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

And then I was coming up the hill from the station, the trees fired with the season and dusk coming down over the river behind me, everything so changeless and pure it was as if I’d stepped back in time, when I remembered I needed to pick up a few things at the deli. I didn’t cook much — I let Tom Scoville, the chef at the Granite, take care of that — but I ate cereal for breakfast, slipped the odd frozen dinner into the microwave or went through the elaborate ritual of slicing Swiss and folding it between two slices of rye. I was out of milk, butter, bread. And as I’d walked down the hill to the train that morning I’d reminded myself to remind myself when I came back up.

I was deep in my post-work oblivion, thinking nothing, and the pockmarked man took me by surprise. Suddenly he was standing there, right in front of the door of Gravenites’ Deli, not exactly blocking my access, but taking up space in a way I didn’t like. Up close, I saw that the pockmarks were a remnant of an epidermal war he was fighting not only on his face but his scalp and throat as well. He smelled like roast beef. “Hello, brother,” he said, thrusting a clipboard at me.

I was in no mood. “I’m an only child,” I said.

Unfazed — I don’t even think he heard me — he just kept talking, “There’s a battle going on here for the souls of our children. And we all have to get involved.”

“Not me,” I said, trying to maneuver past him. “What I have to get is a quart of milk.”

“I saw you at the meeting,” he said, and now he was blocking my way. “You know damn well what this is all about.” Behind him, in the depths of the store, I could see people lined up waiting for cold cuts, sandwiches, a slice of pizza. Thirty seconds had gone by, thirty seconds out of my life. I moved for the door and the clipboard flew up like a bird. “What side you on?” he said. “Because there’s only one side to this — God’s side.”

“Get the fuck out of my way.”

His eyes jumped and steadied and something hard settled into his face. “Don’t use that language with me.”

The whole world dissolved in that instant, as if the movie had slipped off the reel, and a long sorrow opened up inside me. What was going on here had nothing to do with Dave or school boards or Lynnese or her daughter either — it was just some stranger getting in my face, and nobody gets in my face. Some redneck. Some yahoo with a complexion like a cheese grater and bad breath on top of it. So I shoved him and he lurched back against the window and everybody in Gravenites’ Deli looked up at the concussion as the plate glass contracted and snapped back again. He came at me before I could get a second shove in, his hands at the collar of my shirt, bunching the material there, and he was the one cursing now, “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!”

It was over in a minute, the way most fights are. I grabbed both his hands and flung them away from me even as my shirt — green Tencel, in a banana-leaf pattern, eighty-seven bucks on sale — ripped down the front and I gave him a parting shove that sent him into the empty steel framework of the bicycle rack, where his legs got tangled up and he went down hard on the sidewalk. Then I was stalking up the street, the blood screaming in my ears and everything so distorted I thought I was losing my sight.

I felt contaminated. Angry with myself but more angry with him and everybody like him, the narrow, the bigoted, the fanatics, because that was what they were, their hope masquerading as certainty, desperation plucking at your sleeve, plucking, always plucking and pushing. In college — I think it was my sophomore year — I took a course called “Philosophy of Religion” by way of fulfilling an elective requirement, but also because I wanted ammunition against my Catholic mother and the fraud the priests and rabbis and mullahs were perpetrating on people too ignorant and scared to know better. Throughout my childhood I’d been the victim of a scam, of the panoply of God and His angels, of goodness everlasting and the answer to the mystery Mary-Louise carried in her heart and laid out for all to see, and I wanted this certified college course and this middle-aged professor with a pouf of discolored hair and a birthmark in the shape of Lake Erie on his forehead to confirm it. I knew Paley’s argument from design, knew about the watch and the watchmaker, and I knew now that these people — these Jesus freaks — were trundling out the same old argument dressed in new clothes. Intricacy requires design, that was what they said. And design requires a designer. That was as far as they could see, that was it, case closed: God exists. And the earth is ten thousand years old, just like the Bible says.

I went up the sidewalk, my legs churning against the grade with the fierce regularity of my rage, my quadriceps muscles flexing and releasing, the anterior cruciate ligaments aligning and realigning themselves in my knees, the chambers of my Jesus-less heart pumping like the slick-working intricate parts of the intricate machine they were, and the whole debate reduced to a naked clipboard and a torn shirt. I was two blocks from the Granite. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t think. I crossed one street, then the next, and the hill sank ahead of me until the familiar yellow awning of the bar came into view, cars parked out front, lights glowing against the twilight and all the trees down the block masked in shadow.

That was when my vision suddenly came clear and I spotted Lynnese. She was sitting behind a card table in front of the bookstore, Mary-Louise perched on a folding chair beside her with her back arched so perfectly she might have been auditioning for junior cotillion. They were fifty feet from me. I saw a mug imprinted with the hopeful yellow slash of a smiley face, front and center, right in the middle of the table, saw Mary-Louise’s pink backpack at her feet and the sprawl of her books and homework. And I saw the clipboard. Cheap dun plastic, the shining metallic clip. Saw it all at the very moment Lynnese lifted her eyes and flashed me a smile with wings on it.

My reaction? Truthfully? I made as if I didn’t see her. Suddenly I had to cross the street — this was very compelling, an absolute necessity, because even though crossing the street would take me away from the Granite and I’d have to walk a block in the opposite direction and then double back, I had an urgent errand over there on the other side of the street, in that antique shop I’d passed a hundred times and never yet set foot in.

Mutation, and How It Operates in Nature

And then it was a Sunday toward the end of the month, warmer than it should have been at this time of year, and I was out in the woods on the trail behind Breakneck Ridge, enjoying the weight of my daypack and the way the trees caught the wind and shook out their colors. I had two hot dog buns with me, two all-beef wieners, yellow mustard in a disposable packet and a bottle of red wine I’d decanted into my bota bag, and I was planning on a good six- or seven-mile loop and lunch beside a creek I liked to visit, especially in the fall when the bugs were down. The World Series was on, but it featured two teams that didn’t excite me all that much and I figured the Granite could do without me, at least for the afternoon — I’d been in and out all week anyway, mostly when Dave wasn’t there. Nothing against Dave — I just needed a little time to myself. Nights were getting cold. The season was almost gone.

I felt the climb as a burn in my lungs and I realized I wasn’t in the kind of shape I should have been — the walk up from the train was one thing, but the ridge was another thing altogether. I was thinking about the philosophy of religion professor and a trick he’d played on the class one Friday afternoon when all we wanted, collectively, was to get out the door and head downtown for beer, loud music and whatever association we could make with the opposite sex. He put a drawing up on the blackboard, nothing very elaborate, just lines and shadings, that appeared to be a scene out of nature, a crag, a pine tree, a scattering of boulders. He didn’t identify it as a trompe l’oeil, but that was what it was, a trick of the eye, a deception, sweet and simple. There’s a hidden figure here, he told us, and when you see it — and please don’t reveal it to anyone else — you’re welcome to leave. Just concentrate. That’s all it takes. One by one, my classmates gave out with expressions of surprise, wondered a moment over the subtlety of the lesson, packed up their books and left. I was the last one. I stared at that crag, that pine tree, till they were imprinted on my brain, increasingly frustrated — there was nothing there, I was sure of it, and the others were faking it in order to curry favor and not least to get out of the classroom and into the sunlit arena of that Friday afternoon. When finally I did see it — a representation of Jesus leaping clear of the background, his halo a pine bough, a boulder for his cheek — all I felt was disappointment. It was a cheap trick, that was all. What did it prove? That anybody can be fooled? That we can’t trust the evidence of our five senses when five senses are all we’ve got?