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

“I was just wondering if you might have a minute to spare—? To talk. Just a minute, that’s all?”

A Jesus freak, she was thinking. All I need. She was halfway through the door, looking back at him, down at him, but he must have been six-five, six-six, and his fixed blue eyes were nearly on a level with hers. “No,” she said, “I don’t think so. I work nights and—”

He lifted his eyebrows and the corners of his mouth went up a notch. “Oh, no, no, no,” he said, “I’m not a Bible-thumper or anything like that. I’m not selling anything, nothing at all. I’m your neighbor, is all? Todd Gray? From over on Betts Street?”

The wind was at war with the heater and the soft warm slightly rancid smell of home that emanated from the pillows of the built-in couch and the cheap floorboards and the kitchen counter and the molded plastic strips of the ceiling. She was half-in and half-out and he was standing there on the frozen ground.

“No,” he said, “no,” as if she were protesting, “I just wanted to talk to you about Question 62, that’s all. And I won’t take a minute of your time.”

—

She was down on her hands and knees for so long her back began to ache — her lower back, right at the base of the spine, where gravity tugged at the bunched muscles there and her stomach sagged beneath them — and she could feel the burden of her torso in her shoulders and wrists. She was there so long the mist began to lift and an oblivious snail slid out from the furls of one of the plants and etched a trail across the knuckles of her right hand. But she didn’t want to move. She couldn’t move. She was beyond fear now and deep into the realm of fascination, of magic and wonder and the compelling strangeness of the moment. A tiger. A tiger in her garden. No one would believe it. No one, not Doug snoring in the bedroom or Anita locked away in her trailer with its frozen skirt of snow and the wind sitting in the north.

The tiger hadn’t moved. It sat there on its haunches like a dog anticipating a treat, braced on its big buff paws, ears erect, tail twitching, watching her. She’d been talking to it in a low voice for some time now, offering up blandishments against the dwindling nugget of her fear, saying, Good boy, good cat, that’s right, yes —and here her voice contracted to a syrupy chirp— he just wants a little love, doesn’t he? A little love, yeah?

The animal made no sign it understood, but it stayed there, pressed to the fence, apparently as fascinated as she, and as the mist clotted round the smooth lanceolate leaves of the oleanders and steamed from the wet shingles of the Hortons’ across the way, she understood that this was somebody’s pet, the ward of some menagerie owner or private collector like that man in the Bronx or Brooklyn or wherever it was with the full-grown tiger in his apartment and the six-foot alligator in the bathtub. Of course it was. This wasn’t Sumatra or the Sunderbans — aliens hadn’t swooped down overnight in one of their radiant ships and set loose a plague of tigers across the land. The animal was a pet. And it had got loose. It was probably hungry. Bewildered. Tired. It was probably as surprised to see her in her straw hat and faded green overalls as she was to see it — or him. It was definitely a him — she could see the crease where his equipment lay against his groin and the twin bulbs of his testicles.

But she couldn’t crouch like this forever — her back was killing her. And her wrists. Her wrists had gone numb. Very slowly, as if she were doing yoga to a tape running at half-speed, she lowered her bottom down in the damp soil and felt the pressure ease in her arms, and that was all right, except that her new posture seemed to confound the cat — or excite him. He moved up off his haunches and slid silkily down the length of the iron fence, then swung round and came back again, the muscles tensed in his shoulders as he rubbed against the bars, and she was sure that he’d been in a cage, that he wanted a cage now — the security of it, the familiarity, probably the only environment he’d ever known — and all she could think of was how to get him in here, inside the fence and maybe into the garage, where she could lock the door and hide him away.

—

Since Robert died — was killed, that is — she hadn’t had many visitors. There was Tricia, who lived with her boyfriend three trailers down — she sometimes came in for a cup of tea in the evening when Anita was just waking up and trying to consolidate her physical resources for the shift ahead, but her schedule kept her pretty much to herself. She was only thirty-five, widowed less than a year, the blood still ran in her veins and she liked a good time as much as anybody else. Still, it was hard to find people who wanted to make the rounds of the bars at eight a.m., other than congenital losers and pinch-faced retirees hunched over a double vodka as if it was going to give them back the key to their personalities, and the times she’d tried to go out at night on her days off she’d found herself drifting over her first beer while everybody else got up and danced. And so she invited him in, this man, Todd, and here he was sprawled on the couch in his faded cowboy boots with his legs that ran on forever, and she was offering him some stale Triscuits and a bright orange block of cheddar she’d surreptitiously shaved the mold off of and she was just wondering if he might like a glass of chardonnay.

He’d let his grin flag, but it came back now, a boy’s grin, the grin that had no doubt got him whatever he wanted wherever he went. He pushed the hat back till the roots of his hair showed in front, squared his shoulders and gathered in his legs. She saw that he was her age, or close enough, and she saw too that he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. “A little early for me,” he said, and his laugh was genuine. “But if you’re going to have one—”

She was already pouring. “I told you,” she said, “I work nights.”

The wine was one of her few indulgences — it was from a little California vineyard in the Santa Ynez Valley. She and her sister Mae had gone wine-tasting when she was visiting over Christmas and she liked the faint dry echo of the chardonnay so much she had two cases shipped back to Wisconsin. Her impulse was to hoard it, but she was feeling generous this morning, expansive in a way that had nothing to do with the two scotches or the way the trailer ticked and hummed over its heating element and a feeble cone of rinsed-out sunshine poked through the blinds. “This is cocktail hour for me,” she said, handing him the glass, “my chance to kick back before dinner.”

“Right,” he said, “just about the time everybody else is getting to work with crumbs in their lap and a cardboard cup of lukewarm coffee. I used to work nights,” he said. “At a truck stop. I know how it is.”

She’d eased into the chair opposite him, his legs snaking out again as if he couldn’t contain them, boots crossed at the ankles, then uncrossed and crossed again. “So what do you do now?” she asked, wishing she’d had a chance to put on some lipstick, brush her hair. In time, though. In time she would. Especially if he stayed for a second glass.

His eyes, which had never strayed from hers since he hunched through the door, slipped away and then came back again. He shrugged. “This and that.”

She had nothing to say to this and they were silent a moment as they sipped their wine and listened to the wind run at the trailer. “You like it?” she said finally.

“Hm?”

“The wine.”

“Oh, sure, yeah. I’m not much of a connoisseur, I’d say… but yeah, definitely.”

“It’s a California wine. My sister lives out there. Got it right from the winery itself.”