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

“Walt?” she called, thrusting her head out the door. “Booters?”

The frail bleating echo of her own voice came back to her, and then, slipping in underneath it, the faintest whisper of a sound, no louder than the hum of a mosquito’s wings or the muffled cry of a bird strangled in the dark. “Help!” she heard, or thought she heard, a sound so weak and constrained it barely registered.

“Walt?” she tried again.

And then: “Eunice, goddamnit, over here!”

She was so startled she dropped her drink, the glass exploding on the flagstones at her feet and anointing her ankles with vodka. The light was fading, and she didn’t see very well anymore, not without her glasses anyway, and she was puzzled, truly puzzled, to hear her husband’s voice coming out of nowhere. “Walt?” she murmured, moving across the darkened lawn as through a minefield, and when she tripped, and fell, it wasn’t over a sprinkler head or gopher’s mound or a sudden rise in the lawn, it was over the long, attenuated shadow of her husband’s still and recumbent form.

—

Eunice cried out when she went down, a sharp rising exhalation of surprise, followed by an aquiescent grunt and the almost inevitable elision of some essential bone or joint giving way. He’d heard that sound before, too many times to count, on the football field, the baseball diamond, the basketball court, and he knew right away it was trouble. Or more trouble, if that was possible. “Eunice,” he croaked, and his face was cooked right down to the bone, “are you hurt?”

She was right there, right there beside him, one of her legs thrust awkwardly over his, her face all but planted in the turf. She was trying to move, to turn over, to right herself — all that he could feel, though he couldn’t for the life of him swivel his head to see — but she wasn’t having much success. When finally, after a protracted effort, she managed to drag her living leg across his dead one, she took what seemed like an hour to gulp at the air before her lips, tongue and mouth could form a response. “Walt,” she gasped, or moaned actually, that’s what it was, moaning, “my… I think… oh, oh, it hurts…”

He heard a car race up the street, the swift progress of life, places to go, people to meet. Somewhere a voice called out and a door slammed.

“My hip, I think it’s my hip—”

It was all he could do to keep from cursing, but he didn’t have the strength to curse, and there was no use in it, not now. He gritted his teeth. “Listen, I can’t move,” he said. “And I’ve been laying here all day waiting for somebody to notice, but do you think anybody’d even poke their damn head out the door to see if their husband was dead yet and fried up in the sun like a damn pork rind?”

She didn’t answer. The shadows thickened round them. The lawn went from gray to black, the color drained out of the treetops and the sky grew bigger by the minute, as if invisible forces were inflating it with the stuff of the universe. He was looking up at the emerging stars — he had no choice, short of closing his eyes. It had been a long time since he’d looked at the stars, indifferent to any space that didn’t have a roof over it, and he was strangely moved to see that they were all still there. Or most of them anyway, but who was counting? He could hear Eunice sobbing in the dark just to the left of him, and for a long while she didn’t say anything, just sniffed and snuffled, gagging on every third or fourth breath. Finally her voice came at him out of the void: “You always blame me for everything.”

Well, there was truth in that, he supposed, but no sense in getting into it now. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me, Eunice,” he said, trying to keep his voice level, though his heart was hammering and he foresaw every disaster. “I can’t get up. I can’t even move. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

There was no response. A mosquito lighted on his lower eyelid, soft as a snowflake, and he didn’t have the power to brush it away. “Listen,” he said, speaking to the sky and all the spilled paint of the stars, “how bad are you? Can you — do you think you can crawl?”

“It hurts,” she gasped, “Walt, it hurts,” and then she was sobbing again, a broken dry nagging rasp that cut into him like the teeth of a saw.

He softened his voice. “It’s okay, Eunice. Everything’s going to be okay, you’ll see.”

It was then, just as the words passed his lips, that the familiar music of Booters’ jingling tags rang out ecstatically from the far corner of the yard, followed by a joyful woof and the delirious patter of approaching paws. “Booters!” they cried out simultaneously. “Good girl, Booters. Come here, come here, girl!”

—

Eunice was expecting a miracle, nothing less — she was an optimist, always was, always would be — and the minute she heard the dog she thought of all the times Lassie had come to the rescue, Rin Tin Tin, Old Yeller, Buck, Toto and she didn’t know who else. She was lying face-down on the lawn, and her cheek had begun to itch where it was pressed into the grass and the grass made its snaking intaglio in the flesh, but she didn’t dare move because of the pain in her hip and lower back that made her feel as if she were being torn in two. She was scared, of course she was, for herself and for Walt, but when Booters stood over her and began to lick the side of her face, she felt a surge of hope. “That’s a girl,” she said. “Now speak, Booters, speak!”

Booters didn’t speak. She settled her too-big paws down in the grass beside Eunice’s head and whined in a soft, puppyish way. She wasn’t much more than a puppy, after all, a big lumpish stupid dog of indeterminate breed that couldn’t seem to resist soiling the carpet in the hallway no matter how many times she was punished for it. The last dog they’d had, Booters the First, the original Booters, now that was a dog. She was a border collie, her eyes bright with alertness and suspicion, and so smart you could have taught her the multiplication tables if you had a mind to. It was a sad day when they had to have her put down, fifteen years old and so stiff it was like she was walking on stilts, and Walt felt it as much as she did herself, but all he said was “You measure your life in dogs, and if you’re lucky you’ll get five or six of them,” and then he threw the dirt in the hole.

For the next hour, while the mosquitoes had a field day with her face and the back of her neck and her unprotected legs, Eunice kept trying. “Speak, girl!” she said. “Go get help. Get help! Speak!” At first, Walt did his part too, growling out one command after another, but all Booters did was whine through her slushy jowls and shift position to be near whichever one of them was exhorting her the most passionately. And when the automatic sprinklers came on with a hiss of air and the first sputtering release of subterranean pressure, the dog sprang up and trotted over to the porch, smart enough at least to come in out of the rain.

—

He was dozing when the sprinklers came on. He’d long since given up on the dog — what did Eunice expect her to do, flag down an ambulance? — and he was dreaming about nothing more complicated than his bed, his bed and a glass of water, half a glass, anything to soothe his throat, when the deluge began. It was a mixed blessing. He’d never been so thirsty in his life, baked and bleached under the sun till he felt mummified, and he opened his mouth reflexively. Unfortunately, none of the sprinklers had been adjusted to pinpoint the gaping maw of a supine old man stretched out in the middle of the lawn, and while the odd drop did manage to strike his lips and even his tongue, it did nothing to relieve his thirst, and he was soon soaked through to the skin and shivering. And yet still the water kept coming like some sort of Oriental water torture until finally the pipes heaved a sigh and the flow cut off as abruptly as it had begun.