T. Boyle - T.C. Boyle Stories II - Volume II

She pulled back the veil to reveal that hopeful smile and the small shining miracle of her hair. “No, I don’t think so,” she said, bending to remove her son’s impedimenta (“I don’t want,” he kept saying, “I don’t want”). “There,” she said, addressing the pale dwindling oval of his face, “there, it’s all right now. And you can have a soda, if Jackson still has any left in the refrigerator—”

“Oh, yeah, sure,” I said, and I was bending too. “Root beer? Or Seven-Up?”

We wound up sitting in the kitchen, drinking white wine and sharing a box of stale Triscuits while the baby slept and Ethan sucked at a can of Hires in front of the tube in the living room. Out back was the low fence that gave onto the nature preserve, with its bird-friendly marsh that also coincidentally happened to serve as a maternity ward for the mosquitoes, and beyond that was Lake Allagash. “At the office they’re saying the mosquitoes are just seasonal,” Vicki said, working a hand up under the tinted ringlets and giving them a shake, “and besides, they’re pretty much spraying around the clock now, so I would think — well, I mean, they’ve had to close down some of the outdoor rides over at Contash World, and that means money lost, big money.”

I wasn’t a cynic, or I tried not to be, because a pioneer can’t afford cynicism. Look on the bright side, that was what I maintained — there was no alternative. “Okay, fine, but have you seen my wrist? I mean, should I be concerned? Should I go to the doctor, do you think?”

She took my wrist in her cool grip, traced the bumps there with her index finger. She gave a little laugh. “Chigger bites, that’s all. Nothing to worry about. And the mosquitoes’ll just be a bad memory in a week or two, I guarantee it.”

There was a moment of silence, during which we both gazed out the window on the marsh — or swamp, as I’d mistakenly called it before Vicki corrected me. We watched an egret rise up out of nowhere and sail off into the trees. Clouds massed on the horizon in a swell of pure, unadulterated white; the palmettos gathered and released the faintest trace of a breeze. Next door, the wraparound porch of my neighbors — the black couple, Sam and Ernesta Fills — was deserted. Ditto the porch of the house on the other side, into which Mark and Leonard, having traded $2,500 of the cash I’d given them for number 632 and a prime chance at a Casual Contempo, had recently moved. “No,” she said finally, draining her wine glass and holding it out in one delicate hand so that I could refill it for her, “what I’d be concerned about if I was you is your neighbors across the street — the Weekses?”

I gave her a dumb stare.

“You know them — July and Fili Weeks and their three sons?”

“Yeah,” I said, “sure.” Everybody knew everybody else here. It was a rule.

From the TV in the other room came the sound of canned laughter, followed by Ethan’s stuttering high whinny of an underdeveloped laugh. “What about the red curtains?” she said. “And that car? That whatever it is, that race car painted in the three ugliest shades of magenta they keep parked out there on the street where the whole world can see it? They’re in violation of the code on something like eight counts already and they haven’t been here a month yet.”

I felt a prickle of alarm. We were all in this together, and if everybody didn’t pitch in — if everybody didn’t subscribe to the letter as far as the Covenants and Restrictions were concerned — what was going to happen to our property values? “Red curtains?” I said.

Her eyes were steely. “Just like in a whorehouse. And you know the rules — white, off-white, beige and taupe only.”

“Has anybody talked to them? Can’t anybody do anything?”

She set the glass down, drew her gaze away from the window and looked into my eyes. “You mean the Citizens’ Committee?”

I shrugged. “Yeah. Sure. I guess.”

She leaned in close. I could smell the rinse she used in her hair, and it was faintly intoxicating. I loved her eyes, loved the shape of her, loved the way she aspirated her h ’s like an elocution teacher. “Don’t you worry,” she whispered. “We’re already on it.”

—

Once Vicki had mentioned the Weekses and the way they were flouting the code, I couldn’t get them out of my head. July Weeks was a salesman of some sort, aviation parts, I think it was — he worked for Cessna — and he seemed to spend most of his time, despite the mosquito scare, buried deep in his own white wicker chaise longue out on the wraparound porch of his Courteous Coastal directly across the street from me. He was a Southerner, and that was all right because this was the South, after all, but he had one of those accents that just went on clanging and jarring till you could barely understand a word he was saying. Not that I harbor any prejudices — he was my neighbor, and if he wanted to sound like an extra from Deliverance, that was his privilege. But I looked out the front window and saw that race car— No excessive or unsightly vehicles, including campers, RVs, moving vans or trailers, shall be parked on the public streets for a period exceeding forty-eight continuous hours, Section III, Article 12, Declaration of Covenants, Deeds and Restrictions — and the sight of it became an active irritation. Which was compounded by the fact that the eldest son, August, pulled up one afternoon in a pickup truck that sat about six feet up off its Bayou Crawler tires and deposited a boat trailer at the curb. The boat was painted puce with lime-green trim and it had a staved-in hull. Plus, there were those curtains.

A week went by. Two weeks. I got updates from Vicki — we were seeing each other just about every day now — and of course the Citizens’ Committee, as an arm of the TJC, was threatening the Weekses with a lawsuit and the Weekses had hired an attorney and were threatening back, but nothing happened. I couldn’t enjoy my wraparound porch or the view out my mullioned Craftsman windows. Every time I looked up, there was the boat, there was the car, and beyond them, the curtains. The situation began to weigh on me, so one night after dinner I strolled down the three broad inviting steps of my wraparound porch, waved a greeting to the Fills on my right and Mark and Leonard on my left, and crossed the street to mount the equally inviting steps of the Weekses’ wraparound porch with the intention of setting Mr. Weeks straight on a few things. Or no, that sounds too harsh. I wanted to block out a couple issues with him and see if we couldn’t resolve things amicably for all concerned.

He was sitting in the chaise longue, his wife in the wicker armchair beside him. An Atlanta Braves cap that looked as if it had just come off the shelf at Gulpy’s Sports Emporium hid his brow and the crown of his head and he was wearing a pair of those squared-off black sunglasses for people with cataracts, and that reduced the sum of his expression to the sharp beak of his nose and an immobile mouth. The wife was a squat Korean woman whose name I could never remember. She was peeling the husk off of a dark pungent pod or tuber. It was a homey scene, and the moment couldn’t have been more neighborly.

“Hi,” I said (or maybe, prompted by the ambience, I might even have managed a “Howdy”).

Neither of them said a word.

“Listen,” I began, after standing there for an awkward moment (and what had I been expecting — mint juleps?). “Listen, about the curtains and the car and all that — the boat — I just wanted to say, well, I mean, it might seem like a small thing, it’s ridiculous, really, but—”

He cut me off then. I don’t know what he said, but it sounded something like “Rabid rabid gurtz.”