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

There was a clock built into the stove, foreshortened hands painted gold behind a greased-over plastic lens. It read 3:35 a.m. Jimmy’s brother could have kicked himself. He sat in the kitchen, shivering, and had a cup of tea, wishing it would snow so they’d call off school and he could sleep all day. After a while he decided to build up the fire in the living room and sit there on the couch and terrify himself with Dracula —he was halfway through, though he’d started it at Halloween — and then maybe he’d drift off for a while till it was time to get up. He shrugged into his coat and went to the kitchen door, thinking of the punky wood he and Jimmy had stacked in the shed over the weekend.

But then — and I was ahead of him here, because you’d have to be as blind as a cavefish yourself not to see where this was going — the storm door wouldn’t give. There was something there, an immovable shadow stretched long and dark across the doorstep, and it took everything the brother had to wedge the door open enough to squeeze out into the night. And when he did pull himself out into the cold, and the killing, antipathetic breath of it hit him full in the face, he willed the shadow at his feet to take shape until he could distinguish the human form there, with her dried-out skin and fixed eyes and the dirty scraggle of gray-black hair.

“Grace?” I said.

Jimmy’s brother nodded.

“Jesus,” I said. “And your brother — did he see her there?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t remember. She was a drunk, that was all, just another drunk.”

—

We sat for a moment, looking past our drinks to the marina and the black unbroken plane of the sea beyond it. I had an impulse to open up to him, to tell him my story, or one of my stories, as if we were clasping hands at an AA meeting, but I didn’t. I made a clucking sound, meant to signify sympathy and understanding, threw some money on the bar and went out the door, feeling for my keys. What I didn’t tell him, though he might have known it himself, was that Jimmy had put his son in a crematory box at the hospital and he put the box in the back of his Suburban and drove it home and into the garage, and all night, while his wife lay stiff and sedated in the big queen-sized bed upstairs, Jimmy hugged the coffin to him. I didn’t tell him that life is a struggle against weakness, fought not in the brain or in the will but in the cells, in the enzymes, in the key the DNA inserts into the tumbler of our personalities. And I didn’t tell him that I had a son myself, just like Jimmy, though I didn’t see him as much as I would have wanted to, not anymore.

The fact was that I hadn’t wanted a son, hadn’t planned on it or asked or prayed or hoped for or even imagined it. I was twenty-four. My wife was pregnant and I raged at her, Get rid of it, you’re ruining my life, we can’t afford it, you’re crazy, get rid of it, get rid of it. She was complete in herself, sweet-faced and hard-willed, and mine was a voice she couldn’t hear. She went to Lamaze classes, quit drinking, quit smoking, did her exercises, read all the books. My son was born in the Kaiser hospital in Panorama City, eight pounds, six ounces, as healthy as a rat and beautiful in his own way, and I was his father, though I wasn’t ready to be. He was nine months old when one of my drinking buddies — call him Chris, why not? — came for the weekend and we went on a tear. My wife put up with it, even joined in a bit, and on Monday morning, when she had to go in early to work, Chris and I took her out for breakfast.

The day beat down like a hammer and everything in the visible world shone as if it had been lit from within. We’d been up till four, and now it was seven, and while we were waiting for a table Chris and I ducked into the men’s room and alternated hits from a pint of Smirnoff we were planning to doctor our fresh-squeezed orange juice with. So we were feeling fine as we chased the waffles around our plates and my wife smiled and joked and the baby unfurled his arms and grabbed at things in high baby spirits. Then my wife touched up her makeup and left, and right away the mood changed — here was this baby, my son, with his multiplicity of needs, his diapers and his stroller and all the rest of it, and I was in charge.

We finally hit upon the plan of taking him to the beach, to get a little sun, throw a Frisbee, let the sand mold itself to us through the long, slow-simmering morning and into the afternoon and the barbecue I was planning for Chris’ send-off. The beach was deserted, a board-stretched canvas for gulls and pelicans and snapping blue waves, and as soon as we stepped out of the car I felt everything was all right again. My son was wearing nothing but his diaper, and Chris and I were laughing over something, and I tossed my son up in the air, a game we played, and he loved it, squealing and crying out in baby ecstasy. I tossed him again, and then I tossed him to Chris and Chris tossed him back, and that was when I lost my balance and the black sea-honed beak of a half-buried rock loomed up on me and I saw my future in that instant: I was going to drop my son, let him slip through my fingers in a moment of aberration, and he was going to be damaged in a way that nobody could repair.

It didn’t happen. I caught him, and held on, and I never let go.

(2002)

People can talk, they can gossip and cavil and run down this one or the other, and certainly we have our faults, our black funks and suicides and crofters’ wives running off with the first man who’ll have them and a winter’s night that stretches on through the days and weeks like a foretaste of the grave, but in the end the only real story here is the wind. The puff and blow of it. The ceaselessness. The squelched keening of air in movement, running with its currents like a new sea clamped atop the old, winnowing, harrowing, pinching everything down to nothing. It rakes the islands day and night, without respect to season, though if you polled the denizens of Yell, Funzie and Papa Stour, to a man, woman, lamb and pony they would account winter the worst for the bite of it and the sheer frenzy of its coming. One January within living memory the wind blew at gale force for twenty-nine days without remit, and on New Year’s Eve back in ’92 the gusts were estimated at 201 mph at the Muckle Flugga lighthouse here on the northernmost tip of the Isle of Unst. But that was only an estimate: the weather service’s wind gauge was torn from its moorings and launched into eternity that day, along with a host of other things, stony and animate alike.

Junie Ooley should have known better. She was an American woman— the American ornithological woman is the way people around town came to refer to her, or sometimes just the bird woman —and she hadn’t just barely alighted from the ferry when she was blindsided by Robbie Baikie’s old one-eyed tom, which had been trying to inveigle itself across the roof tiles of the kirk after an imaginary pigeon. Or perhaps the pigeon wasn’t imaginary, but by the time the cat blinked his eyes whatever he had seen was gone with the wind. At any rate, Junie Ooley, who was at this juncture a stranger to us all, came banking up the high street in a store-bought tartan skirt and a pair of black tights climbing her queenly legs, a rucksack flailing at the small of her back and both hands clamped firmly to her knit hat, and she never saw the cat coming, for all her visual acuity and the fine-ground photographic lenses she trucked with her everywhere. The cat — his name was Tiger and he must have carried a good ten or twelve pounds of pigeon-fed flesh on his bones — caught a gust and flew off the kirk tiles like a heat-seeking missile locked in on Junie Ooley’s hunched and flapping form.