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

Mallory was already straddling the bike. “Forget it,” she said, with a level of bitterness that went far beyond what was called for, if it was called for at all. I’d done what anyone would have done. Believe me, you just do not get between a couple when they’re in the middle of a fight. Especially strangers. And especially not on a sweltering afternoon on a deserted country road. You want to get involved? Call the cops. That was my feeling anyway, but then the whole thing had happened so quickly I really hadn’t had time to work out the ramifications. I’d acted instinctively, that was all. The problem was, so had she.

Mallory shot me a look. “You’d probably just wind up patting him on the back.” She gave it a beat, lasered in on Chris. “Both of you.”

That was when things got confused, because before I could respond — before I could think — the women were cranking down the drive with the sun lighting them up as if we were all in the second act of a stage play, and the dogs, spurred on by the Lab pup, chose that moment to bolt under the lowest slat of the bleached wooden fence and go after the sheep. The sheep were right there, right in the yard, milling around and letting off a sweaty ovine stink, and the two older dogs — mine and Chris’—knew they were off limits, strictly and absolutely, and that heavy consequences would come down on them if they should ever lapse and let their instincts take over. But that was exactly what happened. The pup, which, as it turned out, was a birthday present from Chris to Anneliese, didn’t yet comprehend the rules — these were sheep and he was a dog — and so he went for them and the sheep reacted and that reaction, predator and prey, drove the older dogs into a frenzy.

In that instant we forgot the women, forgot the couple on the road, forgot spritzers and croquet and the notion of chilling on a scalding afternoon, because the dogs were harrying the sheep and the sheep had nowhere to go and it was up to us — grad students, not farmers, not shepherds — to get in there and separate them. “Oh, shit,” Chris said and then we both hurdled the fence and were right in the thick of it. I went after Nome, shouting his name in a fury, but he’d gone atavistic, tearing wool and hide from one bleating animal after another. I had him twice, flinging myself at him like a linebacker, but he wriggled away and I was down in the dirt, in the dust, a cyclone of dust, the sheep poking at my bare arms and outthrust hands with their stony black hooves. There was shit aplenty. There was blood. And by the time we’d wrestled the dogs down and got them out of there, half a dozen of the sheep had visible gashes on their faces and legs, a situation that was sure to disconcert the farmer — Chris’ landlord — if he were to find out about it, and we ourselves were in serious need of decontamination. I was bleeding. Chris was bleeding. The sheep were bleeding. And the dogs, the dogs we scolded and pinched and whacked, were in the process of being dragged across the front yard to a place where we could chain them up so they could lie panting through the afternoon and contemplate their sins. That was the moment, that was what we were caught up in, and if the women were on their bicycles someplace wearing a scrim of insects or stepping into somebody else’s quarrel, we didn’t know it.

A car went by then, a silver Toyota, but I only caught a glimpse of it and couldn’t have said if there were two people in it or just one.

—

We never did get around to playing croquet — Mallory was too worked up, and besides, just moving had us dripping with sweat — but we sat on the porch and drank zinfandel and soda with shaved ice while the dogs whined and dug in the dirt and finally settled down in a twitching fly-happy oblivion. Mallory was mum on the subject of the couple in the Toyota except to say that by the time she and Anneliese got there, the girl was already in the car, which pulled a U-turn and shot past them up the road, and I thought — foolishly, as it turned out — that that was the end of it. When six o’clock rolled around we wound up going to a pizza place because I was outvoted, three to one, and after that we sat through a movie Anneliese had heard good things about but which turned out to be a dud. It was a French film about three non-specifically unhappy couples who had serial affairs with one another and a troupe of third and fourth parties against a rainy Parisian backdrop that looked as if it had been shot through a translucent beach ball. At the end there was a close-up of each of the principals striding separately and glumly through the rain to separate destinations. The three actresses, heavily made-up, suffered from smeared mascara. The music swelled.

Then it was Gabe’s and the pounding air-conditioned exhilaration of an actual real-life band and limitless cocktails. Chris and Anneliese were great dancers, the kind everybody, participants and wallflowers alike, watches with envy, and they didn’t waste any time, not even bothering to find a table before they were out there in the middle of the floor, their arms flashing white and Anneliese’s coppery flag of hair draining all the color out of the room. We danced well too, Mallory and I, attuned to each other’s moves by way of long acquaintance, and while we weren’t maybe as showy as Chris and Anneliese, we could hold our own. I tried to take Mallory’s hand, but she withheld it and settled into one of the tables with a shrug of irritation. I stood there a moment in mute appeal, but she wouldn’t look me in the eye, and it was then that I began to realize it was going to be a long night. What did I want? I wanted to dance, wanted joy and release — summer break! — but I went to the bar instead and ordered a spritzer for Mallory and a rum and Coke for myself.

The bar was crowded, more crowded than usual, it seemed, even though most of the undergrads had gone home or off to Europe or Costa Rica or wherever they went when somebody else was paying for it. There were two bartenders, both female and both showing off their assets, and it must have taken me five minutes just to get to the bar and another five to catch the attention of the nearest one. I shouted my order over the furious assault of the band. The drinks came. I paid, took one in each hand and began to work my way back through the crowd. It was then that someone jostled me from behind — hard — and half the spritzer went down the front of my shirt and half the rum and Coke down the back of a girl in front of me. The girl swung round on me with an angry look and I swung round on whoever had jostled — pushed — me and found myself staring into the face of the guy from the blacktop road, the guy with the distraught girlfriend and the silver Toyota. It took a beat before I recognized him, a beat measured by the whining nasal complaint of the girl with the Coke-stained blouse—“Jesus, aren’t you even going to apologize?”—and then, without a word, he flashed both palms as if he were performing a magic trick and gave me a deliberate shove that tumbled me back into the girl and took the drinks to the floor in a silent shatter of glass and skittering ice cubes. The girl invoked Jesus again, louder this time, while the guy turned and slipped off into the crowd.

A circle opened around me. The bartender gave me a disgusted look. “Sorry,” I said to the girl, “but you saw that, didn’t you? He shoved me.” And then, though it no longer mattered and he was already passing by the bouncer and swinging open the door to the deepening night beyond, I added, my own voice pinched in complaint, “I don’t even know him.”

When I got back to the table, sans drinks, Mallory gave me a long squint through her glasses and said — or rather, screamed over the noise of the band—“What took you so long?” And then: “Where’re the drinks?”