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

He took another sip of his drink, felt the alcohol quicken in him even as his stomach sank and sank again. The gulls screeched. The knife flashed. And the shore, dense with its pavement and the clustered roof tiles and the sun caught in the solid weave of the palms, came up on him so quickly it startled him. “Yeah,” he said, “yeah, sure. Agreed.” He held to the rail as the captain gunned the engines and the boat leaned into an arc of exploding light, then tipped the cup back till he could feel the ice cold against his front teeth. “And just you wait,” he said, grinning now. “I’m going to nail the granddaddy of all the halibut from here to Oxnard and back.”

—

Of course, given the vicissitudes of the day, that wasn’t how it turned out. If there was a granddaddy out there cruising the murk of the bottom, he kept his whereabouts to himself. Still, Hunter took a real and expanding satisfaction in watching the spider man, his wallet lightened by the price of the rod, reel and rigging he’d tossed, slink off the boat with his head down, while the rest of them — the true sportsmen, the obedient and fully sanctioned — got their extra hour of bobbing off the coast on a sea reduced to the gentlest of swells while the sun warmed their backs and almost everybody took their shirts off to enjoy it. A few people hooked up, Damian among them, and then the captain gave the order to haul in and Damian was declared winner of the pool for his lingcod and he got his picture taken with his arm around Julie in her bikini. As it happened, Hunter and Damian were the last ones off the boat, Julie standing there at the rail in her official capacity to help people up onto the gangplank and receive her tips. “It was awesome,” Damian told her, his plastic bag of fish fillets in one hand, five twenties fanned out in the other, “really awesome. Best trip we’ve ever had — right, Hunt?”

Hunter had dipped his head in acknowledgment, distracted by Julie and the promise he’d come so close to extracting from her out there on the rolling sea. He was about to remind her of it — he was waiting, actually, till Damian went up the ladder so he could have a moment alone with her — when Damian, with a sidelong glance at him, said, “Hey, you know, we’d really take it as an honor, Hunter and me, if you’d come out to dinner with us. To celebrate, I mean. What about champagne? Champagne sound cool?”

Julie looked first to Hunter, then Damian, and let a slow grin spread across her face. “Real nice,” she said. “Spinnakers? In, say, one hour?”

Which was what had brought them to this moment, in the afterglow of the trip, the three of them seated at a table up against the faded pine panels of the back wall, looking out to the bar crowded with tourists, fishermen and locals alike, and beyond that to the harbor and the masts of the ships struck pink with the setting sun. Julie was in a sea-green cocktail dress, her legs long and bare, a silver Neptune’s trident clasped round her neck on a thin silver chain. Damian was on one side of her, Hunter on the other. They’d clinked champagne glasses, made their way through a platter of fried calamari with aioli sauce. Music played faintly. From beyond the open windows, there was the sound of the gulls settling in for the night.

Gradually, as he began to feel the effects of the champagne, it occurred to Hunter that Damian was monopolizing the conversation. Or worse: that Damian had got so carried away he seemed to have forgotten the purpose of this little outing. He kept jumping from one subject to another and when he did try to draw Julie out he was so wound up he couldn’t help talking right through her. “So what’s it like to be a deckhand?” he asked at one point. “Pretty cool job, no? Out on the water all day, fresh air, all that? It’s like a dream job, am I right?” Before she could say ten words he’d already cut her off — he loved the outdoors too, couldn’t she tell? He was the one who’d wanted to come out on the boat—“I practically had to drag Hunt, here”—and it wasn’t just luck that had hooked him up with that lingcod, but experience and desire and a kind of worship of nature too deep to put into words.

Hunter tried to keep up his end of the conversation, injecting sardonic asides, mimicking the tourists at the bar, even singing the first verse of a sea chantey he made up on the spot, but Julie didn’t seem especially receptive. Two guys, one girl. What kind of odds were those?

Damian had shifted closer to her. The second bottle of champagne went down like soda water. Hunter nudged Damian under the table with the toe of his shoe — twice, hard — but Damian was too far gone to notice. Halfway through the main course — was he really feeding her shrimp off the tines of his fork? — Hunter pushed back his chair. “Men’s room,” he muttered. “I’ll be right back.” Julie gave him a vague smile.

To get to the men’s, he had to go out on the deck and down a flight of stairs. All the tables on the deck were occupied, though the fog was rolling in and there was a chill on the air. People were leaning over their elbows, talking too loud, laughing, lifting drinks to their lips. Jewelry glinted at women’s throats, fingers, ears. A girl in her teens sat at the far table, the one that gave onto the stairs, looking into the face of the boy she was with, oblivious to the fact that she was sitting at the worst table in the house. Hunter thumped down the stairs and felt a sudden flare of anger. Son of a bitch, he was thinking. He wasn’t going to sleep on the couch. No way. Not tonight. Not ever.

He slammed into the men’s room and locked the door behind him. The stalls were empty, the sinks dirty, the overhead light dim in its cage. He smelled bleach and air freshener and the inescapable odor they were meant to mask. It had come in on the soles of deck shoes, sandals and boots, ammoniac and potent, the lingering reek of all those failing bits of protoplasm flung up out of the waves to be beached here, on the smudged ceramic tile of the men’s room beneath Spinnakers. The smell caught him unawares and he felt unsteady suddenly, the floor beneath him beginning to rise and recede. But that wasn’t all — the room seemed to be fogging up all of a sudden, a seep of mist coming in under the door and tumbling through the vent as if a cloud had touched down just outside. The far wall faded. The mirror clouded over. He rubbed a palm across the smeared glass, then a paper towel, until finally he put both hands firmly down on the edge of the sink and stared into the mirror, hoping to find something solid there.

(2008)

Snow he could take, but this wasn’t snow, it was sleet. There was an inch of it at least in the gutters and clamped atop the cars, and the sidewalks had been worked into a kind of pocked gray paste that was hell on his shoes — and not just the shine, but the leather itself. He was thinking of last winter — or was it the winter before that? — and a pair of black-and-whites he’d worn onstage, really sharp, and how they’d got ruined in slop just like this. He’d been with a girl who’d waited through three sets for him that night, and her face was lost to him, and her name too, but she had a contour on her — that much he remembered — and by the time they left she was pretty well lit and she pranced into the street outside the club and lifted her face to the sky. Why don’t we walk? she sang out in a pure high voice as if she wanted everybody in New York to hear her. It’s so glorious, isn’t it? Can’t you feel it? And he was lit himself and instead of taking her by the wrist and flagging down a cab he found himself lurching up the street with her, one arm thrown over her shoulder to pull her to him and feel the delicious discontinuous bump of her hip against his. Within half a block his cigarette had gone out and his face was as wet as if he’d been sprayed with a squirt gun; by the time they turned the corner his shoes were gone, and there was nothing either he or the solemn paisano at the shoe repair could do to work the white semicircular scars out of the uppers.