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

In that moment the little man managed to wrench the shovel free, and in the next — it happened so quickly she wasn’t sure she actually saw it — he caught Sean under the chin with the haft, and then the blade, and Sean was on the ground. She never hesitated. Before the man could bring the blade down — and that was what he meant to do, no mistake about it, his arms already raised high for a savage stabbing thrust — she took hold of the haft with all the strength in her and pulled it tight to her chest.

She could smell him. She could feel him. He hung on, the little man, the bum, the one who’d been on the doorstep that afternoon with his reeking breath and greasy clothes, and then he jerked so violently at the shovel she almost pitched headlong into him, into the spill of his flesh and the dankness of the grass. But she didn’t. She jerked back, and Jessica screamed, and Sean, reeling like a drunk, began to pick himself up off the lawn, and for the instant before the man let go of the shovel and flung himself into the shadows across the street she was staring him full in the face — yes, but she wasn’t seeing the man on the TV or the man on the porch or any one of the army of bums lined up along the street in their all-purpose shirts and sweat-stained caps, she was seeing Dr. Toni Brinsley-Schneider, Dr. Brinsley-Schneider the bioethicist, just her.

—

There were two policemen. From where she was sitting at the end of the couch, Melanie could see their cruiser reined in at the curb, the interior a black pit, the slowly revolving light on top chopping up the night over and over again. They were built like runners or squash players, both of them — crisp, efficient men in their thirties who looked away from her bare legs and feet and into her eyes. “So you heard screams, and this was about what time?”

They’d already taken Jessica-something’s statement — Jessica Fortgang, and she had a name now: Ms. Fortgang, as the policemen referred to her — and Sean, hunched in the armchair with an angry red weal under his chin, had given his version of events too. The man in the night, the bum, the one who’d been the cause of all this, had escaped, at least for the time being, and they were denied the satisfaction of seeing him handcuffed in the back of the cruiser, bowed and contrite. Sean had been in a state when the police arrived, clenching his jaws as if he were biting down hard on something, gesturing with a closed fist and wide sweeps of his arm. “The railway killer, it was him, the railway killer,” he kept repeating, till the policeman with the mustache, the taller one, told him the railway killer had turned himself in at the Mexican border some fifteen hours earlier. “That was the Texas border,” he added, and then his partner, in a flat professional voice, said that they were treating this as an assault in any case, possibly an attempted rape. “Your neighbor, Ms. Fortgang? She apparently hired this individual to do some yard work this afternoon and then invited him in for iced tea and a sandwich when he was done. Then he comes back at night — and this is a cultural thing, you understand, a woman looks at one of these guys twice and he expects a whole lot more. He’s a transient, that’s all, nobody from around here. But we’ll get him.”

Melanie answered their questions patiently, though her heart was still jumping in her chest, and she kept glancing at Sean, as if for guidance. But Sean was sullen, distant, withdrawn into some corner of himself — the gun was an embarrassment, the man had knocked him down, he’d been involved in an ordinary altercation with an ordinary bum, and the railway killer had already given himself up. She saw the lines in his face, saw the way his lower lip pushed his chin down into the soft flesh beneath it. Theory couldn’t help here. Theory deconstructs, theory has no purpose, no point, no overview or consolation — it was a kind of intellectual masturbation. If she hadn’t known it before, she knew it now.

The police thanked them, tried on the briefest of smiles, and then Sean showed them to the door and Melanie got up from the couch with the vague idea of making herself a cup of herbal tea to help her unwind. Just as the door closed, she called Sean’s name aloud, and she almost said it, almost said, “Sean, there’s something I’ve been wanting to tell you,” but there was no use in that now.

Sean turned away from the door, shoulders slumped, the corners of his mouth drawn down. After the skirmish on the lawn, he’d shrugged into a pair of jeans and the first shirt he could find — a Hawaiian print, festive with palm fronds and miniature pineapples — and she saw that he’d misbuttoned it. He looked hopeless. He looked lost in his own living room.

She held that picture of him, and then she was thinking, unaccountably, of another captive of the Sioux, a young woman taken from her husband to be bride to a chief, the business settled in the smoke and confusion of a desperate fight, her daughter crying out over the cacophony of shouts and curses and the rolling thunder of a hundred rifles firing at once. Months later, fleeing with her captors after a loss in battle, she watched a brave from another party come up to them on his pony, in full regalia, trailing the shawl she’d knitted for her daughter and a tiny shrunken scalp with the hair — the blond shining hair — still attached.

(1999)

My father is a writer. A pretty well-known one too. You’d recognize the name if I mentioned it, but I won’t mention it, I’m tired of mentioning it — every time I mention it I feel as if I’m suffocating, as if I’m in a burrow deep in the ground and all these fine grains of dirt are raining down on me. We studied him in school, in the tenth grade, a story of his in one of those all-purpose anthologies that dislocate your wrists and throw out your back just to lift them from the table, and then again this year, my freshman year, in college. I got into a Contemporary American Lit class second semester and they were doing two of his novels, along with a three-page list of novels and collections by his contemporaries, and I knew some of them too — or at least I’d seen them at the house. I kept my mouth shut though, especially after the professor, this blond poet in her thirties who once wrote a novel about a nymphomaniac pastry maker, made a joke the first day when she came to my name in the register.

“Achates McNeil,” she called out.

“Here,” I said, feeling hot and cold all over, as if I’d gone from a sauna into a snowbank and back again. I knew what was coming; I’d been through it before.

She paused, looking up from her list to gaze out the window on the frozen wastes of the campus in the frozen skullcap of New York State, and then came back to me and held my eyes a minute. “You wouldn’t happen by any chance to be a relation of anybody on our reading list, would you?”

I sat cramped in the hard wooden seat, thinking about the faceless legions who’d sat there before me, people who’d squirmed over exams and unfeeling professorial remarks and then gone on to become plastic surgeons, gas station attendants, insurance salesmen, bums and corpses. “No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

She gave me a mysterious little smile. “I was thinking of Teresa Golub or maybe Irving Thalamus?” It was a joke. One or two of the literary cretins in back gave it a nervous snort and chuckle, and I began to wonder, not for the first time, if I was really cut out for academic life. This got me thinking about the various careers available to me as a college dropout — rock and roller, chairman of the board, center for the New York Knicks — and I missed the next couple of names, coming back to the world as the name Victoria Roethke descended on the room and hung in the air like the aftershock of a detonation in the upper atmosphere.