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

“So there’s nobody here but you,” Bob Smith says, and that’s when my widow feels the first faint stirring of alarm. A cat rises slowly on the periphery of her vision, stretching itself. The sun slants through the windows, irradiating the skeleton of the dead palm in the big pot in the corner. Everything is still. She just nods her head in response to the question and clutches the purse to her, thinking, It’s all right, just show him to the door now, and thank him, tell him the reward’s coming, in the mail, just leave an address…

But Bob Smith isn’t ready to leave. In fact, he’s hovering over her now, his face as rucked and seamed as an old mailbag, his eyes glittering like something that’s been crushed in the street. “So where’s the jewelry then?” he says, and there’s nothing of the good Samaritan left in his voice now, no bonhomie, no fellow feeling or even civility. “Can you even find it in this shithole? Huh?”

My widow doesn’t say a word.

He has a hand on her wrist suddenly, clamped there like a manacle, and he’s tugging at her, shouting in her face. “You stupid old bitch! You’re going to pay — shit, yes, you’re going to pay. Any cash? Huh? Cash? You know what that is?” And then, before she has time to answer, he snakes out his other hand, the right one, and slaps her till she jerks back from the grip of him like an animal caught in the jaws of a trap.

My widow hasn’t been slapped in seventy-odd years, not since she got into a fight with her sister over a pan of brownies when their mother stepped out of the kitchen to answer the phone. She’s in shock, of course — everything’s happened so fast — but she’s tough, my widow, as tough in the core of her as anybody on earth. Nobody slaps her. Nobody comes into her house on false pretenses and — well, you get the picture. And in the next instant her free hand comes up out of the purse with an ancient can of Mace clutched in it, and because this is a good and fitting universe I’m constructing here, the aerosol spray still works despite an expiration date ten years past, and before she can think, Bob Smith is writhing on the floor in a riot of cat feces, dust balls and lint, cursing and rubbing at his eyes. And more: when my widow turns for the door, ready to scurry out onto that brick porch and scream till her dried-up old lungs give out, who should be standing there at the door but Megan Capaldi, screaming herself.

In Her Own Words

As I say, my widow doesn’t get the newspaper, not anymore. But Megan Capaldi brings her two copies the next day, because her picture is on the front page under the caption, “FEISTY OCTOGENARIAN THWARTS BURGLARY.” There she is, hunched and squinting into the camera, arm in arm with Megan Capaldi, who dialed 911 on her cell phone and escorted my widow to safety while the San Roque Municipal Police handcuffed Bob Smith and secured him in the back of their cruiser. In the photograph, which shows off the front of the house to real advantage, I think, the windows especially, with their intricate design and the wooden frames I scraped, sanded and painted at least three times in the course of my tenure here, my widow is smiling. So too is Megan Capaldi, who wouldn’t be bad-looking at all if only she’d stand up straight. Posed there, with the house mushrooming over them in grainy black and white, you can hardly tell them apart.

On page 2, at the end of the article, my widow is given an opportunity to reflect on her ordeal. “It’s a shame, is what it is,” she is quoted as saying, “the way people like this prey on the elderly — and don’t forget the telemarketers, they’re just as bad. It didn’t used to be this way, before everybody got so suspicious of everybody else, and you didn’t have to triple-lock your doors at night either.”

There was more, much more, because the young woman reporter they sent out to the house had been so sympathetic — a cat person herself — but there were space limitations, and the story, while novel, didn’t have the sort of grit and horror the paper’s readers had come to expect. Any number of times during the interview, for instance, my widow had begun with the phrase “When my husband was alive,” but none of that made the cut.

Night

It is Christmas, a clear cold night, the sky above the house staggering under the weight of the stars. My widow doesn’t know about the stars — or if she does, it’s only theoretically. She doesn’t leave the house much, except for shopping, of course, and shopping is almost exclusively a daytime activity. At the moment, she is sitting in the grand room, on the cherrywood couch in front of the fireplace, where the ashes lie heaped, twenty-two years cold. She has been knitting, and the electric blue needles and balls of yarn lie in her lap, along with three or four cats. Her head is thrown back, resting on the broad wooden plane of the couch, and she is staring up at the high sloping ceiling above her, oblivious to the sky beyond and the cold pinpoints of light crowding the plane of the ecliptic. She’s not thinking about the roof, or the roofer, or rain. She’s not thinking about anything.

There is little evidence of the holidays here — a few Christmas cards scattered across the end table, a wreath of artificial pine she draped over one of the light sconces six years ago. She doesn’t bother anymore with the handcrafted elves and angels from Gstaad, the crèche made of mopane wood, or even the colored lights and bangles. All that was peerless in its time, the magic of the season, our son coming down the stairs in his pajamas, year after year, growing taller and warier, the angels tarnished, the pile of gift-wrapped presents growing in proportion, but that time is past. She and Inge had planned to get together and exchange gifts in the afternoon, but neither of them had felt much enthusiasm for it, and besides, Inge’s car wouldn’t start. What I’d wanted here was for our son to pull up front in a cab, having flown in all the way from the subcontinent to be with his mother for Christmas — and he’d been planning on it too, planning to surprise her, but a new and cruelly virulent strain of cholera swept through the refugee camps, and he couldn’t get away.

So she sits there by the ashes of the cold fire, listening to the furtive groans and thumps of the old house. The night deepens, the stars draw back, higher and higher, arching into the backbone of the sky. She is waiting for something she can’t name, a beautiful old lady clothed in cats, my widow, just waiting. It is very still.

(2000)

All he knew, really, was digging. He dug to eat, to breathe, to live and sleep. He dug because the earth was there beneath his feet, and men paid him to move it. He dug because it was a sacrament, because it was honorable and holy. As a boy in Sicily he stood beside his brothers under the sun that was like a hammer and day after day stabbed his shovel into the skin of the ancient venerable earth of their father’s orchards. As a young man in Boston and New York he burrowed like a rodent beneath streets and rivers, scouring the walls of subway tubes and aqueducts, dropping his pick, lifting his shovel, mining dirt. And now, thirty-two years old and with the deed to seventy bleak and hard-baked acres in his back pocket, he was in California. Digging.

FRIENDS! COME TO THE LAND OF FERTILITY WHERE THE SUN SHINES THE YEAR ROUND AND THE EARTH NEVER SUBMITS TO FROST! COME TO THE LAND THE ANGELS BLESSED! COME TO CALIFORNIA! WRITE NOW, C/O EUPHRATES MEAD, Box 9, Fresno, California.

Yes, the land never froze, that was true and incontrovertible. But the sun scorched it till it was like stone, till it was as hard and impenetrable as the adobe brick the Indians and Mexicans piled up to make their shabby, dusty houses. This much Baldasare discovered in the torporific summer of 1905, within days of disembarking from the train with his pick and shovel, his cardboard suitcase, and his meager supply of dried pasta, flour and beans. He’d come all the way across the country to redeem the land that would bloom with the serrate leaves and sweetly curling tendrils of his own grapes, the grapes of the Baldasare Forestiere Vineyards.