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

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  “All right,” Brice heard himself say, and he was straightening up now and twisting a knot in the neck of the bag, “it’s nothing to get worked up over, sad as it is—it’s just the kind of thing we want to educate people about. But what we’ll do? We’ll leave the bag here beside the trail and collect it when we come back down, because no litterer’s going to spoil my day, are you with me?”

  After that, they went on up along a series of meadows and he pointed out the frost-withered remains of the various plants that flowered here in July—corn lilies, sneezeweed, columbine, rein orchids, geraniums—and promised he’d lead a summer hike if anybody was interested in seeing the meadows in bloom. “Right,” said Beverly, who seemed to have taken up post position just behind him, “and get eaten alive by the mosquitoes. And gnats. And those biting things, what are they? They look like houseflies but they sure make you dance.”

  He turned his head to look at her without breaking stride—and where was Syl? There, back toward the rear, in animated discussion with Mal. She was matching him stride for stride, her hands juggling ideas, the brim of her baseball cap pulled down so he couldn’t make out the upper half of her face, only her outthrust chin and the gleam of her moving lips. “Deerflies,” he said.

  “Not the yellow ones, the black ones.”

  A breeze stirred the tops of the pines. He could taste the moisture on the air. The sun was gone. “I don’t know,” he said. “Some sort of horsefly maybe. But you don’t have to worry today, do you?”

  “No,” she said, taking the grade with short powerful thrusts of her legs, and he saw that she wasn’t so much overweight as muscular, her calves swelling against the woolen knee socks and her thighs caught in the grip of a pair of tight blue nylon shorts. “No, I guess not.”

  “That’s the beauty of a fall hike,” he said, swinging round to fling out his arms as if he’d created it all, the meadows, the views, the soaring pines and big granite boulders ranged like giants’ skulls along the trail. Soon it would all be covered in snow and you’d need skis to get up here.

  The old man—he was second behind Beverly—took the opportunity to ask an involved question about the geology of the mountain, throwing around terms like “pre-cretaceous” and “metamorphic,” and the best Brice could do was to say he honestly didn’t know but that up top, up at nine thousand feet, there were all sorts of rare plants, like purple mountain parsley, which hadn’t even been discovered—or identified, that is—till 1976.

  “Dead now, I suppose,” the old man said.

  Brice acknowledged the point, taking a quick glance behind him to be sure everybody was still there, the group in single file now as the trail steepened and the switchbacks dug into the slope in the thinning air. “Just like the bugs.”

  —

  Two miles up was a saddle with a scatter of downed trees, where he liked to call a rest stop so people could catch up, refer to their water bottles and power bars and take in the view of the granite spires known as the Needles where they rose up like outstretched fingers from the grip of the mountain opposite. The group settled in, some of them spreading groundcloths, others easing down in the pine needles to sort through their packs. Everyone seemed companionable enough at this point, all the hang-ups and anxieties of their daily lives washed clean on the flow of blood pumping through their hearts and lungs and down into the loose working muscles of their legs. As advertised. And what had John Muir said? I never saw a discontented tree. Exactly.

  He was unwrapping the avocado and bean-sprout sandwich he’d prepared in the kitchen before first light when Syl, the bill of her cap set at a rakish angle, eased down beside him and began sorting through her own pack. She was on a diet—a perpetual diet, though to his eyes her figure had scarcely changed over the years, her legs firm, her stomach flat and her small, perfectly proportioned breasts still right where they should be, whether she was wearing a bra or not, and never mind the striations above her upper lip or the way her throat sagged to give away her age—and so she’d passed on his offer to make her a sandwich, relying on her cache of low-cal fiber bars instead. She unwrapped one now and gave him a grin.

  He grinned back. He was feeling good, better than good—he could have climbed up over Slate and kept on going down the far side and into the foothills, along the river course and all the way home. Car? What car? Who needed a car? “What were you two talking about back there?” he asked. “From what I could see it looked like you barely had time to catch your breath.”

  “What? Mal and me? He’s a talker, that’s for sure. He’s still upset about his last wife—Gloria, the one we never met? They lasted two years, I gather, if that. Plus, he keeps repeating himself, starts on one story and then suddenly he’s off on another one and then another till he doesn’t even know what the subject is and you have to guide him back to it.”

  “If you’ve got the patience.” He took a bite of the sandwich, gazed across the massed treetops below them to where the Kern River cut its canyon and then to the mountains beyond, mountains that rolled into other ranges altogether, on and on till they dropped off into the deserts to the east.

  “I don’t know what it is between you two—I mean, after all these years. He’s Mal, what can I say? He’s got his charms. Still.”

  The notion irritated him. “I thought he was a real bore.”

  “That’s just because he was nervous.”

  “Nervous? About what?”

  “You. The situation. Seeing us both after all this time. You know what he said? He said I was as beautiful as the day we first met.”

  He didn’t have anything to say to this. He studied her a moment, her legs sprawled in front of her, her lips pursed, her gaze eclipsed by some private memory. She took a bite of the fiber bar, a smear of chocolate caught in the corner of her mouth, then unscrewed the cap of her water bottle and took a long swallow.

  “But what about you?” she said finally. “You seemed pretty friendly with your groupie there, what was her name—the one with the nails and face job and the hair dyed the color of a brick wall? What is she, a cosmetologist or something?”

  He just smiled. “Beats me.”

  “But she’s hot for something, isn’t she?”

  “Yeah,” he agreed, smiling wider. “Aren’t they all?”

  It had begun to rain, a light pattering in the dust that had people rising to their feet and briskly stuffing things back into their packs. Mal had already shrugged into his poncho and was making his way toward them, so he pushed himself up and clapped his hands to get everyone’s attention. “All right, everybody,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the scrape and shuffle of activity, “gather round a minute. I don’t think the rain’s going to amount to much—”

  “Scattered showers,” the old man put in, cutting him off. “That’s what the TV said.”

  “Right, well, we can head down now or go on up to the summit—what do you think, show of hands?”

  The majority, Mal and Syl included, raised their hands, while the remainder just stood there watching him. “Good,” he said finally. “I’d hate for a little weather to spoil the fun, so let’s go on as planned and see what it’s like up top—anybody has a problem, don’t be shy. Just let me know and we’ll head back down anytime you say. But really, I agree with”—gesturing to the old man—“what was your name?”

  “Louis.”

  “With Louis here. The forecast, I mean. A little rain never hurt anybody, right?”

  —

  They were up at eight thousand feet, moving along easily, the rain sucked back up into the clouds, the trail barely slick and the black sheared-off face of Slate Mountain looming over the treetops as if it had just dropped down out of the sky, when the cries of what must have been a whole flock of ravens broke the silence. The trees held fast. There was the scrape of hiking boots. Then a pair of the birds appeared from below, beating upslope, their w
ings creaking to gain purchase on the air, and everybody stopped to watch them go. “What’s that all about, you think?” Beverly asked, and there she was, right behind him, her hair clamped beneath a floppy pink hat now as a concession to the damp. “Something dead up there?”

  “Probably a deer,” he said, “or the offal anyway. The stuff the hunters leave behind.”

  “For a raven party.”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” he said, moving on, talking over his shoulder while keeping one eye on the snaking line behind him. He was thinking of the way a carcass disappears up here, beetles coming up out of the ground, flies laying their eggs, vultures and ravens at it, rot, bacteria, coyotes, even the mice sneaking out under cover of darkness to gnaw calcium from the bones. He wanted to say, Everything dies to give life to something else, but he didn’t want to come off sounding pompous—or morbid, especially with a group like this, when they were all out here to deny the proposition or at least forget about it for the time it took them to get to the summit of a mountain and back down again—and so he left it at that.

  He turned his head and kept moving on up the trail, Beverly doing her best to keep pace, to show him she was fit, a fit widow, if that was what she was, as if he were in the market and this was some kind of test. Which, he supposed, it was. Why should there be limits? If you felt good, what did age matter? It was only a number. He didn’t feel any different than he had at fifty—or forty, even. His blood pressure was in the acceptable range, he and Syl had sex once a week and he slept through the night and woke each morning with the sense that there was something new out there in the world, something reserved for him and him alone if only he had the strength to go out and find it. His feet dug at the trail. He wasn’t even breathing hard.

  When they got close, he could see that the ravens were squabbling over something just off the trail. They hung in the trees like ornaments, fought along the ground in a black flap of wings, their voices harsh and constricted. He sliced away from the trail then, dodging through waist-high brush until he was there and the ravens lifted off silently and he saw what it was they’d been disputing: a bear. The carcass of a bear, its paws removed and its gut slit open, but otherwise intact. Before he had time to think (Rule #2: Never leave the trail), Beverly was there at his elbow and he could hear the others following behind, their voices muted, legs scissoring through the brush. He hadn’t wanted this: these people were old, they could misstep, break a leg, break everything.

  “What is it,” Beverly said, breathless, “—a bear? Is that a bear?”

  There was an anger churning in him—poachers, and they’d got the gallbladder and the paws to sell on the black market and left the rest to rot. What was wrong with the world? Christ, you couldn’t even take a hike anymore, not without this, this obscenity, this shit. Suddenly he was shouting. “Get back, all of you! Back on the trail!” But it was too late. Half of them were already gathered round, gaping at the swollen dead thing before them, its eyes gone, tongue discolored, the stumps of the legs rigid as poles, and the rest picking their way toward him. Beverly had her cell phone out, taking pictures. And here came Syl and Mal and then the old man, high-stepping his way through the bushes as if they were about to come to life and take him down.

  “We ought to report this,” Beverly said. “What number do we call? You know what number?”

  He would have told her it was useless, useless because there was nothing anybody could do about it, nothing that would put the animal together again and breathe the life back into it or eliminate the superstition and ignorance that drove the market for animal parts, for degradation, for destruction, but instead he just said, “There’s no signal up here.”

  It was then that the trees began to stir, a breeze there, a sound like distant freight. When the rain came, it came in earnest, a heavy pounding that slicked everything even as they struggled back to the trail and fumbled with their rain gear, and then it was sleet, and then it was snow.

  —

  This time there was no debate, no show of hands, no further pretense: if they wanted to make the summit it would have to be another day because he was in charge here—he was the captain of this ship—and they were turning back. “We’re calling it a day,” he said, and he wanted to tail it with a joke, a quip about the weather or maybe the weatherwoman on the radio and how she’d been right after all, but all the lightness had gone out of him. It was always rougher on the way down than the way up—people never seemed to realize that—and with the wet snow the footing would be worse than usual. He’d have to keep an eye on the old guy—Louis—and on Beverly, who’d already slipped twice, the rear of her shorts sporting a long dark vertical smear that ran down the back of her right leg as if she’d just stepped out of the mineral bath at the spa. They hadn’t gone a hundred yards before he almost lost it himself, looking back over his shoulder to keep everyone in sight when he should have been watching his own two feet, but he managed to catch himself at the last minute. That would have been something, the group leader taking a muddy pratfall, and whether he’d have wound up hurting himself or not, he could imagine the sort of multi-faceted joke Mal would have made of it—and you didn’t see him slipping. Not Mal. He had the agility of a surfer, all out-flung arms and flapping lips.

  No one had much to say, not even Beverly, who was right behind him (and Louis behind her, as if they’d drawn lots). Every once in a while, negotiating the sharp corner of a switchback, he’d hear a snatch of Mal’s voice in mid-discourse, but the rest were quiet, focusing on their own thoughts and maybe their disappointment too, because if you didn’t reach the summit, no matter how illuminating the scenery or soothing the exercise, the hike was a failure. For his part, he was disappointed too—the bear had cast a pall over everything and then the weather had come down on top of that, and if he had to think about it, there was Mal too, Mal as pure irritant, and why he’d ever agreed to get back together with him he’d never know. Some misguided notion of being cool or democratic or nostalgic or whatever it was. His neck ached from looking back over his shoulder and his left knee was sore where he’d strained it to keep from falling. He was thinking he’d beg off on dinner plans, thinking maybe Mal could get a ride back with somebody else—Next time, he’d tell him, we’ll do it next time—and then they were down at the seventy-five-hundred-foot level and the snow tapered off to sleet and then a light rain and by the time they reached the parking area it had stopped altogether.

  He stood there patiently at the trailhead, making a checkmark by each name on his reservation list as people filed by him. Most just nodded or gave him a muted thanks, eager to get to their cars and back to their recliners and sofas and wide-screen TVs, but the old man stopped to jaw awhile—Hell, I could have made it to the top, no problem, but I respect your decision, what with the women, but maybe next time we’ll do an all-male hike and really put some miles under our boots, huh, what do you say?—and Beverly stopped too, standing there beside him as if she were ready to hand out certificates of achievement.

  Five minutes passed. Ten. He kept looking up the long flat final stretch of the trail, expecting to see Syl and Mal come striding round the corner at any minute, but they never showed. The old man climbed into his car. The lot cleared. Beverly snapped open her compact and touched up her lipstick, making a kissing noise that seemed unnaturally loud in the silence that had descended after the last of the cars rattled up the rutted road to the highway. “Where could they be?” she murmured, as if thinking for him. “They were right behind us, weren’t they?”

  He looked back across the dirt lot to where his car stood beside a bulky black SUV that must have been Beverly’s, straining his eyes to see into the darkened interior, as if somehow Syl and Mal had slipped by him and were waiting there for him, talking quietly, making jokes, wondering why he was lingering here with this boxy widow while the sky darkened and everybody just grew colder and hungrier.

  At fifteen minutes he cupped his h
ands and began to shout. “Syl!” he called, “Syl!,” until he was bleating it. At twenty, he started back up the trail, Beverly tagging along like a dog, though he tried to dissuade her. “You don’t have to feel responsible,” he told her. “It’s nothing. I’m sure it’s nothing.”

  “I want to help. I can’t just leave you out here by yourself.”

  He had nothing to say to this. He could feel the incline in the long muscles of his legs. His breath steamed before him. “I can’t imagine what happened,” he said, moving quickly now, but not panicking, not yet. “They’re both experienced in the woods and they’re both—Syl especially—in good shape.”

  “Maybe she turned an ankle. Maybe—” Beverly let the thought trail off. She was eager, keeping pace, her arms swinging at her sides.

  He didn’t want to think about heart attack or stroke or even broken bones. He called out till his voice went hoarse and the shadows deepened and the trail was gone and they had to turn back. It was full dark by the time they got back to his car. He sat there, the heater going, Beverly shivering beside him, and tapped the horn at intervals, signaling into the night. An hour crept by. The battery light kept going on and he had to keep starting the car up to run the heater and then shutting it off again. What they talked about, he and Beverly—this stranger who was sitting beside him in the dark while his thoughts raced and collided—he had no recollection of afterward. But at seven, when there was still no sign of Syl, he backed the car around and drove the three miles to the lodge, where there would be a telephone available to him, a ground line that could get him through to anybody, to the county sheriff, the paramedics, Search and Rescue, and what was he going to say? Just this: I’ve got two people missing.

  —