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

“Sir?”

“Yeah,” he’d said, staring up into the sky now, and where were his shades? “Yeah, what? What do you want?”

The smallest beat. “Your car. Sir.”

And then it all came clear to him the way these things do, and he flipped open his wallet to extract two singles — finger-softened money, money as soft and pliable as felt — and the valet accepted them and he was in the car, looking to connect the male end of the seatbelt to the female, and where was the damned thing? There was still a sliver of sun cutting in low over the ocean and he dug into the glove compartment for his old sunglasses, the emergency pair, because the new ones were someplace else altogether, apparently, and not in his pocket and not on the cord round his neck, and then he had them fitted over his ears and the radio was playing something with some real thump to it and he was rolling on out of the lot, looking to merge with the traffic on the boulevard.

That was when everything turned hard-edged and he knew he was drunk. He waited too long to merge — too cautious, too tentative — and the driver behind him laid on the horn and he had no choice but to give him the finger and he might have leaned his head out the window and barked something too, but the car came to life beneath him and somebody swerved wide and he was out in traffic. If he was thinking anything at all it probably had to do with his last DUI, which had come out of nowhere when he wasn’t even that drunk, or maybe not drunk at all. He’d been coming back from Johnny’s Rib Shack after working late, gnawing at a rib, a beer open between his legs, and he came down the slope beneath the underpass where you make a left to turn onto the freeway ramp and he was watching the light and didn’t see the mustard-colored Volvo stopped there in front of him until it was too late. And he was so upset with himself — and not just himself, but the world at large and the way it presented these problems to him, these impediments, the unforeseen and the unexpected just laid out there in front of him as if it were some kind of conspiracy — that he got out of the car, the radiator crushed and hissing and beer pissed all over his lap, and shouted, “All right, so sue me!” at the dazed woman behind the wheel of the other car. But that wasn’t going to happen now. Nothing was going to happen now.

The trees rolled by, people crossed at the crosswalk, lights turned yellow and then red and then green, and he was doing fine, just sailing, thinking he’d take the girls out for burritos or In-N-Out burgers on the way home, when a cop passed him going in the other direction and his heart froze like a block of ice and then thawed instantaneously, hammering so hard he thought it would punch right through his chest. Signal, signal, he told himself, keeping his eyes on the rearview, and he did, he signaled and made the first turn, a road he’d never been on before, and then he made the next turn after that, and the next, and when he looked up again he had no idea where he was.

Which was another reason why he was late, and there was Angelle giving him that hard cold judgmental look — her mother’s look exactly — because she was perfect, she was dutiful and put-upon and the single best kid in the world, in the history of the world, and he was a fuckup, pure and simple. It was wrong, what he asked her to do, but it happened nonetheless, and he guided her through each step, a straight shot on the way home, two and a half miles, that was all, and forget stopping at In-N-Out, they’d just go home and have a pizza delivered. He remembered going on in that vein, “Don’t you girls want pizza tonight? Huh, Lisette? Peppers and onions? And those little roasted artichokes? Or maybe you’d prefer wormheads, mashed wormheads?”—leaning over the seat to cajole her, make it all right and take the tightness out of her face, and he didn’t see the boy on the bicycle, didn’t know anything about him until Angelle let out a choked little cry and there was the heart-stopping thump of something glancing off the fender.

—

The courtroom smelled of wax, the same kind of wax they used on the floors at school, sweet and acrid at the same time, a smell that was almost comforting in its familiarity. But she wasn’t at school — she’d been excused for the morning — and she wasn’t here to be comforted or to feel comfortable either. She was here to listen to Mr. Apodaca and the judge and the D.A. and the members of the jury decide her father’s case and to testify in his behalf, tell what she knew, tell a kind of truth that wasn’t maybe whole and pure but necessary, a necessary truth. That was what Mr. Apodaca was calling it now, necessary, and she’d sat with him and her father in one of the unused rooms off the main corridor — another courtroom — while he went over the whole business one more time for her, just to be sure she understood.

Her father had held her hand on the way in and he sat beside her on one of the wooden benches as his attorney went over the details of that day after school, because he wanted to make sure they were all on the same page. Those were his words exactly—“I want to make sure we’re all on the same page on this”—as he loomed over her and her father, bracing himself on the gleaming wooden rail, his shoes competing with the floor for the brilliance of their shine, and she couldn’t help picturing some Mexican boy, some dropout from the high school, laboring over those shoes while Mr. Apodaca sat high in a leatherbacked chair, his feet in the stainless steel stirrups. She pictured him behind his newspaper, looking stern, or going over his brief, the details, these details. When he was through, when he’d gone through everything, minute by minute, gesture by gesture, coaching her, quizzing her—“And what did he say? What did you say?”—he asked her father if he could have a minute alone with her.

That was when her father gave her hand a final squeeze and then dropped it and got up from the bench. He was wearing a new suit, a navy so dark and severe it made his skin look like raw dough, and he’d had his hair cut so tight round the ears it was as if a machine had been at work there, an edger or a riding mower like the one they used on the soccer field at school, only in miniature, and for an instant she imagined it, tiny people like in Gulliver’s Travels, buzzing round her father’s ears with their mowers and clippers and edgers. The tie he was wearing was the most boring one he owned, a blue fading to black, with no design, not even a stripe. His face was heavy, his crow’s-feet right there for all the world to see — gouges, tears, slits, a butcher’s shop of carved and abused skin — and for the first time she noticed the small gray dollop of loose flesh under his chin. It made him look old, worn-out, past his prime, as if he weren’t the hero anymore but playing the hero’s best friend, the one who never gets the girl and never gets the job. And what role was she playing? The star. She was the star here, and the more the attorney talked on and the heavier her father’s face got, the more it came home to her.

Mr. Apodaca said nothing, just let the silence hang in the room till the memory of her father’s footsteps had faded. Then he leaned over the back of the bench directly in front of her, the great seal of the state of California framed over the dais behind him, and he squeezed his eyes shut a moment so that when he opened them and fixed her with his gaze, there were tears there. Or the appearance of tears. His eyelashes were moist and the moistness picked each of them out individually until all she could think of was the stalks of cane against the fence in the back corner of the yard. “I want you to listen very carefully to what I’m about to say, Angelle,” he breathed, his voice so soft and constricted it was like the sound of the air being let out of a tire. “Because this concerns you and your sister. It could affect your whole life.”