T.C. Boyle Stories II: Volume II

by T. C. Boyle

  At the diner—already busy with the Sunday-morning church crowd—they ordered two large orange juices, which Todd discreetly reinforced with vodka from the bottle he produced from the inside pocket of his parka. She drained the first one all the way to the bottom before she lit her first cigarette of the day and ordered another. Only then did she look at the menu.

  “Go on,” Todd told her, “it’s on me. Order anything you want. Have a steak, anything. Steak and eggs—”

  She was feeling the vodka, the way it seemed to contract her insides and take the lingering chill out of her fingers and toes. She took another sip of her screwdriver, threw back her head to shake out her hair. “I’m a vegetarian,” she said.

  It took him a minute. She watched his eyes narrow, as if he were trying for a better perspective. The waitress stalked by, decaf in one hand, regular in the other, giving them a look. “So what does that mean?”

  “It means I don’t eat any meat.”

  “Dairy?”

  She shrugged. “Not much. I take a calcium supplement.”

  A change seemed to come over him. Where a moment ago he’d been loose and supple, sunk into the cushion of the fake-leather banquette as if his spine had gone to sleep, now suddenly he went rigid. “What,” he said, his voice saturated with irony, “you feel sorry for the cows, is that it? Because they have to have their poor little teats pulled? Well, I’ll tell you, I was raised on a dairy farm and if you didn’t milk those cows every morning they’d explode—and that’s cruelty, if you want to know.”

  She didn’t say anything, didn’t really want to get into it. Whether she drank milk or ate sloppy joes and pig’s feet was nobody’s business but hers and it was a decision she’d made so long ago it was just part of her now, like the shape of her eyes and her hair color. She picked up the menu, just to do something.

  “So what,” he said. “I’m just wasting my time here, is that it? You’re one of these save the animals people? You hate hunting, isn’t that right?” He drew in a breath. “And hunters.”

  “I don’t know,” she said, and she felt a spark of irritation rising in her, “what difference does it make?”

  She saw him clench his fist, and he almost brought it down on the table before he caught himself. He was struggling to control his voice: “What difference does it make? Have you been listening to me? I’ve had death threats over Question 62—from your cat lovers, the pacifists themselves.”

  “Right,” she said. “Like the cats under my trailer are some big threat, aren’t they? Invasive species, right? Well, we’re an invasive species. Mrs. Merker I was telling you about, the one that gets up twenty times a night to find the bathroom and twenty times a night asks me who I am and what I think I’m doing in her house? She’s part of the problem, isn’t she? Why not hunt old ladies too?”

  His eyes jumped round the room before they came back to her, exasperated eyes, irritated, angry. “I don’t know. I’m not into that. I mean, that’s people.”

  She told herself to shut it down, to pick up the menu and order something innocuous—waffles, with fake maple syrup that spared even the maple trees—but she couldn’t. Maybe it was the drinks, maybe that was it. “But don’t people kill birds? Habitat destruction and whatever, mini-malls, diesel engines and what, plastics. Plastics kill birds, don’t they?”

  “Don’t get crazy on me. Because that’s nuts. Just nuts.”

  “Just asking.”

  “Just asking?” Now the fist did come down on the table, a single propulsive thump that set the silverware rattling and heads turning. “We’re talking death threats and you think this is some kind of game?” He was on his feet suddenly, the tallest man in the world, the jacket riding up over his belt, his face soaring, all that displacement of air and light. He bent for his hat, then straightened up again, his face contorted. “Some date,” he said, and then he was gone.

  —

  The night of the tiger, a night that collapsed across the hills like a wet sack under the weight of yet another storm, Mae kept the television on late, hoping for news. Earlier, she and Doug had thought of going out to dinner and then maybe a movie, but with the rain showing no sign of letting up Doug didn’t think he wanted to risk it and so she’d got creative with some leftover marinara sauce, zucchini and rice and they’d wound up watching an old pastel movie on the classic channel. The movie—they missed the first ten minutes and she never did catch the title—featured Gene Kelly in a sailor suit. Doug, who was working on the last beer of his six-pack, said it should have been Singin’ in the Rain.

  That was funny, and though she was distracted—had been distracted all day—she laughed. There was a silence then and they both listened to the rain hammering at the roof—it was so loud, so persistent, that for a moment it drowned out the dialogue on the TV.

  “I guess this is it,” Doug said, leaning back in his recliner with a sigh, “—the monsoon. The real deal, huh?” He gestured to the ceiling with the can of beer.

  “Yeah,” she said, watching the bright figures glide across the screen, “but I just hope it doesn’t float us away. You think the car’s going to be all right in the driveway?”

  He gave her a look of irritation. “It’s only rain.”

  “It seems so strange, though, because there’s no thunder, no lightning. It just keeps coming as if somebody’d turned on a big spigot in the sky.” She made a face. “I don’t know. I don’t like it. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it—even the word, monsoon. It’s so bizarre, like something out of some jungle someplace.”

  He just shrugged. They’d looked to his career and chosen California—Moorpark—over Atlanta, because, and they were both in absolute agreement here, they didn’t want to live in the South. And while she loved the idea of year-round gardening—flowers in February and trees that never lost their leaves—she was still feeling her way around the way the seasons seemed to stall and the earth hardened to clay under the unblinking summer sun till it was like brick and nothing would grow along the fence but devil grass and tumbleweeds. Tumbleweeds. She might as well have been in the Wild West.

  She’d had two beers herself and her attention was drifting—she couldn’t really focus on the movie, all that movement, singing, dancing, the earnest plot, as if any of this meant anything—and when Doug got up without a word and steadied himself against the arm of the chair before moving off toward the bedroom, she picked up the remote and began flicking through the channels. She was looking for something, anything that might bring her back to what she’d felt that morning, on her knees in the garden with the mist rising round her. The tiger was out there, in the black of the night, the rain steaming round it. That was a thing she could hold on to, an image that grew inside her like something that had been planted there. And they wouldn’t be able to track it, she realized, not now, not in this. After a while she muted the sound and just sat there listening to the rain, hoping it would never stop.

  —

  A week went by. The temperature took a nosedive and then it began to snow, off and on, until Saturday, when Anita came out of work to the smell of diesel and the flashing lights of the snowplow and had to struggle through a foot of fresh snow to her car. Her mood was desolate. Mrs. Merker had torn off her Depends and squatted to pee right in front of the nurses’ station and Mr. Pohnert (“Call me Alvin”) kept pressing his buzzer every five minutes to complain that his feet were cold despite the fact that both his legs had been removed five years ago due to complications from diabetes. And there were the usual aggravations, the moans and whimpers and the gagging and retching and people crying out in the dark—the strangeness of the place, insulated and overheated, with its ticking machines and dying bodies and her at the center of it. And now this. The sky was dark and roiled, the snow flung on the wind in sharp stinging pellets. It took her fifteen minutes to get her car out. And she drove home like a zombie, both hands clenching the wheel
even as the tires floated and shimmied over the patches of ice.

  There were tracks punched in the snow around her doorstep, cat tracks, amidst a scattering of blue feathers tipped with black. And a flyer, creased down the middle and shoved into the crack of the door. NO ON 62, it said, SAVE OUR PETS. She didn’t have the heart to open a bottle of chardonnay—that she would save for brighter times—but she did make herself a cup of tea and spike it with a shot of Dewar’s while she thought about what she wanted to eat, soup maybe, just a can of Chunky Vegetable and some wheat toast to dip in it. She had the TV on and her feet up before she noticed the blinking light on her message machine. There were two messages. The first was from Mae—“Call me,” delivered in a tragic voice—and the second, the one she’d been waiting all week for, was from Todd. He was sorry about the blowup, but he’d been under a lot of pressure lately and he hoped they could get together again—soon, real soon—despite their differences, because they really did have a lot in common and she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever met and he’d really like to make it up to her. If she would let him. Please.

  She was wondering about that—what exactly they had in common aside from two semi-drunken go-arounds on her bed and the fact that they were both tall and both lived in Waunakee—when the phone rang. She picked it up on the first ring, thinking it was him. “Hello?” she whispered.

  “Anita?” It was Mae. Her voice was cored out and empty, beyond tragic, beyond tears. “Oh, Anita, Anita.” She broke off, gathered herself. “They shot the tiger.”

  “Who? What tiger?”

  “It didn’t even have claws. This beautiful animal, somebody’s pet, and it couldn’t have—”

  “Couldn’t have what? What tiger? What are you talking about?”

  But the conversation ended there. The connection was broken, either on Mae’s end or hers—she couldn’t be sure until she tried to dial her sister and the phone gave back nothing but static. Somebody had skidded into a telephone pole, that was it, and she wondered how much longer the lights would be on—that would be next, no power—and she got up out of the chair to pull open the tab on the top of the soup can, disgorge the contents into a ceramic bowl and hit the microwave while she could. She punched in the three digits and was rewarded by the mechanical roar of the thing starting up, the bowl rotating inside and the visual display of the numbers counting down, 3:30, 3:29, 3:28, until suddenly, in the space of the next second, the microwave choked off and the TV died and the fluorescent strip under the cabinet flickered once and buried its light in a dark tube.

  For a long while she sat there in the shadows, sipping her tea, which had already crossed the threshold from hot to lukewarm, and then she got up and dumped a handful of ice in it and filled it to the rim with Dewar’s. She was sipping her drink and thinking vaguely about food, a sandwich, she’d make a sandwich when she felt like it, cheese, lettuce, wheat bread—that she could do with or without power—when a sound from beneath the trailer brought her back, a scrabbling there, as of an animal, on its four paws, making a quiet meal.

  She’d have to sacrifice the cats, she could see that now, because as soon as they hooked the phones back up she was going to call Todd. She wished he were here now, wished they were in bed together, under the quilt, drinking chardonnay and listening to the snow sift down on the aluminum roof of the trailer. She didn’t care about the cats. They were nothing to her. And she wanted to please him, she did, but she couldn’t help wondering—and she’d ask him too, she’d put it to him—What had Question 61 been, or Question 50, Question 29? Pave over the land? Pollute the streams? Kill the buffalo? Or what about Question 1, for that matter. Question 1—and she pictured it now, written on a slate in chalk and carried from village to village in a time of want and weather just like this, the snow coming down and people peering out from behind heavy wooden doors with a look of suspicion and irritation—Question 1 must have been something really momentous, the kick start of the whole program of the Department of Natural Resources. And what could it have been? Cut down the trees, flay the hides, pull the fish from the rivers? Or no, she thought, tipping back the mug, it would have been even more basic than that: Kill off the Indians. Yeah. Sure. That must have been it: Kill off the Indians.

  She got up then and made herself a sandwich, then poured herself another little drop of scotch and took the plate and the mug with her to the cubbyhole of her bed, where she sat cross-legged against the pillow that still smelled of him and chewed and drank and listened to the cold message of the snow.

  (2005)

  Sin Dolor

  He came into the world like all the rest of them—like us, that is—brown as an iguana and flecked with the detritus of afterbirth, no more remarkable than the date stamped on the morning’s newspaper, but when I cleared his throat and slapped his infant buttocks, he didn’t make a sound. Quite the contrary. His eyes snapped open with that searching myopia of the newborn and he began to breathe, calmly and quietly, with none of the squalling or fuss of the others. My nurse, Elvira Fuentes, who had spent fifteen years working on the cancer ward at the hospital in Guadalajara before coming home to devote herself to me, both as lover and helpmeet, frowned as I handed the infant to his mother. She was thinking exactly the same thing I was: there must have been some constriction or deformation of the child’s vocal apparatus. Or perhaps he’d been born without it. We’ve seen stranger things, all manner of defects and mutations, especially among the offspring of the migrant workers, what with the devil’s brew of herbicides, pesticides and genetically engineered foodstuffs to which they’ve been routinely exposed. There was one man I won’t name here who came back from the cotton fields of Arizona looking like one of Elvira’s oncological ghosts, and whose wife gave birth nine months later to a monster without a face—no eyes, ears, mouth or nose, just a web of translucent skin stretched tight over a head the size of an avocado. Officially, we labeled it a stillbirth. The corpse—if you could call it that—was disposed of with the rest of the medical waste.

  But that’s neither here nor there. What I mean to say is that we were wrong. Happily, at least as it appeared. The child—he was born to Francisco and Mercedes Funes, street vendors whose tacos de chivo are absolutely poisonous to the digestive tract, and I advise all who read this to avoid their stall at the corner of Independencia and Constitución if you value your equilibrium—was soon groping at his mother’s breast and making the usual gurgling and sucking noises. Mercedes Funes, twenty-seven years old at the time, with six children already to her credit, a pair of bow legs, the shoulders of a fullback and one continuous eyebrow that made you think of Frida Kahlo (stripped of artistry and elegance, that is), was back at her stall that evening, searing goat over a charcoal grill for the entertainment of the unwary, and, as far as Elvira and I were concerned, that was that. One more soul had entered the world. I don’t remember what we did that night, but I suppose it was nothing special. Usually, after we closed the clinic, we would sit in the courtyard, exhausted, and watch the doves settle on the wires while the serving girl put together a green salad and a caldereta de verduras or a platter of fried artichoke hearts, Elvira’s favorite.

  Four years slipped by before I next saw the child or gave more than a glancing thought to the Funes clan except when I was treating cases of vomiting and diarrhea, and as a matter of course questioning my patients as to what and where they’d eaten. “It was the oysters, Doctor,” they’d tell me, looking penitent. “Onions, definitely the onions—they’ve never agreed with me.” “Mayonnaise, I’ll never eat mayonnaise again.” And, my favorite: “The meat hardly smelled at all.” They’d blame the Chinese restaurant, the Mennonites and their dairy, their own wives and uncles and dogs, but more often than not I was able to trace the source of the problem to the Funes stall. My patients would look at me with astonishment. “But that can’t be, Doctor—the Funes make the best tacos in town.”

  At any rate, Mercedes Funes appeared at the
clinic one sun-racked morning with her son in tow. She came through the door tugging him awkwardly by the wrist (they’d named the boy Dámaso, after her husband’s twin brother, who sent small packets of chocolate and the occasional twenty-dollar bill from Los Angeles when the mood took him), and settled into a chair in the waiting room while Elvira’s parrot gnawed at the wicker bars of its cage and the little air conditioner I keep in the front window churned out its hyperborean drafts. I was feeling especially good that morning, at the top of my game, certain real estate investments having turned out rather well for me, and Elvira keeping her eye on a modest little cottage at the seashore, which we hoped to purchase as a getaway and perhaps, in the future, as a place of retirement. After all, I was no longer as young as I once was and the Hippocratic frisson of healing the lame and curing the incurable had been replaced by a sort of repetitious drudgery, nothing a surprise anymore and every patient who walked through the door diagnosed before they even pulled up a chair. I’d seen it all. I was bored. Impatient. Fed up. But, as I say, on this particular day, my mood was buoyant, my whole being filled with an inchoate joy over the prospect of that little frame cottage at the seashore. I believe I may even have been whistling as I entered the examining room.

  “And what seems to be the problem?” I asked.

  Mercedes Funes was wrapped in a shawl despite the heat. She’d done up her hair and was wearing the shoes she reserved for mass on Sundays. In her lap was the child, gazing up at me out of his father’s eyes, eyes that were perfectly round, as if they’d been created on an assembly line, and which never seemed to blink. “It’s his hands, Doctor,” Mercedes said in a whisper. “He’s burned them.”

  Before I could say “Let’s have a look” in my paternal and reassuring tones, the boy held out his hands, palms up, and I saw the wounds there. The burns were third degree, right in the center of each palm, and involved several fingers as well. Leathery scabs—eschars—had replaced the destroyed tissue and were seeping a deep wine-colored fluid around the margins. I’d seen such burns before, of course, on innumerable occasions, the result of a house fire, smoking in bed, a child blundering against a stove, but these seemed odd, as if they’d been deliberately inflicted. I glanced up sharply at the mother and asked what had happened.