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

(2007)

The Sticker

I don’t have any children — I’m not even married, not anymore — but last month, though I was fried from my commute and looking forward to nothing more complicated than the bar, the TV and the microwave dinner, in that order, I made a point of attending the Thursday-evening meeting of the Smithstown School Board. On an empty stomach. Sans alcohol. Why? Because of Melanie Albert’s ninth-grade biology textbook — or, actually, the sticker affixed to the cover of it. This is the book with the close-up of the swallowtail butterfly against a field of pure environmental green, standard issue, used in ten thousand schools across the land, and it came to my attention when her father, Dave, and I were unwinding after work at the Granite Grill a week earlier.

The Granite is our local watering hole, and it doesn’t have much to recommend it, beyond the fact that it’s there. Its virtues reside mainly in what it doesn’t offer, I suppose — no waiters wrestling with their consciences, no chef striving to demonstrate his ability to fuse the Ethiopian and Korean culinary traditions, no music other than the hits of the eighties, piped in through a service that plumbs the deep cuts so that you get to hear The Clash doing “Wrong ’Em Boyo” and David Byrne’s “Swamp,” from his days with Talking Heads, instead of the same unvarying eternal crap you get on the radio. And it’s dimly lighted. Very dimly lighted. All you see, really, beyond the shifting colors of the TV, is the soft backlit glow of the bottles on display behind the bar dissolving into a hundred soothing glints of gold and copper. It’s relaxing — so relaxing I’ve found myself drifting off to dreamland right there in the grip of my barstool, one hand clenched round the stem of the glass, the other bracing up a chin as heavy as all the slag heaps of the earth combined. You could say it’s my second home. Or maybe my first.

We’d just settled onto our stools, my right hand going instinctively to the bowl of artificial bar snacks while the Mets careened round the bases on the wide-screen TV and Rick, the bartender, stirred and strained my first Sidecar of the evening, when I became aware of Dave, off to my left, digging something out of his briefcase. There was a thump beside me and I turned my head. “What’s that?” I said. The title, in fluorescent orange, leapt out at me: An Introduction to Biology. “A little light reading?”

Dave — he was my age, forty-three, and he didn’t bother to dye his hair or counteract the wrinkles eroding his forehead and chewing away at the corners of his eyes because he accepted who he was and he had no qualms about letting the world in on it — just stared at me. He’d given up tennis. Given up poker. And when I called him on a Saturday morning to go out for a hike or a spin up the river in my speedboat with the twin Merc 575s that’ll shear the hair right off your head, he was always busy.

“What?” I said.

He tapped the cover of the book. “Don’t you notice anything?”

My drink had come, iced, sugared, as necessary as oxygen. The Mets scored again. I took a sip.

“The sticker,” he said. “Don’t you see the sticker?”

Prodded, I took notice of it, a lemon-yellow circle the size of a silver dollar, inside of which was a disclaimer printed in sober black letters. The theory of evolution as put forth in this text, it read, is just that, a theory, and should not be confused with fact. “Yeah,” I said. “So?”

He clenched his jaw. Gave me a long hard look. “Don’t you know what this means?”

I thought about that a moment, turning the book over in one hand before setting it back down on the bar. I worked at the sticker with my thumbnail. It was immovable, as if it had been fused to the cover using a revolutionary new process. “Sucker’s really on there,” I said. I gave him a grin. “You wouldn’t happen to have any sandpaper on you, would you?”

“It’s not fucking funny, Cal. You can laugh — you haven’t got a kid in school. But if you believe in anything, if you believe in what’s happening to this country, what’s happening right here in our own community—” He broke off, so wrought up he couldn’t go on. His face was flushed. He picked up his beer and set it down again.

“You’re talking about the fact that we’re living in a theocracy now, right? A theocracy at war with another theocracy?”

“Why do you always have to make a joke out of everything?”

“Bible-thumpers,” I said, but without conviction. I was in a bar. It had been a long day. I wanted to talk about nothing, sports, women, the subtle manipulations of the commercials for beer, cars, Palm Pilots. I didn’t want to delve beneath the surface. It was too cold down there, too dark and claustrophobic. “You can’t be serious,” I said finally, giving ground. “Here? Thirty-five miles up the river from Manhattan?”

He was nodding, his eyes fixed on mine. “I don’t pay that much attention, I guess,” he said finally. “Or Katie either. I don’t even think we voted in the last school board election…. I mean, it’s our own fault. It was just a slate of names, you know. Like the judges. Does anybody ever know the slightest thing about any of the judges on the ballot that comes round every November? Or the town supervisors? Shit. You’d have to devote your life to it, know what I’m saying?”

Feelings were stirring in me — anger, resentment, helplessness. My drink had gone warm. I said the only thing I could think to say: “So what are you going to do?”

Jesus, and Where He Resides

It was raining that Thursday night, though the air was warm still, a last breath of summer before September gave way to October and the days began to wind down till the leaves littered the streets and the boat would have to come out of the water. I had a little trouble finding the place where they were holding the meeting — they’ve built a whole city’s worth of new buildings since I went to school, the population ratcheting up relentlessly even around here where there are zero jobs to be had and all everybody talks about is preserving the semi-rural feel, as if we were all dipping our own candles and greasing the wheels of our buggies. Which is another reason why I couldn’t find the place. It’s dark. The streetlights give out within a block of the junction of the state road and Main Street, and the big old black-barked oaks and elms everybody seems to love soak up the light till the roads might as well be tunnels in a coal mine. And I admit it: my eyes aren’t what they used to be. I’ve put off getting glasses because of the kind of statement they make — weakness, that is — and I’ve heard that once you begin to rely on them you can never go back to the naked eye, that’s it, and here’s your crutch forever. The next thing is reading glasses, and then you’re pottering around with those pathetic lanyards looped round your neck, murmuring, Has anybody seen my glasses?

Anyway, it was the cars that clued me. There must have been a hundred or more of them jamming every space in the parking lot behind the new elementary school, with the overflow parked on a lawn that was just a wet black void sucked out of the shadows. I pulled up within inches of the last car squeezed in on the grass — a cobalt-blue Suburban, humped and mountainous — and felt the wheels give ever so slightly before I shut down the ignition, figuring I’d worry about it later. I pulled up the collar of my coat and hurried along the walk toward the lights glowing in the distance.

The auditorium was packed, standing room only, and everybody looked angry — from the six school board members seated behind a collapsible table up onstage to the reporter from the local paper and the concerned parents and students warming the chairs and lining the walls like extras on a movie set. I caught a nostalgic whiff of floor wax, finger paint and formaldehyde, but it was short-lived, overwhelmed by the working odor of all that crush of humanity. The fact that everybody was wet to one degree or another didn’t help matters, the women’s hair hanging limp, the men’s jackets clinging at the shoulders and under the arms, umbrellas drooling, smears of wet black mud striping the linoleum underfoot. I could smell myself — what I was adding to the mix — in the bad cheese of my underarms and the sweet reek of mango-pineapple rising from the dissolved gel in my hair. It was very hot.