T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

“You know what is going on,” the woman says, holding her ground. “You know,” she repeats, her accent thickening with her anger, “because you are a thief!”

Ormand is big, unshaven, dirty. At twenty-two, he already has a beer gut. “Hell I am,” he says, slurring his words, and the old man realizes he’s been helping himself to the pain pills again. Behind Ormand, Lee Junior bristles. He too, Calvin now sees, is clutching a black bottle.

“Thief!” the woman shouts, and then she begins to cry, her face splotched with red, the big bosom heaving. Watching her, the old man feels a spasm of alarm: why, she’s nothing but a young girl. Thirty years old, if that. For a keen, sharp instant her grief cuts at him like a saw, but then he finds himself wondering how she got so fat. Was it all that blood sausage and beer she sells? All that potato salad?

Now Lee Junior steps forward. “You got no right to come around here and call us names, lady — this is private property.” He is standing two feet from her and he is shouting. “Why don’t you get your fat ass out of here before you get hurt, huh?”

“Yeah,” Ormand spits, backing him up. “You can’t come around here harassing this old man — he’s a veteran, for Christ’s sake. You keep it up and I’m going to have to call the police on you.”

In that instant, the woman comes back to life. The lines of her face bunch in hatred, the lips draw back from her teeth, and suddenly she’s screaming. “ You call the police on me!? Don’t make me laugh.” Across the street a door slams. People are beginning to gather in their yards and driveways, straining to see what the commotion is about. “Pigs! Filth!” the woman shrieks, her little feet dancing in anger, and then she jerks back her head and spits down the front of Lee Junior’s shirt.

The rest is confusion. There’s a struggle, a stew of bodies, the sound of a blow, Lee Junior gives the woman a shove, somebody slams into Calvin’s wheelchair, Ormand’s voice cracks an octave, and the woman cries out in German; the next minute Calvin finds himself sprawled on the rough planks, gasping like a carp out of water, and the woman is sitting on her backside in the dirt at the foot of the stairs.

No one helps Calvin up. His arm hurts where he threw it out to break his fall, and his hip feels twisted or something. He lies very still. Below him, in the dirt, the woman just sits there mewling like a baby, her big lumpy yellow thighs exposed, her socks gray with dust, the little doll’s shoes worn through the soles and scuffed like the seats on the Number 56 bus.

“Get the hell out of here!” Lee Junior roars, shaking his fist. “You … you fat-assed”—here he pauses for the hatred to rise up in him, his face coiled round the words—“Nazi bitch!” And then, addressing himself to Mrs. Tuxton’s astonished face across the street, and to Norm Cramer, the gink in the Dodgers cap, and all the rest of them, he shouts: “And what are you lookin’ at, all of you? Huh?”

Nobody says a word.

Two days later Calvin is sitting out on the porch with a brand-new white plaster cast on his right forearm, watching the sparrows in the big bearded palm across the way and rehearsing numbers by way of mental exercise—5,280 feet in a mile, eight dry quarts in a peck — when Ormand comes up round the side of the house with a satchel of tools in his hand. “Hey, Calvin, what’s doin’?” he says, clapping a big moist hand on the old man’s shoulder. “Feel like takin’ a ride?”

Calvin glances down at his cast with its scrawl of good wishes—“Boogie Out!” Lee Junior had written — and then back at Ormand. He is thinking, suddenly and unaccountably, of the first time he laid eyes on the Orem place. Was it two years ago already? Yes, two years, come fall. He’d been living with that Mexicano family out in the Valley — rice and beans, rice and beans, till he thought he’d turn into a human burrito or blow out his insides or something — and then his daughter had found Jewel’s ad in the paper and gone out and made the arrangements.

“What do you say?” Ormand is leaning over him now. “Calvin?”

“A ride?” Calvin says finally. “Where to?”

Ormand shrugs. “Oh, you know: around.”

Don’t expect anything fancy she’d told him, as if he had anything to say about it. But when they got there and were actually sitting in the car out front where they had a good view of the blistered paint, dead oleanders, trash-strewn yard, and reeling porch, she was the one who got cold feet. She started in on how maybe he wouldn’t like these people and how maybe she ought to look a little further before they decided, but then bang! went the screen door and Big Lee and Ormand ambled down the steps in T-shirts and engineer boots. Big Lee folded a stick of Red Man and tucked it up alongside his teeth, Ormand was clutching a can of Safeway beer like it was grafted onto him, and both of them were grinning as if they’d just shared a dirty joke in the back of the church. And then Big Lee was reaching his callused hand in through the window to shake with Calvin. Glad to meet you, neighbor, he murmured, turning his head to spit.

Shit, Calvin had said, swiveling round to look his daughter in the eye, I like these people.

Two minutes later they’re out in the street, Ormand swinging back the door of his primer-splotched pickup, the pale bulb of Mrs. Tuxton’s face just visible beyond the curtains over her kitchen sink. Even with Ormand’s help, the old man has trouble negotiating the eight-inch traverse from the wheelchair to the car seat, what with his bum leg and fractured forearm and the general debility that comes of living so long, but once they’re under way he leans back, half closes his eyes, and gives himself up to the soothing wash of motion. Trees flit overhead, streaks of light and moving shadow, and then an open stretch and the sun, warm as a hand, on the side of his face.

Yes, he likes these people. They might have their faults — Ormand and Lee Junior are drunk three-quarters of the time (that is, whenever they’re not sleeping) and they gobble up his pain pills like M&Ms — but deep down he feels more kinship with them than he does with his own daughter. At least they’ll talk to him and treat him like a human being instead of something that’s been dead and dug up. Hell, they even seem to like him. When they go out visiting or whatever it is they do — house to house, dusty roads, day and night — they always want to take him along. So what if he has to sit there in the car sometimes for an hour or more? At least he’s out of the house.

When he looks up, they’re in a strange neighborhood. Stucco houses in shades of mustard and aquamarine, shabby palms, campers and trailers and pickups parked out front. Ormand has got a fresh beer and his eyes are shrunk back in his head. He stabs at the radio buttons and a creaky fiddle comes whining through the dashboard speaker. “You been noddin’ out there a bit, huh, Calvin?” he says.

The old man’s teeth hurt him all of a sudden, hurt him something fierce, so that the water comes to his eyes — he wants to cry out with the pain of it, but his arm begins to throb in counterpoint and pretty soon his hip starts kicking up where he twisted it and all he can do is just clamp his jaws shut in frustration. But when the car rolls to a stop beneath a dusty old oak and Ormand slips out the door with his satchel and says, “Just hang out here for a bit, okay, Calvin? I’ll be right back,” the old man finds the image of the German woman rising up in his mind like a river-run log that just won’t stay down, and his voice comes back to him. “Where did you get that soda, anyways?” he says.

“I tell you, Dad, I just don’t trust these people. Now, you look what’s happened to your arm, and then there’s this whole business of Lee going to jail—”