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

He gave me a long, slow, deliberate look, then shrugged. “What, does he owe you money?”

So we talked about Jimmy, Jimmy’s tragedy, Jimmy’s refusal to accept facts and the way Jimmy was running hard up against the sharp edges of the world and was sure to wind up in a coffin just like his father before him and his son too if he didn’t get himself into rehab as his number one priority. Then we talked about me, but I didn’t reveal much, and then it was general subjects, the look of the people on TV as opposed to the look of the flesh-and-blood people sitting at the tables at our feet like an undiscovered tribe, and then, inevitably, we came back to alcohol. I told him of some of my escapades, he told me of his. I was probably on my sixth or seventh brandy and water when we got back as far as our mutual childhoods lived mutually under the shadow of booze, though on opposite coasts. The brother was in an expansive mood, his wife and six-year-old daughter gone for the weekend to a Little Miss pageant in Sacramento, and the four walls of his house — or eight or sixteen or however many there were — inadequate to contain him. I took a sip of my drink and let him fly.

He was three years older than Jimmy, and they had two other brothers and a sister, all younger. They moved around a lot as kids, but one winter they were living out in the country in Dutchess County, at the junction of two blacktop roads where there were a handful of summer cabins that had been converted to cheap year-round housing, a two-pump gas station where you could get milk, bread and Coke in the eight-ounce bottle, and a five-stool roadhouse with a jukebox and a griddle called the Pine Top Tavern. The weather turned nasty, their father was out of work and about a month from bailing out for good, and neither of their parents left the tavern for more than a shower or a shave or to put a couple cans of chicken broth in a saucepan and dump a handful of rice and sliced wieners in on top of it so the kids would have something to eat. Jimmy’s brother had a cough that wouldn’t go away. Their little sister had burned her arm on the stove trying to make herself a can of tomato soup and the brother had to change her bandage twice a day and rub ointment into the exfoliated skin. Jimmy spent his time out in the weed-blistered lot behind the house, kicking a football as close to vertical as he could, over and over again, then slanting off to retrieve it before it could hit the ground. Their dog — Gomer, named after the TV character — had been killed crossing the road on Christmas Eve, and their father blamed one of the drunks leaving the tavern, but nobody did anything about it.

It was just after Christmas — or maybe after New Year’s, because school had started up again — when a cold front came down out of Hudson Bay and froze everything so thoroughly nobody could stand to be out of doors more than five minutes at a time. The birds huddled under the eaves of the tavern, looking distressed; the squirrels hung like ornaments in the stripped trees. Everybody in the family drank hot tea thick with honey and the oily residue of the bitter lemon juice that came out of the plastic squeeze bottle, and that was the only time their hands seemed to warm up. When they went outside, the bare ground crackled underfoot as if it were crusted with snow, and for a few days there none of the converted cabins had water because the lines from the well had frozen underground. Jimmy’s brother, though he had a cough that wouldn’t go away, had to take a pail across the road to the pond and break the ice to get water for the stove.

He remembered his father, wizened forearms propped up on the bar in a stained khaki parka he’d worn in Korea, a sheaf of hair canted the wrong way because it hadn’t seen a comb in days, the smoke of his cigarette fuming in the dark forge of the bar. And his mother, happiest woman in the world, laughing at anything, laughing till all the glasses were drained and the lights went out and the big-bellied bartender with the caved-in face shooed them out the door and locked the place up for the night. It was cold. The space heater did nothing, less than nothing, and Jimmy’s brother could have earned his merit badge as a fire-starter that winter because all he did was comb the skeletal forest for fallen branches, rotten stumps and fence posts, anything that would burn, managing to keep at least a continuous smolder going day and night. And then he got up for school one morning and there was an old woman — or a woman his mother’s age anyway — laid out snoring on the couch in front of the fireplace where the dog used to sleep. He went into his parents’ room and shook his mother awake. “There’s somebody sleeping out there on the couch,” he told her, and watched her gather her features together and assess the day. He had to repeat himself twice, the smell of her, of her warmth and the warmth of his father beside her, rising up to him with a sweet-sick odor of sex and infirmity, and then she murmured through her cracked lips, “Oh, that’s only Grace. You know Grace — from the tavern? Her car won’t start, that’s all. Be a good boy, huh, and don’t wake her?”

He didn’t wake her. He got his brothers and sister out of bed, then huddled with them at the bus stop in the dark, jumping from foot to foot to keep warm and imagining himself on a polar expedition with Amundsen, sled dogs howling at the stars and the ice plates shifting like dominoes beneath their worn and bleeding paws. There was a pot on the stove when he got home from school, some sort of incarnadine stew with a smell of the exotic spices his mother never used — mace, cloves, fennel — and he thought of Grace, with her scraggle of gray-black hair and her face that was like a dried-up field plowed in both directions. He tasted it — they all sampled it, just to see if it was going to be worth eating — and somehow it even managed to taste of Grace, though how could anybody know what Grace tasted like unless they were a cannibal?

His parents weren’t at home. They were three hundred feet away, in the tavern, with Grace and the rest of their good-time buddies. A few dispirited snowflakes sifted down out of the sky. He made himself a sandwich of peanut butter and sliced banana, then went into the tavern to see if his parents or anybody else there was in that phase of rhapsodic drunkenness where they gave up their loose change as if they were philanthropists rolling down Park Avenue in an open Rolls-Royce. One guy, hearty, younger than the rest, in a pair of galoshes with the buckles torn off, gave him a fifty-cent piece, and then his father told him to get the hell out of the bar and stay out till he was of legal age or he’d kick his ass for him but good.

The next morning was even colder, and Jimmy’s brother was up early, shivering despite the rancid warmth generated by his three brothers and the cheap sleeping bag advertised for comfort even at five below zero, which might as well have been made of shredded newspaper for all the good it did. He put the kettle on to boil so they could have hot tea and instant oatmeal to fortify them out there in the wind while they were waiting for the school bus to come shunting down the hill with its headlights reduced to vestigial eyes and the driver propped up behind the black windshield like a blind cavefish given human form. The house was dark but for the overhead light in the kitchen. There was no sound anywhere, nothing from his parents or his brothers and sister, everybody locked in a sleep that was like a spell in a fairy tale, and he missed the dog then, if only to see it stretch and yawn and nose around in its dish. The kettle came to a boil and he’d actually put three tea bags in the pot and begun pouring the water before he realized that something was wrong. What was it? He strained his ears but there was nothing to hear. Not even the tick of the stove or the creak and whine of the house settling into the cold, no sound of stirring birds or tires revolving on the blacktop road. It was then that he thought to check the time.