T. Boyle - Wild Child and Other Stories

The Weak

I was the first one out the door. The rain had let up, nothing more than a persistent drizzle now, the shrubs along the walk black with moisture and the air dense with the smell of it — the smell of nature, that is, wet, fungal, chaotic. And sweet. Infinitely sweet after the reek of that auditorium. I hurried down the walk and across the lot, thinking to get out ahead of the traffic. I was meeting Dave and Katie at the Granite for burgers and a drink or two and I could hardly wait for the postmortem, because I’d wanted to flag my hand and put a question to the girl in the plaid skirt, wanted to ask her just how provable her contention was. Could we thread one of those surgical mini-cameras up through the vein in her thigh and into her left ventricle just to see if we could find the Redeemer there? And what would He be doing? Sitting down to dinner? Frying up fish in a pan? At least Jonah had some elbow room. But then I guessed Jesus was capable of making himself very, very small — sub-microscopic even.

High comedy — Dave and I would have a real laugh over this one. My feet sailed on down the walk, across the lot and through the drizzle of the world, and I was thinking cold beer, medium-rare burger with extra cheese and two slices of Bermuda onion, until I reached my car and saw that I wasn’t going anywhere. The rear tires had sunk maybe half an inch into the grass-turned-to-mud, but that wasn’t the problem, or not the immediate problem. The immediate problem was the Mini Cooper (two-tone, red and black) backed up against my bumper and blocking me as effectively as if a wall had been erected round my car while the meeting was going down.

I was wearing a tan leather three-quarter-length overcoat that had caught my eye in the window of a shop on Fifth Avenue a month back and for which I’d paid too much, and it was on its way to being ruined. I didn’t have an umbrella. And I’d ignored the salesgirl, who’d given me a four-ounce plastic bottle of some waterproofing agent and made me swear to spray the coat with it the minute I got home. I could feel the coat drinking up the wet. A thin trickle, smelling of mango-pineapple, began to drip from the tip of my nose. I looked round me, thinking of the blond woman — this was her car, I was sure of it, and where in hell was she and how could she just block me in like that? — and then I opened the door of my car and slid in to wait.

Twenty of the longest minutes of my life crumbled round me as I sat there in the dark, smoking one of the cigarettes I’d promised myself to give up while the radio whispered and the windshield fogged over. Headlights illuminated me as one car after another backed out, swung round and rolled on out of the lot to freedom. I reminded myself, not for the first time, that patience, far from being a virtue, was just weakness in disguise. A mosquito beat itself up out of nowhere to settle on the back of my neck so I could put an end to its existence before it had its opportunity to produce more mosquitoes to send out into a world of exposed necks, arms and midriffs. Midriffs. I began to think about midriffs and then the blond woman and what hers might look like if she were wearing something less formal than a flocked blue dress that buttoned all the way up to the collar and I pulled on my cigarette and drummed my fingers on the dash and felt my lids grow heavy.

Finally — and it was my bad luck that the last two cars left in the whole place were the ones blocking me in — I heard voices and glanced in the rearview mirror to see three figures emerging from the gloom. Women. “All right, then,” one of them called out, and here she was — the chairwoman, her big white block of a face looming up on the passenger side of my car like a calving glacier as the Suburban flashed its lights and gurgled in appreciation of her—“you have a good night. And feel good. You did real well tonight, honey.”

The door slammed. The Suburban roared. Red brake lights, a great powerful churning of tires and the song of the steering mechanism, and then she was gone. I shifted my eyes to the other side, and there she was, the blonde, framed in the driver’s side mirror. Right next to her daughter, in the plaid skirt and damp white sweater.

I froze. Absolutely. I was motionless. I didn’t draw breath. The girl and her mother climbed into the Mini Cooper and I wanted to shrink down in my seat, crawl into the well under the steering wheel, vanish altogether, but I couldn’t do a thing. I heard the engine start up — they were on their way; in a second they’d be gone — and for all I’d been through, for all the rumbling of my stomach and the craving for alcohol that was almost like a need and the strangeness of that overstuffed auditorium and the testimony I’d witnessed, I felt a yearning so powerful it took me out of myself till I didn’t know where I was. And then I heard the harsh message of the wheels slipping and then an accelerating whine as they fought for purchase in the mud. She had no idea, this woman — not the faintest notion — of how to rock a car out of a hole in a yielding surface. She accelerated. The wheels spun. Then she did it again. And again.

I watched the door swing open, watched her legs emerge from the car as she reached down to remove her shoes and step out onto the grass to assess the situation while her daughter’s torso faded in soft focus behind the fogged-over windshield. And because I was weak, because I hadn’t dated anybody in a month and more and couldn’t stand to see those shining bare legs and glistening feet stained with mud and didn’t care whether Jesus and all the saints in heaven were involved in the equation or not, I got out of my car, looked her full in the face over the glare of the headlights and said,

“Can I help?”

The Fit

I never did get to the Granite that night. I called Dave on my cell and he sounded annoyed — wound up from the meeting and eager to take it out on somebody — but the Mini Cooper was in deeper than it looked and by the time we were able to free it I was in no shape for anything but bed. My coat was ruined. Ditto my shoes. Both pantlegs were greased with mud, my hands dense with it, my fingernails blackened. I should have given up, the term lost cause hammered like a spike into the back of my brain, but I was feeling demonstrative — and maybe just a little bit ashamed of myself over the Jesus freak comment. We were ten minutes into it, the drizzle thickening to rain, the miniature wheels digging deeper and the daughter and I straining against the rear bumper, when the woman behind the wheel — the blonde, the mother — stuck her head out the window and gave me my out. “You know,” she called over the ticking of the engine and the soft beat of the rain, “maybe I should just call Triple A?”

I came up alongside the car so I could see the pale node of her face wrapped in her shining hair and her eyes like liquid fire. The interior of the car sank away into the shadows beyond her. I couldn’t see her shoulders or her torso or her legs. Just her face, like a picture in a frame. “No,” I said, “no need. We can get it out.”

The daughter chimed in then — Mary-Louise. She was standing on the far side of the car, hands on hips. There was a spatter of mud on her sweater. “Come on, Mom,” she said with an edge of exasperation. “Try it again.” She looked to me, then bent to brace herself against the bumper. “Come on,” she said, “one more time.”

I watched the mother’s face. She squeezed her eyes shut a moment so that a little hieroglyph of flesh appeared over the bridge of her nose, then she gave me the full benefit of her gaze and it came to me that she hadn’t heard what I’d said back in the auditorium, that there was no animosity, none at all. I wasn’t on trial. I was just a helpful stranger, the Good Samaritan himself. “I’m Lynnese Mohler,”