T. Boyle - Wild Child and Other Stories

she said, and here was her hand, the nails done in a metallic shade of blue or lavender, slipping free of the darkness to take hold of my own. “And this is my daughter, Mary-Louise.”

“Calvin Jessup.” I leaned toward her, toward the smell of her, her perfume and what lay beneath it. “But people call me Cal. My friends, anyway.” I was smiling. Broadly. Stupidly. The rain quickened.

“Come on, Mom.”

“I want to thank you for your help — you’re really sweet. I mean it. But are you sure I shouldn’t call Triple A? It’s nothing. I mean, they don’t even charge—”

I straightened up and gave her an elaborate shrug, feeling the accumulated weight of every cell and fiber of my one hundred and eighty-seven pounds. I didn’t need alcohol. Didn’t need a burger. All I needed was to push this car out of the ditch. “If you want to wait here in the dark,” I said. “But I really think we can get you out if you just—”

“You have to rock the car, Mom.” The girl — what was she, fourteen, fifteen? Was that ninth grade? I couldn’t remember

— slapped the side of the car with her open palm. “We almost had it there that last time, so just, come on, start it up and then you go back and forth — you know, the way Dad showed us.”

Lynnese glanced up at me, then ducked her head and shook it side to side so that her hair, dense with moisture, fell loose to screen her face. “I’m divorced,” she said.

Behind us, across the lot, the lights of the auditorium faded briefly and then blinked out. “Yeah,” I said. “So am I.”

The Fittest

A week later I was sitting with Dave at the Granite, enjoying my second Sidecar of the evening and watching the first round of the playoffs that wouldn’t feature the Mets (this year, anyway), thinking about Lynnese while Dave went on about the lawsuit he and twelve of the other parents were filing against the school district. I liked Dave. He was one of my oldest friends. And I agreed with him both in principle and fact, but when he got on his high horse, when he got Serious with a capital S, he tended to repeat himself to the point of stupefaction. I was listening to him, feeding him the appropriate responses (“Uh-huh, uh-huh — really?”) at the appropriate junctures, yet I was tuning him out too.

I wanted to talk about Lynnese and what had happened between us in the past week, but I couldn’t. I’d never been comfortable exposing my feelings, which was why people like Dave accused me of making a joke of everything, and I couldn’t even mention her — not to Dave — without feeling like a traitor to the cause. “I’m a Christian,” she told me on the occasion of our first date, before I’d even had a chance to ice the beer or rev up the engines or ask her if she’d like to release the stern line and help cast us off (which was a simple way to involve anybody in the process of what we were about to do, because there’s no pretense in boating and the thrill of being out on the water takes you right back to your childhood, automatically — boom — just like that). The sun was high, Indian summer, a Saturday delivered from the heavens, and I was planning to take her up the river to a floating restaurant-cum-club where we could have cocktails on the deck, listen to reggae (and dance, maybe dance, if she was up for it) and get dinner too. She was wearing shorts. Her hair was its own kind of rapture. “Hi,” I said. “Hi,” she said back.

“Where’s Mary-Louise?” I asked, secretly thrilled that she’d come alone and all the while dreading the intrusion of that child with Jesus in her heart, half-expecting her to pop up out of the backseat of the Mini Cooper or come strolling out of the bushes, and she told me that Mary-Louise was out in the woods hiking—“Up Breakneck Ridge? Where that trail loops behind the mountain to where those lakes are? She loves nature,” she said. “Every least thing, the way she focuses on it — it’s just a shame they won’t let her alone in school, in biology. She could be a scientist, a doctor, anything.” I didn’t have much to say to that. I held out a hand to help her into the boat. She anchored her legs, the hull rocking beneath us, and leveled her eyes on me. “I’m a Christian,” she said.

Well, all right. I’d seen her twice since, and she was as lively, smart and well-informed as anybody I knew — and if I’d expected some sort of sackcloth-and-ashes approach to the intimate moments of an exploratory relationship, well, there went another prejudice.

She was hot. And I was intrigued. Really intrigued. (Though I wouldn’t want to call it love or infatuation or anything more specific than that after what I’d gone through with my ex-wife and the three or four women who came after her.)

“We’re going to break them,” Dave was saying. “I swear to you.

There was that case in Pennsylvania and before that in Kansas, but these people just don’t learn. And they’ve got bucks behind them.

Big bucks.”

“You want to call them fanatics,” was what I said.

“That’s right,” he said. “They’re fanatics.”

The Petitions

Before the trial, there were the petitions. Trials require a whole lot of steam, time to maneuver for position, war chests, thrusts and counter-thrusts, but petitions require nothing more than footwork and a filing fee. Within a week of the meeting, petitioners were everywhere. You couldn’t go into the grocery, the post office or the library without sidestepping a fold-up table with two or three clench-jawed women sitting behind it in a welter of pens, Styrofoam cups, ledgers and homemade signs. And men, men too. Men like Dave, and on the other side of the issue, men like the reverend and the pock-marked man who’d stood beside me in the auditorium distending his lips and puffing up his cheeks to express his opinion of the proceedings. I’d taken a lot of things for granted. Some of us might have lived at the end of long driveways and maybe we didn’t get involved in community issues because that sort of rah-rah business didn’t mesh with our personalities, but as far as I knew we’d always been a community in agreement — save the trees, confine the tourists, preserve the old houses on Main Street, clean up the river and educate the kids to keep them from becoming a drag on society.

Now I saw how wrong I was.

Of course, Dave came into the Granite and laid his petition right out on the bar and I was one of the first to sign it — and not just out of social pressure, Rick and half a dozen of the regulars looking over my shoulder while Elvis Costello sang “My Aim Is True” and my burger sizzled on the grill and the late sun melted across the wall, but because it was the right thing to do. “People can believe what they want,” Dave said, giving a little speech for the bar, “but that doesn’t make it the truth. And it sure as shit doesn’t make it science.”

I signed. Sure, I signed. He would have killed me if I didn’t.

And then I was coming up the hill from the station, the trees fired with the season and dusk coming down over the river behind me, everything so changeless and pure it was as if I’d stepped back in time, when I remembered I needed to pick up a few things at the deli. I didn’t cook much — I let Tom Scoville, the chef at the Granite, take care of that — but I ate cereal for breakfast, slipped the odd frozen dinner into the microwave or went through the elaborate ritual of slicing Swiss and folding it between two slices of rye. I was out of milk, butter, bread. And as I’d walked down the hill to the train that morning I’d reminded myself to remind myself when I came back up.

I was deep in my post-work oblivion, thinking nothing, and the pockmarked man took me by surprise. Suddenly he was standing there, right in front of the door of Gravenites’ Deli, not exactly blocking my access, but taking up space in a way I didn’t like. Up close, I saw that the pock-marks were a remnant of an epidermal war he was fighting not only on his face but his scalp and throat as well. He smelled like roast beef. “Hello, brother,” he said, thrusting a clipboard at me.