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

I was spread-eagled on the slick roof and just trying to inch my way across to the deck when the door there flew open and Lily appeared, dressed in the baby-blue nightie of my dreams which I guess I must have seen hanging on the hook in the bathroom when I went in to relieve myself on one of those happy drinks-dinner-drinks nights, only with a big off-white cable-knit sweater obscuring the parts of her anatomy I’d most come to see. She let out a low exclamation in her sweet girlish voice that was like the trickle of a pure mountain spring, the dog at her feet yapping and the weight of all those stars beginning to crash down on me, and then she said, “Don’t you move, you son of a bitch, because I’ve got a gun.” And she did have a gun. We all have guns up here, twenty guns per person, as if it were a rule of the community. Of course I didn’t have one, or not then anyway. My twenty guns were back home in my own cabin.

But here was my problem. I’d come to reconnoiter, albeit with the hope and maybe even expectation of a whole lot more, but I’d lost the element of surprise and wondered now whether I ought to say something to identify myself as me and not some crazed rapist paroled out of Lompoc Prison and dressed all in black with a black ski mask concealing his face and bad intentions in his heart. And it wasn’t getting shot that motivated me, believe me, because I would have welcomed it at that point — it was what my mother, my poor dead overworked and long-suffering mother, used to call mortification. If I revealed myself now, now that she’d got the drop on me, as they say, how could I hope to convince her that my purpose was essentially romantic — and beyond that consolatory even?

As it turned out, that decision was taken from my hands by the action of what some people would call fate but that I’m here to tell you was just bad luck, pure and simple. I lost my grip. The roof was like a skating rink if you could take a skating rink and cant it at a forty-five degree angle. Suddenly the night deserted me and I was gone. And it was my bad luck — my very bad, catastrophic luck — that I did not land among the drifts but on a big unforgiving incisor of rock that broke my leg just as thoroughly and nastily as Frank’s had been broken out there among the boulders of Hellbore Creek.

While I was lying there, concealed behind my mask like a second-string superhero and unable to move because the pain was like a comet trapped inside my body, I began thinking — and I don’t know why — of the stepson, of Frank Jr. He’d lost his arm in an incident at the San Diego Zoo when he was fourteen, which you may have read about because it made all the papers at the time. There was still a controversy surrounding the whole business, as to whether he really was high on angel dust and provoking the polar bear where it was only trying to cool off in its fetid little pond of greenish water or whether he honestly slipped and fell, but the result was he lost his right arm right to the shoulder and maybe a little beyond. You look at him now — he’s thirty-two years old, handsome as a TV anchorman, with Frank’s blond hair and squared-off features — and from the left side he could be doing Marine Corps recruiting posters, but on the right there’s just nothing there, and when he walks it really throws him off balance so he’s got a kind of funny hitch in his step. Lily, who’s just eleven years older than he is, more the age of a big sister than a mother, had to put up with him under her roof when she and Frank lived down in the flats all those years because with his disability Frank Jr. couldn’t support himself, and believe me, he’s about as pleasant to be around as a cage full of rats, angry at the world and always pissing and moaning about the indescribable pain he feels in his missing limb. Which he invariably goes on to describe in detail. Ad nauseam.

But let me get back to it, because this connects in to what I’m trying to say here, about pain, about my pain and Lily’s pain and everybody else’s too, the upshot being that about three minutes later I’m exposed for who I am. To Lily, who’s standing over me with a flashlight and her snubnose.38 Special that Frank gave her for her birthday year before last, because here’s the kid — Frank Jr., who’s supposed to be living down the hill in Porterville in some sort of halfway house — appearing out of nowhere to swoop down with the one hand he’s got left to him and tear the mask off my face.

—

I don’t think I ever talked and wheedled and apologized and extenuated as much as I did that night, stretched out on my back in the snow and freezing my ass off while Lily looked at me as if I were something she’d stepped on in the parking lot at Costco and Frank Jr. ran in to phone for the sheriff, the fire department and every last living soul on the mountain, including old Brick Sternreit, who’d won the title of Mountain Man three times running during the Memorial Day chili cookoff despite the fact that he was closing in on ninety, Bart Bliss, who ran the lodge and sported the longest beard on the mountain, three widows, two widowers and my own sharp-honed steel-eyed rapier of a wife, Jessica. There was an interval there, Frank Jr. in the house and phones ringing everywhere, when it was just me and Lily and the dead cold of the night. Lily had lowered the.38, thumbed the safety and dropped the thing in the pocket of the big cardigan sweater, which I now saw was decorated with a pair of prancing reindeer done up in red stitching, but the flashlight was still leveled on my face. “Lily,” I gasped, fighting for breath against the pain, “could you lower that light? Please? Because my leg’s broke”—I almost said, Just like Frank’s, but suppressed it—“and I can’t move and the light’s right in my eyes.”

The beam never wavered. “What in hell were you thinking?” This was framed in an accusatory tone, and her voice was anything but melodious and sweet.

“I love you,” I said. “I’ve loved you since the day Frank brought you up here and we all got drunk on pitchers of margaritas down at the lodge… remember?”

Her voice was flat. “You don’t love me.”

“I do.”

“You have a funny way of showing it. What did you think, you’d see me naked or something?”

There was the sound, in the distance, of snow tires crunching the crust of ice on the blacktop road that twisted below us past the Turners’ place, and already the headlights were dancing in the tops of the stripped aspens out front of Lily’s. “You must think I’m like a Peeping Tom or something, but really, I just, I mean—”

“No,” she said, cutting me off, “I don’t think you’re a Peeping Tom — I think you’re a slime. I mean, really, how could you? With Frank barely cold in the ground and what about Jessica, what about her, what about your wife ?”

The pain — the comet that was shooting from my lower leg to my brain and back again, fighting to explode into the night — seized me up a minute and I had no reasonable answer to give her. I wanted to say, She won’t mind, or She doesn’t have to know, or I don’t love her, I love you, but I couldn’t.

“And the mask? What’s with the mask? I mean, that’s just sick.”

And so I wheedled and protested but it did no good because those tires and those headlights belonged to Bill Secord, first responder, and before I could blink twice the whole community was gathered there to contemplate me in my sprawled and broken disgrace (wildly, it came to me that I could say I was just checking the chimney braces as a favor to Frank, in memory of Frank, that is, and to help out a poor widow who didn’t know the first thing about winter maintenance). Voices drifted over me. Two dogs slunk up to sniff my boots. I noticed a bottle of vodka passing from hand to hand, but no one thought to offer me any, not even to wet my lips. People debated whether or not I should be moved and Bill was all official about back injuries and the like and the sheriff appeared out of the shadows to take his report while the ambulance was jerking its lights in and out of the trees and Jessica, my bedmate, my companion, my old rug and sweet married bride, lurched up and leaned over me with her face so disarranged with hurt and confusion and rage I barely recognized her as she let loose with a cold wad of spit that wound up freezing right there on my cheek as the paramedics lifted me onto the stretcher and the doors of the ambulance slammed shut on the night and the mountain, which until that very moment had been my home and my hideout and my refuge from the bad old world.