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

“Nice,” he said, and she could see he was just being polite. Probably the next thing he would say was that he was more of a beer man himself.

She wanted to say more, wanted to tell him about the vineyard, the neat braided rows of grapevines curling round the hills and arcing down into the little valleys like the whorls of a shell, about the tasting room and the feel of the sun on her face as she and Mae sat outside at a redwood table and toasted each other and the power of healing and the beginning of a new life for them both, but she sensed he wouldn’t be interested. So she leaned in then, elbows propped on the knees of the pale blue cotton scrubs she wore to work every night, his legs splayed out in front of her as if he’d been reclining there all his life, and said, “So what is this question you wanted to ask me about anyway?”

—

The more she talked, the more the tiger seemed to settle down. Before long it stopped pacing, leaned into the rails of the fence and let its body melt away till it was lying there in the dirt and devil grass as if it had somehow found the one place in the world that suited it best. There was the sound of the birds — a jay calling harshly from the next yard over, a songbird swapping improvisations with its mate — and the soughing rumble of a car going up the street behind the house, and then she could hear the tiger’s breathing as clearly as if she were sitting in the living room listening to it come through Doug’s stereo speakers. It wasn’t purring, not exactly, but there was a glottal sound there, deep and throaty, and after a moment she realized the animal was asleep and that what she was hearing was a kind of snore, a sucking wheeze, in and out, in and out. She was amazed. Struck dumb. How many people had heard a tiger snore? How many people in the world, in the history of the world, let alone Moorpark? What she felt then was grace, a grace that descended on her from the gray roof of the morning, a sense of privilege and intimacy no one on earth was feeling. This animal didn’t belong to her, she knew that — it had an owner somewhere and he would be out looking for it, the police would be here soon, dogs, trackers, guns — but the moment did.

—

“Well, let me put it this way,” he was saying, “I see you got some ferals living under your trailer…”

“Ferals?” At first she thought he’d meant ferrets and she gave his hat a closer scrutiny. Was that what that was, ferret fur?

“Cats. Stray cats.”

He was studying her intently, challenging her with his eyes. She shrugged. “Three or four of them. They come and go.”

“You’re not feeding them, are you?”

“Not really.”

“Good,” he said, and then repeated himself with a kind of religious fervor, his voice echoing off the molded plastic of the ceiling. She saw that his glass was empty, clutched in one oversized hand and balanced delicately over the crotch of his jeans. “Because they’re bird killers, you know. Big time. You ever notice feathers scattered around?”

“Not really.” This was the moment to look at her own empty glass and hold it up to the light. “But hey, I’m going to have another — help me sleep. How about you?”

He waved his hand in a vague way, which she took to mean yes, and she lifted the bottle from the coffee table and held it aloft a moment so that the pale light through the window caught the label, then leaned forward, way out over the gulf of his parted thighs, to pour for him. He didn’t thank her. Didn’t even seem to notice. “I like birds,” he said. “I love birds. I’ve been a member of the Audubon Society since I was in sixth grade, did you know that?”

She didn’t know that, how could she? — she’d just met him ten minutes ago. But she’d always liked tall men and she liked the way he’d settled in, liked the way things were going. His brow furrowed, his eyes leapt out at her: he was a preacher, after all. So what did she do? She poured herself a glass of wine and shrugged again. Let him talk.

“Anyway,” he said, and he drank off half the glass in a gulp, “anyway — this is good stuff, I see what you mean. But the cats. Did you know there are something like two million stray cats in this state alone and that they’re responsible for killing between forty-seven million to a hundred and thirty-nine million native songbirds a year, depending on the estimate? A hundred and thirty-nine million.” He drew up his legs, the boots sliding away from her and clapping lightly together as he sat up erect in the chair. “Now that’s outrageous, don’t you think?”

“Yeah,” she said, sipping California, tasting the sun on her tongue, the earth, the trees, the vines that wove the hills into a big green fruit-hung tapestry. Robert had been five-eleven, an inch taller than she, and that was fine, that was all right, because she’d had her fill of blind dates and friends of friends who came up to her clavicle, but she’d always wondered what it would be like to date a man who made her feel short. And vulnerable. Somebody who could pull her head to his chest and just squeeze till she felt the weight go out of her legs.

“So that’s why I’m here,” he said, studying the pale gold of the wine in the clear crystal of the glass, before tilting his head to throw back what remained. “That’s why I’m going house to house to drum up support for Question 62—for the birds. To save the birds.”

She felt as if she were drifting, uncontained, floating right up and out through the ceiling of the trailer to blow off on the wind as if she were a bird herself — two scotches and two glasses of wine on a mostly empty stomach, the Lean Cuisine Salmon Gratin with Lemon & Dill sitting frozen on the counter. Still, she had the presence of mind to lean back in the chair, let out a deep breath and focus a smile on him. “All right,” she said, “you got me — what’s Question 62?”

The answer consumed the next ten minutes, during which she put on her listening expression and poured them each another half glass of wine and the presence of the sun grew firmer as it sliced the blinds into plainly delineated stripes that began ever so slowly to creep across the carpet. Question 62, he told her, was coming up for a vote in seventy-two counties on the twelfth of April and it was as simple as this: should cats be listed as an unprotected species like skunks and gophers and other nuisance animals? They were coldly efficient predators and they were interfering with the ecosystem. They were killing off birds and outcompeting native animals like hawks, owls and foxes for prey, and the long and short of it was that any cat found roaming without a collar could be hunted without a license or season or bag limit.

“Hunted?” she said. “You mean, with a gun? Like deer or something?”

“Like gophers,” he said. “Like rats.” His eyes were fierce and he leaned over his empty glass as if he were about to snatch it up and grind it between his teeth. He was sweating, a translucent runnel of fluid leaching out of his hairline and into the baffle of his right eyebrow; in a single motion he shrugged out of his parka and pulled off the hat to reveal a full head of russet hair streaked blond at the tips. He was staring right into her.

“I don’t like guns,” she said.

“Guns’re a fact of life.”

“My husband was killed by a gun.” As she said it, a flat statement of fact, she saw Robert lying in the dirt not fifty feet from where they were sitting now and she heard the sirens and the gunshots, and the face of Tim Palko from the trailer across the way came back to her, Tim Palko, drunk for a week after he lost his job and gone crazy with his deer rifle till the SWAT team closed in and he put the barrel of it in his own mouth and jerked the trigger one last time. But she’d seen death — she saw it every week at the Page Center — and when she looked out the window of the trailer after the first shot thumped through the afternoon like the beat of a bass drum that never reverberated, she could see from the way Robert was lying there that it had come for him and come instantly. Mae had said, How could you be sure? but she had two eyes and she knew absolutely and incontrovertibly, and that knowledge, cold as it was, grim as it was, saved her. If I’d run out there, Mae, she told her, we wouldn’t be sitting here now.