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

She watched his eyes settle on the screen a moment, then drift down to the burger in his hand. He drew back his lips and took a bite, nostrils open wide, the iron muscles working in his jaw. “We live by the railroad tracks,” Melanie said, by way of shifting the subject. “You think we have anything to worry about?”

“What do you mean?”

“The train killer.”

Sean gave her a look. He was in his debating mode, his put-down mode, and she could see it in his eyes. “He doesn’t kill trains, Mel,” he said, “—he kills people. And yes, everybody has something to worry about, everybody on this planet. And if you were listening to half of what Brinsley-Schneider was saying tonight, I wouldn’t be surprised if every third person out there on the street was a serial killer. There’s too many of us, Mel, let’s face it. You think things are going to get better? You think things are better now than when we were kids? When our parents were kids? It’s over. Face it.”

Something corny and ancient was on the jukebox — Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, somebody like that — because the place smacked of the kind of authenticity people were looking for, the kind of authenticity that cried out from the fallen arches, ravaged faces and sclerotic livers of the regulars, to whom she and Sean — at twenty-nine and thirty, respectively — were as inauthentic as newborns.

—

At home, she changed into a cotton nightgown and got into bed with a book. She wasn’t feeling anything, not elation or pain or disappointment, only the symptoms of a headache coming on. The book was something she’d discovered at a yardsale two days earlier— Captured by the Indians: 15 Firsthand Accounts, 1750–1870 —and the minute she opened it she was swept up into a voyeuristic world of pain and savagery that trumped any horror she could conceive of. It wasn’t a good thing to be captured by the Indians, as Sean had snidely observed on seeing her poised behind the cover the night before last, not good at all. There were no notions here of the politically correct, of revisionist history or the ethics of one people forcibly displacing another: no, it was the hot flash of murder and reprisal, the thump of the musket ball hitting home, the operation of knife and tomahawk on unresisting flesh. To die, to be murdered, to be robbed of your life and consciousness and being, that was the stuff of morbid fascination, and she couldn’t get enough of it.

Sean was in his underwear, the briefs he preferred over boxers, the sort of thing she’d always associated with boys — little boys, children, that is — and as she watched him pad across the carpet on his way to the bathroom and his nightly ritual of cleansing, clipping, flossing, brushing, tweezering and shaving, it struck her that she’d never in her life been in an intimate situation with a man — or boy — in boxers. “The last they heard,” Sean was saying, and he paused now to gaze at her over the mound of the bedspread and her tented knees, “he was in the Midwest someplace — after leaving Texas, I mean. That’s a long ways from California, Mel, and besides, his whole thing is so random—”

“He rides freight trains — or hops them, isn’t that the terminology?” she said, peering over the cover of the book. “He hops freight trains, Sean, and that means he could be anywhere in twenty-four hours — or forty-eight. How long does it take to drive from Kansas to Isla Vista? Two days? Three?” She wanted to tell him about the doctor, and what the doctor had said, and what it was going to mean for them, but she didn’t want to see the look on his face, didn’t want to have to fight him, not now, not yet. He’d go pale and tug involuntarily at the grown-over hole in his left earlobe where the big gold hoop used to reside before he got serious about his life, and then he’d tell her she couldn’t have her baby for the same reason she couldn’t have a dog or even a cat — at least until he’d done his dissertation, at least until then.

“I don’t know, Mel,” he said, all the tiredness and resignation in the world crept into his voice, as if a simple discussion could martyr him, “what do you want me to say? He’s coming through the window tonight? Of the two hundred seventy million potential victims in the country, he’s singled us out, zeroed right in on us like a homing pigeon—?”

“Statistics,” she said, and she was surprised at her own vehemence. “That’s like saying you have about the same chance of getting attacked by a shark as you do of getting hit by lightning, and yeah, sure, but anybody anywhere can get hit by lightning, but how many people live by the ocean, how many actually go in it, and of them, how many are crazy enough — or foolhardy, that’s the word I want here — how many are foolhardy enough to go out where the sharks are? Probably a hundred percent of them get eaten, and we live right by the tracks, don’t we?”

As if in answer, there was the sudden sharp blast of the north-bound’s whistle as it neared the intersection two blocks away, and then the building thunder of the train itself, the fierce clatter of the churning wheels and everything in the room trembling with the rush of it. Sean rolled his eyes and disappeared into the bathroom. When the thunder subsided and he could be heard again, he poked his head round the doorframe. “It’s the Indians,” he said.

“It has nothing to do with the Indians.” She wouldn’t give him this, though he was right, of course — or partially anyway. “It’s Brinsley-Schneider, who you seem to think is so great. Brinsley-Schneider and eugenics and euthanasia and all the rest of the deadly u ’s.”

He was smiling the smile of the literary theorist in a room full of them, the smile that made him look like a toad with an oversized insect clamped in its jaws. “The deadly u ’s?” he repeated. And then, softening, he said, “All right, if it’ll make you feel any better I’ll check the doors and windows, okay?”

Her eyes were on the book. Way off in the night she could hear the dying rattle of the last car at the end of the train. Her life was changing, and why couldn’t she feel good about it — why shouldn’t she?

He was in the doorway still, his face settling into the lines and grooves he’d dug for it over the past two and a half years of high seriousness. He looked exactly like himself. “Okay?” he said.

—

She didn’t have to be in at work till twelve the next day — she was an assistant to the reference librarian at the university library, and her schedule was so flexible it was all but bent over double — and after Sean left for class she sat in front of the TV with the sound off and read the account of Lavina Eastlick, who was twenty-nine and the mother of five when the Sioux went on a rampage near Acton, Minnesota, in the long-forgotten year of 1862. There was a moment’s warning, no more than that. A frightened neighbor shouting in the yard, first light, and suddenly Lavina Eastlick — a housewife, a hopeful young woman her own age rudely jolted from sleep — was running barefooted through the wet grass, in her nightgown, herding her children before her. The Indians soon overtook them and cut down her husband, her children, her neighbors and her neighbors’ children, taking the women captive. She’d been shot twice and could barely stand, let alone walk. When she stumbled and fell, a Sioux brave beat her about the head and shoulders with the stock of his rifle and left her for dead. Later, when they’d gone, she was able to crawl off and hide herself in the brush through the long afternoon and interminable night that followed. The wounded children — hers and her neighbors’—lay sprawled in the grass behind her, crying out for water, but she couldn’t move to help them. On the second afternoon the Indians returned to dig at the children’s wounds with sharpened sticks till the terrible gargling cries choked off and the locusts in the trees filled the void with their mindless chant.