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

The kid’s voice came at me like a tape on high speed. “Listen, I didn’t steal anything, I mean, look at me — where would I hide it? I was hungry, that was all. Because it wasn’t normal, what happened to me, you know? And I–I’m sorry, I just get these food cravings.” He was on his feet now and he was pleading. “I only escaped three years ago.”

I didn’t say anything. Lily was right outside the door.

“Listen, I’m begging you,” the kid said, drifting like a shadow across the room. “I just want to — could I just go in the bedroom a minute and close the door?”

So he did and I opened the front door to the sheriff (his name’s Randy Juniper, he’s thirty-six years old and he has a permanent hair up his ass, which is to say I don’t like him and never have liked him and never will), Bill Secord and Lily. Lily looked like she was drowning. Water up to her neck and the river in flood. She and Bill stepped in the room and Bill closed the door behind him and stared down at his shoes. Randy, I noticed, had his three-foot-long flashlight in one hand, though it was broad daylight, and he squinted at me in my own living room as if it was an interrogation cell in Guantánamo or someplace, and then, in his official sheriffese, he said, “You see anybody suspicious out there this morning?”

“They broke into my cabin,” Lily whispered, not looking at me.

“Who?” I said, playing for time.

Now she did glance up, her eyes, which are the exact color of Coca-Cola poured into a clear spotless glass, hardening with the contemplation of how much had been laid on her and laid on her again. “This kid,” she said, her voice gone soft, “like a teenager or maybe twenties, real gawky and skinny and stupid-looking — I pulled into the drive because I was down the lodge for breakfast and I saw him coming round the back of the cabin and when he saw me he just took off into the woods.”

Next question, and I didn’t like the way Sheriff Randy was looking at me, not at all: “Did they get anything?”

They hadn’t. But the screen over the kitchen sink had been slit open and that was enough for her. And the sheriff.

“You,” the sheriff said finally, “wouldn’t know anything about it, would you?”

My answer was a long time coming — seconds, I guess, five, maybe ten even. I didn’t like the implication here because what they were hinting at was that I was a criminal, a thief, maybe a colluder with thieves, and all because I fell off Lily’s roof with the best of intentions, with love in my heart, and so I just looked Randy right in the face and shook my head no.

—

Time passes slowly up here, the hours squeezing out like toothpaste at the flattened end of the tube. I noticed that the days got a little longer and then they started to get a little shorter. The sun hung up in the trees. I fed the birds and the squirrels, stared at the faded place on the wall where the TV had been and thought about various projects I might embark on to fill the lonely hours, building a chicken coop maybe (though chickens wouldn’t last half an hour up here what with the coyotes and the bear and his cousins), buying a horse or a dirt bike so I could get out in the woods more, overhauling the engine on my snow machine. None of these came to fruition. And if I’d taken some satisfaction in how much my neighbors drank, half of them with corrupted livers and at least two I know of working on a single kidney each, now I was drinking so heavily I found myself waking up all day long and in places I didn’t even know I could get to, like on top of the refrigerator or underneath the pickup.

Lily was the problem, of course. And Jessica, who’d moved in with her mother in Sacramento and refused to return my calls. I did give Jessica some thought, remembering the good times like when I held her head down for a full hundred and ten seconds during an apple-bobbing contest at the county fair or how we’d make up a big pot of chili beans and sit out on the deck and listen to the sounds of nature, but it was Lily who occupied my thoughts. My leg was getting stronger and more and more I found myself drifting past her cabin on my daily walks or driving by after dark just to see if her lights were on.

One day, late afternoon, September touching the leaves of the aspens so they went from green to gold overnight and the breath of winter impatient on the air, I just couldn’t take it any longer and decided to dig out my bird-watching binoculars and maybe just stroll through the woods a bit — and if I wound up on the ridge across from Lily’s with an unobstructed view of the lower deck and the Weber grill giving off smoke in the corner there, so much the worse. No one was in sight, but the smoke told me Lily was barbecuing. The thought of that — not just the way she did tri-tip with her special sauce that managed to be both sweet and sour in equal proportions and how she leaned over you to refresh your drink so you could smell the bourbon on her breath and her perfume at the same time, but also the sad fact that I’d once shuffled across the boards of that very deck as an honored guest — got me feeling nostalgic. I sat there on a hard lump of rock, the binoculars trained on the windows, nostalgia clogging my veins like sludge, till the sun shifted and shadows tipped back from the trees and Lily finally appeared, a platter of meat in one hand and a spatula and tongs in the other. She was wearing a pair of red shorts that emphasized the creases front and rear and a low-cut white blouse. Her feet were bare. I wanted to kiss those feet, wanted to come down off my perch and worry over the splinters that were certainly a danger on that deck that hadn’t been treated since Frank died, wanted to warn her, make a joke, see her smile.

We all have binoculars up here, by the way, which are necessary to the enjoyment of nature, or so we tell ourselves, and we like to compete as to whose are the most powerful, just as we compete over our four-by-fours, snow machines and the like. Jessica got my good ones, the Bushnell Elites that allow you to count the whiskers on a marmot’s snout half a mile away, but the ones she left me — bargain basement Nikon 7x20s — were more than adequate to the purpose. I could see not only that Lily’d had her toenails done, in a shade of red that came as close to the hue of those clinging shorts as was humanly possible, but that both of her big toes sported a little white rose painted right in the middle. She was wearing her hoop earrings, the silver glinting in the long tube of sunlight as she bent to lift the top off the Weber and employ the tongs, and though I was maybe a football field away, it was close enough to hear the first startled sizzle of the meat hitting the grill. Or maybe I was imagining that. But I could see that she was all made-up, beautiful as a porcelain doll, with her eyebrows penciled in and her lashes thick as fur.

So I’m only human. And what I was thinking was that even if she wasn’t ready for my company, even if she wouldn’t glance up when I mounted the steps to the deck with a sad forgiving smile and invite me to sit down and break bread with her — or, in this case, slice tri-tip — she would at least have to acknowledge me and maybe even hear me out on the subject of the ski mask and the roof and all the rest. Because I loved her purely and I wanted her to know that. As if it had been decided all along, I pushed myself up from the rock just like that and kept to the cover of the trees while she fussed around the little picnic table on the deck, and as I got closer I could hear the strains of some eighties band leaching out through the screen door in front. At the foot of the driveway, I bent to secrete the binoculars under a bush so as not to give her the wrong impression, and then came silently up on her, looking to the surprise factor, though I wasn’t yet sure if I was going to chime out “Guess who?” or just “Hi” and add that I was in the neighborhood (a joke: we were all in the neighborhood twenty-four/seven) and just thought I’d say hello.