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

A dirty white pigeon fluttered into the air. Somebody said, “Laura Jean, you look terrific, I hardly recognize you,” and a pair of policemen surfaced amidst the crowd, moving toward him now, and here was a too-thin vaguely blondish woman rushing for him with her hands outstretched and the light of redemption in her cracked blue eyes, and she was going to say, “Mr. Riley?” and he was going to say, “Ms. Trumpeter?” but that never happened, because the policemen wrestled him to the pavement even as he felt the cold metallic bite of the handcuffs gnaw into his flesh.

—

Sometime later — he didn’t know how much later because they’d taken his watch — he found himself in a desperate place, a place even the wildest of his wild years couldn’t have begun to prepare him for. There were strange smells, unsettling noises, the rhythmic tapping of heels on linoleum. Cold steel. Corridors within corridors. Here he was in the midst of it, his hands shaking as if he’d had a hundred cups of coffee, and he couldn’t stop pacing back and forth across the stained concrete floor of the solitary cell they’d put him in, the guard or deputy or whatever he was giving him a rude shove and announcing in an overheated voice that it was for his own protection. “The people we got in here, they don’t like creeps like you. And you want to know something? Neither do I.” And then he added, as a kind of oral postscript, “Scumbag.”

Donna Trumpeter, aflutter with righteousness, had tried to explain that they’d made a mistake, that he — Riley, the man in handcuffs with the heart rate surging like Krakatoa — was a famous writer, a celebrity, an award winner, but the cops wouldn’t listen. They produced a blanket for the boy, as if he were cold, as if that were the extent of his problem, and another cop — a female with a face like a blazing gun — wrapped the boy up and led him away. Riley talked himself hoarse. He protested in a high buzzing whine while they led him in cuffs through the cavernous station, and everybody, even the crackheads and bums, stared at him; fulminated while they strong-armed him into the back seat of the cruiser and drove him down the bleak cold street; alternately raged, threatened and pleaded as they read him his rights, took his fingerprints and photo — his mug shot! — and booked him. Was he allowed a phone call? Yes. On a real phone greased with the slime of ten thousand penitential hands, a phone attached to a wall with an actual cord that disappeared inside it before connecting with a vast seething network of wires that ran all the way to Buffalo and beyond. It took four rings for Caroline to answer, each one an eternity, and what was the name of that attorney they’d used when the neighbor’s pinhead of a kid set fire to the fence?

“Hello?” Her voice was guarded, caller I.D. alerting her to the suspect number. Absurdly he wanted to throw his voice and pretend to be a telemarketer, make her laugh, goad her, but things were too desperate for that.

“It’s me,” he said. “I’m in trouble.” He felt as if he were in a submarine deep under the sea and all the air had gone out of it. The walls were squeezing in. He couldn’t breathe. “I’m in jail. I’ve been arrested.”

“Listen, I’m just sitting down to a salad and a glass of wine and I really don’t have time for whatever this is — humor, is that it? You think you’re funny? Because I don’t.”

He dredged something out of his voice, something real, that stopped her. “Caroline,” he said, and now he was sobbing — or almost, right on the verge of it—“I’m in jail. Really. It’s crazy, I know, but I need you to… I need your help. That lawyer, remember that lawyer, what was his name?”

“Lawyer? What are you talking about?”

He repeated himself for the third time, angry now, the humiliation burning in him, and what if the papers got hold of this? “I’m in jail.”

Her voice tightened. “For what?”

“I don’t know, it’s all a mistake.”

Tighter yet: “For what?”

There was a deputy right there, pointing emphatically at his watch. The corridor smelled of cleaning solution, vomit, bad shoes, bad feet, bad breath.

It took everything in him to get the words out. “They’re calling it”—and here he emitted a strained whinnying laugh—“child abuse.”

“Jesus,” she snapped. “Why don’t you get a life? I told you I’m trying to have a bite of dinner here— in peace for once? Go try your routine on one of your groupies, one of the literary ladies of where is it? Greater Stuyvesant. I’m sure they’ll all love it.” And then, because Riley must have committed some sin he wasn’t aware of in another life and another time, something truly heinous and compoundedly unforgivable, the phone went dead.

—

Four hours later — half-past eight by the watch they’d returned to him, along with his wallet, his belt and the flat inanimate slab of Caroline’s iPhone — he was sitting across from Donna Trumpeter in a booth at the bar/restaurant of the Stuyvesant Marriott, trying to nurse his pulse rate back to normal with judicious doses of Johnnie Walker Black. He’d ordered a steak, blood-raw, but it wasn’t there yet. Donna Trumpeter flipped the hair away from her face. She leaned into the table on both her elbows and cupped her chin in her hands. She’d just finished telling him, for the tenth time, how very sorry she was about all of this and that of course the ladies of the service club and her book group and the mayor and all the citizens of the Greater Stuyvesant area who’d driven who knew how many miles to hear him speak all understood that the circumstances were unavoidable. They’d held the ceremony anyway, apparently, the mayor’s wife reading aloud from Maggie of the Farm in the booming tones she’d employed as a high school thespian a quarter century earlier, and everyone — at least at last report — had been satisfied with the evening, the high point of which was the turkey schnitzel, garlic mashed potatoes, brown gravy and peas provided by the high school cafeteria staff doing overtime duty. “But,” and here she drew in a vast quavering breath, “of course, they all wanted you.” Her eyes, giving back the nacreous sheen of the overhead lights, fluttered shut and then snapped open again. “There’s no substitute for genius.”

This last comment, coupled with the tranquilizing effect of the scotch, made him feel marginally better. “I guess that’ll teach me,” he said, sounding as doleful and put-upon as he knew how.

“Oh, no,” she said, “no. You did the right thing. The only thing.”

“If I had to do it again—” he began and then trailed off. He’d been trying to catch the waitress’ eye for a refill, and here she was — a huge woman, titanic, as slow on her feet as mold creeping across a petri dish — backing her way out of the double doors to the kitchen, his steak balanced on one arm, Donna Trumpeter’s Cobb salad on the other. The cops had realized their mistake after an interpreter was brought in to question the boy in Spanish and then they’d hurried to release him, their apologies rattling round the station like a dry cough. They didn’t care. He meant nothing to them. They’d branded him a pervert and a pervert he remained, just another perp, another scumbag, innocent or not. He could go ahead and sue. They were just doing their job and no jury was going to give him a nickel. If anything, he was at fault — for interfering, for letting the real abductor get away when all along they’d been waiting to take him at the station.

The waitress, breathing heavily — puffing, actually, as if she were trying to keep an imaginary feather afloat — set the plates down on the table and as the smell of the steak rose to him he realized how hungry he was. “Another scotch,” he said, and because he was calming down now, the earth solid beneath his feet the way it always had been and always would be, he added, “please,” and then, “if it’s not too much trouble.” He cut meat, lifted it to his lips, sipped scotch. Donna Trumpeter kept up a soft soothing patter which revolved around what an honor it was to be in his presence — she couldn’t believe it; it was like a dream — and how deeply each of his books had moved her, Maggie of the Farm most of all. “Really,” she said, “the way you portray day-to-day life — and the insight you have into women, my God! — it’s almost Tolstoyan. Or no: better. Because it’s real. In the here and now.”