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

At any rate, we made some sandwiches, put the dog in the car and drove through the leafy streets of town until the trees gave way and the countryside opened up around us, two bottles of marked-down shoppers’ special Australian zinfandel in a bag on the floor in back. The radio was playing (bluegrass, a taste we’d acquired since moving out here in the heart of the country) and we had the windows rolled down to enjoy the breeze we were generating as the car humped through the cornfields and over a series of gently rolling hills that made us feel as if we were floating. Nome was in the back seat, hanging his head out the window and striping the fender with airborne slaver. All was well. But then we turned onto the unmarked blacktop road that led out to Chris and Anneliese’s and saw the car there, a silver Toyota, engine running, stopped in our lane and facing in the wrong direction.

As we got closer we saw a woman — girl — coming toward us down the center of the road, her face flushed and her eyes wet with what might have been the effects of overwrought emotion or maybe hay fever, which was endemic here, and we saw a man — boy — then too, perched on the hood of the car, shouting abuse at her retreating back. The term “lovers’ quarrel” came into my head at the very moment the girl lifted her face and Mallory yelled, “Stop!”

“It’s a lovers’ quarrel,” I said, ever so slightly depressing the accelerator.

“Stop!” Mallory repeated, more insistently this time. The guy was watching us, something like an angry smirk on his face. The girl — she was no more than a hundred feet away now — raised her hand as if to flag us down and I eased up on the gas, thinking that maybe they were in trouble after all, something wrong with the car, the engine overheating, the fuel gauge on empty. It was hot. Grasshoppers flung themselves at the windshield like yellow hail. All you could smell was tar.

The car slowed to a halt and the girl bent to my window, letting her face hover there a moment against the green tide of corn. “You need help?” I asked, and those were tears in her eyes, absolutely, tears that swelled against her lids and dried in translucent streaks radiating out from her cheekbones.

“He’s such a jerk,” she said, sucking in her breath. “He’s, he’s”—another breath—“I hate him.”

Mallory leaned over me so the girl could see her face. “Is he your—?”

“He’s a jerk,” the girl repeated. She was younger than us, late teens, early twenties. She wore her blond hair in braids and she was dressed in a black tank top, cut-off jeans and pink Crocs. She threw a look at the guy, who was still perched on the hood of the car, then wiped her nose with the back of her hand and began to cry again.

“That’s right,” he shouted. “Cry. Go ahead. And then you can run back to your mommy and daddy like the little retard you are!” He was blond too, more of a rusty blond, and he had the makings of a reddish beard creeping up into his sideburns. He was wearing a Banksy T-shirt, the one with the rat in sunglasses on it, and it clung to him as if it had been painted on. You could see that he spent time at the gym. A lot of time.

“Get in the car,” Mallory said. “You can come with us — it’ll be all right.”

I turned to Mallory, blocking her view of the girl. “It’s between them,” I said, and at the same time, I don’t know why, I hit the child lock so the door wouldn’t open. “It’s none of our business.”

“None of our business?” she shot back at me. “She could be abused, or I don’t know, abducted, you ever think of that?” She strained to look around me to where the girl was still standing there on the blacktop as if she’d been fixed in place. “Did he hit you, is that it?”

Another sob, sucked back as quickly as it was released. “No. He’s just a jerk, that’s all.”

“Yeah,” he crowed, sliding down off the hood now, “you tell them all about it, because you’re little Miss Perfect, aren’t you? You want to see something? You, I’m talking to you, you in the car.” He raised one arm to show the long red striations there, evidence of what had passed between them. “You want her? You can have her.”

“Get in,” Mallory said.

Nome began to whine. The house was no more than half a mile up the road and probably he could smell Chris and Anneliese’s dog, a malamute named Boxer, and maybe the sheep the farmer kept behind the fence that enclosed the barn. The girl shook her head.

“Go ahead, bitch,” the guy called. He leaned back into the hood of the car and folded his arms across his chest as if he’d been at this awhile and was prepared to go on indefinitely.

“You don’t have to put up with that,” Mallory said, and her voice was honed and hard, the voice she used on me when she was in a mood, when I was talking too much or hadn’t got around to washing the dishes when it was my turn. “Come on, get in.”

“No,” the girl said, stepping back from the car now so that we got a full view of her. Her arms shone with sweat. There were beads of moisture dotting her upper lip. She was pretty, very pretty.

I eased off the brake pedal and the car inched forward even as Mallory said, “Stop, Paul, what are you doing?” and I said, “She doesn’t want to,” and then, lamely, “It’s a lovers’ quarrel, can’t you see that?” Then we were moving up the channel the road cut through the greenest fields in the world, past the pissed-off guy with the scratched forearms and a hard harsh gloating look in his eyes, down into a dip and up the next undulating hill, Mallory furious, thumping at the locked door as if it were a set of drums and straining her neck to look back as the whole scene receded in the rearview mirror.

—

By the time we got to Chris and Anneliese’s, Mallory was in full crisis mode. The minute we pulled into the driveway I flicked off the child lock, but she just gave me a withering look, slammed out of the car and stalked up the steps of the front porch, shouting, “Anneliese, Chris, where are you?” I was out of the car by then, Nome shooting over the front seat to rocket past me even as Boxer came tearing around the corner of the house, a yellow Lab pup I’d never seen before at his heels. The dogs barked rhapsodically, then the screen door swung open and there were Chris and Anneliese, spritzers clutched in their hands. Chris was barefoot and shirtless, Anneliese dressed almost identically to the girl on the road, except that her top was blue, to match her eyes, and she was wearing open-toed flats to show off her feet. Before grad school she’d been a hosiery model for Lord & Taylor in Chicago and she never missed an opportunity to let you know it. As for the rest of her, she was attractive enough, I suppose, with streamlined limbs, kinky copper-colored hair and the whitest teeth I’d ever seen or imagined. My own teeth tended toward the yellowish, but then neither of my parents was a dentist and both of hers were.

Mallory didn’t say hello or how are you or thanks for inviting us, but just wheeled around in exasperation and pointed down the road. “I need a bicycle,” she said. “Can I borrow somebody’s bicycle?”

Anneliese showed her teeth in an uncertain smile. “What are you talking about? You just got here.”

The explanation was brief and vivid and unsparing with regard to my lack of concern or feeling. All three of them looked at me a minute, then Anneliese said, “What if he’s dangerous?”

“He’s not dangerous,” I said reflexively.

“I’m going with you,” Anneliese said, and in the next moment she was pushing a matching pair of ten-speed bicycles out the door, hers and Chris’.

Chris waved his glass. “You think maybe Paul and I should go instead? I mean, just in case?”