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

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  It must have been seven or so, the rain still coming down and people briefly enlivened by the novelty of it as they came and went in spasms of umbrella furling and unfurling, when a guy about my own age—or no, he must have been thirty, or close to it—came in and took the seat beside me. He was wearing a baseball cap, a jeans jacket and a T-shirt that said Obligatory Death, which I took to be the name of a band, though I’d never heard of them. His hair was blond, cut short around the ears, and he wore a soul beard that was like a pale stripe painted under his lip by a very unsteady hand. We exchanged the standard greeting—What’s up?—and then he flagged down the bartender and ordered a draft beer, a shot of tomato juice and two raw eggs.

  “Raw eggs?” the bartender echoed, as if he hadn’t heard him right.

  “Yeah. Two raw eggs, in the shell.”

  The bartender—his name was Chris, or maybe it was Matt—gave a smile and scratched the back of his head. “We can do them over-easy or sunny-side up or poached even, but raw, I don’t know. I mean, nobody’s ever requested raw before—”

  “Ask the chef, why don’t you?”

  The bartender shrugged. “Sure,” he said, “no problem.” He started off in the direction of the kitchen, then pulled up short. “You want toast with that, home fries, or what?”

  “Just the eggs.”

  Everybody was watching now, any little drama worth the price of admission, especially on a night like this, but the bartender—Chris, his name was definitely Chris—just went down to the other end of the bar and communicated the order to the waitress, who made a notation in her pad and disappeared into the kitchen. A moment went by, and then the man turned to me and said in a voice loud enough for everybody to hear, “Jesus, this music sucks. Are we caught in a time warp here, or what?”

  The old men—the regulars—glanced up from their drinks and gave him a look, but they were gray-haired and slack in the belly and they knew their limits. One of them said something about the game on the TV and one of the others chimed in and the conversation started back up in an exclusionary way.

  “Yeah,” I heard myself say, “it really sucks,” and before I knew it I was talking passionately about the bands that meant the most to me even as the new guy poured tomato juice in his beer and sipped the foam off the top, while the music rumbled defiantly on and people came in the door with wet shoes and dripping umbrellas to crowd in behind us. The eggs, brown-shelled and naked in the middle of a standard dinner plate, were delivered by Daria, a waitress I’d had my eye on, though I hadn’t yet worked up the nerve to say more than hello and goodbye to her. “Your order, sir,” she said, easing the plate down on the bar. “You need anything with that? Ketchup? Tabasco?”

  “No,” he said, “no, that’s fine,” and everyone was waiting for him to crack the eggs over his beer, but he didn’t even look at them. He was looking at Daria, holding her with his eyes. “So what’s your name?” he asked, grinning.

  She told him, and she was grinning too.

  “Nice to meet you,” he said, taking her hand. “I’m Ludwig.”

  “Ludwig,” she repeated, pronouncing it with a hard v, as he had, though as far as I could tell—from his clothes and accent, which was pure Southern California—he wasn’t German. Or if he was, he sure had his English down.

  “Are you German?” Daria was flirting with him, and the realization of it began to harden me against him in the most rudimentary way.

  “No,” he said, “I’m from Hermosa Beach, born and raised. It’s the name, right?”

  “I had this German teacher last year? His name was Ludwig, that’s all.”

  “You’re in college?”

  She told him she was, which was news to me. Working her way through. Majoring in business. She wanted to own her own restaurant someday.

  “It was my mother’s idea,” he said, as if he’d been mulling it over. “She was listening to the ‘Eroica’ Symphony the night I was born.” He shrugged. “It’s been my curse ever since.”

  “I don’t know,” she said, “I think it’s kind of cute. You don’t get many Ludwigs, you know?”

  “Yeah, tell me about it,” he said, sipping at his beer.

  She lingered, though there were other things she could have been doing. The sound of the rain intensified so that for a moment it overcame the drone of the speakers. “So what about the eggs,” she said, “you going to need utensils, or—”

  “Or what? Am I going to suck them out of the shell?”

  “Yeah,” she said, “something like that.”

  He reached out a hand cluttered with silver to embrace the eggs and gently roll them back and forth across the gleaming expanse of the plate. “No, I’m just going to fondle them,” he said, and he got the expected response: she laughed. “But does anybody still play dice around here?” he called down the bar as the eyes of the regulars slid in our direction and then away again.

  In those days—and this was ten years ago or more—the game of Horse was popular in certain California bars, as were smoking, unprotected sex and various other adult pleasures that may or may not have been hazardous to your health. There were five dice, shaken in a cup, and you slammed that cup down on the bar, trying for the highest cumulative score, which was thirty. Anything could be bet on, from the next round of drinks to ponying up for the jukebox.

  The rain hissed at the door and it opened briefly to admit a stamping, umbrella-less couple. Ludwig’s question hung unanswered on the air. “No? How about you, Daria?”

  “I’m working, actually.”

  He turned to me. I had no work in the morning or the next morning either—maybe no work at all. My apartment wasn’t what I’d thought it would be, not without anybody to share it with, and I’d already vowed to myself that I’d rather sleep on the streets than go back to my aunt’s because going back there would represent the worst kind of defeat. Take good care of my baby, Kim, my mother had said when she’d dropped me off. He’s the only one I’ve got.

  “Sure,” I said, “I guess. What’re we playing for—for drinks, right?” I began fumbling in my pockets, awkward, shoulders dipping—I was drunk, I could feel it. “Because I don’t have, well, maybe ten bucks—”

  “No,” he said, “no,” already rising from his seat, “you just wait here, just one minute, you’ll see,” and then he was out the door and into the grip of the rain.

  Daria hadn’t moved. She was dressed in the standard outfit for Daggett’s employees, shorts, white ankle socks and a T-shirt with the name of the establishment blazoned across the chest, her legs pale and silken in the flickering light of the fake fireplace in the corner. She gave me a sympathetic look and I shrugged to show her I was ready for anything, a real man of the world.

  There was a noise at the door—a scraping and shifting—and we all looked up to see Ludwig struggling with something against the backdrop of the rain. His hat had been knocked askew and water dripped from his nose and chin. It took a moment, one shoulder pinning the door open, and then he lifted a cage—a substantial cage, two and a half feet high and maybe four long—through the doorway and set it down against the wall. No one moved. No one said a word. There was something in the cage, the apprehension of it as sharp and sudden as the smell it brought with it, something wild and alien and very definitely out of the ordinary on what to this point had been a painfully ordinary night.

  Ludwig wiped the moisture from his face with a swipe of his sleeve, straightened out his hat and came back to the bar, looking jaunty and refreshed. “All right,” he said, “don’t be shy—go have a look. It won’t bite. Or it will, it definitely will, but just don’t get your fingers near it, that’s all—”

  I saw coiled limbs, claws, yellow eyes. Whatever it was, the thing hadn’t moved, not even to blink. I was going to ask what it was, when Daria, still at my side, said, “It’s a cat, some kind of wild cat. Right? A what—a lynx or something?
”

  “You can’t have that thing in here,” one of the regulars said, but already he was getting up out of his seat to have a look at it—everyone was getting up now, shoving back chairs and rising from the tables, crowding around.

  “It’s a serval,” Ludwig was saying. “From Africa. Thirty-five pounds of muscle and quicker than a snake.”

  And where had he gotten it? He’d won it, in a bar in Arizona, on a roll of the dice.

  How long had he had it? Two years.

  What was its name? Cat. Just Cat. And yes, it was a male, and no, he didn’t want to get rid of it but he was moving overseas on a new job and there was just no way he could take it with him, so he felt it was apropos—that was the word he used, apropos—to give it up in the way he’d gotten it.

  He turned to me. “What was your name again?”

  “Junior,” I said. “James Jr. Turner, I mean. James Turner Jr. But everybody calls me Junior.” I wanted to add, “Because of my father, so people wouldn’t confuse us,” but I left it at that, because it got even more complicated considering that my father was six months dead and I could be anybody I wanted.

  “Okay, Junior, here’s the deal,” Ludwig said. “Your ten bucks against the cat, one roll, what do you say?”

  I wanted to say that I had no place for the thing, that I didn’t want a cat of any kind or even a guinea pig or a fish in a bowl and that the ten dollars was meaningless, but everyone was watching me and I couldn’t back out without feeling the shame rise to my face—and there was Daria to consider, because she was watching me too. “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, okay, sure.”

  Sixty seconds later I was still solvent and richer by one cat and one cage. I’d gotten lucky—or unlucky, depending on how you want to look at it—and rolled three fives and two fours; Ludwig rolled a combined eleven. He finished his beer in a gulp, took my hand to seal the deal and offer his congratulations, and then started toward the door. “But what do I feed it?” I called. “I mean, what does it eat?”

  “Eggs,” he said, “it loves eggs. And meat. Raw. No kibble, forget kibble. This is the real deal, this animal, and you need to treat it right.” He was at the door, looking down at the thing with what might have been wistfulness or satisfaction, I couldn’t tell which, then he reached down behind the cage to unfasten something there—a gleam of black leather—and toss it to me: it was a glove, or a gauntlet actually, as long as my arm. “You’ll want to wear this when you feed him,” he said, and then he was gone.

  —

  For a long moment I stared at the door, trying to work out what had happened, and then I looked at the regulars—the expressions on their faces—and at the other customers, locals or maybe even tourists who’d come in for a beer or burger or the catch of the day and had all this strangeness thrust on them, and finally at the cage. Daria was bent beside it, cooing to the animal inside, Ludwig’s eggs cradled in one hand. She was short and compact, conventionally pretty, with the round eyes and symmetrical features of an anime heroine, her running shoes no bigger than a child’s, her blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, and I’d noticed all that before, over the course of weeks of study, but now it came back to me with the force of revelation. She was beautiful, a beautiful girl propped on one knee while her shorts rode up in back and the T-shirt bunched beneath her breasts, offering this cat—my cat—the smallest comfort, as if it were a kitten she’d found abandoned on the street.

  “Jesus, what are you going to do with the thing?” Chris had come out from behind the bar and he was standing beside me now, looking awed.

  I told him I didn’t know. That I hadn’t planned on owning a wild cat, hadn’t even known they existed—servals, that is—until five minutes ago.

  “You live around here?”

  “Bayview Apartments.”

  “They accept pets?”

  I’d never really given it much thought, but they did, they must have—the guy next door to me had a pair of yapping little dogs with bows in their hair and the woman down the hall had a Doberman that was forever scrabbling its nails on the linoleum when she came in and out with it, which she seemed to do about a hundred times a day. But this was something different. This was something that might push at the parameters of the standard lease. “Yeah,” I said, “I think so.”

  There was a single slot where the door of the cage fastened that was big enough to receive an egg without crushing its shell, and Daria, still cooing, rolled first one egg, then the other, through the aperture. For a moment, nothing happened. Then the cat, hunched against the mesh, shifted position ever so slightly and took the first egg in its mouth—two teeth like hypodermics, a crunch, and then the soft frictive scrape of its tongue.

  Daria rose and came to me with a look of wonder. “Don’t do a thing till I get off, okay?” she said, and in her fervor she took hold of my arm. “I get off at nine, so you wait, okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”

  “We can put him in the back of the storage room for now, and then, well, I guess we can use my pickup—”

  I didn’t have the leisure to reflect on how complex things had become all of a sudden, and even if I had I don’t think I would have behaved any differently. I just nodded at her, stared into her plenary eyes and nodded.

  “He’s going to be all right,” she said, and added, “He will,” as if I’d been disagreeing with her. “I’ve got to get back to work, but you wait, okay? You wait right here.” Chris was watching. The manager was watching. The regulars had all craned their necks and half the dinner customers too. Daria patted down her apron, smoothed back her hair. “What did you say your name was again?”

  —

  So I had a cat. And a girl. We put the thing in the back of her red Toyota pickup, threw a tarp over it to keep the rain off, and drove to Von’s, where I watched Daria march up and down the aisles seeking out kitty litter and the biggest cat pan they had (we settled for a dishpan, hard blue plastic that looked all but indestructible), and then it was on to the meat counter. “I’ve only got ten bucks,” I said.

  She gave me a withering look. “This animal’s got to eat,” she informed me, and she reached back to slip the band from her ponytail so that her hair fell glistening across her shoulders, a storm of hair, fluid and loose, the ends trailing down her back like liquid in motion. She tossed her head impatiently. “You do have a credit card, don’t you?”

  Ten minutes later I was directing her back to my building, where I had her park next to the Mustang I’d inherited when my father died, and then we went up the outside stairs and along the walkway to my apartment on the second floor. “I’m sorry,” I said, swinging open the door and hitting the light switch, “but I’m afraid I’m not much of a housekeeper.” I was going to add that I hadn’t expected company either, or I would have straightened up, but Daria just strode right in, cleared a spot on the counter and set down the groceries. I watched her shoulders as she reached into the depths of one bag after another and extracted the forty-odd dollars’ worth of chicken parts and ribeye steak (marked down for quick sale) we’d selected in the meat department.

  “Okay,” she said, turning to me as soon as she’d made space in the refrigerator for it all, “now where are we going to put the cat, because I don’t think we should leave it out there in the truck any longer than we have to, do you? Cats don’t like the rain, I know that—I have two of them. Or one’s a kitten really.” She was on the other side of the kitchen counter, a clutter of crusted dishes and glasses sprouting various colonies of mold separating us. “You have a bedroom, right?”

  I did. But if I was embarrassed by the state of the kitchen and living room—this was my first venture at living alone, and the need for order hadn’t really seemed paramount to me—then the thought of the bedroom, with its funk of dirty clothes and unwashed sheets, the reeking workboots and the duffel bag out of which I’d been living, gave me pause. Here was this
beautiful apparition in my kitchen, the only person besides my aunt who’d ever stepped through the door of my apartment, and now she was about to discover the sad lonely disorder at the heart of my life. “Yeah,” I said, “that door there, to the left of the bathroom,” but she was already in the room, pushing things aside, a frown of concentration pressed between her eyes.

  “You’re going to have to clear this out,” she said. “The bed, everything. All your clothes.”

  I was standing in the doorway, watching her. “What do you mean ‘clear it out’?”

  She lifted her face. “You don’t think that animal can stay caged up like that, do you? There’s hardly room for it to turn around. And that’s just cruel.” She drilled me with that look again, then put her hands on her hips. “I’ll help you,” she said. “It shouldn’t take ten minutes—”

  Then it was up the stairs with the cat, the two of us fighting the awkwardness of the cage. We kept the tarp knotted tightly in place, both to keep the rain off the cat and disguise it from any of my neighbors who might happen by, and though we shifted the angle of the thing coming up the stairs, the animal didn’t make a sound. We had a little trouble getting the cage through the doorway—the cat seemed to concentrate its weight as if in silent protest—but we managed, and then we maneuvered it into the bedroom and set it down in the middle of the rug. Daria had already arranged the litter box in the corner, atop several sheets of newspaper, and she’d taken my biggest stewpot, filled it with water and placed it just inside the door, where I could get to it easily. “Okay,” she said, glancing up at me with a satisfied look, “it’s time for the unveiling,” and she bent to unfasten the tarp.

  The overhead light glared, the tarp slid from the cage and puddled on the floor, and there was the cat, pressed to the mesh in a compression of limbs, the yellow eyes seizing on us. “Nice kitty,” Daria cooed. “Does he want out of that awful cage? Hmm? Does he? And meat—does he want meat?”