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

Frank volunteered for neighborhood watch and he helped out in winter with snow removal, and Lily, with her heartbreaking face and a figure unruined by childbearing because she’d borne no children, not to Frank or her previous husband, who, I understand, worked for the Forest Service over at Mineral King before he drank himself senseless and pitched headlong over the rail of the fire lookout, began organizing potlucks and bridge nights down at the lodge, that sort of thing. And she began drinking more than was probably good for her. As did Frank. This — and we’ve all joked about it — is just one of the hazards of living in a fishbowl community at seventy-two hundred feet and a good twisting brake-eating hour from the nearest town in a place of natural beauty so all-encompassing God might have thought to set it aside for His wife. If He even bothered to get married.

Anyway, Frank liked nature, liked the hills, and despite his age he was always out there hiking no matter the weather. You’d look up from the fire or the TV or your first double vodka and tonic on a snow-bleared winter morning and there he’d be, with his daypack and alpenstock, heading off into the woods without a thought as to trails, compasses or the weather, and if he had a cell phone it really wouldn’t have mattered since the reception here is what they invented the Call Failed indicator for. He went out one spring afternoon with his fly rod and a daypack containing a pint of Jim Beam and two cream cheese and olive sandwiches Lily had sealed in plastic wrap and he never came back. As they later reconstructed it, he was fishing Hellbore Creek for goldens when he must have taken a tumble because his leg was broken in two places, though with his eyes gouged out by the ravens and the way the bear had frolicked with the corpse no one could be sure. He’d been missing four days by the time Search and Rescue found him, the sandwiches gone along with the soft stuff of his eyes and the bourbon drawn down to less than a finger in its intact glass shell. Lily said she was sure he’d suffered and we all tried to reassure her, citing the solace of the bourbon, the soothing rhapsody of the stream and the sun that made way for the stars as if to give him a glimpse of eternity when the nights came on, but privately we knew she was right.

Of course he’d suffered. Alone with his pain. Hopeless. Fighting off the ravens till he could no longer lift his arms. He’d tried to crawl his way out of the canyon, according to Bill Secord, who was one of the first on the scene, but the pain in his leg was too bad apparently and he didn’t make it more than maybe two hundred yards despite all the scratching in the undergrowth and the way his fingernails were abraded down to the nub.

As if that wasn’t enough to lay on any woman, especially one as sweet and undeserving of it as Lily, there was the further complication of her accident. And this wasn’t much more than maybe three or four months after the funeral, when she was just starting to climb out of her own personal canyon and was entertaining a man whose name I don’t want to mention here because the sound of that name — hell, the look of him with his fat gloating face hanging out the open window of his pickup — makes me burn up with jealousy like a dry stick of pine laid on the coals. That’s funny too, I mean, that this particular image should pop into my head, because Lily’s accident involved just exactly that: burning. She had one of these old-fashioned popcorn makers, with the hot oil bubbling in the guts of it, and the way I see it she was a bit flustered when this particular individual showed up at the door with a bottle in one hand and a fistful of wilting wildflowers in the other, no way ready even to start thinking along those terms with Frank still intact in the ground, or mostly so, and maybe she was rushing a little, overcompensating in her role as hostess, and when she settled into the couch with her second drink her foot got tangled in the cord and the whole business, scalding oil, Orville Redenbacher’s crackling yellow kernels and the gleaming aluminum cylinder of the popcorn maker itself, came down on her.

The oil melted the skin across half her back down to the pantyline and wrapped a big annealed scar around her left shoulder and upper arm and burned what looks like two teardrops into the flesh under her left eye, which the plastic surgeon says he can remove and smooth over just like new once she saves up for the next round of operations, because, of course, Frank, who never even bothered to carry a compass with him out into the woods, didn’t have adequate health coverage from his insurer. Or life insurance, for that matter. I remember we all chipped in to defray the funeral expenses, but inevitably we fell well short of the actual cost. Which Lily had to absorb with no help from anybody, not Frank’s sister in Missoula or his one-armed son Lily’d had to put up with through the first ten years of her marriage.

So I was on her roof. With cause. And Jessica, my wife, who likes to turn in early — she’s yawning and gaping and stretching her arms out like she’s drowning come seven-thirty or eight — was at home, oblivious, snoring lightly in the frigid cavern of the bedroom we shared with its view in summer of the blistered duff at the ankles of the trees and in winter the piled-up drifts that look like waves rolling across a stormy white sea. If I’d expected Lily to be, oh, I don’t know, putting her hair up before the bathroom mirror so that her breasts rose and fell with the action of her arms in a baby-blue see-through negligee or something of the like, I was disappointed. At first I could see nothing but the upper hallway leading to her bedroom and the head of the mounted mule deer that graced the top of the stairway (the rock-hard nose of which I’d kissed for luck any number of times when Jessica and I were over for drinks and dinner and drinks when Frank was alive). There was a light on there, glowing faintly in the cheap smoked-glass sconce they’d got for twelve ninety-five at the Home Depot in Porterville, but there was no sign of movement. Or of her. They had a dog — she had a dog, I should say, a Chihuahua mix — but it was so old and withered and blind and deaf and pathetic it couldn’t have raised the alarm if an entire armored division rolled through the living room. So I waited. And watched.

Did I mention, by the way, that this was in winter?

The night was clear all the way up to where the stars slid across their tracks, which meant that it was cold, maybe ten or twelve above, and I was having a little trouble seeing through the eye-slits of my mask, plus my breath was condensing around the opening for my mouth and freezing there so that my lips had begun to sting even before I’d got to Lily’s (on foot, because I didn’t want to just pull up there out front in my truck, because that would have spoiled the surprise — that, and you never knew who was watching up here where everybody’s business is everybody’s business). At least the roof was clear. Frank had gone metal, with a steep pitch that overhung the upper deck, and the sun had taken the three feet of snow the last storm had dropped and deposited it down below. All to the good. I broke the crust of ice around my mouth and was just about to ease myself down on the deck to get a look in the window there, the bedroom window, when the slick thin all-but-invisible sheet of ice that had replaced the snow took my boots out from under me and I lost my balance.

We don’t have gutters here, for obvious reasons — the weight of the snow shearing over the side would rip them off in a heartbeat — so there was nothing between me and a two-story drop but corrugated sheet metal and the odd rivet. I was a little drunk. I admit it. We’d been over to the Ringsteads’ for drinks and cards earlier and after we got home I guess I kept on pouring even as I was thinking about how lonely Lily must have been because half the mountain was there but she never showed. Anyway, I did not plummet over the side and go down two stories to where the big granite boulders protruded like bad teeth from the drifts, or not yet anyway, but instead just managed to catch myself on one of the steel chimney supports Frank had been obliged to install after a Jeffrey pine came down and obliterated the chimney last winter. I was spared. But the noise I’d made in trying to save myself got the blind and deaf Chihuahua barking and that barking apparently roused Lily.