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

As it turned out, I didn’t have the opportunity, because at that moment Frank Jr. came backing his way out through the screen door, a big wooden bowl of salad clutched to his chest under the pressure of his arm and the rim of a sloshing cocktail glass clenched between his teeth. When he saw me — I was at the landing of the six steps that led up to the lower deck — he just about spit the glass into the bowl. As it was, he fumbled the bowl awkwardly for half a second before it hit the deck, spewing romaine and cherry tomatoes across the bleached boards, and I was worried he was going to bite through the glass, but he caught himself. Lily saw me then. Her look was blank at first, as if she didn’t recognize me, or more likely couldn’t place me in context, so far had she gone in wiping me off her personal slate.

Frank Jr. broke the silence. “Jesus, you got brass.”

I couldn’t be sure but Lily looked as if she was smiling at me — or maybe, considering what happened next, she was grimacing. Honestly, I don’t know.

Frank Jr. moved across the deck to put himself between me and her, as if I was some sort of threat, which I wasn’t and never have been, and I couldn’t help comparing him with the skinny kid who’d come up here to violate people’s space and steal what little they had for his own use. Frank Jr. was older, better-looking, but they were both kids to me and they shared the same general look, a kind of twitching around the mouth that only showed the kind of contempt they had for older people, and in that moment I half-wished I’d turned the kid in. I never did find out what happened to him. They found a stolen Mustang convertible abandoned on one of the logging roads not a mile and a half from the development, but whether he was responsible or not no one could say. For my part, I just pushed open the bedroom door after the sheriff left and found the room empty, as if the kid was nothing more than my own invention.

Frank Jr. was real enough though. And he let out a low curse and said, “Neither me or Lily want to see you on this property, not now or ever.” And he turned to her and squeezed her to him and I saw something there that made my heart jump. “Right, Lily?”

I don’t know how it happened, but I found myself all the way up the six steps and standing there on the deck as if I belonged, and I started to explain, but that was one of the hardest things I ever had to do in my life because all the factors had been churning around in me through all those washed-out months, so I just said what I’d said to her that night. “Lily,” I said, “I’m sorry if I offended you or whatever”—I paused, and her eyes weren’t so much hateful as just stunned—“but you know why I did it.”

She said nothing.

Frank Jr. took a step forward. “No,” he said, low and nasty, “she doesn’t.”

“Because I love her,” I said, and maybe I took a step toward him too so that we were three feet apart and the next thing I knew I heard the sound of one fist clapping. Against my cheekbone. Frank Jr. — and he has a lot of power in that arm because when you think of it that arm has to do the work of two — lashed out and hit me and I tell you it was bad luck, pure and simple, that sent me into the rail that maybe wasn’t up to code with regard to height requirements and then pitched me right over it into the duff ten feet down. On my leg. My bad leg. Which broke all over again with a snap you could have heard in Sacramento.

But that wasn’t the worst. The worst was that Lily, instead of coming to my aid as even an anonymous stranger would have, instead took hold of Frank Jr. with both her strong shapely bare suntanned arms and pulled her to him for a long soul kiss that left not a single doubt in my mind. And I tell you, he was the stepson. The stepson, for Christ’s sake. I mean, morally speaking, isn’t that what they call incest?

—

I won’t go into detail about Bill Secord and the sheriff and the whole playing out of the same charade of the winter past, but I will say that when you talk about pain, it comes in varieties and dominions nobody can even begin to imagine. And when you talk about fate, which I reject as a useful proposition, you talk about some kind of wheel you can never get off of. Fate doesn’t leave you any margin for hope or redemption or even change. With fate, the fix is in, but I’m going to tell you that luck is different, bad luck anyway. Bad luck can change. I sit here in my rented wheelchair and look out into the trees present and see the ghosts of the trees past and tell myself it has to, because nobody — not Lily with her scarred back and two permanent tears or Frank Jr. with his missing arm or the snatched kid who had to degrade himself every minute of every day without hope even of the faintest flicker of love — could stand to be as lonely and miserable as this.

(2009)

Dragonfly

What a dragonfly was doing out here in the desert, he couldn’t say. It was a creature of water, a sluggish slime-coated nymph that had metamorphosed into an electric needle of light, designed to hover and dart over pond and ditch in order to feed on the insects that rose from the surface in soft moist clouds. But here it was, as red as blood if blood could shine like metal, hovering in front of his face as if it had come to impart some message. And what would that message be? I am the karmic representative of the insect world, here to tell you that all is well among us. Hooray! Jabba-jabba-jabba! For a long while, long after the creature had hurtled away in shearing splinters of radiance, he sat there, legs folded under him in the blaze of one-hundred-and-eighteen-degree heat, thinking alternately: This is working and I am losing my mind.

And this was only the first day.

Yurt

What he wanted, more than he wanted the air to sink into the alveoli of his lungs or the blood to rush through the chambers of his heart, was to tell his wife about it, about this miracle of the dragonfly in the desert. But of course he couldn’t, because the nature of this retreat, under the guidance of Geshe Stephen O’Dowd and Lama Katie Capolupo, was silence, silence rejuvenant, unbroken, utter. Three years, three months and three days of it, the very term undertaken by the Dalai Lamas themselves in their quest for enlightenment. He had signed on, drawn down his bank account, paid his first wife a lump sum to cover her maintenance and child support for the twins, married the love of his soul on a sere scorched afternoon three weeks ago and put the finishing touches to his yurt. In the Arizona desert. Amidst cholla and saguaro and sun-blistered projections of rock so bleak they might have confounded the Buddha himself. The heat was an anvil and he was the white-hot point of steel beaten under the hammer.

Though he felt light-headed from the morning and afternoon group meditation sessions and the trancing suck of the desert sun, he pushed himself up and tottered back to the yurt on legs that might as well have been deboned for all the stability they offered him, this perfect gift of the dragonfly inside him and no way to get it out. He found her — Karuna, his wife, the former Sally Barlow Townes of Chappaqua, New York — seated in the lotus position on the hemp mat just inside the door. She was a slim, very nearly emaciated girl of twenty-nine, with a strong sweep of jaw, a pouting smallish mouth and a rope of braided blond hair that drew in the light and held it. Despite the heat, she was wearing her pink prayer shawl over a blue pashmina meditation skirt. Her sweat was like body paint, every square millimeter of exposed flesh shining with it.

At first she didn’t lift her eyes, so deeply immersed in the inner self she didn’t seem to be aware of him standing there before her. He felt the smallest stab of jealousy over her ability to penetrate so deeply, to go so far — and on the first day, no less — but then he dismissed it as selfish and hurtful, as bad karma, as papa. They might have been enjoined from speaking, he was thinking, but there were ways around that. Very slowly he began to move his limbs as if he were dancing to an unheard melody, then he clicked his fingers, counting off the beat, and at last she raised her eyes.