T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

“You know she went to the cops?” Lee Junior’s face is like something you’d catch a glimpse of behind a fence.

“The cops?” The Mexican kid darts his black eyes round the room, as if he expects the sheriff to pop up from behind the couch. “What do you mean, she went to the cops?”

“They can’t do a thing,” Ormand cuts in. “Not without a search warrant.”

“That’s right.” Lee Junior reaches for his can of no-name beer, belching softly and thumping a fist against his sternum. “And to get one they need witnesses. And I tell you, any of these shitheels on this block come up against me, they’re going to regret it. Don’t think they don’t know it either.”

“That fat-assed Kraut,” Ormand says, but he breaks into a grin, and then he’s laughing. Lee Junior joins him and the Mexican kid makes some sort of wisecrack, but Calvin misses it. Jewel, her face noncommittal, gets up to change the channel.

“You know what I’m thinkin’?” Ormand says, grinning still. Jewel’s back is turned, and Calvin can see the flicker of green and pink under her right arm as she flips through the channels on the big TV. Lee Junior leans forward and the Mexican kid waves the smoke out of his eyes and props himself up on one elbow, a cautious little smile creeping into the lower part of his face. “What?” the Mexican kid says.

Calvin isn’t there, he doesn’t exist, the cardboard cup is as insubstantial as an eggshell in his splotched and veiny hand as he lifts it, trembling, to his lips. “I’m thinking maybe she could use another lesson.”

In the morning, early, Calvin is awakened by the crackle and stutter of a shortwave radio. His throat is dry and his head aches, three cups of wine gone sour in his mouth and leaden on his belly. With an effort, he pushes himself up and slips on his glasses. The noise seems to be coming from outside the house — static like a storm in the desert, tinny voices all chopped and diced. He parts the curtains.

A police cruiser sits at the curb, engine running, driver’s door swung open wide. Craning his neck, Calvin can get a fix on the porch and the figures of Ormand — bare chest and bare feet — and a patrolman in the uniform of the LAPD. “So what’s this all about?” Ormand is saying.

The officer glances down at the toes of his boots, and then looks up and holds Ormand’s gaze. “A break-in last night at the European Deli around the corner, 2751 Commerce Avenue. The proprietor”—and here he pauses to consult the metal-bound notepad in his hand—“a Mrs. Eva Henckle, thinks that you may have some information for us….”

Ormand’s hair is in disarray; his cheeks are dark with stubble. “No, Officer,” he says, rubbing a hand over his stomach. “I’m sorry, but we didn’t hear a thing. What time was that, did you say?”

The patrolman is young, no more than two or three years older than Ormand. In fact, he looks a bit like Ormand — if Ormand were to lose thirty pounds, stand up straight, get himself a shave, and cut the dark scraggly hair that trails down his back like something stripped from an animal. Ignoring the questions, the patrolman produces a stub of pencil and asks one of his own. “You live here with your aunt, is that right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And a brother, Leland Orem, Junior — is that right?”

“That’s right,” Ormand says. “And like I said, we were all in last night and didn’t hear a thing.”

“Mother deceased?”

“Yeah.”

“And your father?”

“What’s that got to do with the price of beans?” Ormand’s expression has gone nasty suddenly, as if he’s bitten into something rotten.

For a moment, the patrolman is silent, and Calvin becomes aware of the radio again: the hiss of static, and a bored, disembodied voice responding to a second voice, equally bored and disembodied. “Do you know a Jaime Luis Torres?” the patrolman asks.

Ormand hesitates, shuffling his feet on the weathered boards a minute before answering. His voice is small. “Yes,” he says.

“Have you seen him recently?”

“No,” Ormand lies. His voice is a whisper.

“What was that?”

“I said no.”

There is another pause, the patrolman looking into Ormand’s eyes, Ormand looking back. “Mrs. Henckle’s place has been burglarized four times in the last three months. She thinks you and your brother might be responsible. What do you say?”

“I say she’s crazy.” Ormand’s face is big with indignation. The officer says nothing. “She’s had it in for us ever since we were in junior high and she says Lee took a bottle of beer out of the cooler — which he never did. She’s just a crazy bitch and we never had nothin’ to do with her.”

The patrolman seems to mull over this information a moment, thoughtfully stroking the neat clipped crescent of his mustache. Then he says, “She claims she’s seen you and your brother out here on the porch drinking types of German beer and soda you can’t get anywhere else around here — except at her place.”

“Yeah?” Ormand snarls. “And what does that prove? You want to know, I bought that stuff in downtown L.A.”

“Where?”

“This place I know, I’m not sure of the street, but I could drive you right to it, no sweat. She’s just crazy, is all. She don’t have a leg to stand on.”

“Okay, Ormand,” the officer says, snapping shut his notepad. “I’ve got it all down here. Mind if I step inside a minute and look around?”

“You got a search warrant?”

It’s a long morning. Calvin sits up in bed, trying to read an article in The Senior Citizen about looking and feeling younger—“Get Out and Dance!” the headline admonishes — but he has trouble concentrating. The house is preternaturally quiet. Ormand and Lee Junior, who rarely rise before noon, slammed out the door half an hour after the patrolman left, and they haven’t been back since. Jewel is asleep. Calvin can hear the harsh ratcheting snores from her room up the hall.

The thing that motivates him to pull on a flannel shirt and a pair of threadbare khaki pants and lower himself into the wheelchair is hunger — or at least that’s what he tells himself. Most times when Jewel overindulges her taste for red wine and sleeps through the morning, Calvin stays put until he hears her moving about in the kitchen, but today is different. It’s not just that he’s feeling out of sorts physically, the cheap wine having scoured his digestive tract as relentlessly as a dose of the cathartic his mother used to give him when he had worms as a boy, but he’s disturbed by the events of the preceding night and early morning as well. “She could use another lesson,” Ormand had said, and then, first thing in the morning, the patrolman had shown up. Down deep, deeper even than the lowest stratum of excuses and denials he can dredge up, Calvin knows it’s no coincidence.

The wheels rotate under his hands as he moves out into the hallway and eases past Jewel’s room. He can see her through the half-open door, still in her dress and sneakers, her head buried in a litter of bedclothes. Next door is the bathroom — he’s been in there three times already — and then, on the left, the kitchen. He rolls off the carpet and onto the smooth, spattered linoleum, gliding now, pulling right to skirt an overturned bag of garbage, and wheeling up to the sink for a sip of water.

The place is a mess. Unwashed cups, glasses, plates, and silverware litter the counter, and beer bottles too — the black ones. A jar of peanut butter stands open on the kitchen table, attracting flies. There’s a smear of something on the wall, the wastebasket hasn’t been emptied in a week, and the room reeks of sick-sweet decay. Calvin gulps a swallow or two of water from a cup scored with black rings. Eleven A.M. and hot already. He can feel the sweat where the glasses lie flat against his temples as he glides over to the refrigerator and swings back the door.