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

Jason checked his watch. It would be five minutes or so, and then he could start watching for the Amazing Bone Woman, tireless freak that she was. And did she fuck Klaus, or Olaf, or whoever he was, the night before the big event, or was she like Paula, all focus and negativity and no, no, no? He fingered the cup lightly, reminding himself not to damage or crease it in any way — it had to look pristine, fresh-dipped from the bucket — and he watched the corner at the end of the street till his eyes began to blur from the sheer concentration of it all.

Two more men passed by, and nobody cheered, not a murmur, but then suddenly a couple of middle-aged women across the street set up a howl, and the crowd chimed in: the first woman, a woman of string and bone with a puffing heaving puppetlike frame, was swinging into the street in distant silhouette. Jason moved forward. He tugged reflexively at the bill of his hat, jammed the rims of the shades back into his eyesockets. And he started to grin, all his teeth on fire, his lips spread wide: Here, take me, drink me, have me!

As the woman closed, loping, sweating, elbows flailing and knees pounding, the crowd getting into it now, cheering her, cheering this first of the women in a man’s event, the first Iron-woman of the day, he began to realize that this wasn’t Zinny Bauer at all. Her hair was too long, and her legs and chest were too full — and then he saw the number clearly, No. 23, and looked into Paula’s face. She was fifty yards from him, but he could see the toughness in her eyes and the tight little frozen smile of triumph and superiority. She was winning. She was beating Zinny Bauer and Jill Eisen and all those pathetic jocks laboring up the hills and down the blacktop streets behind her. This was her moment, this was it.

But then, and he didn’t stop to think about it, he stepped forward, right out on the street where she could see him, and held out the cup. He heard her feet beating at the pavement with a hard merciless slap, saw the icy twist of a smile and the cold, triumphant eyes. And he felt the briefest fleeting touch of her flesh as the cup left his hand.

(1995)

When I got out of rehab for the second time, there were some legal complications, and the judge — an old jerk who looked like they’d just kicked him out of the Politburo — decided I needed a sponsor. There was a problem with some checks I’d been writing for a while there when all my resources were going up the glass tube, and since I didn’t have a record except for traffic infractions and a juvenile possession when I was fifteen, the court felt inclined to mercy. Was there anybody who could speak up for me, my attorney wondered, anybody financially responsible? Philip, I said, my brother Philip. He’s a doctor.

So Philip. He lived in Detroit, a place I’d never been to, a place where it gets cold in winter and the only palm trees are under glass in the botanical gardens. It would be a change, a real change. But a change is what I needed, and the judge liked the idea that he wouldn’t have to see me in Pasadena anymore and that I’d have a room in Philip’s house with Philip’s wife and my nephews, Josh and Jeff, and that I would be gainfully employed doing lab work at Philip’s obstetrical clinic for the princely sum of six dollars and twenty-five cents an hour.

So Philip. He met me at the airport, his thirty-eight-year-old face as trenched with anal-retentive misery as our father’s was in the year before he died. His hair was going, I saw that right away, and his glasses were too big for his head. And his shoes — he was wearing a pair of brown suede boatlike things that would have had people running for the exits at the Rainbow Club. I hadn’t seen him in six years, not since the funeral, that is, and I wouldn’t have even recognized him if it wasn’t for his eyes — they were just like mine, as blue and icy as a bottle of Aqua Velva. “Little brother,” he said, and he tried to gather a smile around the thin flaps of his lips while he stood there gaping at me like somebody who hadn’t come to the airport specifically to fetch his down-on-his-luck brother and was bewildered to discover him there.

“Philip,” I said, and I set down my two carry-on bags to pull him to me in a full-body, back-thumping, chest-to-chest embrace, as if I was glad to see him. But I wasn’t glad to see him. Not particularly. Philip was ten years older than me, and ten years is a lot when you’re a kid. By the time I knew his name he was in college, and when I was expressing myself with my father’s vintage Mustang, a Ziploc baggie of marijuana, and a can of high-gloss spray paint, he was in medical school. I’d never much liked him, and he felt about the same toward me, and as I embraced him there in the Detroit airport I wondered how that was going to play out over the course of the six months the judge had given me to stay out of trouble and make full restitution or serve the next six in jail.

“Have a good flight?” Philip asked when I was done embracing him.

I stood back from him a moment, the bags at my feet, and couldn’t help being honest with him; that’s just the way I am. “You look like shit, Philip,” I said. “You look like Dad just before he died — or maybe after he died.”

A woman with a big shining planetoid of a face stopped to give me a look, then hitched up her skirt and stamped on by in her heels. The carpeting smelled of chemicals. Outside the dirt-splotched windows was snow, a substance I’d had precious little experience of. “Don’t start, Rick,” Philip said. “I’m in no mood. Believe me.”

I shouldered my bags, stooped over a cigarette, and lit it just to irritate him. I was hoping he’d tell me there was a county ordinance against smoking in public places and that smoking was slow suicide, from a physician’s point of view, but he didn’t rise to the bait. He just stood there, looking harassed. “I’m not starting,” I said. “I’m just… I don’t know. I’m just concerned, that’s all. I mean, you look like shit. I’m your brother. Shouldn’t I be concerned?”

I thought he was going to start wondering aloud why I should be concerned about him, since I was the one on the run from an exasperated judicial system and twelve thousand and some-odd dollars in outstanding checks, but he surprised me. He just shrugged and shifted that lipless smile around a bit and said, “Maybe I’ve been working too hard.”

—

Philip lived on Washtenaw Street, in an upscale housing development called Washtenaw Acres, big houses set back from the street and clustered around a lake glistening with black ice under a weak sky and weaker sun. The trees were stripped and ugly, like dead sticks rammed into the ground, and the snow wasn’t what I’d expected. Somehow I’d thought it would be fluffy and soft, movie snow, big pillows of it cushioning the ground while kids whooshed through it on their sleds, but it wasn’t like that at all. It lay on the ground like a scab, clots of dirt and yellow weed showing through in mangy patches. Bleak, that’s what it was, but I told myself it was better than the Honor Rancho, a whole lot better, and as we pulled into the long sweeping driveway to Philip’s house I put everything I had into feeling optimistic.

Denise had put on weight. She was waiting for us inside the door that led from the three-car garage into the kitchen. I didn’t know her well enough to embrace her the way I’d embraced Philip, and I have to admit I was taken aback by the change in her — she was fat, there was nothing else to say about it — so I just filtered out the squeals of welcome and shook her hand as if it was something I’d found in the street. Besides which, the smell of dinner hit me square in the face, so overpowering it almost brought me to my knees. I hadn’t been in a real kitchen with a real dinner in the oven since I was a kid and my mother was alive, because after she died, and with Philip away, it was just my father and me, and we tended to go out a lot, especially on Sundays.