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

She didn’t say anything.

“You want to go down to Gabe’s for a drink? How does a G and T sound?”

“I don’t know,” she said, looking up at me for the first time. “I guess so. I don’t care.”

It was then that my gaze happened to fall on the bookcase, on the gap there, where the old paperback of Nine Stories had fallen flat. “Where’s the thing?” I said.

“What thing?”

“The mesh. My mesh. ”

She shrugged. “I tossed it.”

“Tossed it? Where? What do you mean?”

In the next moment I was in the kitchen, flipping open the lid to the trashcan, only to find it empty. “You mean outside?” I shouted. “In the Dumpster?”

When I came thundering back into the room she still hadn’t moved. “Jesus, what were you thinking? That was mine. I wanted that. I wanted to keep it.”

Her lips barely moved. “It was dirty.”

—

I must have spent half an hour out there poking through the side-by-side Dumpsters that served our building and the one across the alley from it. I was embarrassed, I’ll tell you, people strolling by and looking at me like I was one of the homeless, a can man, a bottle redeemer, and I was angry too, and getting angrier. She had no right, that was what I kept telling myself — she’d done it just to spite me, I knew it, and the worst thing, the saddest thing, was that now I’d never know if that piece of mesh was the real deal or not. I could have sent it to NASA, to the JPL, to somebody who could say yea or nay. But not now. Not anymore.

When I came back up the stairs, sweating and with the reek of rotting vegetables and gnawed bones and all the rest hanging round me like a miasma, I went right for her. I took hold of her arm, slapped the magazine away and jerked her to her feet. She looked scared and that just set me off all the more. I might have pushed her. She might have pushed back. Next thing I was out the door, out on the street, fuming, the sun still glaring overhead, everything before me looking as ordinary as dishwater. There was a bar down the street — air-conditioning, music, noise, people, a change of mood that was as easy to achieve as switching channels on the TV — and I was actually on my way there, my shoulders tense as wire, when I stopped myself. I patted down my pockets: wallet, keys, cell phone, a dribble of dimes and quarters. I didn’t have a comb or a toothbrush or a change of underwear, I didn’t have books or my iPod or the dog, but none of that seemed to matter, not anymore. A couple in shorts and running shoes flashed by me, breathing noisily. A motor scooter backfired across the street.

We kept the car in the lot out back of the apartment. I went the long way around the building, keeping close to the wall in case Mallory was at the front window looking to see where I’d gone off to. The tank showed less than a quarter full and my wallet held three fives and three singles — along with the change, that gave me a grand total of nineteen dollars and ninety-five cents. No matter. I’d stop at the ATM on the way out of town and if things got desperate I did have a credit card, which we reserved for emergencies only, because we really struggled just to make the minimum payment every month. Was this an emergency? Mallory wouldn’t think so. The geniuses from NASA might not think so either — or the farmer whose sheep bore crusted-over scabs on their legs and throats and sad white faces. But as I wheeled the car out of the lot I couldn’t help thinking it was the biggest emergency of my life.

I didn’t know where I was going, I had no idea beyond the vague notion of putting some miles behind me, heading north maybe till the corn gave way to forest, to pines as fragrant as the air that went cold at night and seeped in through the open window so you had to pull a blanket over you when you went to sleep. The car — the rusted-out Volvo wagon Mallory’s mother used to drive to work back in Connecticut — shuddered and let out a grinding mechanical whine as I pulled up in front of the bank. I got out, mounted the three steps to the concrete walkway where the ATM was and waited the requisite six feet, six inches away from the middle-aged woman in the inflated khaki shorts who was just then feeding in her card. The heat was staggering. My shirt was wet as a dishrag, my hair hanging limp. I wasn’t thinking, just doing.

It was then that I glanced up and noticed the silver Toyota parked in the lot of the ice-cream parlor next door. A woman and two kids emerged from the building, licking cones, and went off down the street, and then the door swung open again and there was the blond girl, her own cone — the pale green of pistachio — held high and her face twisted in a grimace as she said something over her shoulder to the man behind her. He was wearing the same T-shirt he’d worn that day on the road and he didn’t have an ice cream of his own, but as he came through the door he twisted his face too and jerked hold of the girl’s arm. She let out a cry, and then the ice cream, double scoop, which had already begun to melt in green streaks across the back of her hand, slipped from the cone to plop wetly at her feet, just like anything else subject to the law of gravity.

“You creep,” she said. “Look what you did.” And he said something back. And then she said something. And then I was no longer watching them because as far as I was concerned they could go careering around the world on any orbit they wanted, just so long as it never intersected mine again. Space debris collides in two wide bands of low earth orbit, at 620 and 930 miles up, fragmenting and fragmenting again, things as big as satellites and rocket boosters and as small as the glove the astronaut Ed White lost on the first U.S. spacewalk. Eventually, it’s all going to come down, and whether it’ll burn up or crush a house or tap somebody on the shoulder in a dark field on a dark night is anybody’s guess.

The woman at the ATM seemed to be having trouble with her card — no bills had yet appeared and she kept punching at the keys and reinserting the card as if sheer repetition would wear the machine down. I had time. I was very calm. I pulled out my cell and called Mallory. She answered on the first ring. “Yeah?” she snapped, angry still. “What do you want?”

I didn’t say anything, not a word. I just pressed my thumb to the off switch and broke the connection. But what I’d wanted to say was that I’d taken the car and that I’d be back, I was pretty sure I’d be back, and that she should feed the dog and pay the rent, which was due the first of the month, and if she went out at night — if she went out at all — she should remember to look up, look up high, way up there where the stars burn and the space junk roams, because you never can tell what’s going to come down next.

(2012)

The sun was a little gift from the gods, pale as a nectarine and hanging just above the treetops on a morning the weatherman on the local NPR affiliate had assured him would begin with a cold misting drizzle and progress to rain. Well, the weatherman — or actually, she was a woman, a weatherwoman, with a soft whispery voice that made you think of a whole range of activities that had nothing whatever to do with the weather — had been wrong before. More times than he could count. Satellites, ocean sensors, hygrometers, anemometers, barometers — they were all right in their way, relaying messages to people stuck in cities who might want to know when to break out their galoshes and umbrellas, but more often than not he could just step out the back door, take a sniff of the air and tell you with ninety-five percent accuracy what the day was going to bring. Of course he could. And he did it now, riding a rush of endorphins as he shifted the coffee cup from his right hand to his left to swing open the back door, stroll out onto the deck with its unimpaired views of the humped yellow fields and freestanding oaks and the blue-black mountains hanging above them, and take in the air. It was damp, no doubt about that, but the sky was clear, or mostly clear, and even if it did spit a little rain — even if it snowed up there at the higher elevations — there was no way in the world he was going to cancel the hike.