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

As it happened, the man who lived there— had lived there — was a recluse in his early sixties whom no one, not even the next-door neighbors, could recall ever having seen. The properties on either side of him featured eight-foot walls topped with bougainvillea that twisted toward the sun in great puffed-up balls of leaf and thorn and flame-red flower, and as I say, his property had reverted to nature so that his flat acre on a bluff with ocean views might as well have been sectioned out of the Amazonian jungle for all anybody could see into — or out of — it. Isolation, that was what he had. Isolation so absolute it took that odor and a span of eight full days after he’d expired for the police and firemen, who’d arrived simultaneously in response to the neighbors’ complaints, to force open the door and find him sunk into his bed, his mouth thrown open and the mattress so stained with his fluids it had to be burned once the coroner and the forensics people had got done with him.

Why am I telling you all this? Because of what came next, of what I discovered both on my own and with Mary Ellen Stovall’s help, and because I’m in a period of my life — I just turned fifty — when I’ve begun to think less about the daily struggle and more of what awaits us all in the end. Here was an anonymous death, unattended, unmourned, and the thought of it, of this man, whoever he was, drawing his last breath in a run-down house on a very valuable piece of property not two blocks from where Chrissie and I had bought in at top dollar during the very crest of the boom, spoke to me in some deep way I couldn’t define. Had he suffered? Had he lain there for days, weeks, a month, too ill or derelict in his soul to call for help? Had he slowly starved? Mary Ellen — who was to get the listing once the surviving relative, a brother, equally bereft, in some godforsaken place like Nebraska or Oklahoma, had given her the go-ahead — claimed that the body had been practically engulfed in a litter of soda cans, half-filled containers of microwave noodles, and (this really got to me) blackened avocado skins from the tree out back.

According to the ten-line story that appeared in the local paper the day after I got back, the dead man had been identified as Carey Fortunoff, and he’d once been a member of an obscure rock band called Metalavox, after which he disappeared from public view, though he continued to write the occasional song for other bands and singers, a few of whom were named in the article, but they must have been equally obscure since neither Chrissie nor I had ever heard of them. Out of curiosity I googled the band and came up with a single paragraph that was virtually a duplicate of what the paper had run. There was a photo, in black and white, of the five band members in a typical pose of the era, which looked to be late seventies, early eighties, judging from their haircuts and regalia. They were in a cemetery, variously slouching against one tombstone or another, wearing mirror sunglasses and wasp-waisted jackets, their hair judiciously mussed. As to which one was Carey Fortunoff — the dead man — I couldn’t say, though for the two or three minutes I invested in staring at the photo I imagined he was the one standing — slouching — just slightly to the left of the four others and staring out away from the camera as if he had better things on his mind than posing for a cheesy promotional shot. And that was it. I clicked on something else, which led me to another thing altogether and before I knew it half an hour had vanished from my life. Then I went down to see what Chrissie wanted to do about dinner.

—

The next day was Sunday and I was up early, still running on East Coast time. I awakened in the dark and for a long while just lay there on my side watching the numbers mutate on the face of the ancient digital clock Chrissie’s mother had left behind when she’d died the previous year. I hadn’t wanted that clock — I always tried to sleep through the night and didn’t like knowing what time it was if I woke to use the bathroom, which was increasingly common now that I’d reached the age when the prostate seems programmed to enlarge — but, of course, out of sensitivity to Chrissie and her loss, I’d given in. “It reminds me of her,” Chrissie had claimed the day she’d cleared space on the bureau and knelt to plug the thing in. “I know it’s crazy,” she added, turning to give me a plaintive look, “but it’s like she’s right here watching over me.” Again, out of sensitivity, I didn’t point out to my wife that she couldn’t see the thing anyway since she wore a sleep mask to bed (along with a medieval-looking dental appliance designed to prevent her from snoring, which, occasionally, it did). At any rate, I watched the numbers reorganize themselves until the window took on a grayish glow that reminded me of the test pattern on the TV we’d had when I was a boy, then I pushed myself up, pulled on a pair of shorts, a T-shirt and sandals, and slipped out the door, thinking to walk down to the village for croissants and coffee.

It was utterly still, the new-made light just touching the tops of the trees in a glad, dependable way. There was no sound but for the distant hiss of the freeway, a kind of white noise we all get so used to we barely know it’s there. A crow started up somewhere and then the other birds chimed in, variously clucking and whistling, but hidden from view. I wasn’t thinking about Carey Fortunoff or anything else for that matter beyond maybe the way the smell of fresh coffee and croissants hot from the oven hit you when you stepped in the door of the bakery, but then I found myself passing by his house — or jungle, that is — and I couldn’t help stopping right there in the street to wonder all over again about the kind of person who could let his property deteriorate like that.

The car was still there, still listing, still enclosed in a shadowy pocket of vegetation. The bushes were woven as tight as thatch, the trees — eucalyptus, black acacia, oak and Catalina cherry — struggling above them. Looking closer, I could see the bright globes of oranges and — what was it, Meyer lemon? — choked in the gloom, and there, to the side of the car, a splash of pink begonias run wild. I glanced over my shoulder. Did I feel guilty? Ghoulish, even? Yes. But a moment later I was trespassing on a dead man’s property.

It was nothing to duck down the tunnel of the drive to where a crude path twisted through the undergrowth in the direction of what must have been the house itself. The shadows congealed. I felt a chill. People always describe the odor of dead things as being vaguely sweetish, but the smell here was more of the earth, the smell of compost or what’s left at the bottom of the trash can on a summer morning. I’d gone maybe a hundred feet before I spotted a window up ahead, the light puddled there, dense and gray, and then the front of the house emerged from the tangle like a stage prop, single story, flat roof, stucco in a shade of brown so dark it was almost black. Coffee grounds, that was what I thought of, a house the color of coffee grounds, and what was wrong with beige or white or even lime green for that matter? But now the path widened, branches broken off, bushes trampled, and it came to me that this was where the police had gone in to bundle up the corpse in some sort of plastic sheet or body bag, something impervious to leakage.

I could have stopped there. I suppose I should have. But I was curious — and I’d come this far, Chrissie asleep still, the croissants on the warming tray in the display case at the bakery and the coffee brewing, and, as I say, I felt some deeper compulsion, no man an island and all that — and without even thinking I went right up the front steps and tried the door. It was locked, as I’d expected it to be, though in this neighborhood we have an exceptionally low incidence of crime and people have grown pretty casual about security. Half the time — and I’m at fault here, I know it, because you’ve got to be prepared for the unexpected — Chrissie and I forget to set the house alarm when we turn in at night. Still, there I was on the front porch of Carey Fortunoff’s house and the door was locked — and whether he’d locked it himself before climbing into bed for the final time or the firemen had secured it after breaking in was something I didn’t want to think about. Next thing I knew, I was fighting my way through jasmine and oleander gone mad, clinging to the skin of the house and trying the windows successively till I reached the back and found the door there, a windowless slab of pine painted the same color as the house, only two shades lighter. I tried the knob. It turned in my hand till it clicked and the door eased open.