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

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  The car was unremarkable, but strange for all that, its steel shell, the glint of the sun on its windshield, the twin plumes of dust trailing away behind it till it was there and motionless and he could see his ex-wife’s face, a shadow clenched in distaste, as the two boys, nine years old now—or were they ten?—spun out of the doors in a flurry of leaping limbs. He caught them in his arms and rocked them round him in a mad whirl, their voices like the cries of birds descending to a feast. He showed them the prayer wheel, let them spin it. Sat with them and listened to their ten thousand questions (When was he coming back? Where was Karuna? Could they see his yurt? Did he have a pet lizard? Could they have a pet lizard?) He found that his mimetic skills had blossomed and he answered them with his hands, his eyes, the cast of his mouth and the movement of his shoulders. Finally, when the novelty had begun to wear off and they started to look round them for a means of escape—he could only imagine what their mother must have been telling them about their father’s mental state on the long flight and longer drive out here—he produced a pad and pencil and wrote them a note.

  What he was doing, he reiterated, was seeking the truth, prajna, wisdom. Liberation from the cycle of rebirth in which all beings are trapped. If one soul achieves liberation, that soul can guide others toward achieving it too. They crouched beside him, staring at the pad in his lap, their faces numb, eyes fixed on the words as if the words had no meaning. I’m doing it for you, he wrote, underlining fiercely, for you, for both of you.

  “Mom too?” Kaden asked.

  He nodded.

  They gave each other a look, smiles flowering, and in the next instant they sprang up in a sudden delirium of joy and ran to her where she sat in the car, carrying the note like a gift of infinite worth, the paper fluttering in the breeze their moving limbs stirred in the air. She took it, her face a simulacrum of itself behind the reflective windshield, then ordered them into the car. There was the abrupt thunderclap of the engine turning over, the screech of the front end as the car wheeled round, pale miniature hands fluttering their goodbyes out the open window, and then, finally, silence.

  Rattlesnake

  The rattlesnake was itself a shadow, pooled there on the trodden dirt floor of the yurt as if shadows ruled and light was abject. He didn’t see it until it was too late. Karuna, her hair released from the tight braid and exerting a life and movement of its own, was washing her face over a pan of water he’d heated for her on the woodstove and he’d been watching her idly, remembering their first night together after they’d realized to their delight—karma, it was karma—that they lived no more than half an hour’s drive from each other through the dense hilly woodlands of Westchester County. They were in Georgia then, the last night of the conference, and they’d lingered over beers, exchanging information, and she was so stunned by the coincidence that she’d slid away from the table in a slow sinuous dance, then taken him by the hand and led him back to her room.

  When the snake bit her just above the ankle, where the swell of her calf rose from the grip of the heavy white sweatsock she wore as protection against the evening chill, it was just doing what it was designed to do. There was warmth in the yurt. It had come to the warmth. And she, inadvertently, had stepped on it. She didn’t cry out, not even then, not even when the snake snapped back into the shadows as if it were attached to a spring, but just looked down in bewilderment at her bare calf and the two neat spots of blood that had appeared there in commemoration of the puncture wounds. He didn’t think of what the snake’s message had been, not yet, not before Karuna stretched herself out on the bed and he twisted the tourniquet round her calf and her eyes fluttered and the fire hissed in the stove and the leg began to swell and darken and he took the air-horn to the door of the yurt and annihilated the silence in a single screaming stroke.

  The snake’s message—and he knew it even as Dairo and Bodhi flew up out of the darkness with faces like white darting bats, Geshe Stephen and the others not far behind—was this: I am the karmic representative of the reptile world and all is not well among us. There is nothing inside and no cessation of pain. Hooray! Jabba-jabba-jabba!

  Without Sadness

  A tangle of hands moved like thought, juggling mute phrases and tracing the edges of panic. Everyone was gesturing at once, the yurt shrunk round them, the snake vanished, the fire dying in the stove. Karuna’s eyes had stopped blinking. She seemed to be in a deep trance, gone as deep as any soul can go, focused on the rising swirls of the ceiling and the circular hole that gave onto the night and the stars and the dead black face of the universe above.

  His hands trembled as he gripped the pencil and scribbled a note for Geshe Stephen, who was standing stooped over the bed, looking lost. We need to get the doctor.

  The Geshe shrugged. There was no doctor. There was no telephone. The nearest town was Indio Muerto. They all knew that—they’d all signed on with that knowledge and its implications implanted like splinters in their brains.

  What about the car?

  Another shrug. The community’s only automobile was a boxy white Prius belonging to Geshe Stephen, which was housed beneath a formfitting cloth out back of his yurt where its shape wouldn’t tempt anyone from the path or interfere with the business at hand. Its wheels were up on blocks and the Geshe, in a first-day ceremony, had drained the fuel tank and removed the distributor cap as a symbolic gesture while the gathered aspirants looked rapturously on.

  We need to get her to the hospital! he screamed across the page in angry block letters.

  The Geshe nodded. He was in agreement. He dipped his shoulders, produced a tight grin that tapered to a grimace at both corners of his mouth. His expression said: But how?

  Into that silence that was fraught with the shuffling of feet, bare and slippered both, the faint hiss of the stove and the sub-aural racket of neurons firing in brains that were no longer in touch with souls, no longer calm and meditative, neurons nudged from the path and straining to find their way back, there came a deep harsh ratcheting cry from the figure on the bed, from Karuna. They turned to her as one. Her face was twisted. Her leg was swollen to twice its size. The skin was black around the wound. They all looked shocked, Bodhi especially, shocked and offended, wondering why she hadn’t stifled that human noise with a fist, with a knuckle stuffed between her teeth. The silence had been broken, and it was Karuna who had broken it, consciously or not.

  What he wanted to say—to roar so that they could have heard him all the way to Indio Muerto and back—was Christ, what is wrong with you people? Can’t you see she’s dying? But he didn’t. Habit, conditioning, the reflex of the inner path kept him silent, though he was writhing inside. This was attachment and that sigh was the sound of truth.

  Your Boat

  Later, after they’d all filed uselessly out, he built up the fire and sat beside her while her breathing slowed and accelerated and finally caught in her throat for the last time. It might have taken an hour or mere minutes, he couldn’t say. Into his head had come a new mantra, a jingle from a commercial on TV when he was growing up as a child of baseball fields and macadam basketball courts with their bent and rusted hoops and the intense otherworldly green of a New York summer, a green so multivalent and assertive it was like a promise of life to come. The jingle was for a toothpaste and it made its own promises, and yes, you did wonder where the yellow went when you brushed your teeth with Pepsodent. The new mantra sang in his head and danced a tarantella, double speed, triple, and then it became a dirge. Just before dawn he found himself running back even further, reaching down to take hold of the earliest mantra he could recall as it marched implacably across the field of his consciousness, beating out its own tempo with two pounding knees on the underside of a metal desk in the back corner of a just-arisen classroom, Row, row, row your—Om mani padme hum—Gently down the stream. Row, row, row—Om.

  At dawn he got up from the bed and without looking behind him pushed open
the door and walked out into the desert.

  Dragonfly

  In the desert, he walked without purpose or destination. He walked past the hill where his wife had found the discarded water bottle, past the place where the green truck had appeared on the horizon, beyond the mountain where he’d gathered ironwood and down into the hot bleached plain it gave onto. He needed a mantra, but he had none. Into his head it came, the mantra the Geshe had given him, but he couldn’t sustain it, his mind swept clear of everything now. The sun was the eye of God, awake and staring. After a while his feet seemed to desert him and he sat heavily in the lee of a jagged boulder.

  What he awakened to were voices, human voices, speaking aloud. He blinked open his eyes and looked up into three terrified faces, man, woman and child, their wide straw hats framing their skulls like halos. They were speaking to him in a language he didn’t understand. They said, “Necesita usted socorro?” They said, “Tiene agua?” And then one of them, the woman, went down on her knees and held a plastic jug of water to his lips and he drank, but sparingly, and only because he knew they wouldn’t go away, wouldn’t stop talking, unless he did. He didn’t need water. He was beyond water, on a whole different path altogether. He reassured them with gestures, thanked them, blessed them, and then they were gone.

  The sun moved till the projection of rock gave up its shade. His eyes closed but the lids burned till he opened them again and when he opened them the dragonfly was there. He studied it for a long while, the delicate interplay of its wings, the thin twisting calligraphy of its legs and the perfect jointed tube of its thorax. And what was its message? It had no message, he saw that now. It was merely a splinter of light, hovering for just a moment—just this moment—over the desert floor.

  (2009)

  A Death in Kitchawank

  Saturday, just after two, the sun a hot compress on her shoulders and scalp, the shrieks and catcalls of the children as they splash in the shallows a kind of symphony of the usual. Behind her, the sharp thwock of the dense black rubber ball as it rockets from the paddle and slaps the wall, regular as a heartbeat till one of the men miscalculates and it freezes in cardiac arrest on the tail of a stifled curse. One beat, two, and here it comes again: thwock. She’s thinking she should have brought her straw hat to the beach with her because she wouldn’t want a thin red line of sunburn etched into the parting of her hair, but she’ll worry about that later—or maybe not at all. She hasn’t worn her hat in a week or more now—she hates hats, hats are a thing of her mother’s day—and her tan is deep, even at her hairline. She’s wearing a pair of oversized sunglasses new from the drugstore yesterday and last year’s black one-piece, which is maybe a little tight around the hips and waist, but so what? She’s not on display here. This is her beach, her community, her lake. These are her friends and neighbors gathered in their beach chairs and sprawled across their fluffed-up towels and beach blankets with their paperbacks and newspapers and Hebrew National wieners. This is the peace at the center of life. This, this Saturday in July when her mind runs free all the way up to the arch of the sun and back and her only worry is to shift the straps on her shoulders and gloss her lips to keep them from drying out.

  In the house, which she could see if she craned her neck to look back over her shoulder past the concession stand and the paddleball courts and the big open grassy field where teenage couples are strolling hand in hand and boys playing pickup baseball, is the refrigerator, new three years ago and as cluttered as if it had been there a century. In its cool dark depths are the steaks in a covered dish of honey-ginger marinade, the potato salad and coleslaw she put up after breakfast and the Rose’s lime juice and vodka for the gimlets. All is well. And so what if the warm shifting sand beneath her feet has to be trucked in every other year at the expense of the Kitchawank Colony Association, its hundreds of billions of individual grains disappearing into the high grass, washing into the lake, adhering to toes and arches and tanned sinewy ankles only to wind up on bathroom tiles and beneath the kitchen sink? It’s as essential as air, as the water itself: how could you have a beach without it?

  When she next opens her eyes it’s to the quick cold shock of Susan, her youngest, snuggling in beside her, everything wet suddenly as if a whole basket of fish has been upended in her lap. She feels the cold bunched knees poking at her, the shuddering ribcage and chattering teeth, hears her own voice jump up: “Get off, honey, you’re all wet!” And Susan, freckled, stick-limbed, ten years old, snuggling tighter. “I’m cold, Mommy.” She reaches behind her for the beach bag and the towel she’s brought for herself, never bothering to ask where her daughter’s own towel is because she knows it’ll turn up at the edge of the ball field or draped over the welded frame of the monkey bars, as soaked through as a dishrag. And then she’s wrapping her and holding her close till the shivering stops and her daughter springs loose to chase half a dozen other kids to the concession stand. For Coke, winter in a bottle, and the wiener snug in its bun. With chopped onion and sweet pickle relish and plenty of mustard. She lifts her sunglasses for a moment to watch after her and here are the Sollovays, the Greens, the Goldsteins, settling in around her in a wash of greeting and banter and sheer high spirits. Marsha Goldstein, her legs silken and her lips fluttering around her smile, offers a cigarette, but she prefers her own and they both light up and let the tobacco lift them, until in unison, as if they’ve rehearsed it, they throw back their heads and exhale in long twin plumes of blue. “What time did you want us tonight?” Marsha asks. “Fiveish?”

  “Yes,” she says, “yes, that’ll be perfect,” and she glances over her shoulder, past the courts and the chain-link fence and the screen of trees to where her house sits tranquilly on its own little rise—the only house, of all the two hundred and more in the community, that looks directly onto the lake, a fact of which she tries not to be too sinfully proud. There’s the Buick, last year’s model, at rest in the drive like a picture out of a magazine, and the swing set they put up for Susan and her friends, though you could throw a stone and hit the big metal-framed one in the playground at the lake. The Japanese maple she planted when her daughter was born stands out in relief against the near wall of the house, throwing a delicate patterned shade over the flagstone path up to the kitchen door, its leaves the color of the claret Sid likes to sip after dinner. She lets her eyes linger there a moment before lifting them to the house itself. And it’s funny, because with the way the light comes off the lake and the big picture window stands in shadow, she can see into her own kitchen and the table there, already set for dinner, the clock on the yellow wall, time ticking by, and it’s almost as if she’s in two places at once.

  [Forgive me for stepping in here but I do want to get this right—the fact is, I may have been there that day, the threads of the past so snarled now that thirty-five years on I’ve lost the ability to separate them with any clarity. But if I was there, I would have been on the paddleball court, playing in a fiercely competitive and very physical foursome with Miriam’s husband Sid and her two sons—Alan, who was twenty-six, and Lester, my best friend, who was then twenty-two, like me. And I would have entered the next scene too, the dinner scene, preceded by cocktails and the long unwinding of a muggy Saturday afternoon, fresh from the lake and the shower, the corded muscles of my legs gone limp in the afterglow of exercise and the long slow seep of alcohol.]

  She’s got both fans going, the one at the kitchen window and the big lazy ceiling fan revolving in a slow slippage of optical illusion over the table, and yet still she’s dripping. Marsha’s with her, their drinks perspiring on the counter while they stand elbow to elbow at the cutting board, slicing long squared-off strips of carrot and wafer-thin slivers of Vidalia onion for the salad, dicing cucumbers and halving cherry tomatoes still warm from the garden, Marsha, who’d been maid of honor at her wedding to Sid just as she’d been Marsha’s maid of honor when she married David in a time when there were only the four of them. Now the boys are
in their twenties, Susan’s ten and Marsha’s daughter Seldy is sixteen, or no, seventeen.

  “I don’t know,” she’s saying, in reference to the two young couples, summer people, who’ve become fixtures at the beach, “if you’ve got it, flaunt it, though seeing the one girl in her two-piece suit makes me feel like I put on a hundred pounds—yesterday. And another hundred this morning.”

  “No, no, I agree, but the shorter one, what’s her name—?”

  “Barbara, isn’t it? Or is that the other one?”

  “The other one’s Rachel, and she’s really very sweet, though you wouldn’t know it from the look on her face, which to me, I don’t know, is so forbidding—but what I was saying is to walk around in a two-piece when you’re eight months’ pregnant is just—”

  “Too much.”

  “Right,” she says, and then they’re both laughing. “Way too much.”

  From the living room comes the sound of the men, their voices rich and pleased, as they call down the questions of the day, revile Nixon, trade quips with the boys. Les has begun to wear his hair long and dress in bell-bottoms and spangled shirts, in confraternity with his friend T., who looks so satisfied he could be flying across the room on his own magic carpet ride. And she’s had her moments of worry—or not worry, really, just concern—over whether the boys have been experimenting with tea or grass or whatever they call it these days, but she’s never said anything. And won’t. She doesn’t want to harp. Let them do what they’re going to do because no one, not even a mother, can legislate for them. Once they’re grown, that is, and her boys, with the shoulders and arms they inherited from Sid, are definitely grown.

  They’re just sitting down to dinner—to the artichokes, one per plate, the grill out on the deck sending up smoke under the steaks—when Seldy, in a yellow sundress that shows off the figure she’s been growing into over the past year, drifts into the room, late as usual. Her mother says, “It’s about time,” and her father makes a quip about how she must’ve gotten lost on the long grueling four-minute drive from the house, but Sid and the three boys are dumbstruck for one thunderous instant. This is the face of beauty, and though they’re all family here, though Seldy’s like a daughter to Sid and a sister to the boys, Miriam’s boys anyway, none of that matters. Sid’s the first to break the spell, his voice rising to emphasize the joke: “Well, Jesus Christ, we thought we were going to wilt away and starve waiting for you.” And then the boys are falling all over themselves to wave and grin and ante up the wit (“Yeah, and think how starved the first caveman must’ve been to discover you could eat one of these things”), and Seldy, flushing, slides into the empty seat between Alan and Les, letting the steam from the artichoke rise gently about her face and the long trailing ends of her hair slip from her shoulders to sway gracefully over her plate.