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

“I don’t know,” she said, “he was a Latino. I was scared. He really scared me.”

There was a long silence, the clock her mother had given her ticking dramatically from atop the brick-and-board bookcase in the hall, someone’s sprinklers going on outside, the muted rumble of Jessica-something’s TV seeping down through the ceiling — Melanie half-expected to hear the blast of the train’s whistle, but it was too early yet. “It could be,” Sean said finally, “—I mean, why not? You’re right. The guy takes a train, he could be anywhere. And then there’s the aleatory factor—”

She just stared at him.

“Chance. Luck. Fate. You can’t buck fate.” And then a look came over his face: two parts high seriousness, one part vigilante. “But you can be ready for it when it comes — you can be prepared.” Suddenly he was on his feet. “You just wait here, just sit tight”—and his voice had an edge to it, as if she’d been arguing with him, as if she had to be restrained from running off into the night like one of the screaming teenagers in a cheap horror film—“I’ll be right back.”

She wanted a glass of wine, but she knew she couldn’t drink anymore, not if she was going to keep the baby, and if she hadn’t known, the doctor had taken her down a smiling anfractuous road full of caveats and prohibitions, the sort of thing she — the doctor — must go through ten times a day, albeit tailoring her tone to the educational level of the patient. Outside, the sprinklers switched off with an expiring wheeze. She could hear Sean in the bedroom, rummaging around for something. Tonight, she would tell him tonight.

Because the knowledge was too big for her to contain, and she wanted to call her mother and have a long, confidential chat, and call her sisters too — but before that, before there could be any possibility of that, she had to tell Sean, and Sean had to say the things she needed to hear. During her five o’clock break, she’d confided in one of the girls she worked with, Gretchen Mohr, but it did nothing to reassure her. Gretchen was only twenty-three, in no way serious about the guy she was dating, and Melanie could tell from the way she squeezed her eyes shut over the news that the idea of a baby was about as welcome to her as paraplegia or epilepsy. Oh, she tried to cover herself with a flurry of congratulations and a nonstop barrage of platitudes and one-liners, but the final thing she said, her last and deepest thought, gave her away. “I don’t know,” she sighed, staring down into the keyhole of her Diet Coke can as if she were reading tea leaves, “but I just don’t think I’d be comfortable bringing a baby into a world like this.”

When Melanie looked up, Sean was standing over her. He was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of Freud on it, over a legend that read “Dr. Who?” His hair was slicked down, and the left side of his face, up to and encircling the ear, was inflamed with the skin condition he was forever fighting. But that was ordinary, that was the way he always looked. What was different were his eyes — proud, incandescent, lit up like fireworks — and his hands, or what was in his hands. Swaddled in coarse white cloth that was stained with what might have been olive oil lay an object she recognized from the movies, from TV and pawnshop display cases: a gun.

“What is that?” she said, edging away from him. “What are you showing me?”

“Come on, Mel, give me a break.”

“It’s a gun, isn’t it?”

“We’re on the ground floor here, and we’re going to lock the windows tonight, even if it’s hot, which I doubt because already the fog’s coming in, and we’re going to keep this by the bed, on the night table, that’s all.”

She’d drawn up her legs and hugged them to her, as far away from him on the couch as she could manage to be. “I don’t believe you,” she said, and she could hear the thin whine of complaint in her own voice. “You know what my father would say if he saw you now? Where did you get it? Why didn’t you tell me?” she demanded, and she couldn’t help herself — her voice broke on the final syllable.

He drew the thing back, took it from its cradle and raised it up in one hand till it grazed the ceiling. The muscles of his forearm flexed, the soiled rag dropped to the carpet. “Son of a bitch,” he said, “son of a fucking bitch. Tell me this,” he said, “would you rather be the killer or the killee?”

—

She was asleep and dreaming the image of a baby floating in amniotic fluid, the cord attached, eyes shut tight — a big baby, an enormous glowing baby floating free like the interstellar embryo of 2001 —when a sudden sharp explosion of noise jolted her awake. It took her a moment, heart pounding, breath coming quick, to understand what it was — it was a scream, a woman’s scream, improvised and fierce. The room was dark. Sean was asleep beside her. The scream — a single rising note tailing off into what might have been a sob or gasp — seemed to have come from above, where Jessica-something lived alone with her potted plants and two bloated pampered push-faced cats that were never allowed out of the apartment for fear of the world and its multiplied dangers. Melanie sat up and caught her breath.

Nothing. The alarm clock on the night table flashed 1:59 and then 2:00.

Earlier, after a dessert of tapioca pudding with mandarin orange slices fresh from the can, she and Sean had watched a costume drama on the public station that gave her a new appreciation for the term mediocre ( mediocre, as she observed to Sean, didn’t come easy — you had to work at it), and then she’d slipped into bed with her book while the station went into pledge-break mode and Sean sat there paralyzed on the couch. She hadn’t read two paragraphs before he tiptoed into the room, naked and in full amatory display. She left the light on, the better to admire him, but the book dropped to the floor, and then it didn’t matter. She felt new, re-created. His body was so familiar, but everything was different now — she’d never been so aroused, rising up again and again to hold him deep inside her in the place where the baby was. Afterward, immediately afterward, almost as if he’d been drugged, he fell asleep with his head on her breast, and it was left to her to reach up awkwardly and kill the lamp. They hadn’t discussed a thing.

But now — now there was chaos, and it erupted all at once. There was a thump overhead, the caustic burn of a man’s voice, and then another scream, and another, and Melanie was out of bed, the walls pale and vague, the dark shadow that was Sean lurching up mechanically, and “What?” he was saying. “What is it?”

Footsteps on the stairs. More screams. Melanie flicked on the light, and there was Sean, dressed only in his briefs, the long muscles of his legs, all that skin, and the gun in his hand, the pistol, the nasty gleaming black little thing he’d bought at a gun show six months ago and never bothered to tell her about. “Sean,” she said, “Sean, don’t!” but he was already out the door, racing down the hall in the sick yellow wash of the overhead light, already at the front door, the screams from above rising, rising. She was in her nightgown, barefooted, but she had no thought for anything but to get out that door and put an end to whatever this was.

There was a streetlight out front, but the fog had cupped a hand over it and blotted the light from the windows and the stairway too. Melanie shot a glance up the stairs to where Jessica stood bracing herself against the railing, in nothing but panties and a brassiere torn off one shoulder, and then she saw the glint of Sean’s back across the lawn where the cars threw up a bank of shadow against the curb. He was shouting something, ragged, angry syllables that could have made no sense to anyone, even a Theorist, and she saw then that there was somebody else there with him, a dark, shifting figure rallying round a shuffle of feet on the pavement. She was closer now, running, Sean’s feet glowing in the night, the long white stalks of his legs and expanse of his back — he seemed to be wrestling with a shadow, but no, it was an animate thing, a man, a dark little man in bum’s clothes with a shovel clenched in both hands and Sean fighting him for it. Where was the gun? There was no gun. Both Sean’s hands were on the shovel and both the little man’s, and now Jessica was screaming again. “The gun,” Sean said. “In the grass. Get the gun.”