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

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  “Me?” He held the moment, straight-faced, before he broke into a grin. “I’m the number one best dancer in the world,” he said, letting his eyes flick over the dance floor before turning back to her. “Now that Michael Jackson’s dead.”

  Vijay

  What he did, and it was nothing anybody in any movie he’d ever seen would have done, was run. As soon as the tiger let go of him—to slam back into Manny so hard it was like a rocket flashing across the pavement—he scrambled to his feet and ran as fast as he could through the gloom of the day that was closing down around him, looking frantically for a way out, a tree to climb, anything, before he realized he was making for the snack bar, where there were people, where they could call 911, call the cops, call an ambulance. He didn’t think of Vik till Vik came pounding up behind him, blood all over, his clothes in strips and his eyes rolled back in his head. They didn’t say anything, not a word, just ran. It was maybe three hundred yards to the snack bar, three football fields, but it seemed to take forever to get there, as if they were running in place in some waking nightmare—and that was what this was, exactly what it was.

  But when they got there, frantic, the doors were locked and they could see the guy inside, the metal head, the moron, and he wasn’t moving toward them—he was backing away! Vik was beating on the glass, they both were, shouting for help, shouting to open up because there was an animal loose, a tiger loose, open up, open up!

  The kid didn’t open up. He just backed into a corner and tried to stare them down, but he had his cell in his hand and he was punching in a number (as it later turned out he was dialing 911, not because he believed them but because he thought they were on drugs and trying to rob the place). They kept beating on the glass and they would have broken right through it if they could, beating with the palms of their hands and shouting out for help, until they watched the kid’s face go slack and turned to see the tiger coming right at them, its feet churning and its head down—following the blood trail, following the spoor. Vijay felt it like a hot wind as it blew past him to careen into Vik, its paws raking and batting, and though he flattened himself against the glass, shouting “Vik! Vik!” there was nothing he could do but wait to die as the flashing teeth and furious claws worked his brother over.

  Tatiana

  This world. This world of apes, this screeching world. She was out in it, terrified, enraged, doing the only thing she knew to do, one down and dead and another beneath her, all the power of all the generations invested in her and burning bright. She roared. She showed her fangs. And she would have gone for the other one, the one frozen there by the shimmering wall, if it weren’t for the distraction of this solid rolling thing with its flashing lights and screaming siren and the hot quick shock of surprise that ended her life.

  Siobhan

  She danced till she was soaked through—and he was right, Jason, he was the best dancer in the world. The music seeped through her skin and into her blood. Her father danced with her, then she danced with her sister and everybody was taking pictures with their cell phones. And then there was a slow song and Jason put an arm around her waist and she watched what everybody else was doing, all the adults, and rested her head on his shoulder, on his chest, right where she could feel the flutter of his heart. She couldn’t hear any of the animals anymore, couldn’t have heard them even if they’d been roaring, because the music was everything. The night settled in. Jason rocked with her. And if she knew where she was at all, it was because of the smell, the furtive lingering odor of all those animals locked in their cages.

  (2012)

  The Marlbane Manchester Musser Award

  If you’d happened to spot Riley on the train that afternoon, your eyes drifting up momentarily from your BlackBerry, iPod or other hand-held device, you probably wouldn’t have made much of him. He was in his fifties then, taller than average, thinner than average, with a tendency to hunch inside the black leather coat he affected (knee-length, of a style thirty years out of date, replete with once-shining buckles, zippers and studs in the shape of miniature starbursts) and hair that would have been gray or even white but for the providence of the Clairol Corporation. He’d applied a mixture called “Châtain Moyen” in the shower just that morning, expecting, as the label promised, medium brown, but getting instead something between the color of a new penny and a jar of marinara sauce. In any case, he was oblivious. He had his head down, studying the stained typescript of his generic acceptance speech, abbreviating in the left-hand margin the title of the award he was now on his way to receive, though he already had it by heart: The Marlbane Manchester Musser Award in Regional Depiction from the Greater Stuyvesant Area Chamber of Commerce and Associated Libraries. He just didn’t want any slip-ups, that was all. Especially if alcohol was involved. And alcohol was always involved.

  He’d left Buffalo at seven-forty a.m. and expected to be in Albany by two—at least that was what the Amtrak timetable proposed, and whether or not Amtrak would deliver was beyond his control. In Albany, he was to be met by Donna Trumpeter, of the Greater Stuyvesant Women’s Service Club, who would drive him in her own personal blue-black SUV the remaining forty-eight point five miles to the town itself. There would be a dinner, served either in the town hall or a school cafeteria gussied up with crepe paper and a banner, he would give his speech and read a passage from his latest novel, Maggie of the Farm, accept a plaque and a check for $250 and drink as much scotch as was humanly possible before he was presented at the local Holiday Inn for a lukewarm shower, a stab at sleep and, in the morning, acidic coffee and rubberized waffles, after which Donna Trumpeter or one of her compatriots would return him to the train station so he could reverse the journey he was now undertaking.

  “Why do you even bother?” his third wife, Caroline, had thrown at him as he was shrugging into his coat that morning for the drive to the station. “It’s not as if you don’t have a trunk full of awards already—awards you never even glance at, as far as I can see.”

  He had his hand on the doorknob, the slab of the door thrown back on the awakening light of a bitter morning desecrated with sleet, an inch of it already on the ground and more coming. “For the publicity.”

  “Publicity? What kind of publicity you think the Greater Stuyvesant area is going to give you? Nobody in New York’s ever heard of it. I’ll bet they’ve never even heard of it in Albany. Or Troy either. Or what, Utica.”

  “It all adds up.”

  “To what?”

  He sighed. Let his shoulders slump into the cavernous hollows of the coat. “For the money then.”

  “The money? Two hundred fifty bucks? Are you kidding? That’d barely cover dinner at Eladio.”

  “Yes,” he said, the draft raw on the left side of his face.

  “Yes, what?”

  “Yes, I’m kidding.”

  She might have had something more to say about it, but really, what did it bother her what he did—she had a car and a credit card, and a night alone never killed anybody—but she just bunched her chin and squinted her eyes as if to get a better read on him. The sleet whispered over the pavement. The air tasted of metal. “My god,” she said. “What did you do to your hair?”

  —

  He was in the club car, scarring his palate with superheated coffee out of a cardboard container and masticating an ancient sandwich advertised as chicken salad on wheat but which managed to taste of absolutely nothing, when a powerfully built middle-aged man came swaying down the aisle, pushing a boy before him. Riley glanced up, though he wasn’t naturally curious, despite his profession. What he knew of people he knew from his early wild years—and from the newspaper and movies, or films as he liked to call them—and that had been enough to get him through fourteen novels and counting. He believed in giving people their space and if he didn’t really have much use for the rest of humanity, that was all right—he led a pretty hermetic existence these days, what with his books, the cat
s (six of them) and Caroline, Caroline, of course. He liked to say, only half-joking, that he resented strangers because they always seemed to be in his way but that he was willing to tolerate them—and here he’d shrug and grin—because, who knew, they might just buy his books.

  At any rate, there was something about these two that caught his attention, and it might have had to do with the fact that they were the only other people in the car but for the attendant, a recessive little man of indeterminate age and origin who looked as if he’d rolled over more miles than all the truckers in western New York State combined. Still, they made an odd pair. The man was white, fleshy in the face, with eyes that seized on Riley and then flung him away just as quickly, and the boy—he looked to be eight or nine—was dark-skinned, Hispanic maybe. Or maybe Indian—from India. All this went through Riley’s head in an instant and then he dismissed it and returned to his sandwich and the newspaper he’d spread out on the plastic tabletop, even as the big man and the boy settled into the booth directly behind him.

  After a while he felt the booth heave as the man got up and went to the counter to order a coffee for himself and hot chocolate and a sticky bun for the boy. It took no more than a minute or two for the attendant to irradiate the drinks in the microwave and hand over the cellophane packet with the bun smeared inside, but the whole while the big man kept his gaze fixed on Riley, a gaze so steady and unrelenting Riley began to wonder if he somehow knew him. A single jolt of paranoia sizzled through him—could this be the deranged yahoo who’d called up early one morning to say how disgusted he was by Maggie of the Farm because Maggie was such a slut, and go on to wonder, in a pullulating spill of profanity, why that had to be, why every woman in every book and movie and TV show had to be such a fucking slut?—when he realized that the man wasn’t looking at him at all. He was looking beyond him to where the boy sat, as if the boy was a piece of luggage he was afraid somebody was going to dash by and snatch.

  Then the man was swaying down the aisle again, this time more gingerly—and dangerously—because he had his hands full, a cardboard cup in each hand and the sticky bun dangling from two fingers in its shrink-wrapped package. Again the booth heaved. There was the faintest rasp as the cardboard containers made contact with the table. The rails clacked. Scenery rushed past the windows. The man said something (Spanish, was he talking in Spanish?) and it was followed by the noise of crinkling cellophane as the treat was unwrapped—whether by the boy or the man, Riley couldn’t say.

  All of a sudden he was irritated with himself—what did he care? Since these two had come into the car he’d been stuck on the same paragraph, reading it over and over as if the words had no meaning. Exasperated, he glanced out the window as a lone clapboard house flashed by, then a series of brown rippled fields, then another house and another expanse of field, equally brown and equally rippled. He’d just brought his eyes back to the paper when the man’s voice started up behind him.

  “Hello, Lon?” A pause. “I am on the train, yes. Just passing Syracuse. Were you able to place that bet for me? Two hundred, the over/under on the Bills, yes?” The voice was needling, breathy, the vowels elongated and the diction too precise, as if it were being translated, and here it was stuck in Riley’s head. In disgust, he folded up the paper and slid out of the booth, leaving the empty cup and sandwich wrapper for the attendant to deal with. He didn’t glance behind him, though he wanted to give the guy a look—cell phones, God, he hated cell phones. Instead he just brushed imaginary crumbs from the front of his coat and started up the aisle.

  “But I just wanted to tell you,” the man’s voice flew up and batted round the molded aluminum ceiling like an asthmatic bird, “don’t wait for me at the Albany station—change of plan. I’m going to be taking a different route.” He pronounced it “rowt,” but then what would you expect? “Yes, that’s right: I have something I need to dispose of. A package, yes. That’s right, a package.”

  —

  Anent Riley: he was a committed technophobe, forever pushed to the brink by the machines that controlled his life, from the ATM to the ticket dispenser at the parking garage and the clock radio that kept him awake half the night with its eternally blinking light. Card keys baffled and frustrated him—he could never seem to get the elevator to work or open the door to his own room in a hotel, and once he did manage to get inside, the TV remote, with its gang-piling options, invariably defeated him. He distrusted computers, preferring to write by hand, the way he’d always done. And the keyless car Caroline had talked him into buying put him in a rage every time he got behind the wheel—it seemed to change its agenda randomly, confronting him with all sorts of warning beeps and whistles, not to mention a sinuous female voice with an Oxbridge accent that popped up out of nowhere and never seemed to have anything good to say, when all he wanted was to turn a key, shift into gear and go. To drive. To get somewhere—his destination—without having to take a mechanical aptitude test. Was that too much to ask? Wasn’t that what cars were for?

  Worst of all was the cell phone. He refused to carry one—If you want to know the truth, there’s nobody I want to talk to—and it irritated him to see the things stuck to the sides of people’s heads as if generating a nonstop stream of vapid chatter was essential to life, like breathing or eating or shitting. What he valued was simplicity, pen to paper, the phone on its stand in the front hallway where it belonged, starry nights overhead, wood split and stacked beside the fireplace in the hundred-year-old farmhouse he and Caroline had bought six years ago (though admittedly the farm itself was long gone, replaced by tract houses, another irritant). Simplicity. Unmediated experience. Maggie, on her farm, tossing feed to the chickens or tugging at a cow’s udders in the absence of electronic babble. Still, for all that, as he settled back into his seat after his annoying encounter in the club car, he couldn’t help patting his pocket to feel the burden of the alien weight there—Caroline’s iPhone, which she’d insisted he take in the event anything went wrong on the other end of the line. What if Donna Trumpeter failed to show? What if the train derailed? What if terrorists bombed the Albany station? Then I’ll just go ahead and die, he’d said. Gladly. Because I won’t have to carry, this, this—but she’d thrust it on him and that was the end of the argument.

  He’d set the newspaper aside and had just opened the new novel by one of his former classmates at Iowa—Tim McNeil, whose skyrocketing fame made his stomach clench with envy—when the pneumatic doors at the end of the car hissed back and the big man entered, pushing the boy before him with one oversized hand and clutching a valise in the other. Riley noticed the man’s clothes for the first time now—an ill-fitting sport coat in a checkered pattern, pressed pants, shoes so black and glistening he must have shined them three times a day—and what was he? Some sort of foreigner, that was evident, even to someone as indifferent as Riley. The term “Pole” jumped into his head, which was immediately succeeded by “Croat,” though he couldn’t say why, since he’d never been to Poland or Croatia and had never known anyone from either country. Russian, he thought next, and settled on that. But Jesus, the guy wasn’t going to sit across from him, was he? If he was, he’d just get up and—

  But no—the man chose a seat facing him, two rows up. There were other people on the car, a trio of nuns bent over their cell phones, a young mother with two comatose babies, a few salesman types, what looked to be a college girl with a book spread open in her lap though she too was busy with her phone, texting wisdom out into the world, and nobody so much as glanced up. The man made a show of heaving the valise up onto the overhead rack, then deposited the ticket strips in the metal slot on the seatback, pushed the boy into the inner seat and sat heavily in the other, his eyes raking over Riley so that he felt that tympanic thump of discomfort all over again. Enough, he told himself, dropping his eyes—he wasn’t going to let it bother him. Nothing was going to bother him. He was on his way to pick up an award and he was going to have a good time because
that was what this was all about, a break in the routine, a little celebration for work well done, an a-ward, a re-ward, something Caroline could never even begin to understand because she was about as artistic as a tree stump. And it all added up, it did, no matter what she thought. He was in the game still and any one of his books could go big the way McNeil’s had. Who knew? Maybe there’d be a movie, maybe Spielberg would get involved, maybe word of mouth was operating even now . . .

  He bent to the book—a sequel to the New York Times bestselling Blood Ties, which immediately made him wonder if he shouldn’t attempt a sequel to Maggie—and followed the march of the paragraphs up and down the page for as long as he could, which was no more than five minutes, before he fell off to sleep, his chin pinioned to his breastbone.

  —

  Riley wasn’t one to dream—sleep came at him like a hurtling truck—and when he felt the hand on his shoulder, the gentle but persistent pressure there, he was slow to come back to the world. He found himself blinking up into the face of the erstwhile Russian, the big man with the careful accent, who was saying this to him: “Sir. Sir, are you awake?”

  He blinked again, the phrase I am now coming into his head, but he merely murmured, “Huh?”

  The man’s face hung over him, pores cratered like the surface of the moon, tangled black eyebrows, eyes reduced to slits—Cossack’s eyes—and then the man was saying, “Because I must use the facilities and I am wondering if you would watch over the boy for me.” And there was the boy, his head no higher than the seatback, standing right there. Riley saw he was younger than he’d first thought, no more than five or six. “I will thank you,” the man went on, making as if to usher the boy into the seat beside Riley but hesitating, waiting for assent, for permission. Caught by surprise, Riley heard himself say, “Sure. I guess.” And then, before he could think, the boy was sitting limply beside him and the big man leaning in confidentially. “I am grateful. There are bad people everywhere, unfortunately, and one doesn’t like to take chances.” He said something to the boy in a different voice, the tone caustic and admonitory—Spanish, it was definitely Spanish, but then why would a Russian be speaking Spanish, if he was a Russian, that is?—then gave Riley’s shoulder a brief squeeze. “Very bad people.”