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

“Who’s that?” Suzie’s voice rose up out of the stillness. Cole was atop her and she had to lift her head to fix her eyes on me. “John? Is that you?”

Cole rolled off her and flipped a fold of the blanket over her. “Jesus,” he said, “you picked a great moment.” His eyes burned, though I could see he was trying to be cool, trying to minimize it, no big thing.

“Jesus,” Suzie said, “you scared me. Do you always creep around like that?”

“My boots,” I said. “They just — or actually, I just came by to tell you something, that’s all — I can’t stay…”

The rain was like two cupped palms holding the place in its grip. The gutters rattled. Pinpricks needled the roof. “Shit,” Cole said, and Suzie reached out to gather up her clothes, shielding her breasts in the crook of one arm, “I mean, shit, John. Couldn’t you wait in the kitchen, I mean, for like ten fucking minutes? Huh? Couldn’t you?”

I swung round without a word and padded out to the kitchen even as the living room door thundered shut at my back. For a long while I sat at the familiar table with its detritus of burned joss sticks, immolated candles, beer bottles, mugs, food wrappers and the like, thinking I could just write them a note — that would do it — or maybe I’d call Cole later, from home, when he got home, that was, at his mother’s. But I couldn’t find a pencil — nobody took notes here, that was for sure — and finally I just pushed myself up, tiptoed to the door and fell back into my boots and the sodden jacket.

—

It was just getting dark when I pulled up in front of the house. My father’s car was parked there at the curb, but my mother’s wasn’t and it wasn’t in the driveway either. The rain kept coming down — the streets were flooding, broad sheets of water fanning away from the tires and the main road clogged with slow-moving cars and their tired headlights and frantically beating wipers. I ran for the house, kicked off my boots on the doorstep and flung myself inside as if I’d been away for years. My jacket streamed and I hurried across the carpet to the accompaniment of the dog’s thwacking tail and hung it from the shower head in the bathroom. Then I went to the kitchen to look in the refrigerator, feeling desolate and cheated. I didn’t have a habit despite the stigmata of my arms — I was a neophyte still, a twice- or three-times-a-week user — but I had a need, and that need yawned before me, opening up and opening up again, as I leaned over the sink. The cottage was over. Cole was over. Life, as I’d come to know it, was finished.

It was then that I noticed the figure of my father moving through the gloom of the backyard. He had on a pair of galoshes I’d worn as a kid, the kind with the metal fasteners, and he was wearing a yellow rain slicker and one of those winter hats with the fold-down earmuffs. I couldn’t quite tell what he was doing out there, raking dirt or leaves, something to do with the rain, I guessed — the driveway was eroding, maybe that was it. It never crossed my mind that he might need help. And Robert Rowe never crossed my mind either, nor the fact that his speech had been garbled and slow at the noon hour and his eyes drifting toward a point no one in this world could see but him.

No. I was hungry for something, I didn’t know what. It wasn’t food, because I mechanically chewed a handful of saltines over the sink and washed them down with half a glass of milk that tasted like chalk. I paced round the living room, snuck a drink out of my mother’s bottle — Dewar’s, that was what she drank; my father stuck with vodka, the cheaper the better, and I’d never acquired a taste for it. I had another drink, and then another. After a while I eased myself down in my father’s chair and gazed around the room where I’d spent the better part of my life, the secondhand furniture, the forest-green wallpaper gone pale around the windowframes, the peeling sheet-metal planter I’d made for my mother in shop class, the plants within it long since expired, just curls of dead things now. Finally I got up and turned on the TV, then settled back in my father’s chair as the jets came in low and the village went up in flames.

(2003)

There were two kinds of truths, good truths and hurtful ones. That was what her father’s attorney was telling her, and she was listening, doing her best, her face a small glazed crescent of light where the sun glanced off the yellow kitchen wall to illuminate her, but it was hard. Hard because it was a weekday, after school, and this was her free time, her chance to breeze into the 7-Eleven or Instant Message her friends before dinner and homework closed the day down. Hard too because her father was there, sitting on a stool at the kitchen counter, sipping something out of a mug, not coffee, definitely not coffee. His face was soft, the lines at the corners of his eyes nearly erased in the gentle spill of light — his crow’s-feet, and how she loved that word, as if the bird’s scaly claws had taken hold there like something out of a horror story, Edgar Allan Poe, the Raven, Nevermore, but wasn’t a raven different from a crow and why not call them raven’s-feet? Or hawk’s-feet? People could have a hawk’s nose — they always did in stories — but they had crow’s-feet, and that didn’t make any sense at all.

“Angelle,” the attorney said— Mr. Apodaca —and the sound of her own name startled her, “are you listening to me?”

She nodded her head. And because that didn’t seem enough, she spoke up too. “Yes,” she said, but her voice sounded strange in her ears, as if somebody else were speaking for her.

“Good,” he said, “good,” leaning into the table so that his big moist dog’s eyes settled on her with a baleful look. “Because this is very important, I don’t have to stress that—”

He waited for her to nod again before going on.

“There are two kinds of truths,” he repeated, “just like lies. There are bad lies, we all know that, lies meant to cheat and deceive, and then there are white lies, little fibs that don’t really hurt anybody”—he blew out a soft puff of air, as if he were just stepping into a hot tub—“and might actually do good. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

She held herself perfectly still. Of course she understood — he was treating her like a nine-year-old, like her sister, and she was twelve, almost thirteen, and this was an act of rebellion, to hold herself there, not answering, not nodding, not even blinking her eyes.

“Like in this case,” he went on, “your father’s case, I mean. You’ve seen TV, the movies. The judge asks you for the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and you’ll swear to it, everybody does — your father, me, anybody before the court.” He had a mug too, one she recognized from her mother’s college days — B.U., it said in thick red letters, Boston University —but there was coffee in his, or there had been. Now he just pushed it around the table as if it were a chess piece and he couldn’t decide where to play it. “All I want you to remember — and your father wants this too, or no, he needs it, needs you to pay attention — is that there are good truths and bad truths, that’s all. And your memory only serves to a point; I mean, who’s to say what really happened, because everybody has their own version, that woman jogger, the boy on the bike — and the D.A., the district attorney, he’s the one who might ask you what happened that day, just him and me, that’s all. Don’t you worry about anything.”

But she was worried, because Mr. Apodaca was there in the first place, with his perfect suit and perfect tie and his doggy eyes, and because her father had been handcuffed along the side of the road and taken to jail and the car had been impounded, which meant nobody could use it, not her father or her mother when she came back from France or Dolores the maid or Allie the au pair. There was all that, but there was something else too, something in her father’s look and the attorney’s sugary tones that hardened her: they were talking down to her. Talking down to her as if she had no more sense than her little sister. And she did. She did.