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

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  But we didn’t. Cole just drove aimlessly past bleached-out lawns and squat houses, down the naked tunnels of trees and into the country, where the odd field—crippled cornstalks, rotting pumpkins—was squeezed in among the housing developments and the creep of shopping malls. We smoked the joint down to the nub, employed a roach clip and alternated hits till it was nothing but air. An hour stole by. The same hits thumped through the radio, the same commercials. It was getting dark.

  After a while we pulled up at a deserted spot along a blacktop road not two miles from my house. I knew the place from when I was a kid, riding my bike out to the reservoir to fish and throw rocks and fool around. There was a waist-high wall of blackened stone running the length of a long two blocks, and behind that a glimpse of a cluster of stone cottages through the dark veins of the trees. We’d been talking about something comforting—a band or a guitar player—and I’d been drifting, wheeling round and round the moment, secure, calm, and now suddenly we were stopped out on the road in the middle of nowhere. “So, what’s the deal?” I said.

  A car came up the street in the opposite direction and the lights caught Cole’s face. He squinted, put a hand up to shield his eyes till the car had passed, and he craned his neck to make sure it was still moving, watching for the flash of brake lights as it rounded the curve at the corner behind us and vanished into the night. “Nothing,” he said, a spark of animation igniting his voice as if it were a joke—the car, the night, the joint—“I just wanted you to meet some people, that’s all.”

  “What people? Out here?” I gave it a beat. “You don’t mean the little people, do you? The elves? Where are they—crouching behind the wall there? Or in their burrows, is that where they are—asleep in their burrows?”

  We both had a laugh, one of those protracted, breast-pounding jags of hilarity that remind you just how much you’ve smoked and how potent it was. “No,” he said, still wheezing, “no. Big people. Real people, just like you and me.” He pointed to the faintest glow of light from the near cottage. “In there.”

  I was confused. The entrance to the place—the driveway, which squeezed under a stone arch somebody had erected there at some distant point in our perfervid history—was up on the cross street at the end of the block, where the car had just turned. “So why don’t we just go in the driveway?” I wanted to know.

  Cole took a moment to light a cigarette, then he cracked the door and the dark pure refrigerated smell of the night hit me. “Not cool,” he said. “Not cool at all.”

  —

  I made a real effort the next day, and though I had less than three hours’ sleep, I made homeroom with maybe six seconds to spare. The kids—the students, my charges—must have scented the debauch on me, the drift away from the straight and narrow they demanded as part of the social contract, because they were more restive than usual, more boisterous and slippery, as if the seats couldn’t contain them. There was one—there’s always one, memorable not for excellence or scholarship but for weakness, only that—and he spoke up now. Robert, his name was, Robert Rowe. He was fifteen, left back once, and he was no genius but he had more of a spark in him than the others could ever hope for, and that made him stand out—it gave him power, but he didn’t know what to do with it. “Hey, Mr. Caddis,” he called from the back of the room where he was slumped into one of the undersized desks we’d inherited from another era when the average student was shorter, slimmer, more attentive and eager. “You look like shit, you know that?”

  The rest of them—this was only homeroom, where, as I’ve indicated, nothing was expected—froze for a moment. The interaction was delicious for them, I’m sure—they were scientists dissecting the minutest gradations of human behavior: would I explode? Overheat and run for the lavatory like Mr. James, the puker? Ignore the comment? Pretend I hadn’t heard?

  I was beat, truly. Two nights running with less than three hours’ sleep. But I was energized too because something new was happening to me, something that shone over the bleakness of this job, this place, my parents’ damaged lives, as if I’d suddenly discovered the high beams along a dark stretch of highway. “Yeah, Robert,” I said, holding him with my eyes, though he tried to duck away, “thanks for the compliment.” A tutorial pause, flatly instructive. “You look like shit too.”

  The cottage, the stone cottage on the far side of the stone wall in the featureless mask of the night that had given way to this moment of this morning, was a place I felt I’d come home to after a long absence. I’d been to war, hadn’t I? Now I was home. How else to describe it, what that place meant to me from the minute the door swung back and I stepped inside?

  I hadn’t known what to expect. We vaulted the stone wall and picked our way through a dark tangle of leafless sumac and stickers that raked at our boots and the oversized flaps of our pants, and then there was another, lower wall, and we were in the yard. Out front was a dirt bike with its back wheel missing, skeletal under the porch light, and there were glittering fragments of other things there too, machines in various states of disassembly—a chain saw minus the chain, an engine block decorated with lit candles that flickered like votives in the dark cups of the cylinders, a gutted amplifier. And there was music. Loud now, loud enough to rattle the glass in the windowpanes. Somebody inside was playing along with the bass line of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.”

  Cole went in without knocking, and I followed. Through a hallway and into the kitchen, obladi oblada life goes on bra! There were two women there—girls—rising up from the table in the kitchen with loopy grins to wrap their arms around Cole, and then, after the briefest of introductions—“This is my friend, John, he’s a professor”—to embrace me too. They were sisters, both tall, with the requisite hair parted in the middle and trailing down their shoulders. Suzie, the younger, darker and prettier one, and JoJo, two years older, with hair the color of rust before it flakes. There was a Baggie of pot on the table, a pipe and what looked to be half a bar of halvah candy but wasn’t candy at all. Joss sticks burned among the candles that lit the room. A cat looked up sleepily from a pile of newspaper in the corner. “You want to get high?” JoJo asked, and I was charmed instantly—here she was, the consummate hostess—and a portion of my uncertainty and awkwardness went into retreat.

  I looked to Cole, and we both laughed, and this was a laugh of the same quality and flavor as the one we’d shared in the car.

  “What?” Suzie said, leaning back against the stove now, grinning wide. “Oh, I get it—you’re already stoned, both of you, right? High as kites, right?”

  From the living room—the door was closed and I had to presume it was the living room—there was the sudden screech of the needle lifting off the record, then the superamplified rasp of its dropping down again, and “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” came at us once more. JoJo saw my quizzical look and paused in putting the match to the pipe. “Oh, that’s Mike—my boyfriend? He’s like obsessed with that song.”

  I don’t know how much time slid by before the door swung open—we were just sitting there at the table, enveloped in the shroud of our own consciousness, the cat receding into the corner that now seemed half a mile away, candles flickering and sending insubstantial shadows up the walls. I turned round to see Mike standing in the doorframe, wearing the strap of his bass like a bandolier over a shirtless chest. He was big, six feet and something, two hundred pounds, and he was built, pectorals and biceps sharply defined, a stripe of hard blue vein running up each arm, but he didn’t do calisthenics or lift weights or anything like that—it was just the program of his genes. His hair was long, longer than either of the women’s. He wore a Fu Manchu mustache. He was sweating. “That was hot,” he said, “that was really hot.”

  JoJo looked up vacantly. “What,” she said, “you want me to turn down the heat?”

  He gave a laugh and leaned into the table to pluck a handful of popcorn out of a bowl that had somehow materialized there. “No, I mean the
—Didn’t you hear me? That last time? That was hot, that’s what I’m saying.”

  It was only then that we got around to introductions, he and Cole swapping handclasps, and then Cole cocking a finger at me. “He’s a professor,” he said.

  Mike took my hand—the soul shake, a pat on the shoulder—and stood there looking bemused. “A professor?” he said. “No shit?”

  I was too stoned to parse all the nuances of the question, but still the blood must have risen to my face. “A teacher,” I corrected. “You know, just to beat the draft? Like because if you—” and I went off on some disconnected monologue, talking because I was nervous, because I wanted to fit in, and I suppose I would have kept on talking till the sun came up but for the fact that everyone else had gone silent and the realization of it suddenly hit me.

  “No shit?” Mike repeated, grinning in a dangerous way. He was swaying over the table, alternately feeding popcorn into the slot of his mouth and giving me a hooded look. “So how old are you—what, nineteen, twenty?”

  “Twenty-one. I’ll be twenty-two in December.”

  There was more. It wasn’t an inquisition exactly—Cole at one point spoke up for me and said, “He’s cool”—but a kind of scientific examination of this rare bird that had mysteriously turned up at the kitchen table. What did I think? I thought Cole should ease up on the professor business—as I got to know him I realized he was inflating me in order to inflate himself—and that we should all smoke some of the hash, though I wasn’t the host here and hadn’t brought anything to the party.

  Eventually, we did smoke—that was what this was all about, community, the community of mind and spirit and style—and we moved into the living room where the big speakers were to listen to the heartbeat of the music and feel the world settle in around us. There were pillows scattered across the floor, more cats, more incense, ShopRite cola and peppermint tea in heavy homemade mugs and a slow sweet seep of peace. I propped my head against a pillow, stretched my feet out before me. The music was a dream, and I closed my eyes and entered it.

  —

  A week or two later my mother asked me to meet her after work at a bar /restaurant called the Hollander. This was a place with pretensions to grander things, where older people—people my mother’s age—came to drink Manhattans and smoke cigarettes and feel elevated over the crowd that frequented taverns with sawdust on the floors, the sort of places my father favored. Teachers came to the Hollander, lawyers, people who owned car dealerships and dress shops. My mother was a secretary, my father a bus driver. And the Hollander was an ersatz place, with pompous waiters and a fake windmill out front.

  She was at the bar, smoking, sitting with a skinny white-haired guy I didn’t recognize, and as I came up to them I realized he could have been my father’s double, could have been my father, but he wasn’t. There were introductions—his name was Jerry Reilly and he was a teacher just like me—and a free beer appeared at my elbow, but I couldn’t really fathom what was going on here or why my mother would want me to join her in a place like this. I played it cool, ducked my head and answered Jerry Reilly’s interminable questions about school as best I could—Yeah, sure, I guess I liked it; it was better than being executed in Vietnam, wasn’t it?—without irritating him to the point at which I would miss out on a free dinner, but all I wanted to do was get out of there and meet Cole at the cottage in the woods. As expeditiously as possible. Dinner down, goodbyes and thankyous on file, and out the door and into the car.

  That wasn’t how it worked out. Something was in the air and I couldn’t fathom what it was. I kept looking at Jerry Reilly, with his cuff links and snowy collar and whipcord tie and thinking, No, no way—my mother wouldn’t cheat on my father, not with this guy. But her life and what she did with it was a work in progress, as unfathomable to me as my own life must have been to my students—and tonight’s agenda was something else altogether, something that came in the form of a very special warning, specially delivered. We were on our third drink, seated in the dining room now, eating steak all around, though my mother barely touched hers and Jerry Reilly just pushed his around the plate every time I lifted my eyes to look at him. “Listen, John,” my mother said finally, “I just wanted to say something to you. About Cole.”

  All the alarm bells went off simultaneously in my head. “Cole?” I echoed.

  She gave me a look I’d known all my life, the one reserved for missteps and misdeeds. “He has a record.”

  So that was it. “What’s it to you?”

  My mother just shrugged. “I just thought you ought to know, that’s all.”

  “I know. Of course I know. And it’s nothing, believe me—a case of mistaken identity. They got the wrong guy is all.” The fact was that Cole had been busted for selling marijuana to an undercover agent and they were trying to make a felony out of it even as his mother leaned on a retired judge she knew to step in and quash it. I put on a look of offended innocence. “So what’d you do, hire a detective?”

  A thin smile. “I’m just worried about you, that’s all.”

  How I bristled at this. I wasn’t a child—I could take care of myself. How many times had her soft dejected voice come at me out of the shadows of the living room at three and four in the morning, where she sat smoking in the dark while I roamed the streets with my friends? Where had I been? she always wanted to know. Nowhere, I told her. There was the dark, the smell of her cigarette, and then, even softer: I was worried. And what did I do now? I worked my face and gave her a disgusted look to show her how far above all this I was.

  She looked to Jerry Reilly, then back to me. I became aware of the sound of traffic out on the road. It was dark beyond the windows. “You’re not using drugs,” she asked, drawing at her cigarette, so that the interrogative lift came in a fume of smoke, “are you?”

  —

  The first time I ever saw anyone inject heroin was in the bathroom of that stone cottage in the woods. It was probably the third or fourth night I’d gone there with Cole to hang out, listen to music and be convivial on our own terms (he was living at his parents’ house too, and there was no percentage in that). Mike greeted us at the door—he’d put a leather jacket on over a T-shirt and he was all business, heading out to the road to meet a guy named Nicky and they were going on into town to score and we should just hang tight because they’d be right back and did we happen to have any cash on us?—and then we went in and sat with the girls and smoked and didn’t think about much of anything until the front door jerked back on its hinges half an hour later and Mike and Nicky came storming into the room as if their jackets had been set afire.

  Then it was into the bathroom, Mike first, the door open to the rest of us lined up behind him, Nicky (short, with a full beard that did nothing to flesh out a face that had been reduced to the sharp lineaments of bone and cartilage) and the two sisters, Cole and me. I’d contributed five dollars to the enterprise, though I had my doubts. I’d never done anything like this and I was scared of the consequences, the droning narration of the anti-drug films from high school riding up out of some backwater of my mind to assert itself, to take over, become shrill even. Mike threw off his jacket, tore open two glassine packets with his teeth and carefully—meticulously—shook out the contents into a tablespoon. It was a white powder, and it could have been anything, baking soda, confectioners’ sugar, Polident, but it wasn’t, and I remember thinking how innocuous it looked, how anonymous. In the next moment, Mike sat heavily on the toilet, drew some water up into the syringe I’d seen lying there on a shelf in the medicine cabinet last time I’d used the facilities, squeezed a few drops into the powder, mixed it around and then held a lighter beneath the spoon. Then he tied himself off at the biceps with a bit of rubber tubing, drew the mixture from the spoon through a ball of cotton and hit a vein. I watched his eyes. Watched the rush take him, and then the nod. Nicky was next, then Suzie, then JoJo, and finally Cole. Mike hit t
hem, one at a time, like a doctor. I watched each of them rush and go limp, my heart hammering at my ribcage, the record in the living room repeating over and over because nobody had bothered to put the changer down, and then it was my turn. Mike held up the glassine packet. “It’s just a taste,” he said. “Three-dollar bag. You on for it?”

  “No,” I said, “I mean, I don’t think I—”

  He studied me a moment, then tossed me the bag. “It’s a waste,” he said, “a real waste, man.” His voice was slow, the voice of a record played at the wrong speed. He shook his head with infinite calm, moving it carefully from side to side as if it weighed more than the cottage itself. “But hey, we’ll snort it this time. You’ll see what you’re missing, right?”

  I saw. Within the week I was getting off too, and it was my secret—my initiation into a whole new life—and the tracks, the bite marks of the needle that crawled first up one arm and then the other, were my testament.

  —

  It was my job to do lunch duty one week a month, and lunch duty consisted of keeping the student body out of the building for forty-five minutes while they presumably went home, downtown or over to the high school and consumed whatever nourishment was available to them. It was necessary to keep them out of the junior high building for the simple reason that they would destroy it through an abundance of natural high spirits and brainless joviality. I stood in the dim hallway, positioned centrally between the three doors that opened from the southern, eastern and western sides of the building, and made my best effort at chasing them down when they burst in howling against the frigid collapse of the noon hour. On the second day of my third tour of duty, Robert Rowe sauntered in through the front doors and I put down my sandwich—the one my mother had made me in the hour of the wolf before going off to work herself—and reminded him of the rules.