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

That night, under cover of darkness, he pushed his wheelbarrow into town along the highway and found his way to the vacant lot behind the drugstore. Then he started digging. All night, as the constellations drifted in the immensity overhead until one by one they fled the sky, Baldasare plied his shovel, his pick, and his rake. By morning, at first light, the outline of his message was clearly visible from the second-story window of the walkup above the store. It was a heart, a valentine, a perfectly proportioned symbol of his love dug three feet deep in the ground and curving gracefully over the full area of what must have been a quarter-acre lot.

When the outline was finished, Baldasare started on the interior. In his mind’s eye, he saw a heart-shaped crater there in the lot, six feet deep at least, with walls as smooth as cement, a hole that would show Ariadne the depth of the vacancy she’d left in him. He was coming up the ramp he’d shaped of earth with a full wheelbarrow to spread over the corners of the lot, when he glanced up to see Siagris and two of his children standing there peering down at him. Siagris’ hands were on his hips. He looked more incredulous than anything else. “What in Christ’s name do you think you’re doing?” he sputtered.

Baldasare, swinging wide with his load of dirt so that Siagris and the children had to take a quick step back, never even hesitated. He just kept going to a point in the upper corner of the frame where he was dumping and raking out the dirt. “Digging,” he said over his shoulder.

“But you can’t. This is private property. You can’t just dig up people’s yards, don’t you know that? Eh? Don’t you know anything?”

Baldasare didn’t want a confrontation. He was a decent man, mild and pacifistic, but he was determined too. As he came by again with the empty wheelbarrow and eased it down the ramp, he said, “Tell her to look. She is the one. For her, I do this.”

After that, he was deaf to all pleas, threats, and remonstrations, patiently digging, shoring up his walls, spreading his dirt. The sun climbed in the sky. He stopped only to take an occasional drink from a jug of water or to sit on his overturned wheelbarrow and silently eat a sandwich from a store of them wrapped in butcher’s paper. He worked through the day, tireless, and though the sheriff came and threatened him, even the sheriff couldn’t say with any certainty who owned the lot Baldasare was defacing — couldn’t say, that is, without checking the records down at the courthouse, which he was going to do first thing in the morning, Baldasare could be sure of that. Baldasare didn’t respond. He just kept digging.

It began to get dark. Baldasare had cleared the entire cutout of his heart to a depth of three feet, and he wasn’t even close to quitting. Six feet, he was thinking, that’s what it would take, and who could blame him if he kept glancing up at the unrevealing window of the apartment atop the drugstore in the hope of catching a glimpse of his inamorata there? If she was watching, if she knew what he was doing for love of her, if she saw the lean muscles of his arms strain and his back flex, she gave no sign of it. Undeterred, Baldasare dug on.

And then there came a moment, and it must have been past twelve at night, the neighborhood as silent as the grave and Baldasare working by the light of a waxing moon, when two men appeared at the northern edge of the excavation, right where the lobes of the heart came together in a graceful loop. “Hey, Wop,” one of them yelled down to where Baldasare stood with his shovel, “I don’t know who you think you are, but you’re embarrassing my fiancée, and I mean to put an end to it.”

The man’s shadow under that cold moon was immense — it could have been the shadow of a bear or buffalo. The other shadow was thinner, but broad across the shoulders, where it counted, and it danced on shadowy feet. There was no sound but for the slice of Baldasare’s shovel and the slap of the dirt as it dropped into the wheelbarrow.

He was a small man, Baldasare, but the hundreds of tons of dirt he’d moved in his lifetime had made iron of his limbs, and when they fell on him he fought like a man twice his size. Still, the odds were against him, and Hiram Broadbent, fueled by good Kentucky bourbon and with the timely assistance of Calvin Tompkins, a farrier and amateur boxer, was able to beat him to the ground. And once he was down, Broadbent and Tompkins kicked him with their heavy boots till he stirred no more.

—

When Baldasare was released from the hospital, he was a changed man — or at least to the degree that the image of Ariadne Siagris no longer infested his brain. He went back home and sat in a bentwood rocker and stared at the sculpted dirt walls of the kitchen that gave onto the atrium and the striated trunk of its lone avocado tree. His right arm was in a sling, with a cast on it from the elbow down, and he was bound up beneath his shirt like an Egyptian mummy with all the tape it took to keep his cracked ribs in place. After a week or so — his mourning period, as he later referred to it — he found himself one evening in the last and deepest of his rooms, the one at the end of the passage that led to the new atrium where he was thinking of planting a lemon tree or maybe a quince. It was preternaturally quiet. The earth seemed to breathe with and for him.

And then suddenly he began to see things, all sorts of things, a rush of raw design and finished image that flickered across the wall before him like one of Edison’s moving pictures. What he saw was a seventy-acre underground warren that beckoned him on, a maze like no other, with fishponds and gardens open to the sky above, and more, much more — a gift shop and an Italian restaurant with views of subterranean grottoes and a lot for parking the carriages and automobiles of the patrons who would flock there to see what he’d accomplished in his time on earth. It was a complete vision, more eloquent than any set of blueprints or elevations, and it staggered him. He was a young man still, healing by the day, and while he had a long way to go, at least now he knew where he was going. Baldasare Forestiere’s Underground Gardens, he said to himself, trying out the name, and then he said it aloud: “Baldasare Forestiere’s Underground Gardens.”

Standing there in the everlasting silence beneath the earth, he reached out a hand to the wall in front of him, his left hand, pronating the palm as if to bless some holy place. And then, awkwardly at first, but with increasing grace and agility, he began to dig.

(1997)

After the plague — it was some sort of Ebola mutation passed from hand to hand and nose to nose like the common cold — life was different. More relaxed and expansive, more natural. The rat race was over, the freeways were clear all the way to Sacramento, and the poor dwindling ravaged planet was suddenly big and mysterious again. It was a kind of miracle really, what the environmentalists had been hoping for all along, though of course even the most strident of them wouldn’t have wished for his own personal extinction, but there it was. I don’t mean to sound callous — my parents are long dead and I’m unmarried and siblingless, but I lost friends, colleagues and neighbors, the same as any other survivor. What few of us there are, that is. We’re guessing it’s maybe one in ten thousand, here in the States anyway. I’m sure there are whole tribes that escaped it somewhere in the Amazon or the interior valleys of Indonesia, meteorologists in isolated weather stations, fire lookouts, goatherds and the like. But the president’s gone, the vice president, the cabinet, Congress, the joint chiefs of staff, the chairmen of the boards and CEOs of the Fortune 500 companies, along with all their stockholders, employees and retainers. There’s no TV. No electricity or running water. And there won’t be any dining out anytime soon.