T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

Bayard took a step forward. Cullum spat in the dirt and raised the rifle. Bayard could have gone for his gun, but he didn’t even know how to release the safety catch, let alone aim and fire the thing, and it came to him that even if he did know how to handle it, even if he’d fired it a thousand times at cans, bottles, rocks, and junkyard rats, he would never use it, not if all the hungry hordes of the earth were at his door.

But Cullum would. Oh yes, Cullum would. Cullum was on for the long haul.

(1983)

He knew he’d really screwed up. Screwed up in a major and unforgiving way. You could see the perception solidifying in his eyes — eyes that seemed to swell out of his head like hard-cooked eggs extruded through the sockets, and the camera held steady. He was on a stage, faultlessly lit, and a banner proclaimed him RENALDO THE GREAT ESCAPE ARTIST. He was running sweat. Oozing it. His pores were huge, saturated, craters trenching his face like running sores. Suspended six feet above his head, held aloft by block and tackle, was a fused meteorite of junkyard metal the size of a truck engine, its lower surface bristling with the gleaming jagged teeth of a hundred kitchen knives annealed in the forges of Guadalajara. Renaldo’s hands were cuffed to his ankles, and what looked like a tugboat anchor chain was wound round his body six or eight times and bolted to the concrete floor. His lovely assistant, a heavily made-up woman whose thighs ballooned from her lacy tutu like great coppery slabs of meat, looked as if her every tremor and waking nightmare had been distilled in the bitter secretions of that moment. This was definitely not part of the act.

“Watch this,” Jamie said. “Watch this.”

Janine tightened her grip on my hand. The room shrank in on us. The beer in my free hand had gone warm, and when I lifted it to my lips it tasted of yeast and aluminum. And what did I feel? I felt the way the lovely assistant looked, felt the cold charge of revulsion and exhilaration that had come over me when I’d seen my first porno movie at the age of fourteen, felt a hairy-knuckled hand slide up my throat and jerk at a little lever there.

When the video opened, over the credits, Renaldo was clenching a straw between his teeth — a straw, a single straw, yellow and stiff, the smallest part of a broom. He was leaning forward, working the straw in the tiny aperture that controlled the release mechanism of the handcuffs. But now, because he’d begun to appreciate that this wasn’t his day, and that the consequences of that fact were irrevocable, his lips began to tremble and he lost his grip on the straw. The lovely assistant gave the camera a wild strained look and then made as if to dash forward and restore that essential wisp of vegetation to the artist’s mouth, but it was too late. With a thick slushing sound, the sound of tires moving through wet snow, the timer released the mechanism that restrained the iron monolith, and Renaldo was no more.

Jamie said something like, “Dude really bought it,” and then, “Anybody ready for a beer?”

I sat through another ninety-nine permutations of the final moment, variously lit and passionately or indifferently performed, watched the ski-masked bank robber pop his hostage’s head like a grape with the aid of a.44 Magnum and then pop his own, saw the fire-eater immolate herself and the lumberjack make his final cut. Jamie, who’d seen the video half-a-dozen times, couldn’t stop laughing. Janine said nothing, but her grip on my hand was unyielding. For my part, I remember going numb after the third or fourth death, but I sat there all the same, though there were ninety-six to go.

But then, who was counting?

The following weekend, my Aunt Marion died. Or “passed on,” as my mother put it, a delicate euphemistic phrase that conjured up ethereal realms rather than the stark black-and-white image of damp soil and burrowing insects. My mother was in New York, I was in Los Angeles. And no, I wasn’t flying in for the funeral. She cried briefly, dryly, and then hung up.

I was twenty-five at the time, a graduate of an indifferent university, a young man who went to work and made money, sought the company of young women and was perhaps too attached to the friends of his youth, Jamie in particular. I listened to the silence a moment, then phoned Janine and asked her to dinner. She was busy. What about tomorrow, then? I said. She planned to be busy then, too.

I hadn’t laid eyes on my Aunt Marion in ten years. I remembered her as a sticklike woman in a wheelchair with an unsteady lip and a nose that overhung it like a cutbank, a nose that wasn’t qualitatively different from my mother’s and, in the fullness of generation, my own. Her death was the result of an accident — negligence, my mother insisted — and already, less than twenty-four hours after the fact, there was an attorney involved.

It seemed that Aunt Marion had been on an outing to the art museum with several other inmates of the nursing home where she’d been in residence since Nixon’s presidency, and the attendant, in placing her at the head of the ramp out back of the museum dining hall, had failed to properly set the brake on the back wheels of her chair. Aunt Marion suffered from some progressive nervous disorder that had rendered her limbs useless — she was able to control her motorized chair only through the use of a joystick which she gripped between her teeth, and even then only at the best of times. Left alone at the summit of the ramp while the attendant went off to fetch another patient, Aunt Marion felt her chair begin to slip inexorably forward. The chair picked up speed; and one of the two witnesses to the accident claimed that she’d bent her face to the controls to arrest it, while the other insisted she’d done nothing at all to save herself, but had simply glided on down the ramp and into eternity with a tight little smile frozen to her face. In any case, there was blame to be assigned, very specific and undeniable blame, and a cause-and-effect reaction to explain Aunt Marion’s removal from this sphere of being, and, in the end, it seemed to give my mother some measure of comfort.

Try as I might, though, I couldn’t picture the face of Aunt Marion’s death. My own blood was involved, my own nose. And yet it was all somehow remote, distant, and the death of Renaldo the Great stayed with me in a way Aunt Marion’s could never have begun to. I don’t know what I wound up doing that weekend, but in retrospect I picture the Coast Highway, an open convertible, Jamie, a series of bars with irradiated decks and patios, and women who were very much alive.

Janine passed into oblivion, as did Carmen, Eugenie and Katrinka, and Jamie went off to explore the wide bleeding world. He spent the next eight months dredging the dark corners of countries whose names changed in the interim, the sort of places where people died in the streets as regularly as flowers sprang through the soil and pigeons fouled the monuments to the generalissimo of the month. I worked. I turned over money. Somebody gave me a cat. It shat in a box under the sink and filled the house with a graveyard stink.

Jamie had been back two months before he called to invite me to a party in the vast necropolis of the San Fernando Valley. He’d found a job inculcating moral awareness in the minds of six- and seven-year-olds at the Thomas Jefferson Elementary School in Pacoima five days a week, reserving the weekends for puerile thrills. I didn’t realize how much I’d missed him until I saw him standing there on the landing outside my apartment. He looked the same — rangy, bug-eyed, a plucked chicken dressed in surfer’s clothes — but for his nose. It was inflamed, punished, a dollop of meat grafted to his face by some crazed body snatcher. “What’s with the nose?” I said, dispensing with the preliminaries.