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

The wife — her name came to me suddenly: Fili — translated. She carefully set aside the root or pod or whatever it was and gave me a flowering smile that revealed a set of the whitest and evenest teeth I’d ever seen. “He say you can blow it out you ass.”

“No, no,” I said, brushing right by it, “you misunderstand me. I’m not here to complain, or even to convince you of anything. It’s just that, well, I’m your neighbor, and I thought if we—”

Here he spoke again, a low rumble of concatenated sounds that might have been expressive of digestive trouble, but the wife — Fili — seeing my blank expression, dutifully translated: “He say his gun — you know gun? — he say he keep gun loaded.”

—

Things are not perfect. I never claimed they were. And if you’re going to have a free and open town and not one of these gated neo-racist enclaves, you’ve got to be willing to accept that. The TJC sued the Weekses and the Weekses sued them back, and still the curtains flamed behind the windows and the garish race car and the unseaworthy boat sat at the curb across the street. So what I did to make myself feel better, was buy a dog. A Scottie. Lauren would never let me have a dog — she claimed to be allergic, but in fact she was pathologically averse to any intrusion on the rigid order she maintained around the house — and we never had any children either, which didn’t affect me one way or the other, though I should say I was one of the few single men in Jubilation who didn’t view Vicki’s kids as a liability. I grew to like them, in fact — or Ethan anyway; the baby was just a baby, practically inert if it wasn’t shrieking as if it had just had the skin stripped from its limbs. But Ethan was something else. I liked the feel of his tiny bunched little sweating hand in mine as we strolled down to the Benny Tarpon Old Tyme Ice Cream Parlor in the evening or took a turn round Lake Allagash. He was always tugging me one way or the other, chattering, pointing like a tour director: “Look,” he would say. “Look!”

I named the dog Bruce, after my grandfather on my mother’s side. He was a year old and housetrained, and I loved the way the fur hid his paws so that he seemed to glide over the grass of the village green as if he had no means of locomotion beyond willpower and magic.

That was around the time we began to feel the effects of the three-year drought that none of the TJC salespeople had bothered to mention in their all-day seminars and living-color brochures. The wind came up out of the south carrying a freight of smoke (apparently the Everglades were on fire) and a fine brown dust that obliterated our lawns and flowerbeds and made a desert of the village green. The heat seemed to increase too, as if the fires had somehow turned up the thermostat, but the worst of it was the smell. Everywhere you went, whether you were standing on line at the bank, sunk into one of the magic-fingers lounge chairs at the movie theater or pulling your head up off the pillow in the morning, the stale smell of old smoke assaulted your nostrils.

I was walking Bruce up on Golfpark Drive one afternoon, where our select million-dollar-plus homes back up onto the golf course — and you have to realize that this is part of the Contash vision too, millionaires living cheek by jowl with single mothers like Vicki and all the others struggling to pay mortgages that were thirty-five percent higher than those in the surrounding area, not to mention special assessments and maintenance fees — when a man with a camera slung round his neck stopped me and asked if he could take my picture. The sky was marbled with smoke. Dust fled across the pavement. The birds were actually shrieking in the trees. “Me?” I said. “Why me?”

“I don’t know,” he said, snapping the picture. “I like your dog.”

“You do?” I was flattered, I admit it, but I was on my guard too. Journalists from all over the world had descended on the town en masse, mainly to cook up dismissive articles about a legion of Stepford wives and robotic husbands living on a Contash movie set and doing daily obeisance to Gulpy Gator. None of them ever bothered to mention our equanimity, our openness and shared ideals. Why would they? Hard work and sacrifice never have made for good copy.

“Yeah, sure,” he said, “and would you mind posing over there, by the gate to that gingerbread mansion? That’s good. Nice.” He took a series of shots, the camera whirring through its motions. He wore a buzz cut, a two-day growth of nearly translucent beard and a pair of tri-colored Nikes. “You do live here, don’t you?” he asked finally. “I mean, you’re an actual resident, right, and not a tourist?”

I felt a surge of pride. “That’s right,” I said. “I’m one of the originals.”

He gave me an odd look, as if he were trying to sniff out an impostor. “Do they really pay you to walk the dog around the village green six times a day?”

“ Pay me? Who?”

“You know, the town, the company. You can’t have a town without people in it, right?” He looked down at Bruce, who was sniffing attentively at a dust-coated leaf. “Or dogs?” The camera clicked again, several times in succession. “I hear they pay that old lady on the moped too — and the guy that sets up his easel in front of the Gulpy monument every morning.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You’re out of your mind.”

“And I’ll tell you another thing — don’t think just because you bought into the Contash lifestyle you’re immune from all the shit that comes down in the real world, because you’re not. In fact, I’d watch that dog if I were you—”

Somewhere the fires were burning. A rag of smoke flapped at my face and I began to cough. “You’re one of those media types, aren’t you?” I said, pounding at my breastbone. “You people disgust me. You don’t even make a pretense of unbiased reporting — you just want to ridicule us and tear us down, isn’t that right?” My dander was up. Who were these people to come in here and try to undermine everything we’d been working for? I shot him a look of impatience. “It wouldn’t be jealousy, would it? By any chance?”

He shrugged, shifted the camera to one side and dug a cigarette out of his breast pocket. I watched him cup his hands against the breeze and light it. He flung the match in the bushes, a symbolic act, surely. “We used to have a Scottie when I was a kid,” he said, exhaling. “So I’m just telling you — you’d be surprised what I know about this town, what goes on behind closed doors, the double-dealing, the payoffs, the flouting of the environmental regs, all the dirt the TJC and Charles Contash don’t want you to know about. View me as a resource, your diligent representative of the fourth estate. Keep the dog away from the lake, that’s all.”

I was stubborn. I wasn’t listening. “He can swim.”

The man let out a short, unpleasant laugh. “I’m talking about alligators, my friend, and not the cuddly little cartoon kind. You might or might not know it because I’m sure it’s not advertised in any of the TJC brochures, but when they built Contash World back in the sixties they evicted all the alligators, not to mention the coral snakes and cane rattlers and snapping turtles — and where do you think they put them?”

—

All right. I was forewarned. And what happened should never have happened, I know that, but there are hazards in any community, whether it be South Central L.A. or Scarsdale or Kuala Lumpur. I took Bruce around Lake Allagash — twice — and then went home and barbecued a platter of wings and ribs for Vicki and the kids and I thought no more about it. Alligators. They were there, sure they were, but so were the mosquitoes and the poison toads that looked like deflated kick balls and chased the dogs off their kibble. This was Florida. It was muggy. It was hot. We had our share of sand fleas and whatnot. But at least we didn’t have to worry about bronchial pneumonia or snow tires.