides to change tack. “I’m your neighbor, Megan Capaldi?” she says finally. “Remember me? From the school-lunch drive last year?”

  My widow, dressed in an old flannel shirt over the faded and faintly greasy flannel nightgown, does not, in fact, remember her. She remains noncommittal. Behind her, from the depths of the house, a faint mewling arises.

  “I heard that you were a real cat person, and I just thought—well, my daughter April’s cat had kittens, and we’re looking for good homes for them, with people who really care, and this one—we call her Sniggers—is the last one left.”

  My widow is smiling, her face transformed into a girl’s, the striations over her lip pulling back to reveal a shining and perfect set of old lady’s teeth—the originals, beautifully preserved. “Yes,” she says, “yes,” before the question has been asked, already reaching out for the kitten with her regal old hands. She holds it to her a moment, then looks up myopically into the young woman’s face. “Thanks for thinking of me,” she says.

  The Roof

  The roof, made of a composite material guaranteed for life, leaks. My widow is in the bedroom, in bed, crocheting neat four-inch granny squares against some larger need while listening to the murmur of the TV across the room and the crashing impact of yet another storm above her, when the dripping begins. The cats are the first to notice it. One of them, a huge, bloated, square-headed tom with fur like roadkill, shifts position to avoid the cold stinging drops, inadvertently knocking two lesser cats off the west slope of the bed. A jockeying for space ensues, the cats crowding my widow’s crocheting wrists and elbows and leaving a vacant spot at the foot of the bed. Even then, she thinks nothing of it. A voice emanating from the TV cries out, They’re coming—they’re coming through the walls!, followed by the usual cacophony of screams, disjointed music and masticatory sounds. The rain beats at the windows.

  A long slow hour hisses by. Her feet are cold. When she rubs them together, she discovers that they are also wet. Her first thought is for the cats—have they been up to their tricks again? But no, there is a distinct patter now, as of water falling from a height, and she reaches out her hand to confront the mystery. There follows a determined shuffle through the darkened arena of the house, the close but random inspection of the ceilings with a flashlight (which itself takes half an hour to find), and then the all-night vigil over the stewpot gradually filling itself at the foot of the bed. For a while, she resumes her crocheting, but the steady mesmeric drip of the intruding rain idles her fingers and sweeps her off into a reverie of the past. She’s revisiting other roofs—the attic nook of her girlhood room, the splootching nightmare of her student apartment with the dirty sit-water drooling down the wall into the pan as she heated brown rice and vegetables over the stove, the collapse of the ceiling in our first house after a pipe burst when we were away in Europe—and then she’s in Europe herself, in the rain on the Grand Canal, with me, her first and most significant husband, and before long the stewpot is overflowing and she’s so far away she might as well exist in another dimension.

  The roofer, whose name emerged from the morass of the Yellow Pages, arrives some days later during a period of tumultuous weather and stands banging on the front door while rain drools from the corroded copper gutters (which, incidentally, are also guaranteed for life). My widow is ready for him. She’s been up early each day for the past week, exchanging her flannel nightgown for a pair of jeans and a print blouse, over which she wears an old black cardigan decorated with prancing blue reindeer she once gave me for Christmas. She’s combed out her hair and put on a dab of lipstick. Like Megan Capaldi before him, the roofer pounds at the redwood frame of the front door until my widow appears in the vestibule. She fumbles a moment with the glasses that hang from a cord around her neck, and then her face assumes a look of bewilderment: Who is this infant banging at the door?

  “Hello!” calls the roofer, rattling the doorknob impatiently as my widow stands there before him on the inside of the glass panel, looking confused. “It’s me—the roofer?” He’s shouting now: “You said you had a leak?”

  The roofer’s name is Vargas D’Onofrio, and the minute he pronounces it, it’s already slipped her mind. He has quick, nervous eyes, and his face is sunk into a full beard of tightly wound black hairs threaded with gray. He’s in his early forties, actually, but anyone under seventy looks like a newborn to my widow, and understandably so.

  “You’re all wet,” she observes, leading him into the house and up the slow heaving stairs to reveal the location of the leak. She wonders if she should offer to bake him cookies and maybe fix a pouch of that hot chocolate that only needs microwaved water to complete it, and she sees the two of them sitting down at the kitchen table for a nice chat after he’s fixed the roof—but does she have any hot chocolate? Or nuts, shortening, brown sugar? How long has it been since she remembered to buy flour, even? She had a five-pound sack of it in the pantry—she distinctly remembers that—but then wasn’t that the flour the weevils got into? She’s seeing little black bugs, barely the size of three grains of pepper cobbled together, and then she understands that she doesn’t want to chat with this man—or with anybody else, for that matter. She just wants the roof repaired so she can go back to the quiet seep of her old lady’s life.

  “Rotten weather,” the roofer breathes, thumping up the stairs in his work boots and trundling on down the upper hallway to the master bedroom, scattering cats as he goes.

  My widow has given up on the stewpot and has been sleeping downstairs, in what was once our son’s room. As a result, the antique bed is now soaked through to the springs and oozing water the color of tobacco juice.

  “I can patch it,” the roofer says, after stepping out onto the sleeping porch and assaying the roof from the outside, “but you really should have the whole thing replaced once summer comes—and I can do that for you too, and give you a good price. Best price in town, in fact.” The roofer produces a wide bearded closer’s grin that is utterly lost on my widow.

  “But that roof,” she says, “was guaranteed for life.”

  The roofer just shrugs. “Aren’t they all?” he sighs, and disappears through the door to the sleeping porch. As she pulls the door shut, my widow can smell the keen working scent of the rain loosening the earth around the overgrown flowerbeds and the vaguely fishy odor of wet pavement. The air is alive. She can see her breath in it. She watches the roofer’s legs ride up past the window as he hoists himself up the ladder and into the pall of the rain. And then, as she settles into the armchair in the bedroom, she hears him up there, aloft, his heavy tread, the pounding of nails, and through it all a smell of hot burning tar.

  Shopping

  In her day my widow was a champion shopper. She’d been a student of anthropology in her undergraduate years, and she always maintained that a woman’s job—her need, calling and compulsion—was to accumulate things against the hard times to come. Never mind that we didn’t experience any hard times—aside from maybe having to pinch a bit in grad school or maxing out our credit cards when we were traveling in Japan back in the eighties—my widow was ready for anything. She shopped with a passion matched by few women of her generation. Her collections of antique jewelry, glassware, china figurines and the like would, I think, be truly valuable if she could ever find them in the cluttered cavern
s and dark byways of the house and basement, and the fine old Craftsman-era couches and chairs strewn through the main rooms are museum pieces, or would be, if the cats hadn’t gotten to them. Even now, despite the fact that she’s become increasingly withdrawn and more than a bit impatient with the fuss and hurry of the world, my widow can still get out and shop with the best of them.

  On a day freshened by a hard cold breeze off the ocean, she awakens in my son’s narrow bed to a welter of cats and a firm sense of purpose. Her sister, Inge, ten years her junior and unmarried, is driving up from Ventura to take her shopping at the mall for the pre-Christmas sales, and she is galvanized into action. Up and out of bed at first light, cats mewling at her feet, the crusted pot set atop the crusted burner, coffee brewing, and she slips into a nice skirt and blouse (after a prolonged search through the closet in the master bedroom, where the mattress, unfortunately, continues to ooze a brownish fluid), pulls her hair back in a bun and sits down to a breakfast of defrosted wheat bread, rancid cream cheese and jam so old it’s become a culture medium. In my time, there were two newspapers to chew through and the morning news on the radio, but my widow never bothered herself much with the mechanism of receiving and paying bills (the envelope, the check, the stamp), and the newspapers have been discontinued. As for the radio, my widow prefers silence. She is thinking nothing, staring into space and slowly rotating the coffee cup in her hands, when there is a sharp rap at the kitchen door and Inge’s face appears framed there in the glass panel.

  Later, hours later, after lunch at the Thai Palace, after Pic ’n Save, Costco, Ruby’s Thrift Shoppe and the Bargain Basement, my widow finds herself in the midst of a crush of shoppers at Macy’s. She doesn’t like department stores, never has—no bargains to be had, or not usually—but her sister was looking at some tableware for one of their grandnieces, and she finds herself, unaccountably, in the linen department, surrounded by women poking through sheets and pillowcases and little things for the bathroom. There will be a white sale in January, she knows that as well as she knows there will be valentines for Valentine’s Day and lilies for Easter, and since the maid died ten years back she really hasn’t had much need of linens—nobody to change the beds, really—but she can’t help herself. The patterns are so unique, the fabric so fresh and appealing in its neat plastic packaging. Voices leap out around her. Christmas music settles on the air. My widow looks round for a salesperson.