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

He would never know who started the shooting, whether it was one of the guerrillas or the Chief and his men, but the noise of it, the lethal stutter that saw the naked figures jolted out of the pool and the water bloom with color, started him forward. He stepped from the bushes, oblivious to danger, stopping only to snatch a rock from the ground and mold it to his hand in the way he’d done ten thousand times when he was a boy. That was when the skinny kid with the dead eyes sprang up out of nowhere to put a knife to his mother’s throat, and what was the point of that? Aquiles couldn’t understand. One night there was victory, another night defeat. But you played the game just the same — you didn’t blow up the ballpark or shoot the opposing batter. You didn’t extort money from the people who’d earned it through God-given talent and hard work. You didn’t threaten mothers. That wasn’t right. That was impermissible. And so he cocked his arm and let fly with his fastball that had been clocked at ninety-eight miles an hour on the radar gun at Camden Yards while forty-five thousand people stamped and shouted and chanted his name— High and inside, he was thinking, high and inside —and, without complicating matters, let’s just say that his aim was true.

—

Unfortunately, Marita Villalba never fully recovered from her ordeal. She would awaken in the night, smelling game roasting over a campfire — smelling carpincho with its rodent’s hide intact — and she seemed lost in her own kitchen. She gave up dyeing her hair, rarely wore makeup or jewelry. The machine shop was nothing to her and when Rómulo Cordero, hobbled by his wounds, had to step down, she didn’t even come downstairs to attend his retirement party, though the smell of the arepas, empanadas and chivo en coco radiated through the windows and up out of the yard and into the streets for blocks around. More and more she was content to let Suspira Salvatoros look after the kitchen and the children while she sat in the sun with her own mother, their collective fingers, all twenty of them, busy with the intricate needlepoint designs for which they became modestly famous in the immediate neighborhood.

Aquiles went back to the major leagues midway through the season, but after that moment of truth on the hilltop in the jungle of Estado Bolívar, he just couldn’t summon the fire anymore. That, combined with the injury to his rotator cuff, spelled disaster. He was shelled each time he went to the mound, the boos rising in chorus till the manager took the ball from him for the last time and he cleared waivers and came home to stay, his glory gone but the contract guaranteed. The first thing he did was take Suspira Salvatoros to the altar, defeating the ambitions of any number of young and not-so-young women whose curses and lamentations could be heard echoing through the streets for weeks to come. Then he hired a team of painters to whitewash every corner of the compound, even to the tiles of the roof. And finally — and this was perhaps the hardest thing of all — he sold the vermilion Hummer to a TV actor known for his sensitive eyes and hyperactive jaw, replacing it with a used van of uncertain provenance and a color indistinguishable from the dirt of the streets.

(2005)

She knew in her heart it was a mistake, but she’d been laid off and needed the cash and her memories of the Strikers were mostly on the favorable side, so when Mrs. Striker called— Gretchen, this is Gretchen? Mrs. Striker? — she’d said yes, she’d love to come over and hear what they had to say. First, though, she had to listen to her car cough as she drove across town (fuel pump, that was her father’s opinion, offered in a flat voice that said it was none of his problem, not anymore, not now that she was grown and living back at home after a failed attempt at life), and she nearly stalled the thing turning into the Strikers’ block. And then did stall it as she tried, against any reasonable expectation of success, to parallel park in front of their great rearing fortress of a house. It felt strange punching in the code at the gate and seeing how things were different and the same, how the trees had grown while the flowerbeds remained in a state of suspended animation, everything in perpetual bloom and clipped to within a millimeter of perfection. The gardeners saw to that. A whole battalion of them that swarmed over the place twice a week with their blowers and edgers and trimmers, at war with the weeds, the insects, the gophers and ground squirrels and the very tendency of the display plants to want to grow outside the box. At least that was how she remembered it. The gardeners. And how Admiral would rage at the windows, showing his teeth and scrabbling with his claws — and if he could have chewed through glass he would have done it. “That’s right, boy,” she’d say, “that’s right — don’t let those bad men steal all your dead leaves and dirt. You go, boy. You go. That’s right.”

She rang the bell at the front door and it wasn’t Mrs. Striker who answered it but another version of herself in a white maid’s apron and a little white maid’s cap perched atop her head, and she was so surprised she had to double-clutch to keep from dropping her purse. A woman of color does not clean house, that was what her mother always told her, and it had become a kind of mantra when she was growing up, a way of reinforcing core values, of promoting education and the life of the mind, but she couldn’t help wondering how much higher a dogsitter was on the socioeconomic scale than a maid. Or a sous-chef, waitress, aerobics instructor, ticket puncher and tortilla maker, all of which she’d been at one time or another. About the only thing she hadn’t tried was leech gathering. There was a poem on the subject in her college text by William Wordsworth, the poet of daffodils and leeches, and she could summon it up whenever she needed a good laugh. She developed a quick picture of an old long-nosed white man rolling up his pantlegs and wading into the murk, then squeezed out a miniature smile and said, “Hi, I’m Nisha? I came to see Mrs. Striker? And Mr. Striker?”

The maid — she wasn’t much older than Nisha herself, with a placid expression that might have been described as self-satisfied or just plain vacant — held open the door. “I’ll tell them you’re here,” she said.

Nisha murmured a thank-you and stepped into the tiled foyer, thinking of the snake brain and the olfactory memories that lay coiled there. She smelled dog — smelled Admiral — with an overlay of old sock and furniture polish. The great room rose up before her like something transposed from a cathedral. It was a cold room, echoing and hollow, and she’d never liked it. “You mind if I wait in the family room?” she asked.

The maid — or rather the girl, the young woman, the young woman in the demeaning and stereotypical maid’s costume — had already started off in the direction of the kitchen, but she swung round now to give her a look of surprise and irritation. For a moment it seemed as if she might snap at her, but then, finally, she just shrugged and said, “Whatever.”

Nothing had changed in the paneled room that gave onto the garden, not as far as Nisha could see. There were the immense old high-backed leather armchairs and the antique Stickley sofa rescued from the law offices of Striker and Striker, the mahogany bar with the wine rack and the backlit shrine Mr. Striker had created in homage to the spirits of single-malt scotch whisky, and overseeing it all, the oil portrait of Admiral with its dark heroic hues and golden patina of varnish. She remembered the day the painter had come to the house and posed the dog for the preliminary snapshots, Admiral uncooperative, Mrs. Striker strung tight as a wire and the inevitable squirrel bounding across the lawn at the crucial moment. The painter had labored mightily in his studio to make his subject look noble, snout elevated, eyes fixed on some distant, presumably worthy, object, but to Nisha’s mind an Afghan — any Afghan — looked inherently ridiculous, like some escapee from Sesame Street, and Admiral seemed a kind of concentrate of the absurd. He looked goofy, just that.