T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

He hesitated, working up to a slow grin under the porch light. “Got in a fight in this bar,” he said. “Some dude bit it off.”

They’d sewed the tip of his nose back in place — or almost in place; it would forever be canted ever so slightly to the left — but that wasn’t what excited him. He moved past me into the living room and fumbled around in his pocket for a minute, then handed me a series of snapshots, close-ups of his face shortly after the operation. I saw the starched white sheets, the nest of pillows, Jamie’s triumphant leer and an odd glistening black line drawn across the bridge of his nose where the bandage should have been. The photos caught it from above, beneath, head-on and in profile. Jamie was looking over my shoulder. He didn’t say a word, but his breathing was quick and shallow. “So what is it?” I said, swinging round on him. “What’s the deal?”

One word, succulent as a flavored ice: “Leeches.”

“Leeches?”

He held it a moment, center stage. “That’s right, dude, latest thing. They use them to bring back the tiny blood vessels, capillaries and whatnot, the ones they can’t tie up themselves. It’s the sucking action,” and he made a kissing noise. “Suck, suck, suck. I wore them around for three days, grossing the shit out of everybody in the hospital.” He was looking into my eyes. Then he shrugged and turned away. “They wouldn’t let. me take them home, though — that was the pisser.”

The party consisted of seven people — three women and four men, including us — sitting around a formal dining-room table eating carnitas and listening to inflammatory rap at a barely audible volume. The hosts were Hilary and Stefan, who had a house within hearing distance of the Ventura Freeway and taught with Jamie in Pacoima. Hilary’s sister, Judy, was there, the end product of psychosomatic dieting and the tanning salon, along with her friend Marsha and a man in his forties with sprayed-up hair and a goatee whose name I never did catch. We drank Carta Blanca and shots of Cuervo Gold and ate flan for dessert. The general conversation ran to Jamie’s nose, leeches, bowel movements and death. I don’t know how we got into it exactly, but after dinner we gravitated toward a pair of mallowy couches the color of a Haas avocado and began our own anthology of final moments. I came back from the bathroom by way of the kitchen with a fresh beer, and Judy, sunk into her tan like something out of a sarcophagus at Karnak, was narrating the story of the two UCLA students, lovers of nature and of each other, who went kayaking off Point Dume.

It was winter, and the water was cold. There’d been a series of storms bred in the Gulf of Alaska and the hills were bleeding mud. There was frost in the Valley, and Judy’s mother lost a bougainvillea she’d had for twenty years. That was the fatal ingredient, the cold. The big sharks — the great whites — generally stayed well north of the Southern California coast, up near the Bay Area, the Farallons and beyond, where the seals were. That was what they ate: seals.

In Judy’s version, the couple had tied their kayaks together and they were resting, sharing a sandwich, maybe getting romantic — kissing, fondling each other through their wet suits. The shark wasn’t supposed to be there. It wasn’t supposed to mistake the hulls of their kayaks for the silhouettes of two fat rich hot-blooded basking seals either, but it did. The girl drowned after going faint from blood loss and the chill of the water. They never found her lover.

“Jesus,” the older guy said, throwing up his hands. “It’s bad enough to have to go, but to wind up as sharkshit—”

Jamie, who’d been blowing softly into the aperture of his beer bottle, looked perturbed. “But how do you know?” he demanded, settling his eyes on Judy. “I mean, were you there? Did you see it, like maybe from another boat?”

She hadn’t seen it. She wasn’t there. She’d read about it in the paper.

“Uh-uh,” Jamie scolded, wagging his finger. “No fair. You have to have seen it, actually been there.”

The older guy leaned forward, lit a cigarette and told about an accident he’d witnessed on the freeway. He was coming back from the desert on a Monday night, the end of a three-day weekend, and there was a lot of traffic, but it was moving fast. Four guys in a pickup passed him — three in the cab, the fourth outside in the bed of the truck. A motorcycle stood beside him, lashed upright in the center of the bed. They passed on the right, and they were going at a pretty good clip. Just then, feeling a little bored and left out, the guy in the back of the truck mounted the motorcycle, as a joke. He got up on the seat, leaned into the wind raking over the top of the cab and pretended he was heading into the final lap of the motocross. Unfortunately — and this was the morbid thrill of the exercise; there was always a pathetic adverb attached to the narrative, a “sadly” or “tragically” or “unfortunately” to quicken the audience’s blood — unfortunately, traffic was stalled ahead, the driver hit the brakes and the erstwhile motocross champion careened into the cab and went sailing out over the side like an acrobat. And like an acrobat, miraculously, he picked himself up unhurt. The older guy paused, flicked the ash from his cigarette. But unfortunately — and there it was again — the next car hit him in the hips at sixty and flung him under the wheels of a big rig one lane over. Eight more cars hit him before the traffic stopped, and by then there wasn’t much left but hair and grease.

Hilary told the story of the “Tiger Man,” who stood outside the tiger exhibit at the L.A. Zoo eight hours a day, seven days a week, for an entire year, and then was discovered one morning on the limb of a eucalyptus that hung thirty feet over the open enclosure, in the instant before he lost his balance. She was working the concession stand at the time, a summer job while she was in college, and she heard the people round the tiger pit screaming and the tigers roaring and snarling and thought at first they were fighting. By the time she got there the tiger man was in two pieces and his insides were spread out on the grass like blue strings of sausage. They had to shoot one of the tigers, and that was a shame, a real shame.

Jamie was next. He started in on the story of Renaldo the Great as if it were an eyewitness account. “I was like at this circus in Guadalajara,” he said, and my mind began to drift.

It was my turn next, and the only death I could relate, the only one I’d witnessed face to face and not in some voyeuristic video or the pages of Newsweek or Soldier of Fortune , a true death, the dulling of the eyes, the grip gone lax, the passing from animacy to quietus, I’d never spoken of, not to anyone. The face of it came back to me at odd moments, on waking, starting the car, sitting still in the impersonal dark of the theater before the trailers begin to roll. I didn’t want to tell it. I wasn’t going to. When Jamie was done, I was going to excuse myself, lock the bathroom door behind me, lean over the toilet and flush it and flush it again till they forgot all about me.

I was sixteen. I was on the swim team at school, bulking up, pushing myself till there was no breath left in my body, and I entertained visions of strutting around the community pool in the summer with a whistle round my neck. I took the Coast Guard-approved lifesaving course and passed with flying colors. It was May, an early searing day, and I wheeled my mother’s tubercular Ford out along the ocean to a relatively secluded beach I knew, thinking to do some wind sprints in the sand and pit my hammered shoulders and iron legs against the elemental chop and roll of the Pacific. I never got the chance. Unfortunately. I came down off the hill from the highway and there was a Mexican kid there, nine or ten years old, frantic, in full blind headlong flight, running up the path toward me. His limbs were sticks, his eyes inflamed, and the urgency rode him like a jockey. “Socorro!” he cried, the syllables catching in his throat, choking him. “Socorro!” he repeated, springing up off his toes, and he had me by the arm in a fierce wet grip, and we were running.