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

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He was in a brightly lit place, voices swelling round him, an undercurrent of jaunty guitar and country baritone washing through the speakers at either end of the room. The man from the local SAR team — mid-forties, squat, carrying a big breadbasket of flesh round his waist like a badge of authority — had told him they’d be on the case as soon as they could, volunteers and sheriff’s department people driving up the mountain even as they spoke, but that they really couldn’t expect to do much till first light in the morning. The temperature was likely to go down into the teens overnight — that was what he’d heard on the radio anyway — but the snow was expected to hold off, so there was that. Were they dressed for the elements, these two? Did they have a space blanket? A tent? The means to make a fire?

Brice had just shaken his head. He had everything he needed for an emergency in his pack, but who knew what Syl was carrying? Or Mal. Mal should have known better, should have been prepared, but then he’d always been a free spirit — give him a minute and he’d tell you all about it — and whether he’d thought beyond a couple sandwiches and a bottle of water for a routine day hike, who could say? And then he was picturing them up there on the mountain in the fastness of the night, lost and cold and hungry, huddling together for warmth, maybe injured — maybe that was it, maybe Mal had broken a leg or knocked himself unconscious doing the butterfly face-first into a tree — and then he was staring down at the plate set on the bar before him, a sandwich there, untouched, and the drink beside that, bourbon and water, no ice. “I don’t blame you,” Beverly was saying, “because if I was in your place the last thing I’d be thinking about is food, but you’ve got to keep yourself up.”

She was perched on the stool beside him, the remains of a steak and salad scattered about the plate at her elbow, a drink in one hand. She’d gone to the ladies’ and cleaned herself up, the smear of mud gone now, her makeup freshened, her legs crossed at the knee. He saw Syl again, up there in the dark. Huddling. With Mal. And then he saw himself in bed with this woman, with Beverly, who’d confessed to him in a breathless voice that she’d signed up for the hike under false pretenses: “I’m really only fifty-three, and that’s the truth. But then you didn’t exactly I.D. me, did you?”

He kept telling himself that everything was going to turn out all right, that Mal and Syl must have missed the turnoff and taken the trail that led in the other direction altogether, eight miles down to Coy Flat, and that once it got dark they would have seen it was too late to retrace their steps — and he’d told the Search and Rescue man the same thing. They must have missed the fork, that’s all, but the man had just said, How old did you say they were?

What if she died? What if Syl died up there?

He tried to put the thought out of his head, tried to focus: here was the emergency he’d always thought he was prepared for, but when it came to it, he wasn’t prepared for anything. How could he be? How could anybody? The whole world was just chance and misstep, that was all. A bear wandered too far afield and wound up gutted and dead, you took the wrong turn and died of exposure on the flank of a mountain under a thin black sky that was no covering at all. The truth was, he hadn’t taken Syl away from Mal. Mal hadn’t wanted her. He’d gone to South America, to the Andes and Tierra del Fuego, to climb mountains and tramp the wide world, but he couldn’t wait for Syl to finish college and so he left her behind. And Brice had been there for her. Every Friday, no matter the weather or how beaten down he was from the shit job he’d taken out of college just to pay the bills, he drove the two hundred miles up the cleft of the San Joaquin Valley to take her to dinner or a movie or to cruise the student bars and then sit in the lounge of the dorm sucking at her tongue and feeling for her breasts till the lights flickered for curfew. Then they were together. Then they were married. And then, childless by design because children were an extravagance in a world already stressed to the limits, they devoted themselves to right living and ecology, to education and preservation. They grew old together. Older.

Beverly leaned into him, the toe of her hiking boot grazing his leg. He saw that she’d removed the knee socks so that her legs were bare, solid legs, smooth, descending to the sculpted hollows of her ankles. “So what do you want to do?” she asked, and they might have been on a date in some anonymous place, not a care in the world that wasn’t immediate and erotic. “You can’t sit up in your car all night long, you’re not going to do that, are you?”

He was. That was the least he could do. There was a sleeping bag in the trunk. He’d wrap himself in that.

“Because, well, you’re going to have to drive me back to get my car, and I’m perfectly willing to sit there with you for as long as you want and we can honk the horn every once in a while, to signal, but you should know I took a room here for the night, very reasonable actually, and you’re welcome — I mean, no strings attached — if you want to get some sleep, that is…”

In some way it was Syl’s own fault, trusting Mal like that, keeping up the chatter — the flirtation — till neither of them was paying the slightest bit of attention to the trail or where it went or what had happened to the rest of the group, which must have been around the next turn, sure it was, and why worry? It wouldn’t have fazed Mal. Or Syl. He would have liked a bed — and whatever else Beverly was offering — but he could already foresee exactly what was going to happen.

He was going to drive her to her car where it sat beneath the trees in the impenetrable dark and he was going to say no to her, but gently, and there’d be a kiss and maybe a bit more — he wasn’t dead yet — but then she’d get in her car and the brake lights would flash and she’d be gone, back to the lodge and the lights and the music. And he’d sit there wrapped up in the sleeping bag, stiff and miserable, till dawn broke and the Search and Rescue team hurried up the path he was too drained to negotiate and within the hour they’d be back, bearing Mal on a stretcher because Mal was too far gone with cold and disorientation to stand upright on his own. A few minutes — five, ten? — would elapse, each one thunderous, dropping down on him like a series of explosions. He’d be out of the car, moving toward the trailhead, and there she’d be, dehydrated maybe, suffering from exposure, but tall still, and erect, her head held high and her step firm, Syl, the old lady he was married to.

(2011)

There was a foul odor coming from the house — the odor, as it turned out, of rotting flesh — but nobody did anything about it, at least not at first. I was away at the time, my business taking me to the East Coast for a series of fruitless meetings with a consortium of inadequate and unserious people whose names I forgot the minute I settled into the first-class cabin for the trip back home, and so I had the story from my wife’s walking partner, Mary Ellen Stovall, who makes her living in real estate. We’d always wondered about that house, which was something of an eyesore in the neighborhood — or would have been an eyesore, that is, if it was visible from the street. We went by the place nearly every day, my wife Chrissie and I, running errands or strolling down to the beach club or one of the shops and restaurants on the main road. The houses around it — tasteful, well-kept and very, very pricey — were what you’d expect from a California coastal community, in styles ranging from craftsman to Spanish mission to contemporary, most of them older homes that had been extensively remodeled, in some cases taken right down to the frame or even the original slab. But what this one looked like was anybody’s guess because the trees and shrubbery had long since gone wild so that all you saw was a curtain of green enclosing a gravel drive, in the center of which stood — or rather, listed — an ancient, rust-spattered Buick the size of our two Priuses combined.