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

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  I leaned out from my chair and looked down the length of the table to where Señora Whiskers, that apostate, sat with her head in the madman’s lap. “What do you mean?” I demanded.

  Paloma was watching, Isabela too; Bob Fernando Jr. and the little ones sat rigid in their chairs. “Call her to you,” he said.

  I called. And the dog, reluctant at first, came down the length of the table to her master. “Yes?” I said.

  “Do you see the way she walks, head down, sniffing her way? Haven’t you noticed her butting into the furniture, scraping the doorframes? Look into her eyes, Don Bob: she’s going blind.”

  —

  The next morning I awoke to a sound I’d never before heard, a ceaseless rapid thumping, as of a huge penitential heart caught up in the rhythm of its sorrows. Isabela awoke beside me and I peered through the blinds into the courtyard that was still heavy with shadow under a rare crystalline sky. Figures moved there in the courtyard as if in a dream—my children, all of them, even Paloma—and they fought over the swollen globe of a thumping orange ball and flung it high against an orange hoop shrouded in mesh. They were shouting, crying out in a kind of naked joy that approached the ecstatic, and the trenchcoat and the nose and the shrunken bulb of the bobbing head presided over all: basketball.

  Was I disturbed? Yes. Happy for them, happy for their fluid grace and their joy, but struck deep in my bowels with the insidiousness of it: first basketball and then the scripture of doom. Indeed, they were already dressed like the man’s disciples, in hats with earmuffs and the swirling greatcoats we’d long since put away for winter, and the exposed flesh of their hands and faces glistened with his sunblock. Worse: their eyes were visored behind pairs of identical black sunglasses, Mr. John Longworth’s gift to them, along with the gift of hopelessness and terror. The sky was falling, and now they knew it too.

  I stood there dumbfounded at the window. I didn’t have the heart to break up their game or to forbid the practice of it—that would have played into his hands, that would have made me the voice of sanity and restraint (and clearly, with this basketball, sanity and restraint were about as welcome as an explosion at siesta time). Nor could I, as dueño of one of the most venerable estancias in the country, attempt to interdict my guest from speaking of certain worrisome and fantastical subjects, no matter how distasteful I found them personally. But what could I do? He was clearly deluded, if not downright dangerous, but he had the ready weight of his texts and studies to counterbalance any arguments I might make.

  The dog wasn’t blind, any fool could see that. Perhaps her eyes were a bit cloudy, but that was to be expected in a dog of her age, and what if she was losing her sight, what did that prove? I’d had any number of dogs go blind, deaf, lame and senile over the years. That was the way of dogs, and of men too. It was sad, it was regrettable, but it was part of the grand design and there was no sense in running round the barnyard crowing your head off about it. I decided in that moment to go away for a few days, to let the basketball and the novelty of Mr. John Longworth dissipate like the atmospheric gases of which he spoke so endlessly.

  “Isabela,” I said, still standing at the window, still recoiling from that subversive thump, thump, thump, “I’m thinking of going out to the upper range for a few days to look into the health of Manuel Banquedano’s flock—pack up my things for me, will you?”

  —

  This was lambing season, and most of the huasos were in the fields with the flocks to discourage eagle and puma alike. It is a time that never fails to move me, to strengthen my ties to the earth and its rejuvenant cycles, as it must have strengthened those ties for my father and his father before him. There were the lambs, appeared from nowhere on tottering legs, suckling and frolicking in the waste, and they were money in my pocket and the pockets of my children, they were provender and clothing, riches on the hoof. I camped with the men, roasted a haunch of lamb over the open fire, passed a bottle of aguardiente. But this time was different, this time I found myself studying the pattern of moles, pimples, warts and freckles spread across Manuel Banquedano’s face and thinking the worst, this time I gazed out over the craggy cerros and open plains and saw the gaunt flapping figure of Mr. John Longworth like some apparition out of Apocalypse. I lasted four days only, and then, like Christ trudging up the hill to the place of skulls, I came back home to my fate.

  Our guest had been busy in my absence. I’d asked Slobodan Abarca to keep an eye on him, and the first thing I did after greeting Isabela and the children was to amble out to the bunkhouse and have a private conference with the old huaso. The day was gloomy and cold, the wind in an uproar over something. I stepped in the door of the long low-frame building, the very floorboards of which gave off a complicated essence of tobacco, sweat and boot leather, and found it deserted but for the figure of Slobodan Abarca, bent over a chessboard by the window in the rear. I recognized the familiar sun-bleached poncho and manta, the spade-like wedge of the back of his head with its patches of parti-colored hair and oversized ears, and then he turned to me and I saw with a shock that he was wearing dark glasses. Inside. Over a chessboard. I was speechless.

  “Don Bob,” Slobodan Abarca said then in his creaking, unoiled tones, “I want to go back out on the range with the others and I don’t care how old and feeble you think I am, anything is better than this. One more day with that devil from hell and I swear I slit my throat.”

  It seemed that when John Longworth wasn’t out “taking measurements” or inspecting the teeth, eyes, pelt and tongue of every creature he could trap, coerce or pin down, he was lecturing the ranch hands, the smith and the household help on the grisly fate that awaited them. They were doomed, he told them—all of mankind was doomed and the drop of that doom was imminent—and if they valued the little time left to them they would pack up and move north, north to Puerto Montt or Concepción, anywhere away from the poisonous hole in the sky. And those spots on their hands, their throats, between their shoulderblades and caught fast in the cleavage of their breasts, those spots were cancerous or at the very least pre-cancerous. They needed a doctor, a dermatologist, an oncologist. They needed to stay out of the sun. They needed laser surgery. Sunblock. Dark glasses. (The latter he provided, out of a seemingly endless supply, and the credulous fools, believers in the voodoo of science, dutifully clamped them to their faces.) The kitchen staff was threatening a strike and Crispín Mansilla, who looks after the automobiles, had been so terrified of an open sore on his nose that he’d taken his bicycle and set out on the road for Punta Arenas two days previous and no one had heard from him since.

  But worse, far worse. Slobodan Abarca confided something to me that made the blood boil in my veins, made me think of the braided bullhide whip hanging over the fireplace and the pearl-handled dueling pistols my grandfather had once used to settle a dispute over waterfowl rights on the south shore of Lake Castillo: Mr. John Longworth had been paying his special attentions to my daughter. Whisperings were overheard, tête-à-têtes observed, banter and tomfoolery taken note of. They were discovered walking along the lakeshore with their shoulders touching and perhaps even their hands intertwined (Slobodan Abarca couldn’t be sure, what with his failing eyes), they sought each other out at meals, solemnly bounced the basketball in the courtyard and then passed it between them as if it were some rare prize. He was thirty if he was a day, this usurper, this snout, this Mr. John Longworth, and my Paloma was just out of the care of the nuns, an infant still and with her whole life ahead of her. I was incensed. Killing off the natural world was one thing, terrifying honest people, gibbering like a lunatic day and night till the whole estancia was in revolt, but insinuating himself in my daughter’s affections—well, this was, quite simply, the end.

  I stalked up the hill and across the yard, blind to everything, such a storm raging inside me I thought I would explode. The wind howled. It shrieked blood and vengeance and flung black grains of dirt in my face, grains o
f the unforgiving pampas on which I was nurtured and hardened, and I ground them between my teeth. I raged through the house and the servants quailed and the children cried, but Mr. John Longworth was nowhere to be found. Pausing only to snatch up one of my grandfather’s pistols from its velvet cradle in the great hall, I flung myself out the back door and searched the stables, the smokehouse, the generator room. And then, rounding the corner by the hogpen, I detected a movement out of the corner of my eye, and there he was.

  Ungainly as a carrion bird, the coat ends tenting round him in the wind, he was bent over one of the hogs, peering into the cramped universe of its malicious little eyes as if he could see all the evil of the world at work there. I confronted him with a shout and he looked up from beneath the brim of his hat and the fastness of his wraparound glasses, but he didn’t flinch, even as I closed the ground between us with the pistol held out before me like a homing device. “I hate to be the bringer of bad news all the time,” he called out, already lecturing as I approached, “but this pig is in need of veterinary care. It’s not just the eyes, I’m afraid, but the skin too—you see here?”

  I’d stopped ten paces from him, the pistol trained on the nugget of his head. The pig looked up at me hopefully. Its companions grunted, rolled in the dust, united their backsides against the wind.

  “Melanoma,” he said sadly, shaking his visored head. “Most of the others have got it too.”

  “We’re going for a ride,” I said.

  His jaw dropped beneath the screen of the glasses and I could see the intricate work of his front teeth. He tried for a smile. “A ride?”

  “Your time is up here, señor,” I said, and the wind peeled back the sleeve of my jacket against the naked thrust of the gun. “I’m delivering you to Estancia Braun. Now. Without your things, without even so much as a bag, and without any goodbyes either. You’ll have to live without your basketball hoop and sunblock for a few days, I’m afraid—at least until I have your baggage delivered. Now get to your feet—the plane is fueled and ready.”

  He gathered himself up then and rose from the ground, the wind beating at his garments and lifting the hair round his glistening ears. “It’ll do no good to deny it, Don Bob,” he said, talking over his shoulder as he moved off toward the shed where the Super Cub stood out of the wind. “It’s criminal to keep animals out in the open in conditions like these, it’s irresponsible, mad—think of your children, your wife. The land is no good anymore—it’s dead, or it will be. And it’s we who’ve killed it, the so-called civilized nations, with our air conditioners and underarm deodorant. It’ll be decades before the CFCs are eliminated from the atmosphere, if ever, and by then there will be nothing left here but blind rabbits and birds that fly into the sides of rotting buildings. It’s over, Don Bob—your life here is finished.”

  I didn’t believe a word of it—naysaying and bitterness, that’s all it was. I wanted to shoot him right then and there, on the spot, and have done with it—how could I in good conscience deliver him to Don Benedicto Braun, or to anyone, for that matter? He was the poison, he was the plague, he was the ecological disaster. We walked grimly into the wind and he never stopped talking. Snatches of the litany came back to me—ultraviolet, ozone, a hole in the sky bigger than the United States—but I only snarled out directions in reply: “To the left, over there, take hold of the doors and push them inward.”

  In the end, he didn’t fight me. He folded up his limbs and squeezed into the passenger seat and I set aside the pistol and started up the engine. The familiar throb and roar calmed me somewhat, and it had the added virtue of rendering Mr. John Longworth’s jeremiad inaudible. The wind assailed us as we taxied out to the grassy runway—I shouldn’t have been flying that afternoon at all, but as you can no doubt appreciate, I was a desperate man. After a rocky takeoff we climbed into a sky that opened above us in all its infinite glory but which must have seemed woefully sad and depleted to my passenger’s degraded eyes. We coasted high over the wind-whipped trees, the naked rock, the flocks whitening the pastures like distant snow, and he never shut up, not for a second. I tuned him out, let my mind go blank, and watched the horizon for the first weathered outbuildings of Estancia Braun.

  They say that courtesy is merely the veneer of civilization, the first thing sacrificed in a crisis, and I don’t doubt the truth of it. I wonder what became of my manners on that punishing wind-torn afternoon—you would have thought I’d been raised among the Indians, so eager was I to dump my unholy cargo and flee. Like Don Pablo, I didn’t linger, and I could read the surprise and disappointment and perhaps even hurt in Don Benedicto’s face when I pressed his hand and climbed back into the plane. “Weather!” I shouted, and pointed to the sky, where a wall of cloud was already sealing us in. I looked back as he receded on the ground beneath me, the inhuman form of Mr. John Longworth at his side, long arms gesticulating, the lecture already begun. It wasn’t until I reached the verges of my own property, Estancia Castillo stretched out beneath me like a worn carpet and the dead black clouds moving in to strangle the sky, that I had my moment of doubt. What if he was right? I thought. What if Manuel Banquedano truly was riddled with cancer, what if the dog had been blinded by the light, what if my children were at risk? What then?

  The limitless turf unraveled beneath me and I reached up a hand to rub at my eyes, weary suddenly, a man wearing the crown of defeat. A hellish vision came to me then, a vision of 9,000 sheep bleating on the range, their fleece stained and blackened, and every one of them, every one of those inestimable and beloved animals, my inheritance, my life, imprisoned behind a glistening new pair of wraparound sunglasses. So powerful was the vision I could almost hear them baa-ing out their distress. My heart seized. Tears started up in my eyes. Why go on? I was thinking. What hope is there?

  But then the sun broke through the gloom in two pillars of fire, the visible world come to life with a suddenness that took away my breath, color bursting out everywhere, the range green all the way to the horizon, trees nodding in the wind, the very rock faces of the cerros set aflame, and the vision was gone. I listened to the drone of the engine, tipped the wings toward home, and never gave it another thought.

  (1994)

  Tooth and Claw

  The weather had absolutely nothing to do with it—though the rain had been falling off and on throughout the day and the way the gutters were dripping made me feel as if despair was the mildest term in the dictionary—because I would have gone down to Daggett’s that afternoon even if the sun was shining and all the fronds of the palm trees were gilded with light. The problem was work. Or, more specifically, the lack of it. The boss had called at six-thirty a.m. to tell me not to come in, because the guy I’d been replacing had recovered sufficiently from his wrenched back to feel up to working, and no, he wasn’t firing me, because they’d be onto a new job next week and he could use all the hands he could get. “So take a couple days off and enjoy yourself,” he’d rumbled into the phone in his low hoarse uneven voice that always seemed on the verge of morphing into something else altogether—squawks and bleats or maybe just static. “You’re young, right? Go out and get yourself some tail. Get drunk. Go to the library. Help old ladies across the street. You know what I mean?”

  It had been a long day: breakfast out of a cardboard box while cartoon images flickered and faded and reconstituted themselves on the TV screen, and then some desultory reading, starting with the newspaper and a couple of National Geographics I’d picked up at a yard sale, lunch at the deli where I had ham and cheese in a tortilla wrap and exchanged exactly eleven words with the girl behind the counter (Number 7, please, no mayo; Have a nice day; You too), and a walk to the beach that left my sneakers sodden. And after all that it was only three o’clock in the afternoon and I had to force myself to stay away from the bar till five, five at least.

  I wasn’t stupid. And I had no intention of becoming a drunk like all the hard-assed old men in the shopping
mall–blighted town I grew up in, silent men with hate in their eyes and complaint eating away at their insides—like my own dead father, for that matter—but I was new here, or relatively new (nine weeks now and counting) and Daggett’s was the only place where I felt comfortable. And why? Precisely because it was filled with old men drinking themselves into oblivion. It made me think of home. Or feel at home anyway.

  The irony wasn’t lost on me. The whole reason I’d moved out to the Coast to live, first with my Aunt Kim and her husband, Waverley, and then in my own one-bedroom apartment with kitchenette and a three-by-six-foot balcony with a partially obscured view of the Pacific, half a mile off, was so that I could inject a little excitement into my life and mingle with all the college students in the bars that lined State Street cheek to jowl, but here I was hanging out in an old man’s bar that smelled of death and vomit and felt as closed-in as a submarine, when just outside the door were all the exotic sun-struck glories of California. Where it never rained. Except in winter. And it was winter now.

  I nodded self-consciously at the six or seven regulars lined up at the bar, then ordered a Jack-and-Coke, the only drink besides beer I liked the taste of, and I didn’t really like the taste of beer. There were sports on the three TVs hanging from the ceiling—this was a sports bar—but the volume was down and the speakers were blaring the same tired hits of the sixties I could have heard back home. Ad nauseam. When the bartender—he was young at least, as were the waitresses, thankfully—set down my drink, I made a comment about the weather, “Nice day for sunbathing, isn’t it?” and the two regulars nearest me glanced up with something like interest in their eyes. “Or maybe bird-watching,” I added, feeling encouraged, and they swung their heads back to the familiar triangulation of their splayed elbows and cocktail glasses and that was the end of that.