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

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  So I was on her roof. With cause. And Jessica, my wife, who likes to turn in early—she’s yawning and gaping and stretching her arms out like she’s drowning come seven-thirty or eight—was at home, oblivious, snoring lightly in the frigid cavern of the bedroom we shared with its view in summer of the blistered duff at the ankles of the trees and in winter the piled-up drifts that look like waves rolling across a stormy white sea. If I’d expected Lily to be, oh, I don’t know, putting her hair up before the bathroom mirror so that her breasts rose and fell with the action of her arms in a baby-blue see-through negligee or something of the like, I was disappointed. At first I could see nothing but the upper hallway leading to her bedroom and the head of the mounted mule deer that graced the top of the stairway (the rock-hard nose of which I’d kissed for luck any number of times when Jessica and I were over for drinks and dinner and drinks when Frank was alive). There was a light on there, glowing faintly in the cheap smoked-glass sconce they’d got for twelve ninety-five at the Home Depot in Porterville, but there was no sign of movement. Or of her. They had a dog—she had a dog, I should say, a Chihuahua mix—but it was so old and withered and blind and deaf and pathetic it couldn’t have raised the alarm if an entire armored division rolled through the living room. So I waited. And watched.

  Did I mention, by the way, that this was in winter?

  The night was clear all the way up to where the stars slid across their tracks, which meant that it was cold, maybe ten or twelve above, and I was having a little trouble seeing through the eye-slits of my mask, plus my breath was condensing around the opening for my mouth and freezing there so that my lips had begun to sting even before I’d got to Lily’s (on foot, because I didn’t want to just pull up there out front in my truck, because that would have spoiled the surprise—that, and you never knew who was watching up here where everybody’s business is everybody’s business). At least the roof was clear. Frank had gone metal, with a steep pitch that overhung the upper deck, and the sun had taken the three feet of snow the last storm had dropped and deposited it down below. All to the good. I broke the crust of ice around my mouth and was just about to ease myself down on the deck to get a look in the window there, the bedroom window, when the slick thin all-but-invisible sheet of ice that had replaced the snow took my boots out from under me and I lost my balance.

  We don’t have gutters here, for obvious reasons—the weight of the snow shearing over the side would rip them off in a heartbeat—so there was nothing between me and a two-story drop but corrugated sheet metal and the odd rivet. I was a little drunk. I admit it. We’d been over to the Ringsteads’ for drinks and cards earlier and after we got home I guess I kept on pouring even as I was thinking about how lonely Lily must have been because half the mountain was there but she never showed. Anyway, I did not plummet over the side and go down two stories to where the big granite boulders protruded like bad teeth from the drifts, or not yet anyway, but instead just managed to catch myself on one of the steel chimney supports Frank had been obliged to install after a Jeffrey pine came down and obliterated the chimney last winter. I was spared. But the noise I’d made in trying to save myself got the blind and deaf Chihuahua barking and that barking apparently roused Lily.

  I was spread-eagled on the slick roof and just trying to inch my way across to the deck when the door there flew open and Lily appeared, dressed in the baby-blue nightie of my dreams which I guess I must have seen hanging on the hook in the bathroom when I went in to relieve myself on one of those happy drinks-dinner-drinks nights, only with a big off-white cable-knit sweater obscuring the parts of her anatomy I’d most come to see. She let out a low exclamation in her sweet girlish voice that was like the trickle of a pure mountain spring, the dog at her feet yapping and the weight of all those stars beginning to crash down on me, and then she said, “Don’t you move, you son of a bitch, because I’ve got a gun.” And she did have a gun. We all have guns up here, twenty guns per person, as if it were a rule of the community. Of course I didn’t have one, or not then anyway. My twenty guns were back home in my own cabin.

  But here was my problem. I’d come to reconnoiter, albeit with the hope and maybe even expectation of a whole lot more, but I’d lost the element of surprise and wondered now whether I ought to say something to identify myself as me and not some crazed rapist paroled out of Lompoc Prison and dressed all in black with a black ski mask concealing his face and bad intentions in his heart. And it wasn’t getting shot that motivated me, believe me, because I would have welcomed it at that point—it was what my mother, my poor dead overworked and long-suffering mother, used to call mortification. If I revealed myself now, now that she’d got the drop on me, as they say, how could I hope to convince her that my purpose was essentially romantic—and beyond that consolatory even?

  As it turned out, that decision was taken from my hands by the action of what some people would call fate but that I’m here to tell you was just bad luck, pure and simple. I lost my grip. The roof was like a skating rink if you could take a skating rink and cant it at a forty-five degree angle. Suddenly the night deserted me and I was gone. And it was my bad luck—my very bad, catastrophic luck—that I did not land among the drifts but on a big unforgiving incisor of rock that broke my leg just as thoroughly and nastily as Frank’s had been broken out there among the boulders of Hellbore Creek.

  While I was lying there, concealed behind my mask like a second-string superhero and unable to move because the pain was like a comet trapped inside my body, I began thinking—and I don’t know why—of the stepson, of Frank Jr. He’d lost his arm in an incident at the San Diego Zoo when he was fourteen, which you may have read about because it made all the papers at the time. There was still a controversy surrounding the whole business, as to whether he really was high on angel dust and provoking the polar bear where it was only trying to cool off in its fetid little pond of greenish water or whether he honestly slipped and fell, but the result was he lost his right arm right to the shoulder and maybe a little beyond. You look at him now—he’s thirty-two years old, handsome as a TV anchorman, with Frank’s blond hair and squared-off features—and from the left side he could be doing Marine Corps recruiting posters, but on the right there’s just nothing there, and when he walks it really throws him off balance so he’s got a kind of funny hitch in his step. Lily, who’s just eleven years older than he is, more the age of a big sister than a mother, had to put up with him under her roof when she and Frank lived down in the flats all those years because with his disability Frank Jr. couldn’t support himself, and believe me, he’s about as pleasant to be around as a cage full of rats, angry at the world and always pissing and moaning about the indescribable pain he feels in his missing limb. Which he invariably goes on to describe in detail. Ad nauseam.

  But let me get back to it, because this connects in to what I’m trying to say here, about pain, about my pain and Lily’s pain and everybody else’s too, the upshot being that about three minutes later I’m exposed for who I am. To Lily, who’s standing over me with a flashlight and her snubnose .38 Special that Frank gave her for her birthday year before last, because here’s the kid—Frank Jr., who’s supposed to be living down the hill in Porterville in some sort of halfway house—appearing out of nowhere to swoop down with the one hand he’s got left to him and tear the mask off my face.

  —

  I don’t think I ever talked and wheedled and apologized and extenuated as much as I did that night, stretched out on my back in the snow and freezing my ass off while Lily looked at me as if I were something she’d stepped on in the parking lot at Costco and Frank Jr. ran in to phone for the sheriff, the fire department and every last living soul on the mountain, including old Brick Sternreit, who’d won the title of Mountain Man three times running during the Memorial Day chili cookoff despite the fact that he was closing in on ninety, Bart Bliss, who ran the lodge and sported the longest beard on the mountain, three widows, two widowers a
nd my own sharp-honed steel-eyed rapier of a wife, Jessica. There was an interval there, Frank Jr. in the house and phones ringing everywhere, when it was just me and Lily and the dead cold of the night. Lily had lowered the .38, thumbed the safety and dropped the thing in the pocket of the big cardigan sweater, which I now saw was decorated with a pair of prancing reindeer done up in red stitching, but the flashlight was still leveled on my face. “Lily,” I gasped, fighting for breath against the pain, “could you lower that light? Please? Because my leg’s broke”—I almost said, Just like Frank’s, but suppressed it—“and I can’t move and the light’s right in my eyes.”

  The beam never wavered. “What in hell were you thinking?” This was framed in an accusatory tone, and her voice was anything but melodious and sweet.

  “I love you,” I said. “I’ve loved you since the day Frank brought you up here and we all got drunk on pitchers of margaritas down at the lodge . . . remember?”

  Her voice was flat. “You don’t love me.”

  “I do.”

  “You have a funny way of showing it. What did you think, you’d see me naked or something?”

  There was the sound, in the distance, of snow tires crunching the crust of ice on the blacktop road that twisted below us past the Turners’ place, and already the headlights were dancing in the tops of the stripped aspens out front of Lily’s. “You must think I’m like a Peeping Tom or something, but really, I just, I mean—”

  “No,” she said, cutting me off, “I don’t think you’re a Peeping Tom—I think you’re a slime. I mean, really, how could you? With Frank barely cold in the ground and what about Jessica, what about her, what about your wife?”

  The pain—the comet that was shooting from my lower leg to my brain and back again, fighting to explode into the night—seized me up a minute and I had no reasonable answer to give her. I wanted to say, She won’t mind, or She doesn’t have to know, or I don’t love her, I love you, but I couldn’t.

  “And the mask? What’s with the mask? I mean, that’s just sick.”

  And so I wheedled and protested but it did no good because those tires and those headlights belonged to Bill Secord, first responder, and before I could blink twice the whole community was gathered there to contemplate me in my sprawled and broken disgrace (wildly, it came to me that I could say I was just checking the chimney braces as a favor to Frank, in memory of Frank, that is, and to help out a poor widow who didn’t know the first thing about winter maintenance). Voices drifted over me. Two dogs slunk up to sniff my boots. I noticed a bottle of vodka passing from hand to hand, but no one thought to offer me any, not even to wet my lips. People debated whether or not I should be moved and Bill was all official about back injuries and the like and the sheriff appeared out of the shadows to take his report while the ambulance was jerking its lights in and out of the trees and Jessica, my bedmate, my companion, my old rug and sweet married bride, lurched up and leaned over me with her face so disarranged with hurt and confusion and rage I barely recognized her as she let loose with a cold wad of spit that wound up freezing right there on my cheek as the paramedics lifted me onto the stretcher and the doors of the ambulance slammed shut on the night and the mountain, which until that very moment had been my home and my hideout and my refuge from the bad old world.

  You want pain? Jessica filed for divorce before they even got the pin in my leg, and when I had to rely on the jerk whose name I won’t mention to drive me home from the hospital and help me up the steps to my own house and then make a second trip out to the car for the wheelchair, she was gone. As was about eighty-seven percent of the furniture and the plasma TV that had been my only solace the last couple of years, that and the squirrels, that is, and she’d cleaned out most of the microwave dinners and canned goods so that I had nothing to eat on top of nothing to watch. Oh, that was a cold house. And I tell you, for the rest of that winter, I never showed my face for the humiliation of what had gone down, and if I drank bourbon, I drank it alone.

  If we’re anything, though, we’re a community that forgets if not forgives—hell, half of them up here have done things twice as bad as looking in on a woman out of concern and love in the dead of a winter’s night—and by spring I was feeling almost back to normal. So much so that I even took the wheelchair down to the lodge one night, up and down those looping murderous hills for a good mile till my palms were bleeding, and sat there over a medium-rare steak, a pitcher of Firestone and a shot glass that never stayed dry for long because everybody who came through the door stood me a round and slapped me on the back and said how good it was to see me out and about. And that was fine. Time heals all wounds and such. Except that my nerves were like guitar strings twisted too tight and my heart was undergoing cardiac arrest at the thought that Lily might walk through that door at any minute. Which she didn’t. I tried calling her when I got back home—Bill Secord gave me a ride, thank God, or I’d probably still be down there—but she had caller I.D. and wouldn’t pick up.

  It must have been a few weeks later that I ran into that kid out on Tamarack Lane. Tamarack intersects my street, Aspen, and then swerves past our little man-made lake and continues on to the lodge and the main road beyond, so that if I want to go anywhere at all ninety percent of the time it’s going to be down Tamarack. We only have a couple of roads up here anyway, snaking wide frost-buckled blacktop thoroughfares to nowhere, hemmed in by the towering sequoias, ponderosa pines and the like that give the place its name, with maybe a cabin tucked back in the woods every couple of hundred yards, and these roads loop around back on themselves so the plan of the development is like a big hamster maze, one way in and one way out. Beyond that, there’s the state route winding its way down to Porterville to the north in case anybody would want to go down there and buy a plasma TV to replace the one lost to them, and to Kernville on the other side, where there’s nothing much but a couple run-down bars and trinket shops for the tourists. In winter, the Kernville road is closed due to the fact that nobody lives out there and the snow, which averages twenty-four feet per annum and goes to as much as forty and more in an El Niño year, isn’t worth the expense of plowing. Which puts us, for a good four or five months of the year, at the end of the road, for all that indicates or implies about the quality of people we sometimes unfortunately wind up with.

  This kid was one of them, though I didn’t know it at the time. I was getting around pretty good by then with my cane, my leg still shrunken and white as a grub where the cast had constricted it, and I’d just turned onto Tamarack, thinking to hobble down to the lodge for a little exercise and maybe check the mail and see who was around, have a drink or two, get social, when there he was, striding along in this jaunty hey-look-at-me kind of way. Now, it was pretty rare to see strangers walking around the development—somebody goes by my house and nine out of ten I can tell you their first, middle and last name and all the regrets they’ve had since they got out of elementary school—but there are hikers and day-trippers and whatnot coming by occasionally, so it wasn’t unheard of. Anyway, the kid looks to be twenty or so and he’s tall and greyhound skinny, with a little soul patch just like mine, and so of course I’m neighborly and call out my standard greeting (“What up?”), which he returns with a big doggy smile that shows off the gap where three of his teeth are missing in front, one upstairs, two down. Next thing we’re standing there chatting, and if I was vaguely aware of one of the house alarms going off up the street (we’re always getting cabins broken into up here because you leave a place vacant long enough and somebody’s going to notice), I barely gave it a thought.

  He was pretty winning, this kid, a real talker. Within sixty seconds he was asking me about the quality of the construction up on the mountain—he was a big aficionado of cabin architecture as well as being a master carpenter, or so he said, and why not believe him?—and three minutes later I found myself humping back up Aspen with him to show off what I’d done vis-à-vis layout, expose
d beams, roof pitch and all the rest when I took early retirement and built the place for Jessica six years ago. We got talking. I made a pot of coffee. He leaned back in the one armchair my wife had left behind and observed that the place was pretty spare. I agreed that it was. And I said to myself, What the hell, what have I got to lose? So I told him my story. When I was done—and I have to admit I went to some length to wring the very bitterest dregs out of it—I offered to freshen up his coffee with a shot of Jim Beam and he took me up on it and then, because we were just being neighborly as all hell and maybe I hadn’t had as many people to talk to as I might have liked these past months, I encouraged him to sit right there and open up. What was his story? How’d he wind up on the mountain? Was he somebody’s kid? Grandkid?

  Let me tell you, if you thought Lily had troubles, this kid went her one better. Or worse, I guess. He just looked at me a long moment over the rim of his cup, as if deciding whether to trust me or not, and he never flinched when the sheriff’s four-by went up and down the road two if not three times, siren screaming, and then he said, “You ever hear about that kid the parolee snatched in the back of Safeway when he was nine years old and then kept him traveling around the country till the kid didn’t know where he was or even who he was? Not to mention the dirty things he made that scared little kid do just to earn a candy bar—or, shit, a half-rotten scrap of meat? The handcuffs—you hear about the handcuffs?”

  Well, that was a story. How he had to eat dog food out of the can with the only present the man ever gave him, which was a bent spoon. How the man made him split wood for the stove and clean the house like a slave all day and wouldn’t let him get within a mile of a newspaper and never let him out of the house and didn’t even have a TV. I still don’t know how much of it was the truth, but I watched the tears come up in his eyes and you know he had trouble whatever it was. We sat talking for the better part of an hour and then the sheriff, siren stifled now but his lights still flashing, pulled into the driveway, and who was with him but Bill Secord, stepping out carefully so as not to trample the irises Jessica planted along the drive last year, and right behind him, in her red cowgirl boots and skintight jeans, was Lily.