T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

Since the time of these experiences he had very rarely entertained the company of others, had very rarely in fact left his parents’ home. In the winter it was the apartment, in the summer the beach house. His social phobia was so overwhelming that he refused to show himself in public under any circumstance, not even in so trivial a role as picking up half a pound of pastrami at the delicatessen around the corner or taking the wash to the laundromat. He was a hermit, a monk, a solipsist. In the summer he would walk for miles through the dunes so he could swim alone without fear of exposing himself to ridicule, the preponderance of his flesh displayed in a swimsuit.

The upshot of all this is that he had, at the time of this story, reached the age of twenty-one years without ever having been laid. He had never been on a date, had never brushed a cheek against his own, had never squeezed a sweating palm or tit.

He stands, decides to have a closer look. But what if she should wake? The thought attenuates his resolve and he freezes there at the dune’s crest, staring, obsessed. Just like in the nudist magazines. Masturbatory fantasies recur, charge through his head like rams — this is just the situation he had always pictured alone in his room, pulling furiously at his pud.

Soon he becomes increasingly conscious of the heat and removes his T-shirt, dropping it carelessly beside him, his attention fixed on the browned peaks below. He starts stealthily down the slope: a sly beast stalking its prey. But in a moment he’s sliding down out of control, a truckload of sand following him. The seat of his trunks fills with it. At the base of the dune he recovers himself, jumps up, afraid to breathe, his rear abraded and an uncomfortable projection straining against the zipper of his trunks. The trunks begin to annoy him: he removes them.

A course of action is not entirely clear to him, but he moves closer anyhow, now as naked as she. The breasts swell gently with her sleep, the legs stir, the tongue peeps out to moisten her lips. And then suddenly the feathery warmth of the sun becomes a hot oppressive burden and she wakes to a huge childish face in her own and an insistent poking between her thighs. She shrieks, pushes wildly at that fat face. But she’s pinned beneath a truck, she’s been involved in an accident, that’s it, a mountain has fallen and she’s trapped beneath it. (Sure he’s embarrassed but how can he stop now, the blood swelling up in him as it is?)

Cheeks clawed and gashed, eardrums aching, sweating like a frosted goblet, he drives relentlessly on. He inserts a massive fist in her mouth to quiet the wailing, and inadvertently, as he stiffens toward his moment of truth, he shoves increasingly harder, her head smoothing a depression in the sand — a basin for the blood that seeps from her mashed lips, loosened teeth. She gasps, croaks for air. Below, the white triangle is smothered beneath a sea of convulsively heaving flesh, and furtively, deep within, it too begins to bleed.

“Hey!” yell the fishermen. (They’d been poking around up the shore, drinking beer from a cooler, hunting in a half-assed way for stripers or porgies or blues.) “Hey!” And then they begin running toward what looks like a giant sea turtle digging frantically to bury its eggs.

His head rears up in surprise. With a grunt he disengages himself from her body and his fist from her mouth. An enamel cap, embedded between the second and third knuckles of his left hand, comes with it. He stands there for a blind moment, naked, dripping blood, caught in the act of committing an atrocity. He feels shame, mortification, guilt, remorse, self-denigration — and a rabid animal impulse to escape at any cost. He lumbers in a panic toward the sea, his only possible refuge. The fishermen reach the girl just as he is parting the waves, a colossal preterrestrial creature more at home in the sea than on land. “Hey!” the fishermen shout. But he is gone, paddling furiously, smashing the waves like an icebreaker. Deeper and deeper, farther and farther from his pursuers and his own fat life.

The fishermen are standing in the surf, their shoes and pants wet. They bellow a few drunken imprecations but he is already too distant to care. He drifts off on the waves, a great lump of sperm seeking to impregnate the sea. The fishermen turn back to the whimpering girl. One gently cups his hand under her chin while the other removes his trousers and sets to her.

Far out to sea, far beyond the churning fat boy and the rapacious fishermen, that strange pale creature floats, peacefully drowsing. His beard and long hair fan out in the water, become masses of seaweed. A chance wave, peaking higher than the others, rolls over him and he swallows a quantity of water. The next buries him. He has had no warning, no chance to cry for help, no hope that help would be available. Quite simply then, he drowns. A random event, one that I imagine, considering the world as a whole, is quite common.

The fat boy creeps home naked through the dark dunes, miles from where he had first encountered the girl. His feet and lower legs are lacerated from the stiff dune grass which bites into each blind step. In all, he feels a vague sense of shame, but also a certain exhilaration. After all, he’s finally made the first palpable step in overcoming his social inadequacy.

The fishermen are at home, watching color TV. They feel a deep and abiding sense of accomplishment, of fulfillment — though they returned home this afternoon with an empty porgy basket.

The girl sleeps a heavy drugged sleep, enfolded in the astringently white hospital sheets. Her tan contrasts nicely with them. The breath passes gently through her parted lips, lips battered and brown with dried blood. A gray-haired man (her father?) sits beside her, patting her sleeping hand.

The thin man, the pale one, is jerked spasmodically by the underwater currents, tangled in a bed of weed. The crabs have long since discovered him and are rattling their ancient horny shells about his flesh, delighted with the unexpected treat. The tide is washing in, and the drowned man with it. Eventually, I suspect, what is left of him will come to rest on the beach, a few yards away from a curious red-brown stain in the bleached sand. The half-cleaned skeletons and carapaces of other strange creatures lie there too, waiting for the morning’s

It looked like a woman or a girl perched there on the roof of the furniture store, wings folded like a shawl, long legs naked and exposed beneath a skirt of jagged feathers the color of sepia. The sun was pale, poised at equinox. There was the slightest breeze. We stood there, thirty or forty of us, gaping up at the big motionless bird as if we expected it to talk, as if it weren’t a bird at all but a plastic replica with a speaker concealed in its mouth. Sidor’s Furniture, it would squawk, loveseats and three-piece sectionals.

I was twelve. I’d been banging a handball against the side of the store when a man in a Studebaker suddenly swerved into the parking lot, slammed on his brakes, and slid out of the driver’s seat as if mesmerized. His head was tilted back, and he was shading his eyes, squinting to focus on something at the level of the roof. This was odd. Sidor’s roof — a flat glaring expanse of crushed stone and tar relieved only by the neon characters that irradiated the proprietor’s name — was no architectural wonder. What could be so captivating? I pocketed the handball and ambled round to the front of the store. Then I looked up.

There it was: stark and anomalous, a relic of a time before shopping centers, tract houses, gas stations and landfills, a thing of swamps and tidal flats, of ooze, fetid water, and rich black festering muck. In the context of the minutely ordered universe of suburbia, it was startling, as unexpected as a downed meteor or the carcass of a woolly mammoth. I shouted out, whooped with surprise and sudden joy.